Rahi Masoom Raza´s “Aadha Gaon” is the Bharat that India has forgotten

Adha Gaon or A Village Divided is a semi-autobiographical novel by Rahi Masoom Raza, whose village, Gangauli, is at the heart of this book. He shows us what the decades of 1930-50s were like at the village level, in the United Provinces (today’s Uttar Pradesh). It is difficult to categorise it as a novel about the Partition because the book is more about the disputes and festivities of Gangauli than the politics around creating Pakistan – and that is exactly Raza’s argument against religious nationalism; that for the Muslims in Gangauli, Pakistan and its creation are not a concern, because all they know is Gangauli, which is their home.

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2. By tracing where his father and his grandfather are from, he makes us ask some important questions; How do we decide where a person is from? How far can or should we trace back their origins? For how many generations and how many centuries? Everyone’s paternal grandfather and great-grandfather must have come from somewhere”, but are we from the same place as our ancestors were from many generations ago?

Raza shows us how a village is divided along many lines; of gender, caste, class, religion, and sect. The novel conveys how there is no ‘one’ category of Muslims or Hindus. There are the Shia Saiyids, who are the upper-caste zamindars, the Sunni traders and the weavers, who are considered to be lower caste. Likewise, amongst the Hindus, there is a powerful Thakur upper-caste, the Ahirs, Bhars, and the Chamars, who are the lowest caste in the village. Even the Shia Saiyids of the village are divided amongst themselves, between the Uttar Patti and Dakkhin Patti, whose fierce rivalry drives much of the plot of the novel. In face of the two-nation theory, it raises the question of how Muslims all over India can be treated as one body, when the Muslims of even one village are divided along other lines of caste, gender, etc.?

The novel highlights the discrimination of women and lower castes, inside and outside the home. The emphasis on ‘purity of blood’ in the Saiyid families shows how intertwined the system of caste and the control over women’s sexuality are. Women’s identities are defined by marriage almost completely, but they exercise no agency in deciding their partners. The few women who do choose for themselves are forced to run away or are ostracised by the whole community.