Mir appears to have used the same central casting.īollywood’s problem now is not the portrayal of English, but of Muslims, vilified in many recent films. Bollywood maintains a few “goras”, handlebar-mustachioed, cruel-looking blond men, to represent the grasping Angrez in historical films. Mir’s depiction of the English-Indian tensions is melodramatic.
It will break out a week after the murder, and will end with Delhi sacked and in flames, with Ghalib’s life hanging by a thread among Britons crazed for revenge. The simmering sepoy mutiny provides much of the tension in Murder. While the historical Ghalib disapproved of the hotheads taking on the British, the poet’s role in this telling cannot be discussed without a plot spoiler. Mir takes this figure of Ghalib and deploys him to good account to act as a worldly and wise foil for the passions and foibles of his fellow citizens on the eve of the Sepoy Revolt/First Indian War of Independence. The Ghalib of this tradition combines arrogance, a sense of fun, loyalty, and sentimentality. Delhi folk traditions amplified these details, that then inspired the Bollywood and Doordarshan biopics of 19. He suffered terribly from the early deaths of his children and degrading poverty. A sense of his person emerges from his extensive correspondence (edited in English by Ralph Russel and Khorshid ul Islam, 1994). As an Indo-Muslim aristocrat neither Ghalib nor his circle recorded many intimacies for posterity. Raza invents much imaginative detail about the poet’s personal life.
Manners and mutiny spoilers full#
As one of India’s greatest poets, Ghalib’s portrayal here necessarily captures our full attention. Murder in the Mushaira, Raza Mir (Aleph, January 2021)Īsadullah Mirza “Ghalib” is the hero of the story.
The latter is more in keeping with the chatty culture of the protagonists. The story moves along briskly with important psychological and social details being supplied by characters to one another in the course of their dialogue, a device the author favors to avoid too much internal monologue or narrative. Real complications ensue as a colorful cast of characters carry on love affairs whilst plotting to overthrow British rule in India. This is a straightforward murder mystery with a victim so disliked in his lifetime that more than one person is suspected of the killing. Mir’s women move the action of this novel forward in a way they could not do if they strictly observed purdah. His women especially enjoy an anachronistic degree of freedom But this is beside the point. Mir’s characters have much in common with contemporary Delhiwallahs.
For that they have Dalrymple’s White Mughals. Readers in any case will not take Murder as a guide to the manners of late Mughal Delhi. Besides these few slips, Mir navigates the details of Ghalib’s era with a sure eye and ear. Another jarring note is the British resident calling for his female secretary Beckie, an anachronism by about 80 years. Mir’s fluid, contemporary American dialogue comes out about right as the recreation of the racy, sophisticated Dehliwallahs of the time, except when a man pawns his family “tchotchkes”, an unforgivable Yiddishism. The writer of a historical novel has to balance between the need to make the ambience appear suitably authentic, without so many archaisms that the reader gets distracted. So depicted, Mir’s Shahjahan-abad becomes a familiar place, despite the barriers of time, culture and language that separate us from the characters of his new novel. We hear Urdu poets declaim their ghazals to polite applause as part of the mushairas of the title. He lets us smell the boiled sweet meats, the ambergris-heavy perfumes and the odors of the outhouse. Raza Mir’s Murder in the Mushaira brings to life mid-19th-century Shahjahan-abad (as Delhi was then known), its Ramazan celebrations, noble palaces, shrines, shops and slums. Miss Marple evokes mid-20th century Britain, Inspector Montalbano-contemporary Sicily. Murder mysteries make natural period pieces, because passion, crime, investigation and come-uppance speak to material culture and social manners.
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