‘City on Fire’: A Muslim man’s moving memoir about his city Aligarh’s fractured but resilient spirit

Zeyad Masroor Khan was four when he witnessed the riots that led to the demolition of the Babri Masjid. He was 14 when the fires from the 2002 Gujarat pogrom reached Aligarh. He was 32 when he narrowly escaped the violence that would ultimately culminate into the 2020 Delhi riots.

Three years later, he has captured his experiences in a memoir. Set against the backdrop of continuous cycles of violence, City on Fire: A Boyhood in Aligarh explores three significant themes – identity and community in times marked by religious polarisation, the role of pop culture and institutions in such times, and all that we stand to lose if the trend of increasing intolerance continues.

Structured in chronological order, a little over two-thirds of the book is set in Aligarh and the remaining in Delhi. In Aligarh, we are first introduced to Farsh Manzil through the eyes of a young Khan. Farsh Manzil is Khan’s ancestral home, built by his grandfather in 1906, and a point of transition between two adjacent Hindu and Muslim ghettos – Kanwari Ganj and Upar Kot. Khan describes it as being at the “cusp of civilisation”, with people belonging to different religious identities and cultures on either side of it. While in a different world, the coexistence engendered by such close proximity might have fostered a tolerant shared culture – in Khan’s world and ours, it instead makes fertile ground for the escalation of communal conflict.

The worst of times

This is a familiar truth for many localities in North India. Compared to other border areas in Uttar Pradesh – such as Baniya Pada, Kanjarwala Pul, Dahiwali Gali or Usman Para – where violence erupted often, communities on each side of the Farsh live(d) in relative harmony. Elders shared friendly relations and an illusion of safety was maintained. Its fragility was known to everyone though, for it would be shattered every time there was an unrest.

As Khan writes about people’s experiences of riots – some, his own; others, shared with him as cautionary tales – a disconcerting question about identity and community emerges. During periods of political violence, does one’s ascribed identity – in this case, the religion one is born into – trump all other forms of the community we build over the years? In that sense, do such periods represent a blind spot in theories of modernity that centre individual agency in the making and unmaking of identities?

Stories such as “daant kaati roti”, in which a girl identifies her closest and oldest friends as part of the mob that killed her father during a riot, and later left her to die in, a drain speak to a grim reality. Observing this pattern of friends and acquaintances turning against each other in periods of conflict, Khan concludes that “being nice to your neighbours doesn’t really help when the eventual attack comes”.

It is the same sensibility that informs communities’ decisions to install alarms in houses flanking Hindu and Muslim ghettos or to build secret escape routes into bordering ghettos. Throughout the book, we observe only two exceptions to this pattern. The first is Bablu, the conductor of Khan’s school bus, who single-handedly holds off the mob from entering the bus and harming its (Muslim) passengers. This is the first and the only instance we see in the book where a person defends another in a riot on account of their being innocent, a child, rather than their shared religious identity. The second, decades later, is an Ola cab driver who securely takes Khan and his friend from their rented apartment in Madanpur Khadar, a Hindu-dominated locality in South-east Delhi, to Jamia Nagar during the 2020 Delhi riots. The conditions that make such humane actions rare outliers in the moral clarity they display are for us to introspect on as a society.

Prelude to a riot

What we already do know about any act of mass violence, though, is that it pre-necessitates some degree of othering and dehumanising of its victims – a belief by the perpetrators that those they inflict it on are a category of people fundamentally different from them, inferior. Khan reminds us that such a belief is propagated through socio-political networks, portrayals in popular culture, and subtle distortions of truths in public discourse. It is further maintained and strengthened by the ghettoisation of communities – all one learns about the other is through propaganda, without spaces for meaningful interactions that could overturn these beliefs.

Throughout the book, we learn of children who would be suspicious of Khan for being from Upar Kot – what they referred to as Mini Pakistan. Later they morph into landlords who wouldn’t rent to Muslims, or newsroom editors who believed that journalists belonging to religious minorities should strictly restrict their reporting to their issues, that is, stories about the minority.

On the surface, the market seems to be an exception to this otherwise constant experience of othering. An illusion of inter-community camaraderie and safety is good – perhaps, even critical – for the economy. Similar to Ashutosh Varshney’s conception of an institutionalised peace system, the financial dependency Hindus and Muslims have on each other acts as a deterrent against prolonged conflict and isolation. Therefore, it is here that we see the first glimpses of the intermingling of communities after a riot – or as Khan deftly puts it, “when traders suffer losses during curfews, they forget about revenge and the wounded town limps back to normalcy”.

This exception holds only superficially, though. As much as good business sense dictates an unspoken reconciliation, over the course of the book, we learn that the market also holds perverse incentives to initiate a riot in the first place.

First, it grants perpetrators the anonymity to kill, with lower risks of being identified by a neighbour and reported to the police. Second, as we observe through Yaseen’s story, it also creates incentives for neighbours to instigate riots as a way to pressurise members of other faiths living in their midst to sell their homes at lower prices and leave for another ghetto. A similar trend of instigating riots in an attempt to acquire valuable real estate has been observed across North India by Paul Brass. Furthering the ghettoisation of communities, such incentives have devastating consequences for the structure of any society in which they play out.

At a deeper level, the only institution in the book that emerges as a space of acceptance and meaningful inter-community interaction is that of the university. The first time Khan is not as conscious of being a Muslim or being perceived as one is during his time as a student at Aligarh Muslim University. Here, friendships are forged over countless cups of tea with conversations ranging from books, religion and politics to cinema and Monica Bellucci’s beauty. In a similar experience at Jamia Milia, he goes on to make friends and have relationships with others in the ecosystem that seem to not be predetermined by the coincidence of birth.

Later, when he reaches out to others in an attempt to understand how hate thrives in Aligarh, he is met with stories of love – of neighbours protecting one another, irrespective of religion, during riots; of a group of Hindu and Muslim elders, with friends across religious lines, resolving conflicts in communities in which they coexisted; of mosques in Kanwari Ganj, and temples and gurudwaras in Upar Kot. Of smaller oases of hope amidst the larger tragedy of the current Indian political moment.

In writing about a life lived amidst – and shaped by – continuous cycles of violence, Khan paints a moving portrait of both the fracturing and the resilience of Aligarh’s spirit. City on Fire cautions its readers about the grief of letting a past, real or imagined, influence our future; and is at once a memoir, a lament and a whispered prayer for better times.

City on Fire: A Boyhood in Aligarh, Zeyad Masroor Khan, HarperCollins India.