What emerges is not merely an account of a riot, but also a study of how a society changes gradually, almost imperceptibly, until violence becomes possible.
Karbala is not treated merely as a historical place associated with sacrifice and loss. In this novel, it becomes a metaphor for places where injustice is repeatedly inflicted on ordinary people.
One of the novel’s achievements is its attention to Bhagalpur itself.
Literature in India has often served as a record of institutional failure. Where official histories can reduce violence to dates, figures and administrative accounts, fiction can recover the human reality that such records leave behind. Gourinath’s Hindi novel Karbala dar Karbala (Antika Prakashan), belongs to this tradition. Set largely in Bhagalpur and the adjoining regions of north Bihar, it follows a decade marked by the police blindings of 1979-80 and culminating in the communal violence of 1989. What emerges is not merely an account of a riot, but also a study of how a society changes gradually, almost imperceptibly, until violence becomes possible.
The title itself establishes the novel’s central idea. Karbala is not treated merely as a historical place associated with sacrifice and loss. In Gourinath’s usage, it becomes a metaphor for places where injustice is repeatedly inflicted upon ordinary people. The novel connects this idea to a reported statement by the then Bhagalpur police chief K. S. Dwivedi, who invoked Karbala while threatening Muslims. The title therefore carries both historical and contemporary meanings. One Karbala becomes another, and violence acquires a frightening continuity.
A Decade before the Riot
Gourinath is less interested in presenting the 1989 violence as a sudden eruption than in tracing the conditions that made it possible. The novel begins with Shiv, a young student who arrives in Bhagalpur from nearby district for higher education. He carries prejudices acquired from his surroundings, including the casual suspicion of Muslims that has become part of everyday social conditioning. Yet, his friendships and experiences gradually complicate those inherited assumptions.
His relationship with Zarina gives the novel its emotional centre. Intelligent and politically aware, she is also drawn to Vidyapati’s songs and Mirza Ghalib’s poetry. Yet, beneath this cultivated sensibility lies the memory of an earlier violence that has shaped her understanding of the world. Her family had already encountered the criminalisation of public life when her father, a judge, refused to yield to political and administrative pressure. Their relationship is not presented as a conventional romance. It becomes a test of whether friendship, affection and intellectual exchange can survive in a society increasingly organised around suspicion.
Around them, Gourinath builds a much larger social landscape. Students, teachers, politicians, police officers, criminals, traders and families from different communities inhabit the same world. Their lives reveal that communalism does not begin with a riot. It enters through jokes, rumours, political speeches, institutional compromises, social prejudice and the gradual normalisation of difference.
Bhagalpur as a Changing City
One of the novel’s strongest achievements is its attention to Bhagalpur itself. The city of silk, commerce and layered linguistic cultures appears not merely as a setting but as a living social organism. Its decline is connected to the weakening of institutions, the growth of criminal networks and the increasing politicisation of religious identity.
The story of Sarfaraz makes this historical continuity especially painful. His family, associated with Bhagalpur’s silk economy, carries memories of earlier communal violence. The family’s repeated losses suggest that each riot does not end when the streets become quiet. It passes into property, livelihood, family memory and the next generation.
Gourinath also pays attention to the Bengali presence in Bhagalpur and to the city’s older plural cultural life. The result is a portrait of a place whose social complexity is gradually narrowed by political mobilisation. What disappears is not merely communal harmony, but a particular idea of the city itself.
Violence before Violence
The most interesting aspect of Karbala dar Karbala is its understanding of violence as a process. Gourinath shows how criminality and politics begin to overlap, how educational spaces become increasingly polarised, and how institutions that should restrain violence become compromised.
A group of progressive students tries to respond through study circles, pamphlets, street theatre and work among poorer communities. Their efforts are sincere but increasingly marginalised as communal politics enters campus life. Sports, festivals and student organisations, spaces that should create social interaction, acquire new political meanings.
The novel’s documentary impulse is particularly visible here. Gourinath draws upon reported events, political developments and historical material while moving between fictional characters and recognisable public figures. This makes the narrative part novel, part reconstruction, and at times, almost an archive of a city.
That method is also the book’s main formal limitation. The documentary material occasionally becomes so prominent that the fictional movement slows down. Some characters appear more fully imagined than others, while certain explanations tell the reader what the preceding scene has already suggested.
The Limits of a Single Lens
The novel’s political perspective is clear. It is particularly attentive to majoritarian mobilisation, administrative failure, criminal networks and the erosion of secular social relations. That focus gives the book considerable force, but it also leaves some aspects of the period less developed.
The politics of the 1980s contained competing forms of religious conservatism, internal debates within minority communities and conflicts over gender, law and political representation. These receive much less attention in the novel than the growth of majoritarian politics. This does not invalidate Gourinath’s central argument, but it narrows the historical field through which the decade is understood.
A Past that Refuses to Stay Buried
Gourinath’s prose is direct and rooted in the speech rhythms of north Bihar. Maithili, Hindi, Urdu and Bengali cultural references enter the narrative naturally. There is little interest in stylistic polish for its own sake. That quality suits a novel concerned with the erosion of a shared social world. Yet, the book’s strongest passages are not its most declarative ones. They are the moments when an individual life suddenly reveals the scale of a historical rupture: a family losing its livelihood, a student discovering that friendship has acquired a religious boundary or a survivor carrying an earlier instance of violence into the next one.
The Bhagalpur violence of 1989 remains one of the major episodes of communal violence in post-Independence India. Contemporary accounts and later inquiries have documented extensive deaths, displacement and destruction, particularly among Muslims. The historical record is itself marked by disputes over responsibility, investigation and justice. Gourinath enters this contested history through fiction, giving names, relationships and emotional consequences to a past that statistics alone cannot convey.
Karabala dar Karbala is therefore most compelling when it refuses to treat 1989 as an isolated tragedy. Its larger subject is the making of a social atmosphere in which violence becomes imaginable, then permissible, and finally remembered as history.
The novel does not offer consolation. Its faith lies elsewhere, in the friendships, intellectual exchanges and acts of solidarity that survive for a while against the forces pulling society apart. That tension between destruction and resistance gives the book its lasting significance. Gourinath asks us to look at Bhagalpur not as a finished chapter, but as a history whose consequences continue to shape the way a city remembers itself.
(Ashutosh Kumar Thakur is a Bengaluru-based literary critic, translator, bilingual writer and curator)
