Communalism in India

Communalism in India appears as an escalating struggle over who may claim religious traditions, define public order, and speak for the nation. The novel shows how religious identity can be mobilized to threaten a pilgrimage and interpret violence, but also how people organize across communal lines to resist that division. Its account is complicated by doubts about religious authority and by parallel scenes in which police, media, and commercial institutions decide whose identity and testimony they will recognize.

Communalism as a Political Condition

The narrative presents communalism not as a single clash but as a force operating through political agitation, public language, and struggles over national belonging. Reports of sectarian violence circulate alongside arguments about responsibility and competing accounts of what has happened. In the background, a government armaments scandal weakens the Prime Minister’s credibility, while communal tension makes religious identity an immediate political question rather than a private matter.

A report about a massacre of Muslims in a North Indian town becomes one measure of that danger: the victims’ bodies have been dumped in a river. In Kashmir, a once-popular Chief Minister faces hostile groups during Eid prayers after making an accommodation with Congress. Salahuddin Chamchawala, reading the news, sees communal conflict as part of a wider pattern in which cruelty seems to be gaining ground. The film producer Sisodia responds by lamenting that religious faith, despite its highest aspirations, is being made to serve its lowest instincts. These scenes connect local incidents to a broader argument: religious belief does not automatically produce solidarity, and political actors can enlist it in opposing ways.

The public interpretation of violence is itself contested. Government statements attribute killings to known criminals, while progressive critics dispute that explanation and point instead to communal influence in the city police. Other accounts accuse Hindu nationalists of running amok. The narrative does not settle these competing claims into a single official explanation; their conflict is part of the picture of a society in which communities and institutions struggle over who is believed and what violence means.

Pilgrimage and the Policing of Tradition

The Ayesha Haj becomes a conspicuous target because it places Muslim religious practice within a contested idea of national culture. By the ninth week, journalists, politicians, businessmen, tourists, and other onlookers have converged on the march. Its visibility grows further when Ayesha is pictured beside commercial advertisements and when butterflies accompany and feed her. Religious spectacle, political attention, and commercial appropriation gather around the same procession.

Extremist groups condemn the pilgrimage as an attempt to capture public attention and inflame communal sentiment. Their leaflets claim that foot pilgrimage belongs to an ancient, pre-Islamic national tradition, not to Muslim immigrants, and accuse Ayesha of appropriating it. The dispute is therefore about more than the march’s route: it concerns who may perform a practice and have it recognized as national heritage. As the pilgrims approach Sarang, police first threaten to break up the procession, then allow it to continue while warning that they cannot guarantee its safety. Mishal Akhtar insists that the march will go on.

Sarang’s coal wealth gives the confrontation a specific local setting. Communal organizers have been inciting miners against the pilgrims, and a mob forms with demands that the Islamic foot pilgrimage and the so-called butterfly witch leave. Mirza Saeed Akhtar again urges the marchers to turn back, predicting that they will be killed. Ayesha answers through Mishal with a challenge to their courage. Sri Srinivas, however, refuses to join either side: devoted to Lakshmi, whose face he finds reflected in Ayesha’s, he says he cannot participate in the coming confrontation. The differing responses make the procession a test of belief, allegiance, and fear, not a unanimous act of religious fervor.

Communal pressure persists even after the march reaches a mosque. When a foundling is stoned to death, the pilgrims refuse to continue; the villagers are mutinous, and none of them has thrown a stone. Mishal is too ill to rally them, while Ayesha does not dispute their refusal. Mirza Saeed presses her over the source of her messages, asking why she offers interpretations rather than the angel’s precise words. Her answer—that the angel speaks in clear and memorable forms—does not resolve his challenge. In this moment, the crisis concerns not only communal hostility but also the credibility of religious authority and the consequences of demanding proof from someone whose following rests on revelation.

Counter-Mobilization and the Human Chain

Against this atmosphere, Zeeny Vakil, George Miranda, Bhupen Gandhi, and their associates plan a human chain in support of national integration, stretching from the Gateway of India to the city’s northern outskirts. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) had recently organized a successful chain in Kerala, but Bombay presents a different risk. George warns of police obstruction and mob assaults, especially where the route passes through Shiv Sena strongholds. Zeeny argues that public demonstrations are necessary precisely because communal violence is escalating and forces of disintegration must not go unanswered.

Salahuddin Chamchawala finds himself drawn into the preparations, helping settle practical questions such as where to assemble, how many friends each organizer can bring, and what food, drink, and first-aid supplies to carry. His participation marks a change in his immediate life, and the meeting also brings news of the unusual behavior of Gibreel Farishta, stirring up the past. The public campaign and private histories thus begin to press on him at once.

The demonstration succeeds more than its organizers had expected. Apart from minor skirmishes in Mazagaon, it remains orderly; participants link hands from one end of the city to the other, and many are moved to tears. At eight in the morning, with Swatilekha giving the signal from a jeep, the chain forms; an hour later, as rush-hour traffic peaks, it begins to disperse. The action offers a visible counter-image to communal division: people hold one another’s hands across the city, despite the expected harassment and violence.

That image receives little institutional recognition. Doordarshan does not report the demonstration, All India Radio omits it, and most of the government-supporting language press says nothing. Only one English-language daily and one Sunday paper carry the story. Zeeny had expected this silence, explaining that a Communist-organized action could be treated officially as though it had not happened. The contrast is pointed: thousands take part in a peaceful public event, yet control over broadcast and newspaper attention can make that event nearly invisible.

Identity, Authority, and Institutional Power

The novel’s other settings offer comparisons, not interchangeable versions of Indian communalism. At Rosa Diamond’s house in England, an anonymous report brings fifty-seven uniformed constables, thirteen dogs, and immigration officers to search for a suspected illegal entrant. They find Saladin Chamcha, who says he is British and has the right of abode but cannot produce a passport or other identifying document. His explanation of surviving the Bostan disaster is met with ridicule. Later, he tries to establish his identity by giving his full name, professional name, memberships, and car registration number and asking the officers to check the computer. One policeman instead judges his appearance and name against his claim to Englishness; Saladin points out that the immigration officers themselves do not sound Anglo-Saxon. The episode exposes the gap between formal identity and the racialized assumptions that govern whether it is accepted.

A related exclusion operates in the television industry. Hal Valance tells Saladin that he is being dropped from The Aliens Show because audience research suggests that ethnic viewers do not want an ethnic programme. Valance claims Saladin’s presence makes the show too racial, even as he considers the project’s larger commercial possibilities. The exchange makes commercial judgment another institution that assigns people to categories and limits their place within the imagined audience.

The account of Uhuru Simba’s death in custody offers a further, explicitly British parallel about authority and contested testimony. Inspector Stephen Kinch describes the death as an extraordinarily unlikely accident after officers say a nightmare caused Simba to fall from his bunk. Antoinette Roberts challenges the implication that the community’s lives are being treated as a wager, while Hanif Johnson points to the lower bunk, the empty upper bunk, and the absence of witnesses apart from prison officers. Their challenge does not establish an alternative cause, but it exposes why the official account is disputed. Set beside the novel’s Indian scenes, these episodes broaden its concern from religious division alone to the institutions that classify people, weigh their credibility, and decide which public events merit recognition.

Religious Disagreement and the Sources of Speech

The novel also links communal politics to the problem of who may speak in the name of religion. In the Jahilia dream narrative, Salman the Persian warns Mahound that accepting Abu Simbel’s proposed compromise over Lat, Uzza, and Manat would undermine the creed and make the believers appear weak. Mahound replies that he has learned to listen and experiences revelation as something arising from his deepest self. Later, as Gibreel Farishta hears Mahound’s doubts and anguish over the city’s continued worship of the goddesses, he has no answer to offer. Their uncertain connection makes the source of revelation difficult to separate from the prophet’s own inward experience.

A different form of religious authority appears in the Imam’s revolutionary broadcasts. The Imam’s words travel by clandestine radio from Kensington to dreamed-of Desh through Bilal X, whose trained, commanding voice carries the call to revolt against the Empress and against history itself. The Imam treats history, progress, science, and rights as enemies of a completed revelation; the broadcast turns a voice associated with American popular success into an instrument of revolution. This is not the same political conflict as communalism in India, but it sharpens the novel’s question of how religious language can be made into political power—and of how claims to speak for a community can either challenge or harden divisions.