Reading & Writing Lounge

9/11 was a stupendous moment in world history, more specifically, American history, and reams have been written about it. In India, Gujrat was on the boil in 2002 with a train fire and the subsequent massacre of human beings across the state. Little ink has spilled over the blood that flowed down the nations’ conscience. M.G. Vassanji’s The Assassin’s Song is a fitting reminder of what spite can do to a place, its culture, people and sense of history. The novel is a journey in discovery—of the self, conditions that shape one’s life and thoughts, a sense of history that binds human beings to one another, and that fleeting reality in Indian life called destiny.

This then is the broad canvas on which Vassanji arranges the characters and events of this wonderfully evocative novel. Karsan Dargawala, the protagonist, is neither Hindu nor Muslim and the gaadi varas (successor and avatar) to a medieval Pir’s chair in Haripir, later renamed Haripur. This change in name is in consonance with the changes that take place in Haripir and the life of its inhabitants and visitors. Karsan’s father holds the chair and represents the supreme spiritual authority in this tiny corner of Gujrat where communal tensions are few and far between but not uncommon. Karsan’s father has managed to keep marauders at bay through good will and good people management.

But the conflicts remain. Karsan, hankering for cricket and the life outside his little universe is the fulcrum of this conflict in the narrative’s personal realms. He breaks with tradition, renounces the successor-ship, goes off to USA and settles down there against his parents’ wishes. Nothing can bring him back to his spiritual responsibilities. Herein is contained the father-son conflict, the conflict between tradition and modern desires, the conflict between a hazy past and a demanding and promising present. Karsan’s conflict and search for meaning and happiness is built along planes that contain seeds of other conflicts. There are sets of dualities: secularism and communalism, renunciation and worldly pursuits, knowledge ancient and knowledge modern, east and west, truth and deception, shadow and light. And Karsan has to find his meaning within these dualities.

The title of the book is as enigmatic as the sufi saint and his ancestors who continue with his work. Assassin or saint? Eternal flame or the daily ritual of keeping the lamp burning? Father or saheb? Gaadi varas or the westernised scholar? What is the song after all but the secret to the Nur’s identity? One assassin starts a tradition of assimilation and other assassins scatter its fragments far and wide. Can Karsan, returned from personal tragedy and desires accumulated in the west, pick up the fragments again and assimilate?

The Assassin’s Song is a search in words. In this form, it is worth multiple readings, with a depth of sensitivity that only a seasoned writer like Vassanji, assimilating multiple influences himself could render with pathos and humility, subtle humour and the grace of acceptance. What the communal conflagration did to Gujrat and to the national psyche is reflected in the grimness and density of the novel’s last chapters. How to heal the wounds and carry on the tradition of brotherhood and humanity is reflected in Karsan’s return to roots and in his humble acceptance of its inevitability. 

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• Andromache—Unrequited Passion
• My Name is Red: Orhan Pamuk