Blood Brothers: A Family Saga

Blood Brothers is M.J. Akbar’s amazing story of three generations of a Muslim family – based on his own – and how they deal with the fluctuating contours of Hindu-Muslim relations. Telinipara, a small Jute Mill town some 30 miles North of Kolkata along the Hooghly, is a complex Rubik’s Cube of migrant Bihari workers, Hindus and Muslims; Bengalis, poor and ‘bhadralok’; and Sahibs who live in the safe, ‘foreign’ world of Victoria Jute Mill. Into this scattered inhabitation enters a child on the verge of starvation, Prayaag, who is saved and adopted by a Muslim family, converts to Islam and takes on the name of Rahmatullah. As Rahmatullah knits Telinipara into a community, friendship, love, trust and faith are continually tested by the cancer of riots. Incidents – conversion, circumcision, the arrival of plague or electricity – and a fascinating array of characters – the ultimate Brahmin, Rahmatullah’s friend Girija Maharaj, the workers’ leader, Bauna Sardar, the storyteller, Talat Mian, the poet-teacher, Syed Ashfaque, the smiling mendicant, Burha Deewana, the sincere Sahib, Simon Hogg, and then the questioning, demanding third generation of the author and his friend Kamala – interlink into a narrative of social history as well as a powerful memoir. Blood Brothers is a chronicle of its age, its canvas as enchanting as its narrative, a personal journey through change as tensions build, stretching the bonds of a lifetime to breaking point and demanding, in the end, the greatest sacrifice. Its last chapters, written in a bare-bones, unemotional style, are the most moving as the author searches for hope amid raw wounds with a surgeon’s Scalpel.