Akbar begins his story with his grandfather Prayaag, a Bihari Hindu kshatriya. The family owns four bighas of farmland which earns them a mere seven rupees a month. Prayaag’s parents die in a famine. He hears of new jute mills coming up along the Hooghly. So, he climbs on to a train which takes him to Chandernagore. He walks from there to Telinipara village where Victoria Jute Mills has come up and is looking for mill hands. In the early hours of the morning, fagged out and famished, he collapses at the door of a tea stall. The stall owner, Wali Mohammad, finds the boy lying at the door. He gives him tea and biscuits. Being childless, Wali Mohammad and his wife Diljan Bibi start looking upon him as their son. Prayaag readily agrees to marry Diljan’s niece, Jamila, and converts to Islam with a new name—Rahmatullah. He is circumcised. The outcome of this marriage is Akbar Ali. They educate him. When the time comes for Akbar Ali to take a wife, an intermediary arranges to get him a fair-skinned Muslim beauty from Amritsar. Mobashar Akbar is their son. He wins his way to Presidency College, Calcutta, and at the age of 17 decides to take up journalism as his profession. There ends the first part of the family saga.
Another story runs parallel to the family saga. It is of the jute mills’ sahib log. They are not like English stereotypes. Besides Scotch and gin, they enjoy watching Bengali girls bathing naked in the river, attend nautch parties arranged for them during Durga Puja by the only bhadralok mill owner, smoke "cream cones" (hookahs), bed girls sent to entertain them, keep some as concubines and at times marry them. Akbar always gives both sides of the story. There are Indians who support Gandhi or Jinnah or want the British to stay on. There are Brits who are for hanging on to the empire as well as those who are in favour of handing over India to Indians. Even when Hindu-Muslim relations get to a breaking point as they do over cow slaughter, there are some who thirst for Muslim blood, others for restoring communal harmony. So, we go through contemporary history from the time the first bicycles and cars were seen in Telinipara, through the great Bengal famine, World War II, the bombing of Calcutta by Japanese planes, Muslim League’s call for ‘Direct Action’ and the ensuing communal carnage. And all along the narrative are sprinkled quotes from religious texts like the Gayatri Mantra and verses from the Quran, besides couplets from Ghalib, Zafar and Akbar Ilahabadi, and some bawdy English verse.
Akbar explains in a few telling words why the English found it easy to overcome Indians in the fields of battles at Buxar and Plassey: "It was extraordinary how Indians became transformed when they switched sides: disciplined and unwavering under the command of a white man, and pathetic baboons under the green and black-and-white standards of Muslim dynasties in decline. One old man could still do a wondrous imitation, learnt from his forefathers, of a Mughal champion, who swung his heavy sword in the thin air so vigorously before battle that he was utterly exhausted when the actual fighting began... Muslims were high on bravado and short on bravery."
How is it that 30,000 Brits were able to rule over 300 million Indians for so many years? Akbar gives the answer to the question as well as to many others that bewilder the present generation.
Akbar’s family saga ends when he was only 17 and determined to take up journalism. His own career as a trainee with the Illustrated Weekly of India where he met his Syrian Christian wife Mallika, as editor of The Telegraph and Sunday, his short stint as member of Parliament and finally as founder-editor of The Asian Age still remain to be told. He will undoubtedly do so in the next few years in one or two volumes. He will then be India’s answer to Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga. More power to his pen.
