The “Mumbai Riots” and the Play of Literary Strategies: A Reading of Rahman Abbas’s Rohzin

Abstract

The present paper traces reflections of the 1992-3 Mumbai Riots in Rahman Abbas’s 2016 Indian Urdu novel Rohzin by using instruments of literary criticism. While this novel is overtly a story about the love of two young people, it is also a profoundly political novel bearing on a number of problems faced by the younger generation, especially young Muslims in India. Since politics and aesthetics are enmeshed in the plot, the parts of novel related to the Mumbai Riots show that both plot and literary strategies—focalization, time-frame, flashbacks and flash-forwards—employed by the author carry the political import of the text. Furthermore, the features of Magical Realism in the selected text also have both aesthetic and political impact. The article attempts to shows how literary strategies are employed in support of a multi- religious, politically riven, and secular India.

Keywords

• Communal violence
• Urdu literature
• Political impact of literary strategies
• Mumbai