A Kafkaesque questioning of justice

By capturing the emotional upheavals and physical torments of Jibran, Mohsin Khan’s novel lays bare the shadowy nature of a supposedly civilised and humane society, writes Shafey Kidwai.

Since time immemorial human society has been stymied by religious, cultural, ethnic, and linguistic prejudices interfused with contradictory ideologies. Equality and justice were made sacred objects to decontaminate it from the foul odour of bias.

A comprehensive and wellst ruc tured system with a sense of proportion between crime a n d punishment was designed. The prosecution system, drawing its sustenance from religious beliefs, sectarian laws, social convictions, cultural practices, moral values, and policies and priorities of the power, was put to use to decide the quantum of punishment of each crime and its execution. People accepted it as an overly divine act to pave the way for speedy justice. Contrary to plausible appearance, the system, propped by common sense, is nothing but a covert design to safeguard the ruling class’s interests.

Criminal laws, which seem to have been drawn heavily on laws of nature, human values and moral scaffoldings, are essentially social constructs pitched as a panacea of all social ills. The pestering sense of guilt proceeding from the original archetypal sin impels people to adhere to the justice system strictly. Many poets and authors often searingly put down the ubiquitous religious, ideological, political and moral frameworks, but the prosecution system per se escapes creative frowning.

Famous for leaving the beaten path, Franz Kafka produced two incredible books, Before the Law and The Trial that poignantly narrate how the judicial system circumvents the sense of proportion between crime and punishment. Society revels in invoking inverse proportion, and for Kafka, the system is inhuman and arbitrary by its very nature. When tolerance, cooperation and social and cultural rapport no longer pivot, the laws become a scourge. Trivial crimes fetch stringent punishment, and gradually the media and people become the arbiter of justice. Frequent media trials make lynching and mob violence an everyday reality. Utopia gets replaced by Dystopia. The situation worsens more than we could have anticipated — here, the executioner is not visible, but people afflicted with agonising pains are innumerable. Evil runs across all along, and individual liberty is replaced by strict surveillance, and the prosecution system armed with new information technology leaves ordinary citizens exasperated.

A society that no longer binds crime and punishment together with a sense of proportion spells doom for all, and one can measure the depth of its degeneration by focusing attention on the criminal laws through the lens of human dignity and aspirations. It is an incredible portrait by the celebrated Urdu fiction writer. His latest novel, Allah Mian Ka Karkhana has created waves in the subcontinent and has gone into three print editions. Perhaps it is the first Urdu novel that zeroes in on all possible emotional overtones of an omnipresent domestication system and questions its arbitrariness without intellectual posturing. Mohsin Khan whose short story Zehra got unprecedented acclaim in literary circles when published in the Avant- Garde literary journal of Bengaluru Soughat, is now back with his new novel. By fashioning a gripping narrative, Khan has produced a mind-bending and harrowing description of a boy. The novel focuses on the formative years of a lowermiddle- class boy Jibran who falls victim to a world that constantly spurns and punishes him for trivial offences. His mother, father, aunt, uncle, shopkeeper, and mentor Hafiji all join hands to inflict a savage punishment that makes a mockery of the concept and sense of proportion of the guiding spirit of justice.

Through capturing the sentimental ups and downs and physical torment of Jibran, Khan lays bare various shadowy aspects of the “civilised” and “humane” society where innocent playfulness of children, insignificant adolescent moral deviations and adhering to religious practices get a severe penalty. Violence and intolerance surface everywhere. The locale of Khan’s novel reminds one of Shakespeare’s pithy observation about London (that could be applied to any big city) — “London is a non-stop theatre of punishment.”

Jibran’s story unravels a tantalising tale of the essential human predicament that has nothing to do with how old one is. Jibran and his younger sister Nusrat seek to comprehend how antithetical elements shape our universe and why one thing is pitted against the other in the divine creation. Jibran asks: “Allah Miyan ne murghi banai thi to billi kuyun banai” (Why did God create a cat after a hen?) Similarly, why does punishment not conform to the crime?<