Abdullah Khan’s new novel, A Man from Motihari, explores conflict and humanity

The Indian writer infuses elements of his own life into an exploration of the forces that unite and divide us

Abdullah Khan, author of A Man From Motihari. Photo: Abdullah Khan

Mumbai resident Abdullah Khan, a novelist, screenwriter and banker, released his debut novel Patna Blues in 2018, and has returned this year with another story from the heart of the eastern Indian state of Bihar.

A Man from Motihari starts with a curious premise — a story about a struggling author called Aslam who is made to believe that he is an incarnation of the famous British novelist George Orwell. The novel recounts how Aslam falls in love with an American actress called Jessica and attempts to navigate the rise of right-wing political forces in India.

The story's inception goes back to 2010, when Khan received an assignment from a Bangladeshi newspaper to do a story about Orwell’s connection with Motihari — a small town in the northern region of Bihar, where Mahatma Gandhi first experimented with his non-violent philosophy of satyagraha.

During Khan's visit to the haunted bungalow where Orwell was born in 1903, a sudden thought struck him: “What if a boy from Motihari was born in the same room where George Orwell was born? And, how would the fact of sharing the room of his birth with Orwell impact his life?” Based on these musings, Khan began to form the protagonist's life story.

Khan has also written elements of his own life into the book. Like the protagonist of his novel, Aslam Sher Khan, the author was born in a small village near Motihari in Bihar. Like Aslam’s elder brother, Waseem, the author’s initial education was also in madrasas and Urdu-medium schools.

“Champaran meat or ahuna mutton and tash-chiwda are the famous non-vegetarian dishes I love to eat whenever I am in the town,” he says.

Though Aslam gets a day job as a banker, he yearns to be a famous author someday. Before he was a full-time writer, Khan too worked as a banker. The first English novel he purchased was A Strange and Sublime Address by Amit Chaudhuri, who later taught Khan at an international fiction writing workshop.

“Then, I unsuccessfully tried to write A Suitable Girl, inspired by Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy, which is one of my favourite novels,” he says. In 1997, motivated by Arundhati Roy's Booker Prize win, he seriously started to work on his first novel, which subsequently became Patna Blues. Just like his character Aslam, the author also faced rejections from 200 publishers and agents before his debut was finally accepted for publication.

Religion and the politics of hate form a major backdrop of his new novel. Various news events, such as the 1992 and 2002 riots, as well as the 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act, feature in the story.

Khan says no story exists in a vacuum. “In 1992, Bihar was very peaceful under Lalu Prasad Yadav’s administration. In 2002, I was in Basti, in Uttar Pradesh, but nothing happened there. Yes, during the Citizenship Amendment Act, I would overhear all kinds of Islamophobic comments in local trains and in my office in Mumbai. All those events caused me much emotional distress,” he explains.

In February 2002, as religious riots spread across parts of Ahmedabad, one of Aslam's friends is burnt alive in front of his house. The episode sparks within Aslam an antipathy towards sectarianism, as he carries forth a burden of guilt for not being able to save his friend due to the primitive instinct of self-preservation.

In the novel, in 2014, when a divisive Hindutva politician is elected as prime minister, Indian politics takes an ugly turn. The media largely becomes a mouthpiece of the government, often with an anti-Muslim agenda. As a single Muslim man, when Aslam moves to Mumbai, he struggles with finding a house to rent. Moreover, he discovers that many of his colleagues are Islamophobic and bigoted.

In WhatsApp groups too, he notices that most messages echo political propaganda, comprising historical inaccuracies, fake news and anti-Muslim posts — which routinely erupt into “verbal slugfests”. When the Citizenship Amendment Act is proposed in the novel, Aslam takes part in a protest against it.

His real-life sociopolitical environment aside, Khan — who is currently working on a third book set during the 1947 Partition — also explores various themes related to identity and human bonding through his novel.

“Those who believe in human values always look for something common between themselves and others in order to forge a bond,” he says. During his research, Khan discovered an Indian nanny who took care of Orwell when he was a child. There is not much proof about her other than a black-and-white photo with Orwell as a toddler.

Though Indian, the nanny believes that Orwell, who is an Englishman’s son, is the incarnation of her dead son. “Similarly, she believes that Aslam is the reincarnation of her son — his religion doesn't matter to her,” says Khan.

Further in the book, Aslam falls in love with Jessica Carter, a young American woman who is an activist and actress. As Aslam gets to know Jessica more intimately, many of his own biases about Americans undergo a change. He realises that just as all Indians are not alike, neither are all Americans. Jessica’s family, in turn too, changes their preconceived notions about Muslims. “How meeting people demolishes the walls of prejudices,” he writes.

A Man From Motihari is available to order now