A God in Every Stone

"Peshawar was then part of India, or Greater India, which stretched from the borders of Iran at that point to—if you take in Burma—the borders of Siam and Cambodia, and to China at the top. Even if you leave out Burma, it’s basically from Assam all the way through what is now Bangladesh and Pakistan. The story begins in Turkey, just before the First World War. A young Englishwoman is sent there to join an archaeological expedition led by a friend of her father’s, who is excavating the ruins of a site linked to an earlier explorer, the man who first mapped the Indus for Europe. At the dig, she finds herself working alongside an older Turkish archaeologist and slowly, unexpectedly, falling in love with him. Then she’s called back home because the situation between Germany and England is very bad. She thinks she will be back in a few months, but, suddenly, Turkey joins hands with the enemy. At the same time, millions of Indian soldiers are shipped to Europe to fight for the British Army as the First World War erupts. These soldiers find themselves in extremely alien situations in Flanders. They confront snow, and a flat, marshy landscape they are just not used to. They’re in the trenches, there’s incessant rain. And on top of that, the artillery bombardments and the gas attacks, machine gun fire, barbed wire, all the rest. Two of these soldiers from Peshawar are badly injured. One loses an eye. They are moved to Brighton, where a massive hospital has been set up for Indian soldiers. But there they realise how little all this rhetoric of ‘we are one’ matters, how little the British officers or even the government cares for them. It’s a rude shock. They are maimed, crippled, almost killed, but those guys don’t give a damn. The Indians are regarded as third class citizens, almost sub-human. Then the soldiers come back to Peshawar. Later, this young English woman is sent there too, to get her out of England. She wants to explore the area around Peshawar and the Indus. There, she meets these two former soldiers. Things develop from there. The book has two main sections. First, the time around the First World War, then a decade later, when Gandhi’s movement is joined by a Pashtun from Peshawar called Abdul Ghaffar Khan or Badshah Khan. Many people call him ‘the Frontier Gandhi.’ But, as Kamila and others have said, he should be recognised a great freedom fighter in his own right. Pashto culture is a very macho, martial culture. Badshah Khan tried to build a non-violent movement and did succeed, but felt betrayed after Partition when he suddenly found himself at the far-end of Pakistan, not a country he ever wanted to exist. He had been fighting for all of India to be independent, and for Muslims and Hindus to live together. In 1930, his activists and supporters were fired upon by both British and British-Indian soldiers during a massacre in Peshawar. One of the climactic scenes of the whole book takes place here. So, the novel moves from ancient ruins, distant cultures, different ideas of conquest and hegemony, through the carnage of the First World War, and into the movements that would ultimately lead to Indian independence. Again, I love the way she’s done it. It’s not a fat book. She has condensed a lot into 350 pages. I loved reading it. In terms of history, it helps you realise how history can compress, how things might be refracted in the remembering. All the things you want from a proper historical novel. I would say so, yes. My book starts on the day the great poet Rabindranath Tagore dies. It was a major event in Calcutta. Hundreds of thousands gathered on the street to watch the funeral procession go by. The four young characters, the main characters of the book, are there, but they don’t know each other. So, it’s also a portrait of a city during a time of great turmoil. As they make their way through the war years, these four people come across each other, have interactions. They meet and get to know each other in various ways. The war is continuing to squeeze Calcutta from the outset, but it touches the city only briefly, when the Japanese conduct bombing raids. The fear is of when the Japanese will bomb, when they will launch the seemingly inevitable ground invasion. By late 1942, the food has been sucked out of the villages and there is a massive famine across Bengal, which, remember, then includes what is now Bangladesh. These things create the dramatic moments in the book and change the characters’ lives. The first period runs from 1941 to 1943, then there’s a second period in the 1970s where a character is looking back at the war years. I don’t go into Partition and the riots and famine directly, but I look at their after-effects—the toxic half-life of these traumatic events as they impact and effect people down the decades. We are facing a time of great chaos, great uncertainty, and upending anxiety. It was useful for me, writing this book, to remember how that time must have felt during the war. There are ammunition factories, famine, political parties fighting for independence. And there is the whole idea of who we are—our culture, identity, the clash between Hindus and Muslims, men and women, communism and other political struggles. Many of these things resonate with what is going on now, but that wasn’t necessarily intentional. I was just trying to write truthfully and vividly about that time. History was important, but the story, characters and their thinking even more so. But yes, it does make me look at history, and where we are now, quite differently. I find myself thinking: yes, we are in a bad time, but it’s not the first bad time and it won’t be the last."