The book ‘Aavarana’ is authored by Dr. Santeshivara Lingannaiah Bhyrappa, who is one of the most celebrated novelists in the Kannada language. He has authored 24 novels in a glittering career spanning over five decades. He has been awarded Padma Shri and Sahitya Akademi Award along with many other awards. He is also a philosopher and screenwriter. His work has always been a source of heated public debates and is widely used by scholars for studies.

The book, which has been translated into English as ‘Aavarana – The Veil’ by Sandeep Balakrishna, debates how artistic freedom is used by many academicians to murder the truth which society deserves to know, and how the history we know through art has been distorted by historians, artists, and playwriters.

The book shows a protagonist Lakshmi who is a progressive woman in society, who has been a torchbearer for the progressive movement throughout her life but at the end finds herself trapped in an Islamic marriage. As the Islamic way of life forces her to surrender her identity, she realizes how she has always been under the veil of ignorance because of the pamphlet information provided by so-called progressive academicians throughout her life.

She discovers the truth about distorted history when she loses her father and pays a visit to his study and realizes how he had studied all the primary sources and made notes out of them to bring out the true history of Bharat. She decides to write a novel to put out the truth to the public through a fictional story with actual well-researched facts.

The author used a beautiful style of writing as he wrote a novel in which the protagonist herself was writing a novel – it was a novel within a novel. All the facts were well researched and were presented beautifully to question the very fundamentals of Islam which claims to be the most peaceful religion. The book shows no mercy on the reader as it strips the society naked and slaps you with the TRUTH. The book not only tells truth about the past but also shows us a mirror of contemporary times.

All the characters in the book- Razia/Lakshmi, Amir, Razia’s father, Professor Shashi, Nazir, and other not only exist in this fictional world but are among us everywhere. We see them on television, listen to podcasts from them, read their columns, and see them through various other mediums, distorting history one instance at a time. The author makes the reader stop for a moment and examine the ecosystem and the narrative around them, and question everything fed by these voices.

The author crushed various narratives used by liberal academia by questioning them on rational grounds and by narrating the actual truth which has been hidden by them. The Islamic attack on Hindu temples has been coated by the lies where they say that this also happened because of the wars waged between the Hindu Vaishnavites and Shaivites. It questions how animal sacrifice has been banned in various Hindu cultures, but when it comes to Muslims there has always been an argument that we can’t interfere in personal laws and how we should protect minority culture.

Islam which boasts about only worshiping the one true God and spreading the message of brotherhood, and which says that all Muslims are equal all over the world, but in reality they are the most biased when it comes to differentiating between Muslims of India, Egypt, Syria, and Saudi.

Liberal academia and urban Naxals, who find it acceptable to mock Hindus, are claiming the title of being progressive and intellectual, even though they have no primary sources to back their arguments and rely completely on pamphlet knowledge. Instead of mocking, they should read primary sources where there have been accounts of barbaric behavior by Islamic rulers which Islamic historians have proudly recorded in their literary works.

There has been a trend where young people are corrupted and brainwashed by the senior academicians in the name of liberal thoughts and by simply quoting Karl Marx that ‘religion is the opium of the masses’. These points have been also pointed by the author in a very articulate way, and through examples which are mirrored in the contemporary times. The most important thing which has been presented by the author is how the government uses these narratives for politics by appeasing the minorities.

The book shakes all your assumptions and leaves readers intrigued. The reader cannot figure out whether it is fiction, a historical book, or a cause for alarm. An alarm calling out everyone who has peddled false narratives under the veil of freedom of expression. We have seen movies like Jodha-Akbar, Mughal-e-Azam and various other television serials constantly glorifying the barbaric Muslim rulers.

This novel within a novel helps us to track the history of the state of today’s society. The book takes off the veil from everyone – it shows the reality to Lakshmi and Amir which they have been ignoring for most of their life, and it also reveals the true colors of Shastri, who wore the title of being a progressive secular socialist.

-By Pulkit Singh Bisht

(To commemorate the 74th Republic Day celebrations, student volunteers of INDgenius from O. P. Jindal Global University review books with nationalistic sentiments and about various socio-political issues)