Keeper of the shrine
6 September 2008
MG Vassanji is one of the unsung greats of African literature. An Ismaili Muslim of Gujarati heritage, born in Kenya and raised in Tanzania, he attended the University of Nairobi before winning a scholarship to MIT to study nuclear physics. In 1978 he moved to Canada to work at the Ontario nuclear research facility. He began his literary career two years later. So far, his writing has focused on the experience of south Asians in east Africa. This mainly merchant community has been around since the 1850s, but trade has existed between the two continents since at least the 13th century. It was a Gujarati sea pilot who led Vasco da Gama from Kenya to India in 1498.
This long history gives Vassanji's fiction a fascinating depth of field. In The Gunny Sack, published in 1989, a Tanzanian Asian is bequeathed a sack full of ancient mementos, which provokes a gallery of stories. The book won a Commonwealth Writers' Prize. A stream of novels has since followed, most recently The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (2004), which tells the story of a young Indian who grows up in Mau Mau Kenya and then moves to Toronto, where he is numbered "one of Africa's most corrupt men". Typically, Vassanji's books dramatise the doubly alienated plight of the east African Asian (alienated from both Africa and India). To this has gradually been added description of Asian experience in Canada and the United States.
His work shares some aspects with north America-based Indian writers such as Rohinton Mistry and Bharati Mukherjee. It also bears comparison with the "British wing" of the Indian/Pakistani diaspora, from Salman Rushdie to rising stars such as Tahmima Anam and Nikita Lalwani. But Vassanji's writing is closest to the knotted postcolonial experience described, albeit in very different ways, by Caribbean Asian writers such as VS Naipaul and David Dabydeen. In much postcolonial writing, cultural identity is presented as fluid but also recursive to heritage, as if one could only tell one's own story by knowing the skin of one's neighbour. With his new novel, The Assassin's Song, Vassanji has met this issue of difference-based self-labelling head on.
The main cultural background of the novel involves the history of Muslims in the Indian state of Gujarat. The story takes the reader from a 13th-century village there to the United States in the 1960s and Canada in the 1980s. We move back to Gujarat in 2002, when brutal Hindu-Muslim riots took place. After Kashmir, Gujarat remains the most communally sensitive region in India, as witnessed by a resurgence of violence there last month.
The narrator Karsan's father is the saheb of Pirbaag, lord and keeper of an ancient Sufi shrine in Gujarat. His village home is overlooked by the mausoleum of the mystic Pir Bawa, around whose magical activities the shrine came into being in 1260. Although the teenage Karsan wishes the distinction would simply go away - he just wants to play cricket - he must succeed his father.
In due course he must take on the mantle and learn the secret of the shrine. This is concentrated in the speaking of a "bol", a mantra passed from father to son. The position does not just involve guardianship; to be saheb is to be avatar of a cosmic force, in which Sikhs and Hindus as well as Muslims believe. Pir Bawa himself was a syncretic figure who mixed occultism with Islam and the classical Hinduism of his once-welcoming Gujarati hosts.
"But now the shrine lies in ruins, a victim of the violence that so gripped our state recently, an orgy of murder and destruction of the kind we euphemistically call 'riots'. Only the rats visit the Sufi now, to root among the ruins. My father is dead and so is my mother. And my brother militantly calls himself a Muslim and is wanted for questioning regarding a horrific crime."
The novel reveals its forthcoming action in a proleptic first chapter. We learn of Karsan's childhood, and see him accepted by Harvard. The novel then shifts register to describe, with high comedy, the experience of being an Indian immigrant at a predominantly white US university in the 1960s. Karsan falls in love with hippy Marge, studies English poetry, gets his PhD, and moves to British Columbia to work as an academic. He forgets, or thinks he has forgotten, the bol that is the key to his identity.
He loses touch with his father, who is left distraught by Karsan's rejection of his heritage. But devotees of the sect, whom Karsan meets in urban America, pull at the string of faith, being all too ready to accept him at face value as the incarnation of the cosmos. When Karsan returns to India, he finds Pirbaag despoiled and his brother on the run from the police. Eventually he remembers the bol and takes his place as guardian of the ruined shrine.
We never know the exact words of the bol, only that it illuminates a connection between present-day Ismailis and the medieval Shia sect of the Assassins, "who disdained the outer forms of worship and the Muslim laws of Sharia for inner spiritual truths", and were also feared for their "penchant for murdering their enemies with impudent and terrifying facility".
Although he has returned to his heritage, Karsan is still left asking the same existential questions - who am I? Am I real? - that an individual from any culture on earth might ask. Making a general virtue of its own exceptionalism, The Assassin's Song is thus both particular and universal, which is one of the marks of great literature. Historical novel, bildungsroman and terrorist thriller all rolled into one, it is above all a celebration of religious tolerance, which is something more necessary now than ever in Gujarat and elsewhere.
Giles Foden recently ghosted Manubhai Madhvani's Tide of Fortune, the memoir of a Gujarati merchant family who emigrated to East Africa in 1893.