Blood Brothers by M. J Akbar, 2006, Roli.

At the very beginning of Blood Brothers, Akbar tells us how Prayag, his grandfather died. He didn’t expire with any worldly weight but was transmitting a revolutionary soul from one generation to another. Prayag might have not thought even in his unconscious faculty that the transmitted passion would emerge into a well-received journalist in M.J Akbar who was playing on his chest while he was dying. Akbar pens the oppressions and emergence of three generations out of the dilapidated colonial India ruled by the British. The after affect was the crisis from where Akbar emerged. The family saga imprints the pre and post independent India; the biggest climax in the changing scenario of the nation and its history. Though the plot revolves around the undivided Bengal, Akbar recounts the blood links of Prayag and his struggle on how he moved from Bihar to Telenipara near Calcutta and thereafter his struggle to survive in poverty under the shadow of the British who had complete control on the Victoria Jute Mill. Thousands of labourers from Bihar and adjoining areas worked there tirelessly and produced finest jute items that were exported to Britain.

Though Prayag was not one amongst those labourers, he grew out of them. The Indian myth on why one should go to the religious shrines to beg a son from the sufi further convinced Prayag to follow Islamic faith. It was more than a religious reincarnation but a bond of two human beings that aspired for the new generation, in British India, that would not starve but change their fortune to see a new nation. M.J Akbar recounts them lucidly --- the British divided the Indian society in the name of religion. Akbar also mentions the role of caring British authorities whose moral support remained with Prayag’s family and all those Indians who understood the essence of life. As a child Akbar encountered the great famine of Bengal, which he claims, was manmade and miniature of the pogroms that were waiting to be held when the country was dividing into Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan. Prayag found a girl for his son from Kashmiri origin. While Imtiaz, Akbar’s mother, remained in India after the partition of the country, her relatives shifted to Lahore. Her memories of Kashmir, Lahore and Telenipara in Calcutta are enlisted prudently. Young Akbar was one amongst those Indian youths motivated by the British officials due to his scholastic aptitude. He got enough chance to learn a lot from the outgoing British. He was born when the nation was changing its mind. The British were leaving the country and Indian leaders readying themselves to rule the new India. Would their amateur leadership be able to rule the nation? Perhaps not: Gandhi was already sidelined. It further disillusioned the question.

The Victoria Jute Mill was not same after independence as it was earlier. Labourers in Telenipara were leading their lives in inhumane conditions post independence. They didn’t want the British, who had built their jute mill, to be thrown out of India. But the British had to go because India was free. Indian masses encountered wars between the two newly born independent countries. The plague of communal riots and devastation of partition had started showing path to the intruders of adversary. Some Muslims denied going to Pakistan because “there were lots of Muslims there”. Akbar’s ancestors were one amongst them.

And, perhaps, this was the biggest family saga coming out of the story of three generations of Prayag. Each Indian encountered this. The family tree symbolizes three generations of India. Blood flow into the veins and they are same either from a Hindu or a Muslim. The Blood Brothers metamorphose this fact into reality. The story goes from Bihar to Calcutta to Lucknow to Kashmir to Lahore the whole of the undivided India that countered renaissance and pogroms with equal pace.

The sequel of the book should come at the earliest because new generation of journalists need to know more --- the emergence of a veteran journalist. The book winds up when Akbar is merely a seventeen year old boy. Life, as they said, is a tale told by an idiot. But Akbar defied this. How? One needs to know and I am hopeful that the sooner he reveals before us the better it is.

November 15, 2006

Asif Anwar Alig is a Delhi-based television professional.