Publishers : Context/Westland Publishers
Uzma Aslam Khan is the prize-winning author of five novels published worldwide. These include Trespassing, translated in 18 languages and recipient of a Commonwealth Prize nomination; The Geometry of God, a Kirkus Reviews’ Best Book of 2009; Thinner Than Skin, nominated for the Man Asian Literary Prize and DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, and winner of the French Embassy Prize for Best Fiction at the Karachi Literature Festival 2014. Her work has twice won a Zoetrope: All Story Short Fiction Prize, and appeared in Granta, The Massachusetts Review, and The Guardian, among other periodicals.
Khan’s novel, The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali, 27 years in the making, writes into being the stories of those caught in the vortex of history, yet written out of it. Already out in India, Pakistan, and Sweden, it won the 9th UBL Literary Awards English Language Fiction category 2020 as well as the Karachi Literature Festival-Getz Pharma Fiction Prize 2021.
The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali will be simultaneously released in the US and UK in April 2022.
History and historical fiction about the Indian subcontinent, especially set during the colonial rule, often lack nuance in their portrayal of the people that were, and still are, pushed to the margins by the traditions of the land. As I gleaned stories of marginalised revolutionaries and reformers from some little known but brilliant history books, I longed to read fiction that could breathe life into these accounts in a way that only fiction can. I had not expected to find what I was pining for in a book set in the Andaman Islands. This is a place which is emblematic of white sands, pristine seas, and wild flora and fauna. Sure, the place is important for our national history as the site of the cellular jail, the dreaded Kaala Paani – but that is where (hi)stories ended, not began.
The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali is set in the Andamans during the duration of the Second World War. The narrative jumps back and forth between years. It covers the initial days of the war, when the British in their misplaced confidence carried on with the daily torture of the prisoners in the cellular jail and the lavish parties on Ross Island, their abrupt departure in the face of the Japanese invasion, the horrors of the Japanese occupation – amidst which the islands became the one of the first places in India where the national flag was hoisted on land independent of British colonial rule. The narrative interweaves the stories of several characters – the two children of a convict exiled to the islands, a Burmese boy whose family made the islands their home over multiple generations, and an unnamed woman political prisoner provide the main points of view.
The stories that the characters have to tell are very difficult ones, forged out of hardships and deprivation, but they are all told with beautiful prose. The history is well researched, and though the setting is isolated and unique, the narrative contains astute political insights into the history as well as the present of the subcontinent. In this far-flung piece of land home to people cast out, or violently removed, and forgotten, a lot of the traditional boundaries of caste and creed are erased. But this does not lead to a utopia of mutual trust and cooperation against a common enemy. The ugly contentment of the pecking order of oppression, and the cruel hope of eventual reversal of roles, that nourish these institutions on the mainland, keep the machinery going – irrespective of the occupying country. The residents also carry with them memories of the mainland, which they pass onto their children who have never set foot on that landmass. Yet in the dreariness of daily life amidst the uninterrupted series of tragedies that are unleashed onto the islands, there are moments of great individual as well as collective bravery and kindness that is as human as cruelty or apathy.
In the span of less than 400 pages, the book speaks to its readers about deported convicts and the women who were forced or coerced to join them, about the man with a hundred eyes who kept watch on the goings on in the jail from a central tower, about freedom fighters on hunger strike being drowned in milk, about tribes that have lived undisturbed for thousands of years before becoming civilisation missions for the British, about women’s precarious place in the freedom movement, and about comfort women brought to the island for the Japanese troops. Above all, it speaks of the pointlessness of systemic violence.
As history is being distorted, misrepresented, weaponised in a country that is sinking farther and farther into an abyss of hatred and regression, a reckoning with these stories, neglected and forgotten, is of utmost importance. It is high time we make a conscious effort to understand where we came from, to acknowledge how these stories have made us – even if we live a life of relative privilege. It is time to question our heroes. To listen. To explore. To be kind and courageous. I am glad that books like this one exist, which might help us do just that.