Empire at a crossroads

Thirty years into Shah Jahan’s reign, as his empire descends into intrigue and civil war, two real-life European travellers, Venetian Niccolao Manucci and French Francois Bernier, find themselves mixed up in the battle. Sudhir Kakar’s novel follows a conceit straight out of Salman Rushdie’s Enchantress of Florence (which also featured Manucci), presenting not one but two viewpoints on the Mughal court. Manucci and Bernier take turns narrating events, often contradicting or correcting each other.

The two physicians have a mutual antipathy, so it’s just as well that they end up ranged on different sides of the tussle for the Peacock Throne. Manucci, a more exuberant personality, serves under the generous if self-absorbed Dara Shikoh. The more supercilious Bernier becomes part of the retinue of Danishmand Khan, Shah Jahan’s foreign minister, who eventually sends him to Aurangzeb’s camp to observe matters. Kakar uses these two alternating accounts to outline the crossroads at which the empire finds itself, oscillating between Dara’s brand of Sufism (which incorporates some dubious astrology) and Aurangzeb’s austerely Sunni Islamism.

Full report here Timeout Mumbai

Gauls and Romans in Agra

Piety and prurience, medicine and court intrigue crowd Kakar’s richly-felt tapestry set in Shah Jahan’s India

The Crimson Throne
Sudhir Kakar
Penguin; Rs 450; Pp 253

High up on my must-read list of a handful of Indian authors is Sudhir Kakar. He is India’s best-known psychoanalyst. His prose is lucid and his range of topics very wide. He makes one think. His latest novel, The Crimson Throne, though ostensibly about the battles for succession between Emperor Shah Jahan’s four sons, tells you about India in the 17th century as portrayed by two European adventurers, an Italian, Niccolai Manucci, in his Storia Do Mogor, and a Frenchman, Francois Bernier, in his Travels in the Mughal Empire AD 1656-1665. Manucci worked his way as a deck-hand and made his way to Goa. He was hospitably accomodated by Jesuit priests and found lodgings on top of a hill with a Hindu vaidraj practicing ayurveda. He found a mistress to cater to his other needs. Soon after, Bernier landed in Surat; he also enjoyed the hospitality of the Jesuits. Both men travelled in bullock cart caravans to Delhi, staying in serais and noting conditions prevailing in the countryside. They arrived in the capital about the same time and took an instant dislike to each other.

Shah Jahan had already named his eldest son Dara Shikoh as heir apparent, and posted his other sons as viceroys in distant provinces. But his decisions carried little weight, as it was widely known that he was a very sick man. He was also known to be grossly oversexed. His favourite queen was Mumtaz Mahal, who bore 12 children in as many years. Unani hakeems believed that a man could not have sex with a pregnant woman as the hard knocks of the penis would damage the foetus. So, the emperor had to get other women to cater to his needs. The ulema condoned his liaisons with his own daughters as a man’s right to taste the fruit of his own labours.

Full report here Outlook

Dirty, sexy politics

Italian traveller and writer Niccolao Manucci, known for his work Storia do Mogor, worked for Dara Shukoh, emperor Shah Jahan’s eldest son and chosen heir, and thus had first-hand knowledge of the Mughal court. He is one of the two narrators of Kakar’s book. The other is François Bernier, a French physician and traveller, who for 12 years was attached to Aurangzeb, who killed elder brother Dara to become emperor. Bernier is credited with writing the first published post-Classical classification of humans into distinct races. He also wrote Travels in the Mughal Empire, which is mainly about Dara and Aurangzeb.

Kakar’s triumph is in choosing his two narrators, who speak to the reader in alternate chapters. It’s also his undoing.

The book is set in the dying years of Shah Jahan’s reign. The monarch indulges in the pleasures of the flesh to divert himself from the travails of an aging body. A fratricidal battle is brewing among his sons — Dara, Shuja, Aurangzeb and Murad — for the Peacock Throne, which epitomises the splendour of Shah Jahan’s rule.

This may not be the best period of the Mughal rule, but it is certainly the most intriguing. The chief contenders to the throne, Dara and Aurangzeb, are the dream-come-true for a fiction writer weaving a tale of two warring protagonists. Dara is the charismatic heir, the emperor’s favourite son, who is full of tolerance for diverse religious beliefs. He has written much on the Oneness of God and Man, the immanence of the Divine and the consequent assertion that there is no difference between various religions. He also writes about a dream in which he saw Vashishtha and Rama and Rama embracing him.

Full report here Business Standard

The difficulty of being a Mughal emperor, and Mr Roy

If you have not read Sudhir Kakar’s analysis of Indian character, you have missed out something very precious. I have read every book he has published and eagerly await for the next one. He is India’s best-known psychoanalyst and a veryhandsome man to whose charm many beautiful women have succumbed.
He now lives in Goa with his second wife, a German psychiatrist.

You can start with his latest The Crimson Throne (Penguin-Viking) which I think is his best work. It is about the last year of the reign of Emperor Shahjahan and the  war of succession between his four sons. It is based on the observations of two European adventurers — the Italian Niccolai Manucci, a semi-literate fellow from Venice with an appetite for women. He worked as a deck cleaner and arrived in Goa in 1675. He recorded his experiences in Storia Do Mogor. The other was a Frenchman Francois Bernier, a more perceptive observer who arrived in Surat and wrote about the state of affairs in the Mughal Empire. Kakar has based his work entirely on these secondary sources and what he said about India in the 17th century is true about the India of today.

To whet your appetite, let me tell you how Manucci travelled from Goa to Delhi and made his name as a magic healer. He received the hospitality of Jesuit priests who found him lodgings on top of a hill. His sole companion was a Hindu vaid practising Ayurveda. He told him that the stomach was the repository of all ailments and an examination of a sick person’s faeces before prescribing medicine was vital.

Full report here Hindustan Times

Strife, sex and succession

The court of this Mughal emperor was replete with compelling drama. Sudhir Kakar shows his grasp of it as a historian, not as a novelist

Very few writers comprehend the deep structure of the Indian mind, and the way it reveals itself in both public and private behaviour, as the psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar. Indeed, one of Kakar’s recent books, written in collaboration with his wife Katharina, was a striking wide-angle view of the tangled roots and branches of the Indian psyche called, simply, The Indians.

Kakar has also for around a decade been a practitioner of historical fiction, each book based on the life of a prominent historical personage: the sage Vatsyayana, author of the Kama Sutra, in The Ascetic of Desire; Ramakrishna Paramhansa and Swami Vivekananda in Ecstasy; Mahatma Gandhi in Mira and the Mahatma. On its new journey the Kakar Bus of Fiction, as it were, stops at yet another intriguing point in Indian history: the Mughal period.

Mughal India has been vividly documented not just by historians and poets, and indeed on occasion the great emperors themselves, but also by the accounts of visitors to the Mughal court. Two of these travellers were the Italian Niccolao Manucci and the Frenchman Francois Bernier. In Kakar’s book their respective memoirs of life in India under Mughal rule are mined to produce a double-sided view of a storied moment in Indian history.

Full report here Mint

Tharoor releases historical tale on India

A historical tale of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan's reign, told through the eyes of two European travellers, has been released. The Crimson Throne by noted writer Sudhir Kakar was released by Congress MP Shashi Tharoor who moderated a discussion between the author flanked by the ambassadors of France, Jerome Bonnafont and Italy, Roberto Toscano.

"The interplay of the perspective of two travellers dealing with the years of the rule of Dara Shikoh and the rise of Aurangzeb makes for good reading," said Tharoor who was making his appearance in the national capital after a break.

The book set in the 17the century India is a narrative by two travellers Niccolao Manucci and Grancois Bernier who arrive in India and find their way into the innermost circles of the Emperor.

The narrative is about how the country braces itself for the brutal succession to the Peacock throne.

Full report here Hindustan Times

India has got beneath my skin: Diana Preston

Married to fellow writer Michael Preston, British author Diana Preston reveals that travel is always on their cards. The couple chose India as the first faraway destination to visit, knowing little that the country would eventually become the centre of many novels they would pen together. Diana admits, “I have lost count of the number of times I have visited India since then. The country has just got beneath my skin. From the shore temples of the South to the Northern fringes of the country, we have seen it all. Every time we come back, we go away learning a lot.” 

It was on her first trip to India that Diana developed her interest in the Mughal history of India, gazing at the majestic Taj Mahal and walking down the Fatehpur Sikri corridors. Diana adds, “It led us further back into the chronicles of the Mughal era. Five years ago, we wrote our book on the Taj Mahal.”

Writing novels exclusively centred around this glorious historical period required several research trips. The author laughs as she recounts, “We had so much travel to do that we even got ourselves round trip railway passes. To capture all the sights and sounds of the country, we preferred travelling at night.” They also decided to do all their traveling by train.

Full report here DNA

Review: Brothers at War

REVIEW

Brothers at War
By Alex Rutherford
Headline Review,

427 pages, Rs 495

Blurb

The second enthralling installment in Alex Rutherford's Empire of the Moghul series. 1530, Agra, Northern India. Humayun, the newly-crowned second Moghul Emperor, is a fortunate man. His father, Babur, has bequeathed him wealth, glory and an empire which stretches a thousand miles south from the Khyber pass; he must now build on his legacy, and make the Moghuls worthy of their forebear, Tamburlaine. But, unbeknown to him, Humayun is already in grave danger. His half-brothers are plotting against him; they doubt that he has the strength, the will, the brutality needed to command the Moghul armies and lead them to still-greater glories. Perhaps they are right. Soon Humayun will be locked in a terrible battle: not only for his crown, not only for his life, but for the existence of the very empire itself.

Bring on Akbar Mint

A few chapters into the first book in the Empire of the Moghul trilogy, Raiders from the North, and I was hooked. And a little embarrassed for it. If a review request hadn’t been forthcoming, I would have never ever picked up a copy of Alex Rutherford’s debut. I am not a snob by any means, and I have the Ludlums to prove it, but period fiction just isn’t my cup of tea.

If I want to immerse myself in period literature, why not choose a well-written history? And if I must read fiction, why not pick up something like Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland or even the Fake IPL Player’s book? Both fictional but within an identifiable context.

Period fiction requires two leaps of my imagination. My imagination, I was under the impression, was not so leapy. And then I read the excellent ‘Raiders from the North’. And I leapt verily!

That book was an engaging, well-balanced work that told the story of Babar’s impossible rise to power and the genesis of the Mughal empire. The book had a certain cinematic heft to it, with a TV documentary-like treatment of the dramatic and the historic. In that context it was also a book that went well with the contemporary need to dramatize history. Big budget TV series such as The Tudors, Band of Brothers and the more recent The Pacific all explain spans of history through the feelings, lusts, fears and thrills of their protagonists.

Not with maps and relics, but with sex and savagery

‘It was fun to create a new identity'

In India for the launch of the second book in the Empire of the Moghul series, author Diana Preston - one half of Alex Rutherford- holds forth on psuedonyms, India and the perils of research trips.

When the first book in the Empire of the Moghul series, Raiders from the North, came out, the first thing I did was to check the back flap for more information on the author. Nothing except a vague phrase “Alex Rutherford lives in London”. A Google search revealed that Alex Rutherford was actually the husband-wife team of Michael and Diana Preston and that Empire of the Moghul series was their first stab at historical fiction.

Other books as co-authors include A Pirate of Exquisite Mind (on the English buccaneer, sea captain, author and scientific observer William Dampier), Cleopatra and Antony and two books on the Taj Mahal (A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time and Taj Mahal).

Diana also has The Road to Culloden Moor (on Bonnie Prince Charlie); A First Rate Tragedy (on Robert Scott and his ill-fated expedition to the Antarctic), The Boxer Rebellion (on China's war against foreigners in 1900) and Lusitania (on the 1915 sinking of the Lusitania), and Before the Fallout (from Marie Curie to the bombing of Hiroshima) to her credit.

Full report here Hindu

Review: Shadow Princess

REVIEW
Shadow Princess
Indu Sundaresan 
Atria
352 pages, $25, 

Blurb 

In Shadow Princess, Indu Sundaresan picks up where she left off in The Twentieth Wife and The Feast of Roses, returning to seventeenth-century India a few years after Mehrunnisa's death, as two royal princesses struggle for power.The daughters of the emperor, Jahangir and Roshanara, conspire and scheme against one another in an attempt to gain power over their father's harem. As royal princesses, they are confined in the imperial harem and not allowed to marry.

However, this does not stop them from having illicit affairs or plotting who will be the next heir to the throne.These royal sisters are in competition for everything: control over the harem, their father's affection, and the future of their country. Unfortunately, only one of them can succeed. And despite their best efforts to affect the future, their schemes are eclipsed, both during their lives and in posterity, as they live in the shadow of the greatest monument in Indian history, the Taj Mahal.With a flair and enthusiasm for history and culture, Sundaresan creates a story full of rich details that brings the reader deep into the world of the lives of Indian women and their struggles for power and the profound history of the Taj Mahal, one of the most celebrated works of architecture in the world.

OregonLive.com

The Taj Mahal, India's emblematic monument of subcontinental grace and design, is at the heart of Shadow Princess, the latest novel from Seattle author Indu Sundaresan. Following on the recognition of her previous historical novels The Twentieth Wife and Feast of Roses, Shadow Princess is the third in a series of linked sagas set at the height of the Mughal Empire, the Persian-tinged Muslim dynasty that ruled Hindu North India for 300 years before its fall in 1858 to the nabobs and viceroys of Anglo-India.

Into her novel's darker elements of fratricide, sibling rivalry and intrigue, Sundaresan works in the leitmotif of the Taj Mahal and its symbolism of purity. Though the Taj Mahal was built in memory of the eponymous empress Mumtaz Mahal, her daughter Jahanara is the center of the unfolding story. Still mourning her mother's death, the 17-year-old princess, who is soon to become the most powerful woman in the Empire, must console her grief-stricken father and save his reign from collapsing due to strife and chaos. She not only assumes much of her father's power, issuing royal edicts and running her own intelligence network, but she also takes over her mother's role as chief consort in all but nocturnal duties, out of filial devotion forgoing a life and love of her own.