Old engagements

I wonder if you’ve ever thought about why people write their autobiographies, or get them written. It could be, for one, the need to explain a life lived in a particular manner, perhaps to capture memories before they curl around their edges and die, or to delineate the push and pull of events that formed some greater scenario observed often through other eyes, or minds. A large body of critics believe that, in real terms, it’s all a cathartic act and why should one impose this on the reader? The reasons could unfold like in a game of solitaire; the placing of one correct card on another correct card is imperative, to complete the suit. Sudhir Kakar, of course, knows how to play his cards right.

Kakar’s academic credentials are formidable. An engineer who trained in psychoanalysis at the Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt, his biodata lists associations with Harvard, Princeton, Berlin, Vienna, McGill, IIM Ahmedabad, the INSEAD and other establishments. The famed Die Zeit of Germany placed him amongst the top 21 thinkers of the 21st century. Additionally, he was the first living author whose books have featured in the Essential Writing series of Oxford University Press. Oh yes, he lives in Goa.

A Book of Memory therefore came bundled with the promise of Kakar’s insights into morals, mores and matters; it would be wonderful to agree, or to disagree, with him as one went along; also, to watch how this gifted communicator handled the wary relationship that seems to exist between the need to be objective and the desire not to be that at crucial turns and bends. On the flipside, the book could turn out to be severely academic, even unwieldy, and annotated to a standstill.

Full report here Telegraph

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

History makes for compelling books because they offer insights into our lives, says MP and writer Shashi Tharoor, who would love to write a historical fiction himself in future.

'Historical fictions are very important because they depict a different time period and throw fresh insight into our lives. They show how our lives derive from that time period. Reading historical fiction is a method of reconnecting,' Tharoor said, releasing writer and psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar's new book, 'The Crimson Throne', at the French ambassador's residence in the capital.
The book, Kakar's fifth novel, is a window to the decadence of Mughal India during 30 years of emperor Shah Jahan's reign and the war of succession to the Peacock Throne between the emperor's tolerant eldest son Dara Shukoh and his astute sibling Aurangzeb.

It is a dispassionate study of the first clash within the spiritual mosaic of Islam - a war precipitated by Dara's religious inclusiveness and Aurangzeb's bigotry told by two European travellers.
 
Full report here Sify