Review: The Company of Violent Men by Siddharthya Roy

For a book about contemporary journalism, Siddharthya Roy’s The Company of Violent Men has an aptly clickbaity title. The violent men rarely materialise — instead, there is a succession of bloviating men. They initially harbour a suggestion of violence or grand conspiracies, but later turn out to be empty vessels with noisy promises.

However, in a world full of enticing baubles, clickbait can be useful. Roy’s book might rarely feature violent men, but it does tell us a lot about the men whom prevailing narratives or journalists eager to concoct a story might arbitrarily deem violent. In its pages, we meet refugees, small-time wheeler-dealers, and civilians going about their lives amid a vortex of conflict or dispossession.

The book is also an intriguing account of what is behind-the-scenes in journalism. The author pursues stories that often start with a promising lead, but eventually fizzle into a non-newsworthy morass or languish in dead ends. They might not have seen the light of publication earlier, but Roy has now repurposed them into a book. He writes, “For the longest time in my head, it [the book] was called The Rejects — meaning that which was rejected from my stories at the edit table.”

In the first chapter, he talks about stumbling upon what seems like a breakthrough after the 2016 terrorist attack on Holey Artisan Bakery in Dhaka, Bangladesh. He used his programming chops to scrape social media posts that criticised the Bangladeshi government’s actions against Islamists. Then, he geolocated the posts and traced many back to a “nameless unfinished mosque” in Dhaka.

Roy travelled from New York to Dhaka, pretended to be a Bengali-American Muslim, and took on the alias Yasin to investigate further. 20 pages later, however, all we learn is that the people who ran the mosque “weren’t terrorist material”. The section ends with no new insights regarding the bakery attack.

A meeting with a professor in Dhaka, however, leads him to his next story. Its peg is a cricket match in a town he describes thus: “...in 2004, Bagmara slid from being the dream project of secular progressivism to the seat of the first-ever caliphate declared by an Al-Qaeda-affiliate terrorist group in South Asia”. He visited Bagmara about a decade after the government killed the man who set up the Caliphate. Roy documents the terror he unleashed and the attempts to undo his legacy of extremism in the essay Cricket in the Caliphate.

It sifts through people’s testimonies of violence to highlight realpolitik in Bangladesh and the suffering it has engendered. Through a story from the grassroots, Roy exemplifies a global trend. As he describes it: “States create and unleash a monster, let it run amok, and then clamp down on the civil rights of regular citizens, citing the monster.”

Later in the book, the author goes “jihadi hunting in Germany”. There, he meets a man claiming to be Saddam Hussein’s former bodyguard, who turns out to be “the most blatant and unashamed liar”. Towards the book’s end, there are whiffs of violence. A meeting with sources in a desolate location in Cox’s Bazar seems like it might go south, but his driver rescues him before anything untoward happens. In a disturbing turn of events, he and his family faced death threats for his story on sexual assaults by militants in Kashmir.

In many of these narratives, we often learn more about Roy’s work than the place he is in or its inhabitants. In others, however, people take centre stage, such as during his interviews with refugee Rohingya women who became sex workers in Bangladesh. With these stories, his purported goal is to “un-trope” people that “news headlines have flattened into convenient tropes of good and evil and us and them” and “bring them back to life as real, living, breathing humans”.

Unfortunately, the author also succumbs to reductive platitudes at times, as is evident in formulations like “when I looked beyond the burqa and the beard”. In the essay Maach, Meth and Metalhead Sharia, Roy is shocked that Hasan, a “neophyte wannabe jihadist” he met in Cox’s Bazar, is also a cannabis-smoking metalhead and might be gay. He later acknowledges that people can encompass multitudes, but does not explain why he labels Hassan a jihadist in the first place.

One suspects that Hassan has been, in the author’s words, “flattened into convenient tropes” because he went to a madrasa that might have harboured “extremists” (We don’t know for sure because Roy had to abandon the investigation). The use of jihadist and extremist as catch-all terms for diverse beliefs and actions, accompanied by a lack of context and nuance, has unfortunately been one of the hallmarks of global journalism for a couple of decades now.

Interestingly, when Roy was a student at Columbia Journalism School, his thesis adviser and programme director both rejected Cricket in the Caliphate because it didn’t conform to their straitjacketed notions. It was eventually published on the website Roads and Kingdoms in 2017.

Difficult as it was for Roy to pursue the story then, I imagine it would be even harder now for someone to report a similar story, let alone get it published. The profession of journalism has been changing significantly over the past decade. Even where there is an appetite for nuanced stories, budgets are limited and newsroom staff skeletal. Few journalists today can travel and report deeply in multiple locations, more so if they belong to the Global South or don’t return with a solid story. Yet, Roy regards himself as “at best, an itinerant journalist—an outsider to the ranks of real journalists”.

When I hear the term ‘real journalist’ these days, I am reminded of a fictional character: Rachel from the first season of the show The White Lotus. She graduated from journalism school, but worked dead-end jobs aggregating content and click bait, with originality and accuracy subservient to quantity. This is not to say that ‘real journalism’ has disappeared, but pursuing it might be an unreal aspiration for most. Amid this, Roy’s experiences provide a peek into a profession and style of working that might eventually transform beyond recognition.

Syed Saad Ahmed is a writer and communications professional.