VIOLENCE IS THE fundamental experience that shapes Muslim life in India. Sooner or later, you will face it. There is no escaping, or, at least, there has not been so far. It permeates Muslim neighbourhoods, through stories of police encounters of near and distant neighbours, or of fearful families regaining their strength after dousing teargas shells. It infiltrates your dreams—remember that loud gas cylinder blast from ten years ago? It makes you fear the state, evoking a disquieting nervousness upon seeing a uniformed police official. Yet, some of us are also resilient precisely because of how the instances of violence that rocked our lives shaped us.
Amid their increasing marginality, Muslims have persistently tried to challenge and overcome societal and state barriers to their mobility. Theirs is a story of resistance against the storm of Hindu nationalism, wherein the fear and anxiety of impending and past violence does not necessarily lead to defeatism but to a renewed sense of continual struggle and defiance. This is the story that you will find in Zara Chowdhary’s recent memoir, The Lucky Ones, a patchwork narrative that recounts her childhood, family stories and years of growing up in India’s most segregated city, Ahmedabad, while relaying the political reality and harrowing violence the state witnessed in that period.
I came across Chowdhary’s memoir, at the time a text written for her master’s degree, while down a rabbit hole of reading, in early 2021. I finished it in under a day, admiring how it went beyond established tropes about Muslim lives, like a lost syncretism or the capture of Muslim politics by religious mullahs. Soon, I discovered our somewhat interconnected lives. A Muslim growing up in Ahmedabad, she was 16 during the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom. I was just shy of six years old, living in the Kalupur–Dariapur neighbourhood, a few kilometres away from her Jasmine Apartment in Khanpur. As I read her memoir, the streets of the city came alive, as did the violent sloganeering we witnessed in 2002. In 2024, Chowdhary published a more cohesive version of the memoir, a text that revolves around being a woman in a household that did not respect her; where her mother, originally from Tamil Nadu, was pushed to the family’s periphery; growing up as a Muslim; and witnessing postcolonial India’s worst anti-Muslim pogrom.
The Lucky Ones, crucially, veers away from the artificiality and expected story that Muslim memoirs often posit. Writing in The Caravan, in 2020, Shireen Azam specified tendencies in Muslim autobiographies, where some themes are ubiquitous: “the pain surrounding Partition, … the ostensible glory of the Nehruvian era, … the ulemas of the 1980s, who stymied attempts to reform the community, … and the gradual institutional collapse of secularism after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992.” These memoirs usually either take refuge in the feudal past of glory or express resentment at the takeover of religious spaces by conservative mullahs. More generally, they portray marginalisation and sociopolitical realities through a decline in personal fortunes and the growing separation between Hindus and Muslims amid the Hindu nationalist capture of the Indian state. In narratives about Gujarat, Muslims become the helpless or faceless victims par excellence, while privileging the stories of better off, numerically insignificant trading or landowning castes: Bohras, Memons and Khojas. These are important facets of India’s Muslim lives, but such representations also tend to bury the individuality inherent in their journeys—the lens of Muslim identity occupies the whole of such depictions, almost as if no other social identities and circumstances exist.