Stunned Animals, Misunderstood Animals, Beatific Animals: Stray Reflections on ‘Allah Miyan Ka Karkhana’
[HUG reads Allah Miyan Ka Karkhana by Mohsin Khan. Trans. Saeed Ahmad. Noida: Rekhta Publications, 2023] A great humanist work is unpitying and naïve at once. Such writing brings us very close to our unuttered & unutterable tendencies and contingent calculations, and lines those up with the alignment of stars, in order to create a bewildering but eminently possible tapestry of events. History moves through the foibles and grandeur of human beings here, but invariably the central point is to deeply question assumptions about our superiority as all-knowing beings in the world; and to follow how we act and react when confronted with absolute contingency,whenever the ground shifts with no prior notice. Being there turns more significant than being something in such searching texts. One way to address such a predicament is to frame ourselves in close proximity to our neighbours: insects, moles and reptiles, crows and pigeons, domestic animals like dogs and cats, goats and monkeys, donkeys and chicken. We share our habitat with them. But we share more: our craftiness, our vast generosity and love, the sudden mustering and eruption of courage, the apprehending of unrealized terror and our common and monumental stupidity. Each species has its own world, and there are interspecies behavioural ways and tactics, and then the bipeds who call themselves humans interact with those in the ‘other’ world. Those creatures reciprocate or attack, flee or surrender to the bipeds. And of course, bipeds interact with other bipeds. How does relationality work in these overlapping spheres? Great modern writers like Melville and Cormac McCarthy, Hofmannsthal and Kafka, Conrad and Coetzee, Basheer and Bibhutibhushan have encountered their own skin and bones by squarely confronting the creaturely terrain. Francis Bacon and Werner Herzog have done the same in kindred arts. A remarkable detour in Mohsin Khan’s novel Allah Miyan Ka Karkhana (translated into Hindi by Saeed Ahmad) comes right in the middle of it. The episode proves prescient as the narration progresses. The brother sister duo of Gibran and Nusrat are left to play with their hen and chicks, as they try to protect them (vainly) from the predatory eyes of the cats and the crows since their kite has been torn and the kite-flying string burnt to ashes by their mother. At such a moment they spy a blue-white butterfly, flitting about in joyous airiness. The hen and the chicken take turns to jump at the prancing insect, but it eludes them with ease. After flitting about for a while, the butterfly perches itself on a wall. Gibran and Nusrat inch closer to the butterfly and watch it periodically open and shut its magnificent blue-white pair of wings. At an opportune moment, Gibran lurches forth and catches hold of its wings. The butterfly tries to free itself from his clutches, but in vain. Nusrat implores her brother to let go off it but Gibran says that he has now found a new pet for himself. Upon Nusrat’s advice that it isn’t easy to nurture a butterfly, Gibran finally frees it and lets it go. But with a severely impaired pair of wings now, the butterfly can hardly fly. Exhausted and writhing in pain, it decides to again sit—but this time, quite low on the wall. The hen was waiting for exactly such a moment. At one swoop it picks up the butterfly on its beaks and crushes it to death little by little. The chicks too join the unexpected feast with glee. While one of them crushes the head of the butterfly, others enjoy savouring the wings and the antennae. “Am not I A fly like thee?Or art not thou A man like me? For I dance, And drink, and sing,Till some blind hand Shall brush my wing.” The short exchange that follows between the two siblings re-translates somewhat like this: Nusrat: Bhaiya, the butterfly must have condemned you with lots of malediction. Now you will see that the Almighty shall have your body plucked in the same manner by hens and chickens when you reach the abode of Allah Miyan. Gibran: Why would I be plucked and maimed? I’d let it go. The butterfly was savoured by the hen and the chickens. It’s they who would suffer. Nusrat: If you had not gotten hold of her legs with so much violence, she would have easily flown higher up. Nusrat was telling the truth, and so, Gibran turns silent. Later he notices that the blueish tinge of the butterfly’s wings is still throbbing warm over his fingertips. The novel is about various kinds of predation and its consequences. The roots of such predation cannot be removed by cosmetic morality or by cruel rationalism. The work is rather an exploration in psychological and relational phenomenology, which eventually brings about the tragic realization that the innocence of certain creatures—be it human children, dogs or butterflies, must pass through the hellfire and the miracles of Allah Miyan’s factory—which is what creaturely existence is all about. The miracles of creation are at once bewildering—for the food cycle ensures that one animal preys on another. The novel begins with a crucial question relating food cycles to creation itself. A motif begins to emerge. When a pet chick (Kallo) is taken away by the predatory local cat, the adolescent protagonist Gibran asks his sister: “What was the need to make cats at all if Allah Miyan had already made chicken?” Nusrat, in equal innocence, replies that she does not know the answer but Allah Miyan must have thought about such things before he created his myriad creatures. All through the novel, this simple and piercing question shall return in many guises. The responses of the adults range from admonishment (Don’t ask such blasphemous questions) to metaphysical unknowability (The Almighty has his own designs and reasons, which are beyond human comprehension). There is a third answer: to read books and dive into jahandari (practical and material knowledge) and not mere deendari (spiritual and religious knowledge) and to understand the nature of things as well as hone imagination.