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The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali
Nomi and Zee are Local Borns—their father a convict condemned by the British to the Andaman Islands, their mother shipped off with him. The islands are an inhospitable place, despite their surreal beauty. In this unreliable world, the children have their friend Aye, the pet hen Priya and the distracted love of their parents to shore them up from one day to the next. Meanwhile, within the walls of the prison, Prisoner 218 D wages a war on her jailers with only her body and her memory.
When war descends upon this overlooked outpost of Empire, the British are forced out and the Japanese move in. Soon the first shot is fired and Zee is forced to flee, leaving Nomi and the other islanders to contend with a new malice. The islands—and the seas surrounding them—become a battlefield, resulting in tragedy for some and a brittle kind of freedom for others, who find themselves increasingly entangled in a mesh of alliances and betrayals.
Ambitiously imagined and hauntingly alive, The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali writes into being the interwoven stories of people caught in the vortex of history, powerless yet with powers of their own: of bravery and wonder, empathy and endurance. Uzma Aslam Khan’s extraordinary new novel is an unflinching and lyrical page-turner, an epic telling of a largely forgotten chapter in the history of the subcontinent.
When war descends upon this overlooked outpost of Empire, the British are forced out and the Japanese move in. Soon the first shot is fired and Zee is forced to flee, leaving Nomi and the other islanders to contend with a new malice. The islands—and the seas surrounding them—become a battlefield, resulting in tragedy for some and a brittle kind of freedom for others, who find themselves increasingly entangled in a mesh of alliances and betrayals.
Ambitiously imagined and hauntingly alive, The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali writes into being the interwoven stories of people caught in the vortex of history, powerless yet with powers of their own: of bravery and wonder, empathy and endurance. Uzma Aslam Khan’s extraordinary new novel is an unflinching and lyrical page-turner, an epic telling of a largely forgotten chapter in the history of the subcontinent.
380 pages, Hardcover
First published April 25, 2019
106 people are currently reading
2026 people want to read
About the author
Uzma Aslam Khan
12 books141 followersUzma Aslam Khan is the prize-winning author of five novels published worldwide. These include Trespassing, translated in 18 languages and recipient of a Commonwealth Prize nomination; The Geometry of God, a Kirkus Reviews' Best Book of 2009; Thinner Than Skin, nominated for the Man Asian Literary Prize and DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, and winner of the French Embassy Prize for Best Fiction at the Karachi Literature Festival 2014. Her work has twice won a Zoetrope: All Story Short Fiction Prize, and appeared in Granta, The Massachusetts Review, Australian Book Review, Nimrod, AGNI, Calyx, and Guardian UK, among many other periodicals.
Khan’s fifth novel, The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali, is set in the British penal settlement of the Andaman Islands during the 1930s, through the Japanese occupation during World War II. The book, 27 years in the making, writes into being the stories of those caught in the vortex of history, yet written out of it. The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali won the Karachi Literature Festival-Getz Pharma Fiction Prize and the UBL Literary Awards English Language Fiction category in Pakistan. In India, it was shortlisted for the TATA Literature Live! Best Book of the Year, Fiction. Released in the US in 2022, The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali was a New York Times' "Best Historical Fiction 2022" as well as a New York Times' "Books for Summer 2022." In 2023, it won the Massachusetts Book Award in Fiction.
See:
https://www.massbook.org/mass-book-aw...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/04/bo...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/27/bo...
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/t...
Khan’s fifth novel, The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali, is set in the British penal settlement of the Andaman Islands during the 1930s, through the Japanese occupation during World War II. The book, 27 years in the making, writes into being the stories of those caught in the vortex of history, yet written out of it. The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali won the Karachi Literature Festival-Getz Pharma Fiction Prize and the UBL Literary Awards English Language Fiction category in Pakistan. In India, it was shortlisted for the TATA Literature Live! Best Book of the Year, Fiction. Released in the US in 2022, The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali was a New York Times' "Best Historical Fiction 2022" as well as a New York Times' "Books for Summer 2022." In 2023, it won the Massachusetts Book Award in Fiction.
See:
https://www.massbook.org/mass-book-aw...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/04/bo...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/27/bo...
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/t...
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 61 reviews
April 9, 2022
My thanks to Walker Rutter-Bowman at Deep Vellum Publishing for a e-galley of this book; thanks also to Edelweiss through whom I also received another e-copy.
Can there be hell in paradise?
There certainly can for the Andaman Islands with its ‘sky … blue as a kingfisher’s wing. [and] sea … lilac, with hints of jade’ became just that for the many thousands of prisoners (political prisoners and convicts) who were ‘transported’ to the Ross Island Penal Colony—the black water/kala paani; for the Korean, Chinese and Malay ‘comfort women’ brought there by the Japanese during their occupation of the island; for the released convicts and their families who lived there, for the slightest misstep would subject them to the worst whether at the hands of the colonisers or the so-called ‘rescuers’, the Japanese who had supposedly come to liberate them; or even for the indigenous population who suffered at the hands of many invaders.
Beautifully written but harrowing and emotionally wrenching, The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali by Pakistani author Uzma Aslam Khan, tells their story. Based around various real life events, the book tells us the intertwined stories of several people over the period 1936 to 1947; there is Nomi Ali of the title, who is 13 when our story opens (the Islands on the verge of Japanese occupation) who lives with her older brother ‘Zee’ (Zeeshan), who loves books and excels at his studies, their mother who serves as a warder for the women prisoners overseeing their work at a sewing factory; while Hyder Ali, their father, a former convict (not a political prisoner) now released is too broken by his imprisonment to do much work; then there is Aye, Zee and Nomi’s friend, a fourth generation Burmese boy living there with his family, his great-grandfather having been among the first to have been transported there—and ‘trusty’ of the British administrator; an unnamed political prisoner, a young woman—brought there at a time that women were not supposed to be sent but were all the same; Shakuntala, the Portuguese-Bengali widow of a British officer, who continues to live there and run a farm raising pigs and chickens, with her young daughter, ‘White’ Paula; and indigenous people Loka, Lulu and Lala Ram who end up playing an important role in their lives. Each of these characters’ lives is tinged with tragedy (in fact, it rather runs through their lives), some past, and some that plays out every single day—be it in the form of what they have to (or had to) bear in the prison—any who has been there has never ever left
Too many who watched had never stopped living it, the climb to the hill’s summit to one of the 693 cells, the days and nights creeping from one end to the next, 13 ½ x 7, a smallness buried deep in the folds of the brain, where it grew, oh grew. Then the sound of the heavy grill door as it slammed shut, and the three-step snap of a latch system to puzzle even the niftiest thief.
Or be it in the form of new developments/changes that test them or make their lives miserable, for no fault of their own. This book traces their journeys.
This is, as I mentioned earlier, a beautifully written book, and one which draws its readers right in, making us interested in the stories and the fate of almost every one of its characters. Most perhaps have shades of grey to them, but we find ourselves in sympathy with everyone. Some may have committed ‘crimes’ or stood up against their colonisers, but the latter’s acts in the name of imprisonment or correction expose their facades of ‘civilisation’; even those that have supposedly come to free them from their colonisers are no different for all their claims of being at one with them.
Khan pulls no punches when she describes the horrors that these people, be it the prisoners, the (voluntary or involuntary) settlers, the ‘comfort’ women, or the indigenous community had to face. To say that reading these experiences was gut-wrenching is an understatement—but it was that and much more at each step (And incidentally, I also found myself thinking of a point I had recently discussed with a fellow blogger about how fiction can draw out more emotional responses from us vis-à-vis nonfiction, and that stood out to me here because just last year I had read a book on transportation, and the many horrors that were inflicted on the millions of transportees across several penal settlements; and while what I read had certainly shocked me, the level of emotional response was far higher here, where we ‘knew’ these people). And it was only later, looking up some of these aspects online, that I realised how many of these actual incidents had occurred in real life—how thousands suffered, how lives—minds and bodies were broken, how only precious little of these lives were their own.
This is an excellently researched book, and the historical aspects were something I really appreciated reading. I don’t think (at least as far as my memory serves me) that we learnt very much about the Islands back in school history lessons, so beyond it being the site of Kala Paani, I knew little about the island. Through this book, I felt I learnt much about it, from its first Malay conquerors to its first occupation by the British; the ships that brought prisoners there; the Japanese occupation, as well as the prison itself (I didn’t know that it was based on Bentham’s panopticon for instance). These were aspects I really enjoyed.
This is definitely a book well worth reading, but one that will certainly shake you and impact you emotionally.
4.75 stars (I’m leaving that .25 off because sometimes it felt for me that it was just all too much to bear—but that is easy for me to say, reading it far from those that faced it)
p.s. I must mention the lovely cover of this edition, the relevance of which comes to one as one reads the book.
Can there be hell in paradise?
There certainly can for the Andaman Islands with its ‘sky … blue as a kingfisher’s wing. [and] sea … lilac, with hints of jade’ became just that for the many thousands of prisoners (political prisoners and convicts) who were ‘transported’ to the Ross Island Penal Colony—the black water/kala paani; for the Korean, Chinese and Malay ‘comfort women’ brought there by the Japanese during their occupation of the island; for the released convicts and their families who lived there, for the slightest misstep would subject them to the worst whether at the hands of the colonisers or the so-called ‘rescuers’, the Japanese who had supposedly come to liberate them; or even for the indigenous population who suffered at the hands of many invaders.
Beautifully written but harrowing and emotionally wrenching, The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali by Pakistani author Uzma Aslam Khan, tells their story. Based around various real life events, the book tells us the intertwined stories of several people over the period 1936 to 1947; there is Nomi Ali of the title, who is 13 when our story opens (the Islands on the verge of Japanese occupation) who lives with her older brother ‘Zee’ (Zeeshan), who loves books and excels at his studies, their mother who serves as a warder for the women prisoners overseeing their work at a sewing factory; while Hyder Ali, their father, a former convict (not a political prisoner) now released is too broken by his imprisonment to do much work; then there is Aye, Zee and Nomi’s friend, a fourth generation Burmese boy living there with his family, his great-grandfather having been among the first to have been transported there—and ‘trusty’ of the British administrator; an unnamed political prisoner, a young woman—brought there at a time that women were not supposed to be sent but were all the same; Shakuntala, the Portuguese-Bengali widow of a British officer, who continues to live there and run a farm raising pigs and chickens, with her young daughter, ‘White’ Paula; and indigenous people Loka, Lulu and Lala Ram who end up playing an important role in their lives. Each of these characters’ lives is tinged with tragedy (in fact, it rather runs through their lives), some past, and some that plays out every single day—be it in the form of what they have to (or had to) bear in the prison—any who has been there has never ever left
Too many who watched had never stopped living it, the climb to the hill’s summit to one of the 693 cells, the days and nights creeping from one end to the next, 13 ½ x 7, a smallness buried deep in the folds of the brain, where it grew, oh grew. Then the sound of the heavy grill door as it slammed shut, and the three-step snap of a latch system to puzzle even the niftiest thief.
Or be it in the form of new developments/changes that test them or make their lives miserable, for no fault of their own. This book traces their journeys.
This is, as I mentioned earlier, a beautifully written book, and one which draws its readers right in, making us interested in the stories and the fate of almost every one of its characters. Most perhaps have shades of grey to them, but we find ourselves in sympathy with everyone. Some may have committed ‘crimes’ or stood up against their colonisers, but the latter’s acts in the name of imprisonment or correction expose their facades of ‘civilisation’; even those that have supposedly come to free them from their colonisers are no different for all their claims of being at one with them.
Khan pulls no punches when she describes the horrors that these people, be it the prisoners, the (voluntary or involuntary) settlers, the ‘comfort’ women, or the indigenous community had to face. To say that reading these experiences was gut-wrenching is an understatement—but it was that and much more at each step (And incidentally, I also found myself thinking of a point I had recently discussed with a fellow blogger about how fiction can draw out more emotional responses from us vis-à-vis nonfiction, and that stood out to me here because just last year I had read a book on transportation, and the many horrors that were inflicted on the millions of transportees across several penal settlements; and while what I read had certainly shocked me, the level of emotional response was far higher here, where we ‘knew’ these people). And it was only later, looking up some of these aspects online, that I realised how many of these actual incidents had occurred in real life—how thousands suffered, how lives—minds and bodies were broken, how only precious little of these lives were their own.
This is an excellently researched book, and the historical aspects were something I really appreciated reading. I don’t think (at least as far as my memory serves me) that we learnt very much about the Islands back in school history lessons, so beyond it being the site of Kala Paani, I knew little about the island. Through this book, I felt I learnt much about it, from its first Malay conquerors to its first occupation by the British; the ships that brought prisoners there; the Japanese occupation, as well as the prison itself (I didn’t know that it was based on Bentham’s panopticon for instance). These were aspects I really enjoyed.
This is definitely a book well worth reading, but one that will certainly shake you and impact you emotionally.
4.75 stars (I’m leaving that .25 off because sometimes it felt for me that it was just all too much to bear—but that is easy for me to say, reading it far from those that faced it)
p.s. I must mention the lovely cover of this edition, the relevance of which comes to one as one reads the book.
June 17, 2019
This is a lost story of WW2. I knew almost nothing of the Andaman Islands -- didn't know the British used it as a prison colony for Indians, or that the Japanese occupied it during the war. The writer smoothly weaves this excavated, violent history into a delicate story of people that history forgets, with a particular focus on the child Nomi and her brother Zee. As with Khan's previous books, it is the poetic language that kept me reading. She has a way of contrasting big, horrible events with small, aching moments of beauty. A must read for lovers of historical fiction, Second World War buffs, and for anyone really who loves a book that is hard to put down.
December 24, 2022
Incredible. Still absorbing it, but these are my thoughts. Uzma Aslam Khan writes about places and people few writers see. She boldly charts new territory, with every book. This one, set in the Andaman Islands, has (like her previous Thinner Than Skin ) a surreal, magical quality. Yet what happens to the people and land (nature is as much a characte) under the British and Japanese during WW2, feels close to the bone. Not many authors combine beauty and pain so seamlessly, think Arundhati Roy, Gabriel García Márquez. Also, maybe because I’m South Asian, I was in awe of the sweep. The characters are from today's India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Myanmar, from many religions. Nomi and Zee are Muslim. Shakuntala, Hindu and Christian (Portuguese Indian). Aye is Buddhist. Dr. Singh is Sikh. The woman prisoner is unnamed and uncategorized. Loka is indigenous. All loving described, but only some survive (won’t say which).
I read this in one week and don’t read fast. It was so visual, I felt I was there. Everything is humanized. Colonialism and racism are written about especially from the perspective of marginalized people, and the book could just as easily be about today. Khan invites readers to bear witness to lives omitted from the past, and present. Toward the end, the prisoner thinks:
This book should go down as essential reading of erased histories reclaimed with defiance and love. After I finished it, I was reminded of this quote by George Orwell: "In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
I read this in one week and don’t read fast. It was so visual, I felt I was there. Everything is humanized. Colonialism and racism are written about especially from the perspective of marginalized people, and the book could just as easily be about today. Khan invites readers to bear witness to lives omitted from the past, and present. Toward the end, the prisoner thinks:
“Somewhere in the great sky beyond this sky of planes was a star made entirely of words. And on the star lived as many different kinds of words as birds in all the skies, fish in all the seas, and clay patterns in all the hands of adoring women. Some words were cautious as the crabs nesting on the beach. Others, bold as the giant hornbills prattling in the trees. Then there were those that made no sound, but were equally fearless, folding their arms and waiting for her to sit on their lap. The prisoner who was no longer a prisoner was gathering all these many words to herself and would speak them, if there were but someone to listen, even a little.”
This book should go down as essential reading of erased histories reclaimed with defiance and love. After I finished it, I was reminded of this quote by George Orwell: "In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
March 11, 2024
Long titles win. Set in the Andaman Islands over a course of oppressive imperial regimes, this is a lyrical historical fiction that tells a largely forgotten chapter in the history of the subcontinent. An engaging read.
April 12, 2022
$12.50 SALE ebook editions, available now ONLY at the Publisher's site!
THIS REVIEW HAS MANY LINKS TO INFORMATIONAL RESOURCES ON MY WEBSITE.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: First, read this:
The reason to read, or not to read, this story is there in those quotes. There are adults imprisoned in this story, adults whose sufferings are inflicted on bodies as well as souls; their children are, revoltingly but oddly mercifully, imprisoned with them in a soul-warping hothouse of rage and mistrust...but with their loving (if distracted) parents. These strands are braided throughout this intense, powerful, experiential read.
The bones of the story...a political prison on the Andaman Islands during WWII is attacked by the Japanese, slaughter is heaped on torture, and through it all a family makes a life amid the death...are unfamiliar to most of us in the US. The existence of the Andamans, those odd and liminal boundary markers between marine biomes and cultural fault lines between the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea, is probably unfamiliar even to geographically savvy folk here. Unless, of course, they're familiar with that idiotic spiritual imperialist who got himself murdered by the North Sentinelese isolationists. (Got what he deserved, in my never-remotely humble opinion.) These islands are very charged with an intense and irresistible energy for storytellers. Author Khan is the one who should be trusted to tell you the saga of their restless spirits.
I can't really imagine it's a spoiler to reveal that the British Raj wasn't too terribly popular with quite a lot of the people they ruled. If you haven't heard of the Mahatma, take a quick peek at Wikipedia and then come back. He wasn't alone; he didn't work in isolation; and he wasn't the first freedom fighter on the Indian subcontinent. The parents in this story are, like the Mahatma, resisters of British imperial rule of India. For their beliefs and the actions they inspired them to take, they're imprisoned in the Cellular Jail. This hellscape was built after the 1857 Indian Rebellion exploded the political-prisoner population the British detained.
History lesson aside, though it's very much not an aside but a central part of the experience of this read, the story Author Khan tells us is a deeply personal one. Nomi Ali, a Muslim child, is brought up with her brother in the Cellular Jail's ambit...and, odd as it sounds, it's...just a childhood. An abnormal one to the reader. Nomi doesn't really process this...she experiences the pains of growing up as the child of adults who are distracted, whose attention doesn't center on her or her needs. The awfulness an adult reader barely needs to infer, it feels so pervasive to us, isn't her issue. She feels alone. Her life isn't, in her observation, very important or even all that interesting. So she finds companionship and she comes of age in this stew of people who have only one thing in common: the colonial oppressors want them kept away from their homes enough to isolate them thoroughly. In the ordinary course of her life, Nomi wouldn't have encountered a Burmese person, or lived in a place with an Indigenous population older than her own ancestors, or been directly in the path of the Japanese army as they swept through South Asia.
Brutal as the British were as jailers, the Japanese arrived to add much more misery...need I remind anyone of the "comfort women" and their heinous sufferings?...to the existing awfulness. For Nomi, though, this is...life. She gets on with the task of being alive and growing up.
It is for that reason that I kept reading this chronicle in multiple voices of the horrors of war in a colonial setting. I was not taken with the author's choice to spread her narrative over multiple points of view and multiple strands of time. It was an extra call on my attention, an extra demand to retain details, that seemed to me to be unnecessary to make the larger point. Author Khan was asking that I invest in many lives, but shallowly; had I been given a choice, I would've invested in Nomi very deeply, and her story would still have enabled the deep interrogation of the immorality of colonialism and its inevitable offshoot, war.
I would not in any way recommend that you shy away from reading this story. I want it to be part of all of our mental furniture, to fix itself in the legendarium of World War II. The urgency and the passion of Author Khan's storytelling voice will woo resistant readers into investing in a painful read, I honestly believe, and the story told is one of such tremendous relevance and urgency in 2022. We're witnessing analogous events unfold in Xinjiang. We're watching in horror as Mariupol and Kramatorsk see vile crimes against children, therefore against the future of humanity itself, perpetrated by invaders bent on territorial occupation. We aren't entitled to remain ignorant of the ways that impacts those who suffer it.
But it's entirely too much to doomscroll the day away, to surrender to a helpless wretchedness. So turn, as I always have and recommend that you do too, to the past perfect, the completed action that explains and illuminates the present. This novel will give you furniture to rest your unanchored anguish and rage on. Nomi, and the characters around her, will afford us in our privileged isolation from the physical realities of war, a trellis to grow the vines of empathy into maturity. I hope they will root strongly in you, and bloom flowers of yellow and blue tolerance and understanding.
Understanding the experience of war, as THE MIRACULOUS TRUE HISTORY OF NOMI ALI affords you the opportunity to do, might lead to more compassionate actions in one's own sphere of reality. This true story, told as a novel, gives you the chance to think through the consequences of inattention and indifference.
THIS REVIEW HAS MANY LINKS TO INFORMATIONAL RESOURCES ON MY WEBSITE.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: First, read this:
“Have you noticed that when men want freedom, the conversation is about the nature of action, violence or non-violence? But when women want freedom, the conversation is about the nature of women, natural or unnatural?”
–and–
Somewhere in the great sky beyond this sky of planes was a star made entirely of words. And on the star lived as many different kinds of words as birds in all the skies, fish in all the seas, and clay patterns in all the hands of adoring women. Some words were cautious as the crabs nesting on the beach. Others, bold as the giant hornbills prattling in the trees. Then there were those that made no sound, but were equally fearless, folding their arms and waiting for her to sit on their lap. The prisoner who was no longer a prisoner was gathering all these many words to herself and would speak them, if there were but someone to listen, even a little.
The reason to read, or not to read, this story is there in those quotes. There are adults imprisoned in this story, adults whose sufferings are inflicted on bodies as well as souls; their children are, revoltingly but oddly mercifully, imprisoned with them in a soul-warping hothouse of rage and mistrust...but with their loving (if distracted) parents. These strands are braided throughout this intense, powerful, experiential read.
The bones of the story...a political prison on the Andaman Islands during WWII is attacked by the Japanese, slaughter is heaped on torture, and through it all a family makes a life amid the death...are unfamiliar to most of us in the US. The existence of the Andamans, those odd and liminal boundary markers between marine biomes and cultural fault lines between the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea, is probably unfamiliar even to geographically savvy folk here. Unless, of course, they're familiar with that idiotic spiritual imperialist who got himself murdered by the North Sentinelese isolationists. (Got what he deserved, in my never-remotely humble opinion.) These islands are very charged with an intense and irresistible energy for storytellers. Author Khan is the one who should be trusted to tell you the saga of their restless spirits.
I can't really imagine it's a spoiler to reveal that the British Raj wasn't too terribly popular with quite a lot of the people they ruled. If you haven't heard of the Mahatma, take a quick peek at Wikipedia and then come back. He wasn't alone; he didn't work in isolation; and he wasn't the first freedom fighter on the Indian subcontinent. The parents in this story are, like the Mahatma, resisters of British imperial rule of India. For their beliefs and the actions they inspired them to take, they're imprisoned in the Cellular Jail. This hellscape was built after the 1857 Indian Rebellion exploded the political-prisoner population the British detained.
History lesson aside, though it's very much not an aside but a central part of the experience of this read, the story Author Khan tells us is a deeply personal one. Nomi Ali, a Muslim child, is brought up with her brother in the Cellular Jail's ambit...and, odd as it sounds, it's...just a childhood. An abnormal one to the reader. Nomi doesn't really process this...she experiences the pains of growing up as the child of adults who are distracted, whose attention doesn't center on her or her needs. The awfulness an adult reader barely needs to infer, it feels so pervasive to us, isn't her issue. She feels alone. Her life isn't, in her observation, very important or even all that interesting. So she finds companionship and she comes of age in this stew of people who have only one thing in common: the colonial oppressors want them kept away from their homes enough to isolate them thoroughly. In the ordinary course of her life, Nomi wouldn't have encountered a Burmese person, or lived in a place with an Indigenous population older than her own ancestors, or been directly in the path of the Japanese army as they swept through South Asia.
Brutal as the British were as jailers, the Japanese arrived to add much more misery...need I remind anyone of the "comfort women" and their heinous sufferings?...to the existing awfulness. For Nomi, though, this is...life. She gets on with the task of being alive and growing up.
It is for that reason that I kept reading this chronicle in multiple voices of the horrors of war in a colonial setting. I was not taken with the author's choice to spread her narrative over multiple points of view and multiple strands of time. It was an extra call on my attention, an extra demand to retain details, that seemed to me to be unnecessary to make the larger point. Author Khan was asking that I invest in many lives, but shallowly; had I been given a choice, I would've invested in Nomi very deeply, and her story would still have enabled the deep interrogation of the immorality of colonialism and its inevitable offshoot, war.
I would not in any way recommend that you shy away from reading this story. I want it to be part of all of our mental furniture, to fix itself in the legendarium of World War II. The urgency and the passion of Author Khan's storytelling voice will woo resistant readers into investing in a painful read, I honestly believe, and the story told is one of such tremendous relevance and urgency in 2022. We're witnessing analogous events unfold in Xinjiang. We're watching in horror as Mariupol and Kramatorsk see vile crimes against children, therefore against the future of humanity itself, perpetrated by invaders bent on territorial occupation. We aren't entitled to remain ignorant of the ways that impacts those who suffer it.
But it's entirely too much to doomscroll the day away, to surrender to a helpless wretchedness. So turn, as I always have and recommend that you do too, to the past perfect, the completed action that explains and illuminates the present. This novel will give you furniture to rest your unanchored anguish and rage on. Nomi, and the characters around her, will afford us in our privileged isolation from the physical realities of war, a trellis to grow the vines of empathy into maturity. I hope they will root strongly in you, and bloom flowers of yellow and blue tolerance and understanding.
Understanding the experience of war, as THE MIRACULOUS TRUE HISTORY OF NOMI ALI affords you the opportunity to do, might lead to more compassionate actions in one's own sphere of reality. This true story, told as a novel, gives you the chance to think through the consequences of inattention and indifference.
June 18, 2022
I've read 3 or 4 of her books. I eagerly seek her work (getting ahold of this title took awhile, including purchasing this from a disreputable vendor in India, but finally my local library agreed to my purchase suggestion...now there's a waiting list!) and I will definitely read more from her.
This book is a contemplation--deep, thoughtful, heartfelt and wrenching. The story, set in the Andamans, tells of this penal colony during WWII as the British pull out (their misplaced hubris is consistent) and the Japanese enter. The Indians, the Burmese, and the locals are buffeted about as the warring colonial foreigners engage in a pissing contest.
This story is affecting, beautifully written, and intricately plotted, It has multiple perspectives on the same event in the tradition of Urdu storytelling... a bit like Rashomon but without each view necessarily contradicting the others.
I continue to process how this title grips the reader in layers of emotions as the characters struggle with many traumas (yeah, TW and CW throughout). It's not only about Nomi; it's about the people around her and about living through a situation that is already oppressive (ie, a prison town under British rule/imperialism) and then add the war and occupation.
Overall, the storycrafting is gorgeous and masterful. And I'll add that the 3rd person perspective is done so expertly that the read feels very intimate. How is that done? Just amazing.
The quotes I noted are mainly from the first 2/3rds of the book. I was too engrossed by the last third to track the beautiful passages.
Several quotes:
This was as far as had ever come. The higher up Zee took her, the more the ocean flew through the trees, and she tried to focus on this because it was beautiful.
Zee was pointing to the purest of sands below, where palm trees swayed in prayer. Nearby were strict rows of coconut palms, a whole army of them....
...When his focus switched to Zee, a small smile hovered at the corner of his lips. He kept stroking, slowly, because love was the opposite of haste.
...He has come to envision a god dying to escape. He has come to confess that he has learned something he wishes no one to learn and what he learned was this. There is nothing more hurtful than hope.
...There it was again. Influence. Not to be confused with loyalty. A key difference. After all, this was the same boy who had trampled, with ease and even relish, the clothes of his rulers that day on the mountain! Every rebellion against theft began with theft. How glad he was to have been there that day to help! (A common ant could become exotic, a tin toy a magic trick!) The Local Born children did not know loyalty, not yet. Loyalty was something encoded, and could not be felt by the son of a convict any more than by an aborigine. It could only be felt by the free.
...Slowly, his body became habituated by Zee's. The two began to glide. A single night became one long and graceful movement.
...The opposite of peace is not war, someone close to her had once said. The opposite of peace is inertia.
Ahead, the trees drew spells in their sleep. When he first came here, said Mr. Howard, on nights such as this, he believed himself to have washed up on a chain of dreaming islands, all glassy bays and whispering surf. Our lovely lost world, he had called it. "As though there was something here that caused the clay of the physical body to glow."...
...Yet, in his heart he knew and so did she: given the chance to reverse his choice, he might still have misgivings. It seemed to be the way of the island that whenever there were only two sides, neither was right.
...Only through ritual could continuity be maintained, and so could tenderness.
Before the ships with the bright sun arrived, there had been a woman who tossed nets far into the sea in a single movement that was an extension of her breath.
This book is a contemplation--deep, thoughtful, heartfelt and wrenching. The story, set in the Andamans, tells of this penal colony during WWII as the British pull out (their misplaced hubris is consistent) and the Japanese enter. The Indians, the Burmese, and the locals are buffeted about as the warring colonial foreigners engage in a pissing contest.
This story is affecting, beautifully written, and intricately plotted, It has multiple perspectives on the same event in the tradition of Urdu storytelling... a bit like Rashomon but without each view necessarily contradicting the others.
I continue to process how this title grips the reader in layers of emotions as the characters struggle with many traumas (yeah, TW and CW throughout). It's not only about Nomi; it's about the people around her and about living through a situation that is already oppressive (ie, a prison town under British rule/imperialism) and then add the war and occupation.
Overall, the storycrafting is gorgeous and masterful. And I'll add that the 3rd person perspective is done so expertly that the read feels very intimate. How is that done? Just amazing.
The quotes I noted are mainly from the first 2/3rds of the book. I was too engrossed by the last third to track the beautiful passages.
Several quotes:
This was as far as had ever come. The higher up Zee took her, the more the ocean flew through the trees, and she tried to focus on this because it was beautiful.
Zee was pointing to the purest of sands below, where palm trees swayed in prayer. Nearby were strict rows of coconut palms, a whole army of them....
...When his focus switched to Zee, a small smile hovered at the corner of his lips. He kept stroking, slowly, because love was the opposite of haste.
...He has come to envision a god dying to escape. He has come to confess that he has learned something he wishes no one to learn and what he learned was this. There is nothing more hurtful than hope.
...There it was again. Influence. Not to be confused with loyalty. A key difference. After all, this was the same boy who had trampled, with ease and even relish, the clothes of his rulers that day on the mountain! Every rebellion against theft began with theft. How glad he was to have been there that day to help! (A common ant could become exotic, a tin toy a magic trick!) The Local Born children did not know loyalty, not yet. Loyalty was something encoded, and could not be felt by the son of a convict any more than by an aborigine. It could only be felt by the free.
...Slowly, his body became habituated by Zee's. The two began to glide. A single night became one long and graceful movement.
...The opposite of peace is not war, someone close to her had once said. The opposite of peace is inertia.
Ahead, the trees drew spells in their sleep. When he first came here, said Mr. Howard, on nights such as this, he believed himself to have washed up on a chain of dreaming islands, all glassy bays and whispering surf. Our lovely lost world, he had called it. "As though there was something here that caused the clay of the physical body to glow."...
...Yet, in his heart he knew and so did she: given the chance to reverse his choice, he might still have misgivings. It seemed to be the way of the island that whenever there were only two sides, neither was right.
...Only through ritual could continuity be maintained, and so could tenderness.
Before the ships with the bright sun arrived, there had been a woman who tossed nets far into the sea in a single movement that was an extension of her breath.
Want to read
December 26, 2021Pakistani literature!
June 18, 2021
Uzma Aslam Khan’s The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali is a many layered narrative set in the Andaman Islands amidst the historical backdrop of the India freedom movement and the Second World War played out between the Allies and the Japanese forces. A work of fiction, the plot weds fiction to historical incidents and real life people in an arc that examines personal memories that gets swept aside in political history. And no,that is not the only theme that the book talks about: there is the violence and oppression of colonial subjects by the British, the distinctions and divisions that fragment a small island on narrow lines of indigenous roots, nation, race and colour and gender.
The book brings alive an unknown facet ofIndian political history that unfolded in the Andamans when it was caught in the flux of being occupied by the Japanese forces and the terrible destruction that followed. It also talks about something that has not been brought out to the public domain: the plight of women prisoners at the infamous Cellular jail.The author pits her characters at odds and one another due to the fault lines of their race and birth, the position they find themselves in when the island changes hands, leaving each to grapple with who is the more oppressive force and where do loyalties and survival figure.
There is violence and torture in the narrative but there is also humanity that shimmers through the broken lives cut off physically and metaphorically from popular imagination and concern. The narrative jumps back and forth between timelines and characters and that can be disconcerting considering the many themes that the book tackles. But overall,this is a book that will fascinate you and leave you deeply troubled with the way it brings to fore what it means to live with the guilt of surviving horrors when others have not, of being desperate to live and then finding out that nothing really mattered in the end.
Full review here: https://bookandconversations.wordpres...
The book brings alive an unknown facet ofIndian political history that unfolded in the Andamans when it was caught in the flux of being occupied by the Japanese forces and the terrible destruction that followed. It also talks about something that has not been brought out to the public domain: the plight of women prisoners at the infamous Cellular jail.The author pits her characters at odds and one another due to the fault lines of their race and birth, the position they find themselves in when the island changes hands, leaving each to grapple with who is the more oppressive force and where do loyalties and survival figure.
There is violence and torture in the narrative but there is also humanity that shimmers through the broken lives cut off physically and metaphorically from popular imagination and concern. The narrative jumps back and forth between timelines and characters and that can be disconcerting considering the many themes that the book tackles. But overall,this is a book that will fascinate you and leave you deeply troubled with the way it brings to fore what it means to live with the guilt of surviving horrors when others have not, of being desperate to live and then finding out that nothing really mattered in the end.
Full review here: https://bookandconversations.wordpres...
December 3, 2019
The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali
Uzma Aslam Khan
Context/Westland Books, India, 2019
By Osama Siddique
From afar it is idyllic. A green island, overrun with forests of giant padauk trees and climbing lianas. Pristine waters surround it in bewitching shades of blue – though one should be mindful that parts of it might still be mined. The island – Andaman – belongs to an archipelago known by the same name.
There are other islands in this archipelago where indigenous people are estimated to have had an uninterrupted and reclusive natural existence for fifty millennia or more. They continue to occupy their tree-canopied abodes -- ‘untamed’ but harmless to the outside world.
Yet the ‘civilizing’ European males who came here a couple of hundred years ago chose to call them ‘savages’ for reasons deeply self-serving. In order to understand real savagery -- a sophisticated and very modern form of it -- one, in fact, has to turn to South Andaman Island and its capital Port Blair with its infamous British colonial era penal colony called the Cellular Jail.
The ocean-facing jail that could incarcerate hundreds of prisoners was curiously shaped like a starfish – its seven arms containing narrow, solitary prison cells extending from a central watchtower, like spokes in a wheel. Inspired by the efficiency driven fantasies of utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, such panopticons were erected at different locations in Hindustan. French theoretician Michel Foucault masterfully dissects their underlying project of ‘normalization’ and control in his 1975 book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Any layperson with half a functioning heart can also sense their dehumanising capacity.
Dispelling forgetfulness
That one jailer could simultaneously monitor hundreds of prisoners who would not even know that they were being watched was a delightfully simple idea – delightful for the jailer of course. Or more chillingly, as Uzma Aslam Khan puts it: “The man in the central tower was there, looking at [them] with all one hundred eyes.”
This was no ordinary penal colony. Invested with institutionally manufactured fear and intimidation, it developed an aura that looms much larger and darker than the actual place. It lay beyond the dreaded Kala Pani or Black Water. Generations of freedom fighters were transported to it on life sentences as a punishment for gallantly dissenting against the harsh colonial rule. It ought to figure prominently in the minds of a truly liberated and grateful people but, as we know, we are neither.
Our ignorance about Kala Pani is not just due to the fact that we are ahistorical, though that is a major reason. While our historians are largely to be blamed for this state of affairs, our literary writings are also devoid of nuanced and probing historical insights. Mercifully, for every historical outrage eventually there comes along a work of fiction that does it justice.
In important ways, even more so than a good history book, it is good fiction that is truly capable of capturing not just what is factually known to have transpired but also the attendant hopes, dreams and emotions of a people and of an era. Such a work of fiction miraculously lifts the mists of collective forgetfulness. When it comes to the hellish penal colony of Andaman Island, The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali performs that vital and welcome miracle.
That its author is one of the most lyrical prose writers hailing from or connected to South Asia is not just fortunate but a vital prerequisite for what she has chosen to write in this book. Any endeavour to excavate and recreate the hopes and apprehensions of generations of voiceless convicts and those born in Andaman would have been a fruitless task if it had been approached purely as an exercise in documentation and analysis of what survives of the prison on that island. For what survives largely are prisoner numbers, dry and crumbling prison records and cold, mechanical details of prison rules, processes and practices even though some historians and journalists have recently done a fabulous job of bringing to light the horrors of the Andaman prison colony.
Listening to the unheard
But though these histories and reportages have opened up the jail to the modern gaze and showcased some of its known inmates, what of the lesser known people who crossed the much feared Kala Pani – which sucked up caste, creed, community and also all hope – became mere numbers, languished in jail for years and then died namelessly? What of the nearly unknown – women prisoners, ex-convicts settled on the island, and island-born children?
Shipload after shipload of the condemned arrived and the island swallowed them like a primeval beast. A character in the novel who had served time in the Andaman describes the spectacle of these arrivals both succinctly and poignantly. When he is asked why he did not accompany others to witness the arrival of a new ship, he admitted that he could not bear to watch others being sent to the Andaman jail where “no gods watched over them, only men did”.
No gods watched over them as they lived in acutely miserable conditions, were employed like animals for forced labour and were perpetually subjected to solitary confinement (that is how the cells were designed), beatings, torture, medical experiments and force-feeding. Some of the most harrowing passages in the novel describe all these practices.
No gods watched over them as the penal colony changed hands from the British to the Japanese in World War II. The Japanese introduced their own special horrors, including mass abuse of women abducted or procured for the soldiers.
Though feeble, distant and ephemeral – quite like the haunting, dying words of the drowning -- the voices from the past have been successfully captured and amplified by this remarkable novel. Most of its narrative is spun around three adolescents -- Nomi, Zee and Aye. It is through them, various other island dwellers who have seen it all and the enigmatic and anonymous female prisoner known merely as Prisoner 218 D that Khan adroitly gives voice to those who were seldom, if ever, heard.
A new relevance
Set in the 1930s and the 1940s around World War II, The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali provides us both a series of flashbacks and a multiplicity of perspectives through a predominantly stream of consciousness style of writing. In an interview, the novelist has described writing as a deeply immersive act for her. This immersive style is evident in the dream-like quality to her beautiful prose as she weaves together vivid descriptions, memories, nostalgia and conscious and sub-conscious reflections. At times it is hard to tell which of the various inter-connected realms she has led one into. But that is deliberate.
For recollections, experiences and emotions often overlap and supplement each other as the writer speaks of the common ordeals and shared coping mechanisms of a vast array of subjugated people caught up in the juggernaut of events. Many among them realise that “no good had ever come from getting involved in the wars of men who should have stayed apart”.
Andaman continues to haunt us in other ways as well – including through a massive battle for dominance that is underway these days in India between polarising political and ideological icons. Nathuram Godse, the man who assassinated Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, is being propounded as an alternative to his victim. Ideological purity, revolutionary zeal and uncompromising courage – as much as these qualities can be successfully manufactured – are being attributed to him to anoint him as a new national saint.
While Godse is rather compromised due to his violent tactics and the corrosive ignominy attached to them, Brave New India is being coaxed by its new rulers to choose Veer -- or Brave -- Savarkar over Mahatma -- or great-souled -- Gandhi. But even Vinayak Damodar Savarkar – the formulator of Hindutva philosophy – is not above controversy. There is mounting evidence that he wrote abject apologies to his captors during his imprisonment at the Andaman penal colony. This is proving fairly inconvenient for those desirous of hoisting him as the fountainhead of their worldview. This novel thus arrives at a time when Andaman has been receiving renewed and much-needed attention. It will help ensure that the attention does not dissipate.
The sublime and the horrendous
While the novel castigates the complex cycle of cruelties unleashed by colonialism and the essentially horrendous nature of any war, at its heart it displays deep anguish caused by the cruel pointlessness of it all. It is an anguish that results from the vast and deep destruction wreaked by tides of history that are not controlled by those who get impacted by them the most. What could be a crueler irony than the one described in the following passage from the novel:
“The next day, a bomb nearly struck Army Headquarters in Haddo. It killed an inmate of the asylum, a man locked inside decades prior for reasons no one remembered. He bled to death believing that the view of the sugarcane plantation opening before him through the blasted wall was of paradise.”
Khan also displays a striking ability to capture and juxtapose the sublime as well as the truly horrendous. Nowhere is this resonant more than in her treatment of the artistic sensibility of a Japanese occupier and his description of Ukiyo-e -- or the ‘Pictures of the Floating World’ genre of Japanese art -- and the unimaginably depraved practice of Ni-ku-ichi -- or twenty-nine soldiers to one girl. In brutal times that normalise the depraved, the very notion of any benevolent divine presence comes into question. Tellingly, one character in the novel says to another: “Our god is the same…This doesn’t make him good.”
Well researched and lyrically narrated, The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali is a fundamentally and unabashedly political novel. It is a novel about pain, loss and systematic exploitation but ultimately it is also about injustice that transcends time and locale. And yet unlike a lot that has been written more recently and raved about internationally, this book is neither reluctant nor vague about its politics. It does not obfuscate injustice as a neutral, ahistorical and decontextualised phenomenon. It provides no leeway for the unjust to breathe easy.
In Khan’s politics, the ingloriousness of empires, the tyranny of the oppressors and the suffering of the victims are not abstract ideas. She engages with these ideas through specific stories with a definite history and a particular geography – a history and a geography that keep repeating in the Global South. Her novel is not a neutered, truncated and soulless tale of injustice but the one in which neither villainy nor victimhood are underplayed, mitigated or disguised. At the same time, all that in no way prevents her from also successfully exploring the universality of these phenomena. Therein lies the great triumph of the novel.
Osama Siddique is the author of the acclaimed historical novel ‘Snuffing Out the Moon’ and the multiple awards winning non-fiction ‘Pakistan’s Experience with Formal Law: An Alien Justice.’
(This review appeared in the July 2019 issue of The Herald and the November 30, 2019 issue of Scroll.in - See https://scroll.in/article/945225/few-...)
Uzma Aslam Khan
Context/Westland Books, India, 2019
By Osama Siddique
From afar it is idyllic. A green island, overrun with forests of giant padauk trees and climbing lianas. Pristine waters surround it in bewitching shades of blue – though one should be mindful that parts of it might still be mined. The island – Andaman – belongs to an archipelago known by the same name.
There are other islands in this archipelago where indigenous people are estimated to have had an uninterrupted and reclusive natural existence for fifty millennia or more. They continue to occupy their tree-canopied abodes -- ‘untamed’ but harmless to the outside world.
Yet the ‘civilizing’ European males who came here a couple of hundred years ago chose to call them ‘savages’ for reasons deeply self-serving. In order to understand real savagery -- a sophisticated and very modern form of it -- one, in fact, has to turn to South Andaman Island and its capital Port Blair with its infamous British colonial era penal colony called the Cellular Jail.
The ocean-facing jail that could incarcerate hundreds of prisoners was curiously shaped like a starfish – its seven arms containing narrow, solitary prison cells extending from a central watchtower, like spokes in a wheel. Inspired by the efficiency driven fantasies of utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, such panopticons were erected at different locations in Hindustan. French theoretician Michel Foucault masterfully dissects their underlying project of ‘normalization’ and control in his 1975 book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Any layperson with half a functioning heart can also sense their dehumanising capacity.
Dispelling forgetfulness
That one jailer could simultaneously monitor hundreds of prisoners who would not even know that they were being watched was a delightfully simple idea – delightful for the jailer of course. Or more chillingly, as Uzma Aslam Khan puts it: “The man in the central tower was there, looking at [them] with all one hundred eyes.”
This was no ordinary penal colony. Invested with institutionally manufactured fear and intimidation, it developed an aura that looms much larger and darker than the actual place. It lay beyond the dreaded Kala Pani or Black Water. Generations of freedom fighters were transported to it on life sentences as a punishment for gallantly dissenting against the harsh colonial rule. It ought to figure prominently in the minds of a truly liberated and grateful people but, as we know, we are neither.
Our ignorance about Kala Pani is not just due to the fact that we are ahistorical, though that is a major reason. While our historians are largely to be blamed for this state of affairs, our literary writings are also devoid of nuanced and probing historical insights. Mercifully, for every historical outrage eventually there comes along a work of fiction that does it justice.
In important ways, even more so than a good history book, it is good fiction that is truly capable of capturing not just what is factually known to have transpired but also the attendant hopes, dreams and emotions of a people and of an era. Such a work of fiction miraculously lifts the mists of collective forgetfulness. When it comes to the hellish penal colony of Andaman Island, The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali performs that vital and welcome miracle.
That its author is one of the most lyrical prose writers hailing from or connected to South Asia is not just fortunate but a vital prerequisite for what she has chosen to write in this book. Any endeavour to excavate and recreate the hopes and apprehensions of generations of voiceless convicts and those born in Andaman would have been a fruitless task if it had been approached purely as an exercise in documentation and analysis of what survives of the prison on that island. For what survives largely are prisoner numbers, dry and crumbling prison records and cold, mechanical details of prison rules, processes and practices even though some historians and journalists have recently done a fabulous job of bringing to light the horrors of the Andaman prison colony.
Listening to the unheard
But though these histories and reportages have opened up the jail to the modern gaze and showcased some of its known inmates, what of the lesser known people who crossed the much feared Kala Pani – which sucked up caste, creed, community and also all hope – became mere numbers, languished in jail for years and then died namelessly? What of the nearly unknown – women prisoners, ex-convicts settled on the island, and island-born children?
Shipload after shipload of the condemned arrived and the island swallowed them like a primeval beast. A character in the novel who had served time in the Andaman describes the spectacle of these arrivals both succinctly and poignantly. When he is asked why he did not accompany others to witness the arrival of a new ship, he admitted that he could not bear to watch others being sent to the Andaman jail where “no gods watched over them, only men did”.
No gods watched over them as they lived in acutely miserable conditions, were employed like animals for forced labour and were perpetually subjected to solitary confinement (that is how the cells were designed), beatings, torture, medical experiments and force-feeding. Some of the most harrowing passages in the novel describe all these practices.
No gods watched over them as the penal colony changed hands from the British to the Japanese in World War II. The Japanese introduced their own special horrors, including mass abuse of women abducted or procured for the soldiers.
Though feeble, distant and ephemeral – quite like the haunting, dying words of the drowning -- the voices from the past have been successfully captured and amplified by this remarkable novel. Most of its narrative is spun around three adolescents -- Nomi, Zee and Aye. It is through them, various other island dwellers who have seen it all and the enigmatic and anonymous female prisoner known merely as Prisoner 218 D that Khan adroitly gives voice to those who were seldom, if ever, heard.
A new relevance
Set in the 1930s and the 1940s around World War II, The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali provides us both a series of flashbacks and a multiplicity of perspectives through a predominantly stream of consciousness style of writing. In an interview, the novelist has described writing as a deeply immersive act for her. This immersive style is evident in the dream-like quality to her beautiful prose as she weaves together vivid descriptions, memories, nostalgia and conscious and sub-conscious reflections. At times it is hard to tell which of the various inter-connected realms she has led one into. But that is deliberate.
For recollections, experiences and emotions often overlap and supplement each other as the writer speaks of the common ordeals and shared coping mechanisms of a vast array of subjugated people caught up in the juggernaut of events. Many among them realise that “no good had ever come from getting involved in the wars of men who should have stayed apart”.
Andaman continues to haunt us in other ways as well – including through a massive battle for dominance that is underway these days in India between polarising political and ideological icons. Nathuram Godse, the man who assassinated Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, is being propounded as an alternative to his victim. Ideological purity, revolutionary zeal and uncompromising courage – as much as these qualities can be successfully manufactured – are being attributed to him to anoint him as a new national saint.
While Godse is rather compromised due to his violent tactics and the corrosive ignominy attached to them, Brave New India is being coaxed by its new rulers to choose Veer -- or Brave -- Savarkar over Mahatma -- or great-souled -- Gandhi. But even Vinayak Damodar Savarkar – the formulator of Hindutva philosophy – is not above controversy. There is mounting evidence that he wrote abject apologies to his captors during his imprisonment at the Andaman penal colony. This is proving fairly inconvenient for those desirous of hoisting him as the fountainhead of their worldview. This novel thus arrives at a time when Andaman has been receiving renewed and much-needed attention. It will help ensure that the attention does not dissipate.
The sublime and the horrendous
While the novel castigates the complex cycle of cruelties unleashed by colonialism and the essentially horrendous nature of any war, at its heart it displays deep anguish caused by the cruel pointlessness of it all. It is an anguish that results from the vast and deep destruction wreaked by tides of history that are not controlled by those who get impacted by them the most. What could be a crueler irony than the one described in the following passage from the novel:
“The next day, a bomb nearly struck Army Headquarters in Haddo. It killed an inmate of the asylum, a man locked inside decades prior for reasons no one remembered. He bled to death believing that the view of the sugarcane plantation opening before him through the blasted wall was of paradise.”
Khan also displays a striking ability to capture and juxtapose the sublime as well as the truly horrendous. Nowhere is this resonant more than in her treatment of the artistic sensibility of a Japanese occupier and his description of Ukiyo-e -- or the ‘Pictures of the Floating World’ genre of Japanese art -- and the unimaginably depraved practice of Ni-ku-ichi -- or twenty-nine soldiers to one girl. In brutal times that normalise the depraved, the very notion of any benevolent divine presence comes into question. Tellingly, one character in the novel says to another: “Our god is the same…This doesn’t make him good.”
Well researched and lyrically narrated, The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali is a fundamentally and unabashedly political novel. It is a novel about pain, loss and systematic exploitation but ultimately it is also about injustice that transcends time and locale. And yet unlike a lot that has been written more recently and raved about internationally, this book is neither reluctant nor vague about its politics. It does not obfuscate injustice as a neutral, ahistorical and decontextualised phenomenon. It provides no leeway for the unjust to breathe easy.
In Khan’s politics, the ingloriousness of empires, the tyranny of the oppressors and the suffering of the victims are not abstract ideas. She engages with these ideas through specific stories with a definite history and a particular geography – a history and a geography that keep repeating in the Global South. Her novel is not a neutered, truncated and soulless tale of injustice but the one in which neither villainy nor victimhood are underplayed, mitigated or disguised. At the same time, all that in no way prevents her from also successfully exploring the universality of these phenomena. Therein lies the great triumph of the novel.
Osama Siddique is the author of the acclaimed historical novel ‘Snuffing Out the Moon’ and the multiple awards winning non-fiction ‘Pakistan’s Experience with Formal Law: An Alien Justice.’
(This review appeared in the July 2019 issue of The Herald and the November 30, 2019 issue of Scroll.in - See https://scroll.in/article/945225/few-...)
June 18, 2019
Wonderfully written historic fiction. Every character touches you so deep in a way that after a point you almost start living with them. Nomi, Aye, Zee, Hydar Ali, Priya - The Chicken, Sakunthala, White Paula, The Prisoner every one was so alive. A forgotten history of the subcontinent. Many thanks to the author for bringing it with so much life.
August 13, 2021
This review will be substantially different than everyone else's, but not in the way you might think. My experience reading Uzma Aslam Khan's beautiful novel was like a trip through the looking glass-- because her work historically mirrors my own Andaman novel, Glorious Boy, which came out last year. Both our books are set in and around Port Blair between 1936 and 1945. They fictionalize many of the same historical figures and extraordinary events, as well as the unforgettable landscape of the Andamans. Yet Ms. Khan and I come at the story from different angles. Her goal, I suspect, was to interrogate the suffering and struggle of the local population of Freedom Fighters and their families at the hands of the British and then the Japanese in WWII. Mine was to imagine my way into the cultural connections, as well as the collisions, that crisscrossed this uniquely multi-cultural corner of the world. Our books overlap in too many ways to count, and yet they do not truly resemble each other. Still, it's a remarkable coincidence of publishing.
The Miraculous True History reveals the intricacies of the penal colony of Port Blair, including the horror of forced feedings during the prisoners' hunger strikes and the abominable treatment of women by the British. The prose is taut and spare, the relationships complex, and the details carefully researched. This book will take you deeply into the multigenerational effects of the trauma that the British perpetrated on the convicts exiled in Port Blair. The story pulses with love and yearning, and it will sear you.
I am sure that Ms. Khan was as certain as I was that no one else could possibly be writing a novel about this remote outpost of history. Instead, we must have been writing at the same time, and now scholars of the Andamans have a true abundance of literature to bring this history to life. These glorious isles deserve no less.
The Miraculous True History reveals the intricacies of the penal colony of Port Blair, including the horror of forced feedings during the prisoners' hunger strikes and the abominable treatment of women by the British. The prose is taut and spare, the relationships complex, and the details carefully researched. This book will take you deeply into the multigenerational effects of the trauma that the British perpetrated on the convicts exiled in Port Blair. The story pulses with love and yearning, and it will sear you.
I am sure that Ms. Khan was as certain as I was that no one else could possibly be writing a novel about this remote outpost of history. Instead, we must have been writing at the same time, and now scholars of the Andamans have a true abundance of literature to bring this history to life. These glorious isles deserve no less.
August 11, 2020
This book was an excellent read and I'm so glad I chanced upon it. The author ingeniously manages to weave well-researched history with powerful storytelling and delicately etched characters from diverse cultures, religions and ethnicities. I didn't know much about the now largely erased history of the violence that unfolded on the islands under British and Japanese occupation until I read this book. I strongly believe that this is how history should be taught. Uzma Aslam Khan has done a wonderful job at humanising mere statistics that are only casually mentioned in passing in the telling of our history which has mostly been written through the male western perspective. I feel that this fictions is one of the best devices to learn history and this book has done it justice.
I'm now in the process of tracing events mentioned in the book to history. Many thanks to the author for writing this gem of a book. I have so many questions for her!
I'm now in the process of tracing events mentioned in the book to history. Many thanks to the author for writing this gem of a book. I have so many questions for her!
November 29, 2023
In the last line of her acknowledgements, Uzma Aslam Khan writes "..to my father, who taught me to look at power, and never forget." When I finished this book, I couldn't stop thinking of that one line - somehow, it made me understand the story a little bit better.
I have read many works of historical fiction over the course of my life and especially over the past two years - but this book remains one of the best I have found, in the genre. The best stories are the ones that make you look at something you thought you knew, with a whole different lens. Nomi Ali does exactly that, with a history I thought I knew like the back of my hand, and does it so well it leaves me ashamed.
The Andamans are a part of India that make it to our geography books with some difficulty and are completely kept out of the history ones. Understandably. This is not a history that fits neatly into our patriotic pride - it holds within itself stories of many different marginalised people, under many different oppressive regimes, and after a point, the lines begin to blur so much it is difficult to point towards that one enemy.
The islands were a place of exile. The islands were exploited, their people brutalised, tortured, displaced, and when the time came, ignored. It needed a truly compassionate perspective and really skilful writing to tell their story with honesty, and this book manages it perfectly. The prose is beautiful and yet the narrative structure, the jump-cut view points, the abrupt banality of the way the author chooses to end some of the vignettes, are jarring enough to constantly remind you that this is not, and should not be, an easy story to tell.
The Andamans, through the entirety of their recorded history, have been a land of "suspended violence", and the book, through its brilliant writing, never lets you forget that.
And then of course, The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali is also a masterclass in connecting the personal with the political. The very subject of the book is a statement, and as I said in the beginning, a searing look at power. But it is also personal, and that does not take away from its politics - it strengthens it.
For the longest time, I couldn't understand why the book is called what it is. I couldn't understand what it is about Nomi that makes her the titular character. Why not Aye, with his deep mystical connection with the islands? Why not the political prisoner whose name we never find out but whose fragmented identities and visceral memories help us place the events of the island in the broader context of the freedom struggle raging in the mainland? Why Nomi?
It is only towards the end that it begins to make sense. That the characterisation of Nomi, so lovingly and painstakingly established, begins to fit the role assigned to her by the writer. You see, Nomi is something of a historian herself. She collects memorabilia, and stories. She is able to live these stories, and at the same time, move out of her own body and watch them unfold from a distance. She feels the pain and the loss in every voice in the island that speaks to her and yet, she listens to them all and holds them within her without falling apart.
Nomi Ali is thus, the book itself.
She is the custodian of all the stories that we hear through the pages, - we get to listen to them because she did, and then remembered, for us.
I have read many works of historical fiction over the course of my life and especially over the past two years - but this book remains one of the best I have found, in the genre. The best stories are the ones that make you look at something you thought you knew, with a whole different lens. Nomi Ali does exactly that, with a history I thought I knew like the back of my hand, and does it so well it leaves me ashamed.
The Andamans are a part of India that make it to our geography books with some difficulty and are completely kept out of the history ones. Understandably. This is not a history that fits neatly into our patriotic pride - it holds within itself stories of many different marginalised people, under many different oppressive regimes, and after a point, the lines begin to blur so much it is difficult to point towards that one enemy.
The islands were a place of exile. The islands were exploited, their people brutalised, tortured, displaced, and when the time came, ignored. It needed a truly compassionate perspective and really skilful writing to tell their story with honesty, and this book manages it perfectly. The prose is beautiful and yet the narrative structure, the jump-cut view points, the abrupt banality of the way the author chooses to end some of the vignettes, are jarring enough to constantly remind you that this is not, and should not be, an easy story to tell.
The Andamans, through the entirety of their recorded history, have been a land of "suspended violence", and the book, through its brilliant writing, never lets you forget that.
And then of course, The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali is also a masterclass in connecting the personal with the political. The very subject of the book is a statement, and as I said in the beginning, a searing look at power. But it is also personal, and that does not take away from its politics - it strengthens it.
For the longest time, I couldn't understand why the book is called what it is. I couldn't understand what it is about Nomi that makes her the titular character. Why not Aye, with his deep mystical connection with the islands? Why not the political prisoner whose name we never find out but whose fragmented identities and visceral memories help us place the events of the island in the broader context of the freedom struggle raging in the mainland? Why Nomi?
It is only towards the end that it begins to make sense. That the characterisation of Nomi, so lovingly and painstakingly established, begins to fit the role assigned to her by the writer. You see, Nomi is something of a historian herself. She collects memorabilia, and stories. She is able to live these stories, and at the same time, move out of her own body and watch them unfold from a distance. She feels the pain and the loss in every voice in the island that speaks to her and yet, she listens to them all and holds them within her without falling apart.
Nomi Ali is thus, the book itself.
She is the custodian of all the stories that we hear through the pages, - we get to listen to them because she did, and then remembered, for us.
December 11, 2020
Few weeks back when I visited Readings, I picked up this book because it was written by Pakistani woman and there were positive remarks by Pankaj Mishra on the back cover. I hadn’t read any book by this author before and never heard about her so naturally I didn’t have high expectations. The storyline is based on historical events that took place in Andaman Islands under British Raj where Indian and Burmese political prisoners were exiled to and later the islands were occupied by the Japanese during the WWII. It revolves around fictional characters brought together by fate to live through atrocities of colonialism and the Japanese Occupation. However, Uzma Aslam Khan didn’t overlook the indigenous people living on these rocks, they and their superstitions are also a part of the story. They all had different origins but interwoven destinies. While reading the first half of the book, I kept thinking about “The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy.” Though two novels are totally different but both stories narrates melancholy, powerlessness and endurance.
Before reading this book, I didn’t even know that such prison island exited and how farther west Japan came into Indian Ocean during WWII. They described it rightly as “an epic telling of a largely forgotten chapter in the history of subcontinent.”
Before reading this book, I didn’t even know that such prison island exited and how farther west Japan came into Indian Ocean during WWII. They described it rightly as “an epic telling of a largely forgotten chapter in the history of subcontinent.”
July 6, 2020
It is sad to have suffered but it is worse to have suffered and also be robbed of the chance to tell your story. This book is an example where the author reclaims the sparsely written about horrors that took place on the penal colony of Andaman Islands during world war II and tells the story out loud - for the world must listen.
July 21, 2023
The book has opened my eyes to a part of history that I never knew about. The writing is very beautiful but all the puzzle pieces in the story never really came together for me. The way timelines cut across each other was clear and well crafted but I felt no satisfaction reaching the end of the book. It's not that I hated the ending or the treatment of the characters, but it felt like a very rushed ending.
December 30, 2022
thought-provoking and brilliantly writtern
thoughts coming shortly
thoughts coming shortly
July 22, 2024
This book was absolutely beautiful. A forgotten history, this book introduced me to an area of the world in such visceral detail that I forgot I had never read anything about it. It is also a story of unimaginable loss and cruelty but Khan somehow weaves a single thread of hope and optimism (or at least acceptance) throughout.
May 1, 2019
The story starts from 1936 to 1947 midsummer, is set on Andaman Island. The time was based on World War 2. British colonial was hiding in these islands because they are scared of Japan. Meanwhile, Japan has tried their best to destroy this island. At the same time, Haider Ali came to this island with his two children Zee and Nomi with his wife Fehmida. It’s a woman's prison. Haider Ali sent to this island as a convicted prisoner.
.
.
This starfish jail was made for prison in those criminals at the time of the British Empire, but now Japan has possessed this Andaman Island. Indian prisoners are getting outcast in this Jail and getting tortured to the death. You will find the condition of those female convicts in the women's prison on that Island, which was known as darn batty and miserable. How can they be such inhospitable. They made this island a disaster battlefield?
.
.
Author Mohammed Hanif said a beautiful line of this book “A glorious novel about a forgotten place and a part of our history that we hardly ever talk about"... Long time ago I have watched a movie named “Kalapani” which has described like how British police used to torture to those heroes who were fighting for the Independent India. They were tortured by those police to the death. Now that jail has become a heritage. However, no one knows the pain, the suffering of those prisoners who were kept there to be tortured.
.
.
Firstly, this is a true story of Nomi Ali. Honestly saying, I really didn’t know this much about Nomi Ali before reading this book. This book is a token of information, which is fairly studded with lots of histories and secrets into those engulfing situations made by some outsiders like British or Japanese. You will see those patience between the sufferers is rather unrivalled. You will find little slow in the very beginning, but once you will start to cope with the situation, it will be impossible to put down the book. I must say it’s a historical phenomenon. Hats off to author Uzma Aslam Khan for writing a book like this. On some pages, you’ll start to feel that Author is incredibly describing her own story. Thanks a lot Westland Books for sending me this book to read and review.
Ratings : 4.5/5⭐️
.
.
This starfish jail was made for prison in those criminals at the time of the British Empire, but now Japan has possessed this Andaman Island. Indian prisoners are getting outcast in this Jail and getting tortured to the death. You will find the condition of those female convicts in the women's prison on that Island, which was known as darn batty and miserable. How can they be such inhospitable. They made this island a disaster battlefield?
.
.
Author Mohammed Hanif said a beautiful line of this book “A glorious novel about a forgotten place and a part of our history that we hardly ever talk about"... Long time ago I have watched a movie named “Kalapani” which has described like how British police used to torture to those heroes who were fighting for the Independent India. They were tortured by those police to the death. Now that jail has become a heritage. However, no one knows the pain, the suffering of those prisoners who were kept there to be tortured.
.
.
Firstly, this is a true story of Nomi Ali. Honestly saying, I really didn’t know this much about Nomi Ali before reading this book. This book is a token of information, which is fairly studded with lots of histories and secrets into those engulfing situations made by some outsiders like British or Japanese. You will see those patience between the sufferers is rather unrivalled. You will find little slow in the very beginning, but once you will start to cope with the situation, it will be impossible to put down the book. I must say it’s a historical phenomenon. Hats off to author Uzma Aslam Khan for writing a book like this. On some pages, you’ll start to feel that Author is incredibly describing her own story. Thanks a lot Westland Books for sending me this book to read and review.
Ratings : 4.5/5⭐️
September 16, 2020
Within three days of the Japanese occupation of the Andaman Islands in March 1942, a 15-year old boy who had fired an empty airgun as a protest against some Japanese soldiers for snatching his family’s poultry had his limbs methodically twisted and broken at a forced public gathering that included his parents and young sister – before being shot dead. Acclaimed Pakistani writer Uzma Aslam Khan takes up this real incident and weaves an epic story around it – about a land and its people trying to negotiate the occupying forces while going about their daily lives, constantly scared of being branded as spies and tortured – and executed.
Formed as a penal colony post-1857 Uprising, the islands come alive through an eclectic cast of characters, mostly ‘local-borns’ (children of prisoners with criminal charges, settled on the islands by the Britishers after serving their sentences); the Colonial administrators, unleashing their sadistic fury on hunger-strikers in the Cellular Jail; the subsequent Japanese invaders and their enslaved ‘comfort women’; and the distant ethnic population in the neighbouring islands whose ancient customs are suddenly disrupted by the war.
THE MIRACULOUS TRUE HISTORY OF NOMI ALI resurrects the under-represented history of a forgotten people caught up in the vortex of war between two imperialist powers, people who eventually emerge with deep scars as the nation is bifurcated during its moment of birth.
For those interested in Indian history, this fascinating account can fill a big lacuna in our understanding of a neglected past.
Formed as a penal colony post-1857 Uprising, the islands come alive through an eclectic cast of characters, mostly ‘local-borns’ (children of prisoners with criminal charges, settled on the islands by the Britishers after serving their sentences); the Colonial administrators, unleashing their sadistic fury on hunger-strikers in the Cellular Jail; the subsequent Japanese invaders and their enslaved ‘comfort women’; and the distant ethnic population in the neighbouring islands whose ancient customs are suddenly disrupted by the war.
THE MIRACULOUS TRUE HISTORY OF NOMI ALI resurrects the under-represented history of a forgotten people caught up in the vortex of war between two imperialist powers, people who eventually emerge with deep scars as the nation is bifurcated during its moment of birth.
For those interested in Indian history, this fascinating account can fill a big lacuna in our understanding of a neglected past.
February 28, 2021
Of all the Pakistani Anglophone literature that I've read and heard about, particularly dealing with to the trauma of partition, this narrative is so far the most authentic and empathetic. Uzma Aslam Khan does her wonder in the following manner:
*Extraordinarily convincing character development. I feel like I grew with the characters of Nomi and Aye from children to adults and troublemakers to caretakers.
*Exceptional historical insight and timeline of the WWII and the freedom struggle.
*The imagery and metaphors evoke a sense of being planted in the Andaman Islands, the setting of the novel.
*The cadence of the text and its timeline reminds me of Jazz, sonorous and excruciating!
*Extraordinarily convincing character development. I feel like I grew with the characters of Nomi and Aye from children to adults and troublemakers to caretakers.
*Exceptional historical insight and timeline of the WWII and the freedom struggle.
*The imagery and metaphors evoke a sense of being planted in the Andaman Islands, the setting of the novel.
*The cadence of the text and its timeline reminds me of Jazz, sonorous and excruciating!
July 18, 2021
What a great experience it was exploring the world of Andaman Island, British outpost for outcast prisoners during the imperial reign over subcontinent. Uzma has taken us through the life's of Nomi Ali and her surroundings giving the reader a unique insight into the world hidden from general public view. To an inquisitive reader, the book is not only a literary delight but a chance to discover the history behind Andaman island and how it is still one of the few areas of the world, untouched by modern world and its adulterations.
A great read and an enjoyable experience.
A great read and an enjoyable experience.
May 31, 2023
aruna
4.0 out of 5 stars A homage to those omitted from collective memory
Reviewed in India on June 1, 2020
Verified Purchase
Andamans – was the dreaded kalapani (the crossing of the sea and the infamous Cellular jail) for the Indians during the British Raj, while to the British, it was a 'prisoner paradise' in the words of Sir Henry Craik, Home Secretary. The pristine beauty of the islands no doubt made it a paradise. Yet, the British chose to make it a penal colony and transported prisoners from the mainland. During both the British and Japanese occupation the paradise became a hell on earth for the islanders.
Uzma Aslam Khan brings to light a slice of the brutal history of the British-Japanese-British occupation of the Andamans. (roughly the period between 1934 to 1947). In one of her interviews, the author spoke about how this book was 26 years in the making. Her research shows in the painstaking depth and detail of the historical aspects. Many historical events have been suitably woven into the novel - during the British occupation - hunger strike by freedom fighters, forced feeding them by tube by non-professionals, (some prisoners drowned in the milk when the inserted tube made way into the lungs), torture and barbaric treatment of political prisoners. During the Japanese occupation - Zulfikar Ali’s firing to prevent Japanese soldiers from molesting women and his brutal public execution, Dr. Diwan Singh a kind soul who was tortured and executed, boatloads of settlers sent to uninhabited islands many thrown off into the sea (very few survived to tell the tale).
The action of prominent leaders like the Mahatma Gandhi to call off the hunger strike, the arrival of Netaji Bose to meet the Japanese leaders, and the unfurling of the flag of free India also find a mention. It is interesting to see how both the leaders, venerable, were way off the mark in understanding the true plight of the people in the islands.
It is the fictional story, the narrative style, and technique, the lyrical quality of the language which stands out. Khan’s effort is to tell the story of how deep the individual suffering was. Her focus is on the impact of the trauma on the body and spirit of the people at the receiving end. The cast of characters is wide though intriguing- Haider Ali who caused the death of his father’s patients by mistakenly giving strong emetic, he was transported from Lahore and jailed later “allowed” to settle. His wife came as a prisoner bride, both Zee and Nomi their children were born on the island. Aye’s great grandfather was transported as punishment from Burma. For the British doctors, Andaman was a malarial country and a fit outpost for chichona alkaloid trials (from which quinine is distilled). Aye’s father was one of the victims who suffered from side effects and became depressed ‘weary of life’’. The enigmatic, Prisoner 218 B, a young woman political prisoner, was sent from Lahore, a ‘terrorist’ for attempting to shoot a British Officer. Dr. Singh the Medical Officer came to the island for work, Shakuntala Best came with her husband who was posted as Deputy Commissioner and continued to stay on the island after his death. Loka, Lulu, and her son Lala Ram, the original people of Andamans who play a major role in the story.
The adolescent's Zee, Aye, and Nomi are the focus of the story and how their fate gets intertwined with prisoner 218 B and Loka, Lulu and Lala Ram. The focal point of the story is Zee’s death at the hands of Japanese soldiers to teach the community a lesson to not take them lightly. Both Nomi and Aye are shattered at his loss. The actions of these children impact their lives and of other in dramatic ways, at times impulsive like Zee’s shooting in the air when Japanese soldiers tried to steal his sister’s hen or premeditated when Aye made a barter with Loka to secrete prisoner 218 B and end her misery. Nomi unwittingly got prisoner 218 B in trouble in the factory.
The three adolescents are confronted with difficult choices and challenges. Zee is unable to respect his father who after his release is crippled and lives off his wife’s earnings. Zee is good at studies and adores Mr. Campbell his teacher but his life is cut short due to his impulsive action. Aye comes across as a boy who matures beyond his years. He works hard to be Mr. Howard’s the Superintendent’s Trusty. However, he is disenchanted when he witnesses the tormenting of prisoners particularly of 218B, and is made to force-feed the prisoners. He takes matters in his hand and makes a deal with Loka the Andamanese to help him get his brother in law’s skull from Mr. Howard’s cabinet with ‘the one thing’’ in return i.e, to arrange for the escape of prisoner 218B and bring an end to her misery. Nomi matures after the loss of Zee and becomes the keeper of her parents. She is the one who puts the idea to Aye to get 218B out of jail and later has a fateful encounter with the prisoner.
The other characters are fleshed out and well developed. Shakuntala and Dr. Singh play an important role. They see better times during the British occupation but in the Japanese occupation, both of them suffer in different ways. Dr. Mori the Japanese Doctor is a connoisseur of art but does not stop at cruelty towards women, Cillian is the ruthless jailer, Dr. Susuhma San the dentist, spy but friendly to the children. The author is able to bring out, how despite the cruelty of both the occupations, the difference between the British and Japanese approaches.
The author chooses a back and forth narrative. Memory plays an important element in the novel. Her technique suits the stream of consciousness style where the inner thoughts and emotions of the protagonists get maximum space. The overall effect is a nuanced and deeply layered story of the trauma of the characters and the pointlessness of the entire barbarism. One also gains many interesting insights such as Zee, Aye, and Nomi being local borns don’t understand that concept of freedom from foreign yoke.
A leitmotif of the narrative is the twist and turns of fate, did Haider Ali while escaping get caught by the very rope he made in the prison, what if Aye would have bartered Zee’s life with Loka he could have saved his friend but later he would not have survived as it was prisoner 218 B who got him food when he was marooned, what if Nomi did not ask for a pet, there would be no hen, no Japanese soldiers trying to catch Zee need not have fired to give a few examples. The characters become linked to each other in curious ways which gives the novel an intriguing touch.
It is difficult to ignore the natural beauty of Andamans. Nature is an active factor in the novel. The writing is lyrical and some of the images stay for long in one’s mind Zee walking with a tilt of his head carrying Mr. Campbell’s heavy briefcase, burning elephants falling in the sea like balls of fire. Many passages are of rare beauty. However, in places, it seems the author tries too hard with little purchase. Perhaps, the omnipresent narrator prevents the readers from drawing close to the characters. A drawback of the author’s technique and style is the omnipresent narrator which at times inhibits characters grow on the reader.
These don’t in any way take away from the huge effort and deep commitment of the author to set right the omission from the collective memory of one of the lesser-known tragedies of India. This book also sheds some light on the plight of the Andamanese who had lived in the land for generations were suddenly marginalized. The treatment women received in the islands is shocking. Forcing of Andamanese women to British ships for the soldiers. The depravity of the Japanese in the practice of ni-Ju-Ku i.e., 29 soldiers to a woman, their crude and invasive medical tests to ensure the safety of the soldiers, and imported comfort women. I wonder how these actions did not get a hearing along with the Nanking trials.
Khan’s novel is poignant and lyrical. She brings to light a host of issues that are not much known and which can help understand what is happening to the marginalized in the world today. Her objective to set right the omission from the collective memory of what happened in the islands during the British-Japanese-British occupation is laudable.
4.0 out of 5 stars A homage to those omitted from collective memory
Reviewed in India on June 1, 2020
Verified Purchase
Andamans – was the dreaded kalapani (the crossing of the sea and the infamous Cellular jail) for the Indians during the British Raj, while to the British, it was a 'prisoner paradise' in the words of Sir Henry Craik, Home Secretary. The pristine beauty of the islands no doubt made it a paradise. Yet, the British chose to make it a penal colony and transported prisoners from the mainland. During both the British and Japanese occupation the paradise became a hell on earth for the islanders.
Uzma Aslam Khan brings to light a slice of the brutal history of the British-Japanese-British occupation of the Andamans. (roughly the period between 1934 to 1947). In one of her interviews, the author spoke about how this book was 26 years in the making. Her research shows in the painstaking depth and detail of the historical aspects. Many historical events have been suitably woven into the novel - during the British occupation - hunger strike by freedom fighters, forced feeding them by tube by non-professionals, (some prisoners drowned in the milk when the inserted tube made way into the lungs), torture and barbaric treatment of political prisoners. During the Japanese occupation - Zulfikar Ali’s firing to prevent Japanese soldiers from molesting women and his brutal public execution, Dr. Diwan Singh a kind soul who was tortured and executed, boatloads of settlers sent to uninhabited islands many thrown off into the sea (very few survived to tell the tale).
The action of prominent leaders like the Mahatma Gandhi to call off the hunger strike, the arrival of Netaji Bose to meet the Japanese leaders, and the unfurling of the flag of free India also find a mention. It is interesting to see how both the leaders, venerable, were way off the mark in understanding the true plight of the people in the islands.
It is the fictional story, the narrative style, and technique, the lyrical quality of the language which stands out. Khan’s effort is to tell the story of how deep the individual suffering was. Her focus is on the impact of the trauma on the body and spirit of the people at the receiving end. The cast of characters is wide though intriguing- Haider Ali who caused the death of his father’s patients by mistakenly giving strong emetic, he was transported from Lahore and jailed later “allowed” to settle. His wife came as a prisoner bride, both Zee and Nomi their children were born on the island. Aye’s great grandfather was transported as punishment from Burma. For the British doctors, Andaman was a malarial country and a fit outpost for chichona alkaloid trials (from which quinine is distilled). Aye’s father was one of the victims who suffered from side effects and became depressed ‘weary of life’’. The enigmatic, Prisoner 218 B, a young woman political prisoner, was sent from Lahore, a ‘terrorist’ for attempting to shoot a British Officer. Dr. Singh the Medical Officer came to the island for work, Shakuntala Best came with her husband who was posted as Deputy Commissioner and continued to stay on the island after his death. Loka, Lulu, and her son Lala Ram, the original people of Andamans who play a major role in the story.
The adolescent's Zee, Aye, and Nomi are the focus of the story and how their fate gets intertwined with prisoner 218 B and Loka, Lulu and Lala Ram. The focal point of the story is Zee’s death at the hands of Japanese soldiers to teach the community a lesson to not take them lightly. Both Nomi and Aye are shattered at his loss. The actions of these children impact their lives and of other in dramatic ways, at times impulsive like Zee’s shooting in the air when Japanese soldiers tried to steal his sister’s hen or premeditated when Aye made a barter with Loka to secrete prisoner 218 B and end her misery. Nomi unwittingly got prisoner 218 B in trouble in the factory.
The three adolescents are confronted with difficult choices and challenges. Zee is unable to respect his father who after his release is crippled and lives off his wife’s earnings. Zee is good at studies and adores Mr. Campbell his teacher but his life is cut short due to his impulsive action. Aye comes across as a boy who matures beyond his years. He works hard to be Mr. Howard’s the Superintendent’s Trusty. However, he is disenchanted when he witnesses the tormenting of prisoners particularly of 218B, and is made to force-feed the prisoners. He takes matters in his hand and makes a deal with Loka the Andamanese to help him get his brother in law’s skull from Mr. Howard’s cabinet with ‘the one thing’’ in return i.e, to arrange for the escape of prisoner 218B and bring an end to her misery. Nomi matures after the loss of Zee and becomes the keeper of her parents. She is the one who puts the idea to Aye to get 218B out of jail and later has a fateful encounter with the prisoner.
The other characters are fleshed out and well developed. Shakuntala and Dr. Singh play an important role. They see better times during the British occupation but in the Japanese occupation, both of them suffer in different ways. Dr. Mori the Japanese Doctor is a connoisseur of art but does not stop at cruelty towards women, Cillian is the ruthless jailer, Dr. Susuhma San the dentist, spy but friendly to the children. The author is able to bring out, how despite the cruelty of both the occupations, the difference between the British and Japanese approaches.
The author chooses a back and forth narrative. Memory plays an important element in the novel. Her technique suits the stream of consciousness style where the inner thoughts and emotions of the protagonists get maximum space. The overall effect is a nuanced and deeply layered story of the trauma of the characters and the pointlessness of the entire barbarism. One also gains many interesting insights such as Zee, Aye, and Nomi being local borns don’t understand that concept of freedom from foreign yoke.
A leitmotif of the narrative is the twist and turns of fate, did Haider Ali while escaping get caught by the very rope he made in the prison, what if Aye would have bartered Zee’s life with Loka he could have saved his friend but later he would not have survived as it was prisoner 218 B who got him food when he was marooned, what if Nomi did not ask for a pet, there would be no hen, no Japanese soldiers trying to catch Zee need not have fired to give a few examples. The characters become linked to each other in curious ways which gives the novel an intriguing touch.
It is difficult to ignore the natural beauty of Andamans. Nature is an active factor in the novel. The writing is lyrical and some of the images stay for long in one’s mind Zee walking with a tilt of his head carrying Mr. Campbell’s heavy briefcase, burning elephants falling in the sea like balls of fire. Many passages are of rare beauty. However, in places, it seems the author tries too hard with little purchase. Perhaps, the omnipresent narrator prevents the readers from drawing close to the characters. A drawback of the author’s technique and style is the omnipresent narrator which at times inhibits characters grow on the reader.
These don’t in any way take away from the huge effort and deep commitment of the author to set right the omission from the collective memory of one of the lesser-known tragedies of India. This book also sheds some light on the plight of the Andamanese who had lived in the land for generations were suddenly marginalized. The treatment women received in the islands is shocking. Forcing of Andamanese women to British ships for the soldiers. The depravity of the Japanese in the practice of ni-Ju-Ku i.e., 29 soldiers to a woman, their crude and invasive medical tests to ensure the safety of the soldiers, and imported comfort women. I wonder how these actions did not get a hearing along with the Nanking trials.
Khan’s novel is poignant and lyrical. She brings to light a host of issues that are not much known and which can help understand what is happening to the marginalized in the world today. Her objective to set right the omission from the collective memory of what happened in the islands during the British-Japanese-British occupation is laudable.
June 3, 2021
A brilliant and expansive book. The subject matter was a complete revelation for me, with my ignorance of the use of the Andaman Islands as a prison colony for Indians during British rule. What really made this book shine was being able to read a story that focuses on the colonised rather than the coloniser, and the dispossessed and voiceless rather than those with power. The writing is also beautiful and paints a moving picture of the islands and the people on it, as well as of the cruelty visited on both nature and people by those in power. I'm definitely going to try out more of the author's works.
Read
February 10, 2025These islands have always fascinated me. And what a read this was!
The Andaman Islands, with their stunning natural beauty became a site of immense suffering. This paradise turned into a hell for the countless individuals sent to the Ross Island Penal Colony, known as kala paani or “black water.” From political prisoners and convicts, Korean, Chinese, and Malay “comfort women” and the indigenous inhabitants who all faced the horrors of what the colonizers portrayed as “justice”. The oppressive atmosphere of the British and then the Japanese is vividly depicted.
Uzma Aslam Khan’s powerful novel, The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali, intricately weaves together the stories of these individuals between 1936 and 1947, drawing on real historical events. At the story’s beginning, we meet thirteen year old Nomi Ali, her brother, Zeeshan (Zee) and Aye, their Burmese friend, who is a fourth-generation resident, his family’s history intertwined with the islands’ penal colony. The siblings live a normal childhood amidst the death, being brought up by distracted parents.
Khan’s meticulous research enriches the narrative, providing valuable historical context. The book illuminates the islands’ history, from early Malay influence to British and Japanese occupation, the mechanics of the prison system (including its basis in Bentham’s panopticon), and the ships that transported prisoners.
The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali is an emotional read, about a dark, often overlooked chapter in world history. I found the weight of the suffering quite overwhelming at times but I still found it hard to tear myself away from this magical island and impossible to turn a blind eye to a significant historical story that needs to be heard.
The Andaman Islands, with their stunning natural beauty became a site of immense suffering. This paradise turned into a hell for the countless individuals sent to the Ross Island Penal Colony, known as kala paani or “black water.” From political prisoners and convicts, Korean, Chinese, and Malay “comfort women” and the indigenous inhabitants who all faced the horrors of what the colonizers portrayed as “justice”. The oppressive atmosphere of the British and then the Japanese is vividly depicted.
Uzma Aslam Khan’s powerful novel, The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali, intricately weaves together the stories of these individuals between 1936 and 1947, drawing on real historical events. At the story’s beginning, we meet thirteen year old Nomi Ali, her brother, Zeeshan (Zee) and Aye, their Burmese friend, who is a fourth-generation resident, his family’s history intertwined with the islands’ penal colony. The siblings live a normal childhood amidst the death, being brought up by distracted parents.
Khan’s meticulous research enriches the narrative, providing valuable historical context. The book illuminates the islands’ history, from early Malay influence to British and Japanese occupation, the mechanics of the prison system (including its basis in Bentham’s panopticon), and the ships that transported prisoners.
The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali is an emotional read, about a dark, often overlooked chapter in world history. I found the weight of the suffering quite overwhelming at times but I still found it hard to tear myself away from this magical island and impossible to turn a blind eye to a significant historical story that needs to be heard.
April 8, 2023
"It seemed to be the way of the island that whenever there were only two sides, neither was right."
A largely forgotten piece of the Indian subcontinent's history is made alive and given voice in this incredible novel. Far from the mainland, on the penal colony in Port Blair on the South Andaman Island, the local borns and transported residents are subjected to horrific violence -- torture, murder, enforced disappearances, rape, drownings, starvation, and slave labour -- by two successive imperial colonial powers between the years of 1936 and 1947.
The events are mostly seen from the eyes of two kids, Nomi and Aye, who struggle to find the strength within themselves, in each other, and in their island's natural environment, to survive and overcome loss, even as circumstances break them and their loved ones mercilessly. The novel mixes fiction with facts gleaned from historical records to describe the complex relationships of the local characters with the occupiers as they juggle their own histories of crime, imprisonment, love, and escape, and how India's freedom movement plays in the backdrop of what they do and what's done to them.
Uzma Aslam Khan's writing is often poetic ("In the morning, the rain fell in her mother's voice") but direct where needed ("He would speak of the night that seven hundred men, women and children were...pushed into the ocean into a storm, as bombs rained down on them"), and her story does well to restore the dignity of the victims while exposing the brutality of the colonizers.
A largely forgotten piece of the Indian subcontinent's history is made alive and given voice in this incredible novel. Far from the mainland, on the penal colony in Port Blair on the South Andaman Island, the local borns and transported residents are subjected to horrific violence -- torture, murder, enforced disappearances, rape, drownings, starvation, and slave labour -- by two successive imperial colonial powers between the years of 1936 and 1947.
The events are mostly seen from the eyes of two kids, Nomi and Aye, who struggle to find the strength within themselves, in each other, and in their island's natural environment, to survive and overcome loss, even as circumstances break them and their loved ones mercilessly. The novel mixes fiction with facts gleaned from historical records to describe the complex relationships of the local characters with the occupiers as they juggle their own histories of crime, imprisonment, love, and escape, and how India's freedom movement plays in the backdrop of what they do and what's done to them.
Uzma Aslam Khan's writing is often poetic ("In the morning, the rain fell in her mother's voice") but direct where needed ("He would speak of the night that seven hundred men, women and children were...pushed into the ocean into a storm, as bombs rained down on them"), and her story does well to restore the dignity of the victims while exposing the brutality of the colonizers.
February 12, 2022
Unlike most reviewers here, I was aware of the Kala Pani jail in the Andamans. But what I was unaware of was the deep horror the people had to go through in the islands. Our history texts have conveniently overlooked the real struggle of the ordinary people under the colonial rule and during the WW period. This was a very depressing read for me, but was indeed an eye opener. It took an incredibly long time for me to finish this book because it was just too much for me to imagine. Everything ends at a good note, post independence. So that’s something! Overall, the writing is great and poetic and has successfully described the lives of both the prisoners, ordinary people and indigenous population of the island. I felt that some of the characters deserved a better ending, like the prisoner who is no longer a prisoner. I wish she were able to return to Lahore and unite with her family. Overall, this novel made me remember that the freedom we are enjoying now is the result of years of struggle by several generations of ordinary men and women, many of them we know through our text books, but a majority of them are forgotten. But we owe it to them and the losses and pain they had to endure so we have a better life.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 19, 2023
Historical fiction about the era around WWII in the Andaman Islands, the location of a penal colony established by the British for Indian prisoners. The Andamans lie in the Bay of Bengal, close to what was then Burma. The book follows Nomi and her brother Zee (children of a former Indian prisoner), plus their good friend Aye, a boy of Burmese heritage. Other key characters include an unnamed woman political prisoner and a group of indigenous Adamanese. In the first part of the book the islands are under harsh British rule and in the second part it is under Japanese rule which begins with a carrot and turns to the stick. We see the relationships of the three friends with each other, their families, and their colonisers as the war begins and progresses. After a slow start, a long plane flight gave me time to get into the many characters of the book. The book is beautifully written, the island is paradise mixed with terror. The current situation is that the Andaman Islands and nearby Nicobar Islands are territories of India, with few indigenous people remaining and numerous immigrants, many who arrived during partition.
May 18, 2024
Uzma Aslam Khan's novel "The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali" explores the little-known history of the Andaman Islands during World War II in a hauntingly beautiful way. Khan creates an evocative portrait of colonial tyranny, resistance, and the search for identity via the entwined lives of its masterfully created characters.
This novel is based on historical events but it's characters and their situation are fictional
The protagonist of the story is a young girl named Nomi Ali, whose hardships as a Japanese occupied community are reflected in her experiences. Lyrical and honest, Khan's prose depicts the violence inflicted upon the islands' residents while capturing their natural beauty. The work excels at humanising history by providing a very intimate look at the effects of colonisation and conflict.
"The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali" delves deeply into the human spirit's eternal spirit and overlooked histories. With its emotional depth and historical relevance, Uzma Aslam Khan's work is both vital and captivating to read.
This novel is based on historical events but it's characters and their situation are fictional
The protagonist of the story is a young girl named Nomi Ali, whose hardships as a Japanese occupied community are reflected in her experiences. Lyrical and honest, Khan's prose depicts the violence inflicted upon the islands' residents while capturing their natural beauty. The work excels at humanising history by providing a very intimate look at the effects of colonisation and conflict.
"The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali" delves deeply into the human spirit's eternal spirit and overlooked histories. With its emotional depth and historical relevance, Uzma Aslam Khan's work is both vital and captivating to read.
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