Wanted: The Premchand of the Historical Novel

Say, what art thou, that talk'st of kings and queens?

Henry VI, Part III

IN LATE JANUARY, a report from Cairo's Tahrir Square described a young girl holding a placard which urged Hosni Mubarak to leave quickly. It said:

Make it short. This is history, and we will have to memorise it at school.

Some make history, and some have history thrust upon them, either in school or by reason of being ruled. We are taught history so that we may know what has shaped our world and us collectively. We learn history so as not to repeat its mistakes. At least, that is a good explanation and not inaccurate. But why should anyone write a historical novel, or read one?

One reason is it's easy pickings. History is full of characters and episodes far stranger than fiction. The dramatist, plot in hand, has merely to flesh it out with physical detail and psychological depth (merely!). Another reason is the urge, which few writers can resist, of driving home the lessons that history has to teach, by judicious selection of cause and effect. A third, perhaps, is the human predilection to get it right in afterthought ("And you know what I told him then…?"), to round off the raw edges of truth.

Historical novels driven by the above reasons have well-known, or reasonably well-known, characters at their centre, and deal with 'important' matters. If not about Napoleon, they are about Desirée. Another kind of novel tells a good story by populating a gay or troubled age with people who may well have existed. The remembered age is far more often gay than troubled, more Shangri-La than angry-land. For us, the present is always difficult, and if someone reminds us of the Great Famine or the Great Plague it is to draw a moral. There was always a Golden Age, when men were real men and women were real women and (as Douglas Adams puts it) small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. Sanguinary or salacious, these stories when done well have an oomph to them that carries us clean out of our present time.

Escapism and moral fable—the urge to retell a rattling good tale rarely eludes one of these categories. The historical novel in India is as old as the novel itself. First written when we were a set of conquered and decultured states, it usually reminded us of a glorious past. For centuries our dramatists had been helping themselves to generous doses of the Mahabharata—which is classed as history (iti-hasa, thus it happened), as opposed to the Ramayana, which is a kavya or poem. Girish Karnad's play, Tughlaq, is an excellent modern example, which adapts this tradition to convey a moral about the corrupting effect of power.

In recent years, English-language writers have been lured by the virtues of historical fiction. We are uniquely equipped for this genre. Not only is our own historical reservoir practically inexhaustible, but we've also had three centuries of getting used to Western ways of thinking. In fact, my interest in the genre was awoken by the first two volumes of the Mughal saga retold by a British couple who write under the name 'Alex Rutherford'.

I wondered: to what extent are we permitted to rewrite history? In its retelling, how much are we allowed to change it to suit our ends?

Current liberal opinion, as vouchsafed in the media, appears to have it that a public figure is fair game. (Who is a public figure is for the courts to decide.) Novelist Jeffrey Archer, in his First Among Equals (1984), had Elizabeth II abdicating the British throne in favour of her son. We've had many thrillers, before and since, which give in detail the process of making decisions in the Oval Office or the Kremlin. These are cosmetic, at worst, and may be shrugged off.

The dead—especially those centuries dead—cannot fight back in court, and historical novelists sometimes take very great liberties with the dead. Alex Rutherford's first retelling, Raiders From the North, was wooden, to say the least, with none of the lyrical abandon which possessed Babar himself in his writing or his adventures. (Rutherford uses "Moghul" and "Babur".) Even the battle scenes were dead—and there is no greater crime than that.

And this is beyond everything: For Rutherford, Babar had to be present when his father died. It's a matter of historical record that he was miles away. To compound this, in 'his' second instalment of the saga, Brothers at War, Rutherford makes sure Akbar is present at Humayun's death, which is also inaccurate. Why this sentimentality? Would Rutherford dare to take such liberties with English history? Would 'he' portray Elizabeth as present at Henry VIII's deathbed? Elizabeth succeeded to the Tudor high seat two years after Akbar did to the Mughal throne, and of course there were two intervening monarchs between her and her father, but details like that are unimportant to writers such as Rutherford. Indian readers might swallow Elizabeth at Henry's passing, just as Western readers would swallow these Mughal deathbed scenes. It's all a matter of what you can sell, not of veracity. Ignorance is a wonderful appetiser.

The two historical novelists I would revere—were I capable of reverence—are Robert Graves and Georgette Heyer. Heyer started out writing gay romances of the late 1700s and the Regency, and she never wrote of 'the common man' except in passing. Yet her later novels—she died in 1974 at 71, having published about 50—turn the old romance story on its head. She also wrote historical retellings based on true people and events, but these were never as popular. Heyer valued these latter more highly than her romances. Her sad fate is comparable to that of Arthur Conan Doyle who always thought The White Company, Rodney Stone and the rest were of much more value than his Sherlock Holmes stories. His Brigadier Gerard adventures, at least, are worthy of being classed with Holmes.

Graves, the classicist and poet, about 20 of whose 120 books are historical novels set between 600 BCE and 1780 ACE, may well have abominated Heyer, if he ever read her—he died in 1985 at 90—but they share a common heaven whose inhabitants are nominated by me. This is because they were both so imbued by the spirit of the times they wrote about that they did not have to research a fact or an opinion, and their characters are both fully fleshed and full of the zeitgeist.

Of the clutch of historical novels that I grasped for this essay, it was Aniruddha Bahal's The Emissary that shocked me the most. Bahal's first novel, Bunker 13, drew a lot of laughs because it won the Bad Sex Award given by a British newspaper. (Yet he was the first Indian to win it, so there was admiration behind the guffaws. It doesn't matter what gets us into the Guinness World Records, turning the most cartwheels or saving the most lives.)

Bunker 13 displayed not only its writer's ineluctable cleverness but also his knack of getting into his characters' skins—a skill which I, as a reviewer some years ago, was too obtuse to notice. But The Emissary is uncanny. Bahal, in his 'Acknowledgements', merely mentions VS Naipaul's advise (sic) to read the Greeks. How did he obtain the wherewithal? Without the classical education which, say, Graves had, he gets the tone of narrative and introspection of a classical author just right. There are, of course, inelegancies of language, and horrible mistakes (such as constantly referring to the "sanctum sanctorum" as the "sanctorum") which his background as a magazine journalist, and the time he wasted planting bugs in other people's offices, account for. This book, 444 pages though it is, promises a sequel, and I'd wait all agog for it except that Bahal's infuriating cleverness—the Seleucus/Ptolemy business at the end—promises something stupid. Stupid, I mean, for a craftsman as skilled as he is.

However, why should an Indian novelist eschew our own inexhaustible reservoir for Alexander's age? Well, why not? This is globalisation time, and if 'Rutherford' can do a colonial job on us, we can do a postcolonial job on his antecedents. The wonder is that Bahal does it so well.

Another wonder, then, is that we can't do it half as well when it comes to our own history. The Mughal period is so rich in contemporary narrative that it hardly needs retelling. Yet it draws us back to retell: twice- and thrice-told tales, but to what purpose? Indu Sundaresan's Shadow Princess, we're told by the blurb, is a sequel to her novels on Nur Jahan and so on (which, pardon me, I do not mean to read), and it adds not a jot to the books in Sundaresan's bibliography. Jahanara, Aurangzeb's eldest sister, is a fascinating character, who needs stories to be told about her. She was in favour of Dara Shukoh succeeding to the Peacock Throne, that's well known; but why did Aurangzeb suffer her so gladly? This chapter offers the imaginative historian so many possibilities (I'm sure Rutherford will take it up with a vengeance in a future instalment) that I'm saddened by Sundaresan's disregard of them.

Sundaresan has chapters about Jahanara as a 16-year-old, when her mother Mumtaz died, and about the next few formative years of all the royal children. But the last couple of decades, when Dara and Aurangzeb played a royal game of chess, are dealt with in fast-forward mode. And the years of Shah Jahan's suffering, shut up in sight of the Taj Mahal, when Jahanara resisted all Aurangzeb's blandishments to be instead with her father, I'd consider to be the story most worth telling. However, it requires the skill of psychoanalysis, which Sundaresan perhaps is wise to recognise is not her strength.

Sudhir Kakar approaches us from the other end of the spectrum. He is a luminous psychologist and brings his tools to the dissection of our social mores with such understated flair that I have long considered him one of India's wise men. His books on Indian society in the 1980s were so brilliant that I was overawed when I interviewed him, as I've done twice. I've thought it a pity that in the past decade he has swung the way of fiction.

The Crimson Throne, Kakar's new novel, shares the era of Sundaresan's but little else. He draws—and elaborates—on the accounts of two European fortune-hunters in the 1650s, Niccolao Manucci and Francois Bernier, to portray an empire in terminal decline. His portraits of Shah Jahan's children are well etched, and the psychology shows the touch of a master. We—Hindu children—have been brought up to revile Aurangzeb as an iconoclast and Dara as tolerant, simply because he translated the Upanishads. The Europeans' accounts show Dara to have been a feckless prince, arrogant and unwary. However, Kakar's novel fails—this is a big "however"—in not fulfilling the promise of its 'Prologue'. There I read, with bated breath, of a prescience that "the House of Timur was fated to disappear," but my breath was unabated at the end of the book. I so wish that Kakar would stay with his nonfiction analyses.

But writers like Sundaresan—and, indeed, Kakar—have caught hold of the wrong end of the stick. History is not on their side. The writing of the historical novel, like the study of history itself, is tending towards the subaltern: that is, to the lives of the common people. The kings and queens and courtiers have all had it their own way for too long. Above all, stories about them lack reliability and completeness. Nowadays, when I read a novel set in the long-ago, I am compelled to ask, "Where did they shit, and when?" If every other detail is given to me, not least the descriptions of fabulous banquets, why not this?

In Raymond Chandler's novel The Long Goodbye, Roger Wade, a best-selling historical novelist, says:

"You know something? I'm a liar. My heroes are eight feet tall and my heroines have callouses on their bottoms from lying in bed with their knees up. Lace and ruffles, swords and coaches, elegance and leisure, duels and gallant death. All lies. They used perfume instead of soap, their teeth rotted because they never cleaned them, their fingernails smelled of stale gravy. The nobility of France urinated against the walls in the marble corridors of Versailles, and when you finally got several sets of underclothes off the lovely marquise the first thing you noticed was that she needed a bath. I ought to tell it that way."

Ramachandra Guha has said, repeatedly and rightly, that the besetting vice of Indian biography is hagiography. It's time to go to the roots: What made Rome a mighty power was not her heroes but her citizens' lust for land, as Nicholas Ostler points out in his wonderful "biography of Latin", Ad Infinitum. We need books about India that tell the story of the ordinary man—or, more seldom, woman, tied to the land. We need a Premchand, a Karanth of the historical novel. (I should mention here the Kannada writer Niranjana's brilliant Egyptian novel, Coming Forth by Day, translated by his daughter, Tejaswini Niranjana.)

Biman Nath's novel is a welcome addition to the oeuvre. Nath is an astrophysicist, and Nothing is Blue is, naturally, based on an intellectual theme. The "nothing" in the title refers to the cipher, the number or non-number zero which, as our patriots are quick to point out, was invented in India. Nath has for his protagonist a monk at Nalanda in the century after Harsha, before the Afghans began to raid and put so much of our history to the sword. Unfortunately, Nalanda's story is part of that which has been lost. Nath does a good job of recreation, though. After all, our monks and our poor live, today, in much the same way as they did 1,500 years ago.

This novel is especially refreshing for its intellectual themes, the quest for the zero and what is less than it; the vexing question of a calendar that is fixed and unchanging; and the slide of Buddhism into magic and fleshly lusts that was to doom it in the land of its birth. Its love interest is also subtly crafted; but Nath is not a writer by profession and it shows. It's not in his stars, perhaps? I await his next effort.

The love interest is the theme of By the Tungabhadra, a recent translation of a 1965 Bangla novel by Saradindu Bandopadhyay. The translator is ecstatic about Bandopadhyay's work in his endnotes, but I—a translator myself—have lost faith in the process. My admiration for those who attempt to translate Urdu, for instance—how on earth do you translate 'hamdardi'?—is unbounded; however, their best efforts have not met with success.

For a critical mind formed by Graves and Heyer, Tungabhadra's story is not a success. Two Oriya princesses take ship to marry a Vijayanagar king; one of them falls in love with a commoner. There are subplots that lead, in our Indian fashion, nowhere. A good story, but an English-language novelist would have told it better—in the English language.

And then, finally, we come to an English-language novelist who has told it better, as he does most things. My judgement of Amitav Ghosh, as of Sudhir Kakar, has always been that he should stick to nonfiction. Sea of Poppies shakes that opinion. Here is the subaltern novel! It is so good, the characters are so finely drawn and their story so well told that I cannot wait for the next instalment, which I hear is due this year.

Why should I wait for that sequel and not Aniruddha Bahal's, whose precursor is as fine a book and requires a greater leap of the cultural imagination? I don't know why. We critics are all ridden with prejudice, a 'pre-judice' which tells us that a novelist who has been publishing novels for 25 years, and who writes for The New Yorker, is ipso facto better than a journalist who's won the Bad Sex Award. All I can say, ridden with prejudice as I am, is that Bahal's book marks a wholly unexpected, and much-needed, leap for Indian imaginative writing in English.

I had believed for 20 years after the founding of Penguin Books India in 1986 that with volume would come quality. I'm not so sure of that any more. This is not, I think, so much the fault of our publishing houses as of our media—media that devoted three days to Cricket World Cup hysteria during a week in which 200 million Indians went to the polls, media that don't care what an Indian writer gets into the London newspapers for. Therefore, we Indians will continue to produce historical novels in English—some good and some redundant—but rare will be a Lok Sabha term in which we will again get two such novels as Bahal's and Ghosh's.