‘Soul Climate’ by Inez Baranay: The connect that isn’t

“I consider the brotherhood of man as the only tie, and partitions based on race or religion are, to my mind, artificial and arbitrary…”

— Dr MA Ansari, as quoted in Halide Edib’s ‘Inside India’ (1937)

The book ‘Soul Climate’ is inspired by Halide Edib’s soul-connect with India. She had been invited to deliver lectures at Jamia Millia Islamia in 1935, upon invitation by Dr Mukhtar Ahmad Ansari, one of the founders of Jamia, Gandhi’s trusted medical doctor, freedom fighter and a champion of Hindu-Muslim unity.

Halide was a feminist, writer, freedom fighter, a liberal Muslim (but also with a different take on Islam being adaptable and amenable to change), a controversial figure for the western media, one-time comrade of Kemal Pasha, and was exiled by the state she had fought to create.

Set in 1935, the plot of the book concerns her visit. The novel plays out in Dar-es-Salam, Dr Ansari’s residence at Daryaganj in Delhi, which was the hotbed of meetings of all the greats of the Indian freedom movement.

There are three main characters — cousins Zoya, Nuran and Aisha — upper class, angst-driven. They discuss their lives, while being witness to these meetings in their “Dr Uncle’s” home. They also hear talks by Halide Hanum/Halide Edib and reflect upon them. Other characters mentioned are Auntie Toy, imprisoned by the British government at the time when Zoya enters the household, after a trip to “the ashram in the south”, obliquely referring to Ramana Ashram in Tamil Nadu (but not naming it). There is the intellectual-activist Sajjad, a Gandhian, who will ultimately pursue academics in London.

So, while the author, Inez Baranay, writes that it would please her if “the main result of this book of mine would be that readers would turn to Halide’s own writings”, she is unable to evoke the chaos of walking between history and fiction.

Ultimately, the book remains stuck between two parallel strands: the cousins and their existential crisis, and Inez’s own discussions (which form the most interesting part of the book), around Halide’s writing (her biography, the novel ‘The Clown and His Daughter’, etc); her own search for Dr Ansari’s house, finding pictures of the same in the library; her witnessing the CAA agitation; her opinions on fundamentalism, communalism, citizenship, etc. Had she focused on this, and conversed fictionally with Halide, it would have made it more fascinating.

The concocted crisis of identity of the cousins (from an elite background and with a Paris connect, too) is not teased out, but rather sloppily ‘resolved’ towards the end. Dr Ansari, too, finds no voice. Quotable sentences abound in the non-fiction part of the book, including on the banned 1932 book ‘Angaaray’ (Rashid Jahan, Mahmud-uz-Zafar and Ahmed Ali), which, Inez speculates, might have been read by Aisha. Nuran is made to accompany Halide to Gandhi’s ashram (after the discussion in ‘Inside India’ on the same).

There is just too much material needlessly scattered. Careless editing, too, mars the work.

— The reviewer is an independent journalist and historian