The optimism epidemic

The optimism epidemic is a figurative illness that spreads across India in 1942, giving public and private expression to hope for a united, politically plural future. Its most visible source is Mian Abdullah, the Hummingbird, whose Free Islam Convocation opposes partition; its victims include Aadam Aziz and Nadir Khan, who persist in believing that Abdullah’s cause can prevail. The epidemic ends with Abdullah’s assassination, but its pattern recurs later in Saleem’s account of political language: a phrase can become a public force, even as the realities it promises are undone by violence or official falsehood.

A fever in a year of drought

The epidemic first appears through Aadam Aziz, who in late summer bicycles through Agra whistling with unusual happiness. His optimism is presented as contagious: despite official efforts to suppress it, cheerfulness has broken out across the country during a period of hardship. The contrast is pointed. The rains have failed, the earth cracks, roads gather dust, and water shortages have become so severe that milk sellers cannot find clean water to adulterate their milk. In Agra, a world war continues at a distance while the heat mounts; nevertheless, Aadam keeps whistling.

At the paan shop on Cornwallis Road, older men treat this cheerfulness as an omen rather than a reasonable response to political possibility. They play hit-the-spittoon and speculate about what might emerge from the fractured earth. Aadam’s tune, by contrast, is an old German song, Tannenbaum. His buoyancy sets him apart from the men who regard it as poor taste in such circumstances, while the drought’s cracks supply the story with an image of instability beneath the apparent confidence.

Mian Abdullah and the political cause

The narrator identifies the epidemic’s source as one person: Mian Abdullah, known to others as the Hummingbird. A newspaper describes him as a magician turned conjurer who rose from Delhi’s magicians’ ghetto to become a hope for India’s Muslims. He founded and led the Free Islam Convocation, which brought together Muslim splinter groups as an alternative to the Muslim League’s dogmatism and vested interests. The Convocation opposed partition and sought to demonstrate that the League spoke for itself, not for all Muslims.

In 1942, the movement’s second annual assembly is being prepared on the Agra maidan. Its planned gathering of agrarian movements, urban labor syndicates, religious figures, and regional groups makes the optimism more than a private mood: it rests on the prospect of a broad coalition. The Rani of Cooch Naheen funds the assembly, while Aadam supports Abdullah because he sees him as fighting for a cause that is also his own. Aadam and Nadir share that confidence, and the narrator says the epidemic is what keeps Nadir serving as Abdullah’s secretary despite the demanding work and the discomfort caused by Abdullah’s incessant humming.

The political stakes are sharpened by opposition to partition. Aadam and the Rani reject the Muslim League’s claim to represent Indian Muslims and regard its partition demand as serving its own interests. Abdullah’s Convocation offers a competing political arrangement: a loose federation of different Muslim groups rather than a single dogmatic authority. Its posters express the sense of abandonment felt by those who believe the League has turned away from them while claiming to speak in their name.

The reversal at the Convocation offices

The Hummingbird’s optimism does not prepare his supporters for the attack. On the night of the assassination, Abdullah and Nadir are working late in the Free Islam Convocation offices on the University campus. A poster there carries Abdullah’s anti-partition sentiment in a quotation from Iqbal: “Where can we find a land that is foreign to God?” As they finish their work, assassins arrive.

The next morning, a sweeper-woman discovers Abdullah dead in the office. The killers are not identified, and their paymasters are never named. Aadam is summoned by Major Zulfikar to write the death certificate for his friend; the promised follow-up to settle details does not take place in the account. The narrator marks the death as the end of the epidemic. The tents on the maidan come down, and the Convocation is never held again. The Rani withdraws to her bed and remains there for years, while the political hope that had gathered around Abdullah loses its public meeting place and its unifying figure.

A phrase that returns in public life

The epidemic’s pattern reaches beyond the 1942 movement. Years later, Saleem’s account shows language crossing from private speech into collective action. During a procession connected with the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti, he is confronted by demonstrators who ask him to speak Gujarati. He recites a schoolyard rhyme, not understanding that his words will be taken up by the crowd. The chant travels through the procession and becomes a song of conflict; when the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti demonstration meets a Maha Gujarat Parishad demonstration at Kemp’s Corner, the competing crowds fight. The ensuing language riot kills fifteen people and injures more than three hundred.

The episode does not repeat Abdullah’s politics, but it echoes the epidemic’s account of how collective feeling gathers and spreads. A phrase becomes consequential not because it began as a considered program, but because people repeat it in a charged public setting. Saleem says the riot’s aftermath includes the partition of Bombay State and the city’s becoming the capital of Maharashtra. The novel thus places the Convocation’s unrealized anti-partition coalition beside a later division organized around language: public words can mobilize a multitude, but the result may be unity, conflict, or separation.

The motif also frames Saleem’s account of Pakistan, where he describes himself as adrift among falsenesses and unrealities, in contrast with the many competing possibilities of his Indian childhood. His conclusion that truth can be instructed to take a prescribed form recalls the gap between the Convocation’s claim to represent a broad constituency and the political outcome that silences it. The optimism epidemic is therefore both an image of hope’s contagious force and a measure of its vulnerability: the promise of collective possibility persists in memory, even when violence ends the movement that carried it.