What’s Past is Fiction
A solidly researched novel by Uzma Aslam Khan becomes a substitute for an island’s history
IIt is only in the past couple of decades that historical accounts of the Japanese occupation of the Andamans during World War II have begun to emerge. The Japanese were seen as liberators when they arrived in 1942, and soon the islands nominally became part of Subhas Chandra Bose’s Azad Hind. Actual control rested with the Japanese, though, who soon became paranoid about locals cooperating with British forces. In addition to wartime hardship and famine, the period was marked by torture and mass executions. Some estimates put the number of dead in the war years as high as a quarter of the islands’ population. When the British retook the islands in 1945, now they were welcomed as liberators.
The first victim of the Japanese occupation was a young man named Zulfiqar Ali, who stood up to soldiers entering their homes to grab poultry. His arms were twisted out of their
sockets before he was shot. The Pakistani author Uzma Aslam Khan’s fifth novel, The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali, is set during, and in the lead-up to, the Japanese occupation of the islands. It begins with a boy named Zee Ali trying to protect his sister Nomi’s pet chicken from Japanese soldiers. From here, like the wings of the Cellular Jail, radiates the cast of characters that populates the novel.
Nomi and Zee’s father came to the islands as a prisoner, making them ‘local-borns’. Their mother works at the prison. Their friend Aye is Burmese and a personal attendant to the prison superintendent, which allows us glimpses of what goes on behind the scenes with the British administrators. A Japanese dentist-spy and, after occupation, a doctor who examines ‘comfort women’ brought to the island for the troops, allow us a window into the world of the occupiers. There’s a nameless woman revolutionary with an arc that grows in significance, a brutal jailor, the Portuguese-Indian widow of a British official who has chosen to remain on the islands after his death and a few indigenous people living their lives both in the forests and sometimes overlapping with more recent settlers on the islands.
The novel makes for a brisk read, with the narrative darting back and forth in time. History here is not the backdrop but the central frame of the novel. This history includes the Japanese occupation, of course, but also life in and around the prison, especially in relation to women. The book’s characters are often based closely, like Zee, on real figures from the time. There’s no way to tell, within the novel, what characters and events are derived from reality. The history is solidly researched with dates and numbers matching what is known.
It’s so solid, in fact, that there’s a somewhat cursory feeling to the imagined plot events that occupy the gaps between the history.
The islands in the 1930s and 1940s had an intriguing mix of people: indigenous groups, the local-borns, Moplahs transported from Kerala, Bhantus from Uttar Pradesh brought by the Salvation Army, some Burmese, and the Ranchis (Adivasis brought from central India as forest labour—some of whom deserve much of the credit for keeping British spies undetected in the forests). The novel captures only a fraction of this complexity, which feels like an opportunity missed. British life on the islands is depicted with a richness that perhaps comes from the Raj life being well-recorded. Interactions between the indigenous population and later arrivals—and surely, these are more in number and deeper than what has been recorded—are ingeniously extrapolated from anthropological research. But the texture of other lives feels sparse, with the occasional detail that gives pause (a plastic pencil sharpener, a rubber slipper, both unlikely to have been in use back then).
The novel is also part of a larger discussion about how relatively little-known histories are told. Zulfiqar Ali’s life and death still hold a resonance for the Punjabi Muslim community in Port Blair. What does it mean then, for them and the rest of us, for his story to be written and widely read as fiction? Leaving that aside for now, The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali is an informative, somewhat uneven, novel with a lot of fascinating true history in it.