REVIEW: The Last Victory

REVIEW
The Last Victory: The Imperial Agent II
Timeri N. Murari
Penguin
Rs 399
Pp 432
ISBN: 0143065726
Paperback

Blurb
It is October 1910 and the lovers Kim and Parvati are fleeing across India, escaping forces beyond their control. They know that great changes are afoot—the Mahatma’s ideas are gaining ground and the Indian National Congress is about to change remarkably with the entrance of Jawaharlal Nehru. Ahead lie turbulent times that will reveal the ruthlessness of the Empire and give rise to the promise of independence.

Kim and Parvati’s lives criss-cross those of many known and unknown Indians who believe in the Indian nation, and they too are swept into the very centre of the struggle for independence, where they must confront their terrifying tormentors.

Taking off from The Imperial Agent, where Timeri Murari masterfully recreated Kipling’s free-spirited and idealistic hero, Kimball O’Hara, The Last Victory is a thrilling account of Kim’s life—from the uncertainty of youth to an illuminating maturity mirrored only by the brilliance of a new India.


Review
High voltage drama Hindu
Exploring this novel is somewhat like opening a carefully preserved album of beautiful images and wondering if they'll survive the harsh light of scrutiny. Any work of fiction that dares to toy with the historical past risks courting that danger. And the final days of the Raj, in particular — the subject of The Last Victory— has inspired so many memorable tomes that yet another novel, which gives it pride of place would, one imagines, invite more intense critical attention than most.

But Timeri N. Murari's grand Raj production (for that is how this sequel to The Imperial Agent comes across) will probably get away unscathed. Its meticulously researched historical backdrop notwithstanding, the book adroitly escapes being judged by the criteria that would apply to a historical novel. The thoroughness of this research is evident as the author weaves his suspense-charged fictional episodes around real-life events — among them, World War I and the Jallianwallah Bagh massacre — and smoothly incorporates personalities like Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru into his narrative, making them come alive in imagined sequences, even if there is a tendency towards stereotyping in the delineation of such characters as General Reginald Dyer of Jallianwallah Bagh notoriety who vows to “teach the bloody wogs a lesson they'll never forget”.

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

History goes pop

There was a time—all of the 19th century—when the educated read history books and the slightly less educated read historical novels. This trend petered out sometime around the mid-20th century, under the impact of decolonization (which exposed much of “history” as Eurocentric), the rise and defeat of fascism (which exposed some of “history” as racist) and later, feminism and postmodernism (which, in different ways, revealed “history” to be often “his story”).

Lately, however, there has been a revival—both of popular histories (as in the “Mughal” books by William Dalrymple) and of historical fiction (as in Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace or Hilary Mantel’s Booker-winner from last year, Wolf Hall).

Jonathan Phillips’ Holy Warriors: A Modern History of the Crusades and Ira Berlin’s The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations are sterling examples of good history books written, once again, for a large readership and not just for scholars.

Full report here Mint

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.