Zara Chowdhary has crafted a searing account of religious violence and its consequences. In 2002, two train carriages were set on fire in a depot in Godhra, India, killing at least fifty-eight people, many of whom were religious workers, traveling back from Ayodhya, a sacred city for Hindus. Chowdhary explains that “The head of the state, the chief minister, calls the burning an ‘act of terrorism,’ code since 9/11 for something the Muslims must have done.” Within weeks, more than 2,000 Muslims were murdered in response by Hindu mobs.
Chowdhary describes how Hindu mobs numbering in the thousands poured into her town of Gujarat, looting, raping, and burning alive the state’s Muslim citizens. The massacre continued for three months. She likens it to how the United States kicked off a global “war” against terror after 9/11, stating, the “Americans have redefined how a strong, powerful nation deals with those who try to terrorize it.” “Americans make war and decimating an enemy look cool.”
Chowdhary recites horrific tales of victims of what she characterizes as a pogrom or an ethnic cleansing with the complicity of the state and the ruling political establishment. She recounts the atrocities committed by one of the mob members whose wife would, a decade later, defend him in court claiming, “He couldn’t have raped or brutalized women because he was married to me, a Muslim.” She explains the genesis of the word “ghetto,” and then details how her community, and the Jasmine Apartment where she lived, became a ghetto. Curfews were enforced, schools were closed and tests and exams postponed indefinitely. There was a mass migration of Muslim citizens away from their homes and into refugee camps. By the end of the year, more than 50,000 Muslims became refugees in their own country.
The Chowdharys Hindu neighbors were not always the enemy. Just months before the massacre, the Chowdhary family lived for weeks with their Hindu friends across the river when structural engineers were testing the integrity of their apartment after an earthquake killed 50,000 Gujarati. The Chowdhary family spent months every other summer with the Hindu Reddys, friends of Chowdhary’s father’s when they all were in the same graduate program in California. Chowdhary, whose alcoholic father, Papa, terrorized his wife and two daughters, learned from the Reddys “how daughters deserved to be spoken to” and that “our mother was loved, even admired. . . .”
Chowdhary’s reflections on Papa help put the anti-Islamic violence that gripped the country in context. Papa’s family was educated and upper class, affording their son a graduate school education in America. Their privilege opened a door for him at the state-run Gujarat Electricity Board when he returned to India. But, he faced constant humiliation with a brazenly anti-Muslim government in place leading to an early retirement at forty-eight years of age (he would die of cancer in four years). Chowdhary explains that Papa’s job was a 20 year purgatory at the end of which he emerged alcoholic, bitter, but incorruptible.
Chowdhary has crafted an elegant and moving memoir about the largest massacre in independent India. She traces the political, economic, and social repercussions of decades of bloodshed. But what is particularly noteworthy about this memoir is her keen teenage observations of how years of anti-Muslim violence in India impacted her fractured family. Thank you Crown and Net Galley for an advance copy of this remarkable memoir.
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