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Ask the Author: Indu Sundaresan
Answered Questions (14)
Indu Sundaresan
Thank you, Debamitra! We all know of Mehrunnisa, Empress Nur Jahan, from our history lessons, but it's mostly as Emperor Jahangir's wife, a powerful one, who still shows up in history texts without having given him an heir.
When I began researching Mehrunnisa's story, or backstory before she became Empress, there was a paucity of readily available material on her. What came through, of course, was that she had been married before, had a child from that marriage, and married Jahangir 'late' in life, when she was 33 years old, aged by Mughal standards.
But, to find who she was before she became powerful, I had to seek out the stories of the men in her life. Her father, Ghias Beg, before she was married to Ali Quli, and her first husband after. Interestingly enough, there's a lot of backstory for Ali Quli, because he killed Jahangir's cohort, Koka.
And then, Sir Thomas Roe, the first official English ambassador to the Mughal courts, also left little indications of who she was even though he never met/saw her. But, her father talked to him about her, her brother mentioned her.
THE TWENTIETH WIFE is really then, a sort of investigative novel about her life, and who she was before she became the most powerful woman in the Mughal dynasty. Her childhood, and her early adult years shaped her into the woman she becomes in the sequel, THE FEAST OF ROSES.
When I began researching Mehrunnisa's story, or backstory before she became Empress, there was a paucity of readily available material on her. What came through, of course, was that she had been married before, had a child from that marriage, and married Jahangir 'late' in life, when she was 33 years old, aged by Mughal standards.
But, to find who she was before she became powerful, I had to seek out the stories of the men in her life. Her father, Ghias Beg, before she was married to Ali Quli, and her first husband after. Interestingly enough, there's a lot of backstory for Ali Quli, because he killed Jahangir's cohort, Koka.
And then, Sir Thomas Roe, the first official English ambassador to the Mughal courts, also left little indications of who she was even though he never met/saw her. But, her father talked to him about her, her brother mentioned her.
THE TWENTIETH WIFE is really then, a sort of investigative novel about her life, and who she was before she became the most powerful woman in the Mughal dynasty. Her childhood, and her early adult years shaped her into the woman she becomes in the sequel, THE FEAST OF ROSES.
Indu Sundaresan
I read a lot, all around the topic I'm interested in. For my latest novel, THE MOUNTAIN OF LIGHT, which is about the Kohinoor diamond and how it was taken from India to the Queen of England, I began reading about the diamond's history from the very beginning.
But, that goes back some four thousand years (!) and then the diamond resurfaces in the hands of an Indian king about every century from the 12th Century onwards. The more I read, the more I realized that I had to narrow the timeline, and so I ended up wrapping it over a 70 odd year time period for the novel and then consequently, focused on just a few characters and a specific time in diamond's history.
But, the spark was there--the Kohinoor diamond. If you're interested in writing historical fiction, then you must find that spark. Is it a moment in time? An incident? It could be something as simple as say, a flood, a natural disaster, a murder, a love letter that you discovered--each thing is a spark. Then, you set about finding out who these people were. Then, you read about their time, what they ate, what they wore, what happened in the world when they lived. Then, you imagine who these people were--who did they like/love/hate/loathe...everything goes into the making of the story. You may not put down everything on paper (or, in the finished novel) but you KNOW, it's there in your head. That's enough.
But, that goes back some four thousand years (!) and then the diamond resurfaces in the hands of an Indian king about every century from the 12th Century onwards. The more I read, the more I realized that I had to narrow the timeline, and so I ended up wrapping it over a 70 odd year time period for the novel and then consequently, focused on just a few characters and a specific time in diamond's history.
But, the spark was there--the Kohinoor diamond. If you're interested in writing historical fiction, then you must find that spark. Is it a moment in time? An incident? It could be something as simple as say, a flood, a natural disaster, a murder, a love letter that you discovered--each thing is a spark. Then, you set about finding out who these people were. Then, you read about their time, what they ate, what they wore, what happened in the world when they lived. Then, you imagine who these people were--who did they like/love/hate/loathe...everything goes into the making of the story. You may not put down everything on paper (or, in the finished novel) but you KNOW, it's there in your head. That's enough.
Indu Sundaresan
Thank you, Vrinda! I hope you've had a chance to read SHADOW PRINCESS by now. I'll say about 70% of the novels of the Taj trilogy are based on fact and historical documentation. Naturally, the scenes, the dialogues are fictional, from my imagination, but history sparked those scenes.
In THE FEAST OF ROSES, there is this pivotal chess game between Mehrunnisa (who's trying to establish her power in the harem and at court) and Mahabat Khan (one of the most powerful ministers at court). That scene's entirely fictional. But, what is fact is that earlier, Mahabat went to Emperor Jahangir and berated him for letting a woman (Mehrunnisa) make decisions for him. And what is also fact is that about a month after this talk, Mahabat is sent to Kabul (on the outer fringe of India's Mughal Empire) as Governor, which was an odd posting for a man meant to be near the Emperor.
My guess is that Mehrunnisa made this happen--sent Mahabat into virtual exile, so to speak. So, I constructed this chess scene (and had an enormous amount of fun doing so, which you see when you read that scene) in which she lets Mahabat know that she's powerful and influential. She trounces him in the game, and then banishes him from court.
So, here's your fact, and your fiction in one part of THE FEAST OF ROSES.
In THE FEAST OF ROSES, there is this pivotal chess game between Mehrunnisa (who's trying to establish her power in the harem and at court) and Mahabat Khan (one of the most powerful ministers at court). That scene's entirely fictional. But, what is fact is that earlier, Mahabat went to Emperor Jahangir and berated him for letting a woman (Mehrunnisa) make decisions for him. And what is also fact is that about a month after this talk, Mahabat is sent to Kabul (on the outer fringe of India's Mughal Empire) as Governor, which was an odd posting for a man meant to be near the Emperor.
My guess is that Mehrunnisa made this happen--sent Mahabat into virtual exile, so to speak. So, I constructed this chess scene (and had an enormous amount of fun doing so, which you see when you read that scene) in which she lets Mahabat know that she's powerful and influential. She trounces him in the game, and then banishes him from court.
So, here's your fact, and your fiction in one part of THE FEAST OF ROSES.
Indu Sundaresan
Claire, thank you! When you write a character's entire life history (as in THE TWENTIETH WIFE and THE FEAST OF ROSES), you do have to pick and choose which parts to set on scene, and which to cover in narration or skip over in time. In THE TWENTIETH WIFE, I thought, for example, that when her father flees from Persia, that was important to set on scene--it's dramatic, fraught with tension, and it introduces the family's circumstances as being dire, destitute, and the main character is born, of course.
The next chapter begins then eight years after this flight from Persia to India--and the contrast in circumstances is huge. Mehrunnisa's family is well-to-do, rich even, her father has a position in the Mughal courts, and Mehrunnisa is eight years old. It is the year Prince Salim marries for the first time, and the first time that Mehrunnisa sees the man she's going to marry, so again, the intervening eight years were not as important as this moment in time, because it sets up for the rest of the story.
The next chapter begins then eight years after this flight from Persia to India--and the contrast in circumstances is huge. Mehrunnisa's family is well-to-do, rich even, her father has a position in the Mughal courts, and Mehrunnisa is eight years old. It is the year Prince Salim marries for the first time, and the first time that Mehrunnisa sees the man she's going to marry, so again, the intervening eight years were not as important as this moment in time, because it sets up for the rest of the story.
Indu Sundaresan
Preethi, thanks for you question. I haven't thought about Zebunnisa, not actively, in any case. When I continue with the Mughals, I think I want to explore Emperor Aurangzeb a little more...perhaps, who knows?
Indu Sundaresan
There's a bit of a long answer for this, Akshay! I read about Mehrunnisa, Empress Nur Jahan during graduate school here in the US. I was homesick one day, went to the library and checked out books on India. One of them was on Mughal harems and Mehrunnisa.
After I graduated (with degrees in economics and operations research) I decided to write a novel. I wrote two (unpublished) novels before I turned my attention to Mehrunnisa and wrote both THE TWENTIETH WIFE and THE FEAST OF ROSES in one sitting. (They went through countless revisions after that first draft, of course.) That was novel 1 and novel 2 of the trilogy.
I knew even then I would write the third novel, SHADOW PRINCESS, because as I researched the first two, Shah Jahan's daughters, Jahanara and Roshanara, came to life, especially their rivalry with each other and their supporting of different brothers as the next Mughal emperor.
But, I let some 7 years pass before SHADOW PRINCESS was published--in the interim I wrote THE SPLENDOR OF SILENCE and IN THE CONVENT OF LITTLE FLOWERS. I needed that time away from the Mughal world, because I'd spent too much time in the Mughal world in writing the first two novels of the trilogy--so when I wrote the third, SHADOW PRINCESS, I came back anew to Mughal India.
As I said, long answer :-)
After I graduated (with degrees in economics and operations research) I decided to write a novel. I wrote two (unpublished) novels before I turned my attention to Mehrunnisa and wrote both THE TWENTIETH WIFE and THE FEAST OF ROSES in one sitting. (They went through countless revisions after that first draft, of course.) That was novel 1 and novel 2 of the trilogy.
I knew even then I would write the third novel, SHADOW PRINCESS, because as I researched the first two, Shah Jahan's daughters, Jahanara and Roshanara, came to life, especially their rivalry with each other and their supporting of different brothers as the next Mughal emperor.
But, I let some 7 years pass before SHADOW PRINCESS was published--in the interim I wrote THE SPLENDOR OF SILENCE and IN THE CONVENT OF LITTLE FLOWERS. I needed that time away from the Mughal world, because I'd spent too much time in the Mughal world in writing the first two novels of the trilogy--so when I wrote the third, SHADOW PRINCESS, I came back anew to Mughal India.
As I said, long answer :-)
Indu Sundaresan
Thank you, Supreya. I've been asked about writing about the other Mughal kings, especially Aurangazeb, and I did expand Ruqqaya's character quite a bit in THE TWENTIETH WIFE, but never been asked about Akbar's mother, Hamida Banu. Definitely something to think about--writing a prequel to THE TWENTIETH WIFE!
Indu Sundaresan
Yes, I have, Mollie!
Indu Sundaresan
Hi Kudzai, that answer is in one of my previously answered questions.
Indu Sundaresan
Interesting question. Times have certainly evolved as far as women's rights go (I know, there's still plenty of ground to cover yet).
In the novels of the Taj trilogy, I focus on two powerful women in the Mughal dynasty--Empress Nur Jahan and Princess Jahanara. They were both women living in an imperial harem, behind a purdah (veil), not seen by men outside of the imperial family.
The purdah, the confinement within harem walls, was actually, in 17th Century India, not so much a sign of oppression (we see it that way today, certainly) but a sign of wealth. It meant, literally, that the male principal had the means of looking after a large number of women; they did not have to get up every morning, sweep the front doorstep, draw water from the well, cook the day's meals--what common women did.
What I did in the novels of the Taj trilogy was to actively imagine this sort of confinement to be the norm. Then, I considered how these two women became powerful under those circumstances. If this is normal, how did they manipulate the situation to create authority--how then to gain the sort of power a man had outside of the harem's walls?
That Nur Jahan and Jahanara dabbled in court politics and shaped India's future and history from their time period is undeniable. How they did it, you see in THE TWENTIETH WIFE, THE FEAST OF ROSES and SHADOW PRINCESS.
In the novels of the Taj trilogy, I focus on two powerful women in the Mughal dynasty--Empress Nur Jahan and Princess Jahanara. They were both women living in an imperial harem, behind a purdah (veil), not seen by men outside of the imperial family.
The purdah, the confinement within harem walls, was actually, in 17th Century India, not so much a sign of oppression (we see it that way today, certainly) but a sign of wealth. It meant, literally, that the male principal had the means of looking after a large number of women; they did not have to get up every morning, sweep the front doorstep, draw water from the well, cook the day's meals--what common women did.
What I did in the novels of the Taj trilogy was to actively imagine this sort of confinement to be the norm. Then, I considered how these two women became powerful under those circumstances. If this is normal, how did they manipulate the situation to create authority--how then to gain the sort of power a man had outside of the harem's walls?
That Nur Jahan and Jahanara dabbled in court politics and shaped India's future and history from their time period is undeniable. How they did it, you see in THE TWENTIETH WIFE, THE FEAST OF ROSES and SHADOW PRINCESS.
Indu Sundaresan
I mention a bit of this in the Afterword of the third novel of the trilogy, SHADOW PRINCESS. Mumtaz Mahal, for whom the Taj is built, was Empress for only three short years, from 1628, until 1631 when she died. Obviously she was beloved of Emperor Shah Jahan--he built the Taj in her memory--but she didn't live long enough in a position of power to change the world she lived in. As, Mehrunnisa, Empress Nur Jahan did in THE TWENTIETH WIFE and THE FEAST OF ROSES, and as Mumtaz's daughter did, in the third novel of the trilogy.
Indu Sundaresan
I think--and I'm thinking back to when I first started writing--it was because I could read for research, and recreate entire worlds anew in my novels. Characters tend to be the same, in contemporary or historical fiction, in that our motives are the same, our wants and needs similar. But, the world we live in now, and worlds before us, are different.
Indu Sundaresan
I read extensively about the topic when an idea first strikes me. My latest novel, THE MOUNTAIN OF LIGHT, is about the 186 carat Kohinoor diamond, taken from India in 1850 and currently in the Queen Mother’s crown in England. In the very first instance, I had to bookend the timeline for the story, because the diamond had a deep reach into India’s history, beginning from (so it’s said) a first mention in the Hindu epic The Mahabharata, written more than two thousand years ago.
So, I wrapped the timeframe of the novel from 1817 until about 1893, and focused on who the diamond’s last Indian owners were, and how they lost the diamond to the British, and what that loss meant to them.
At the end of most of my novels is an Afterword, where I explain what’s fact and what’s fiction. Here’s an example of how I manipulated fact into my fiction in THE MOUNTAIN OF LIGHT.
In 1850, the Governor-General of India, Lord Dalhousie, takes the Kohinoor (which belonged to the Punjab kings) to Bombay and sends it, very, very secretly to England on board a Royal Navy Steam sloop called the HMS Medea. Only the two men carrying it, a Colonel Mackeson and Edward Ramsay, know of the diamond being on board—even the captain of the Medea has no idea of the precious cargo he’s carrying. This is fact.
When I came to this part of the novel, about midway through the book, I knew that I wanted this last voyage of the Kohinoor diamond to be more…dramatic, perhaps is the word. So, I changed this one fact. In LIGHT, the Kohinoor travels aboard a commercial steamer, still in the care of Mackeson and Ramsay, but all of a sudden, as you’ll see in the book, a slew of unsavory characters come to life, all wanting to steal, or merely just catch a glimpse of this precious stone that once belonged to the Gods in India.
This chapter in LIGHT is titled ‘An Alexandria Moon.’ And though I’ve messed with facts a bit, almost every other detail you will read has some factual accuracy to it. If I didn’t do this, put careful attention on the details, then my fiction will read like…well, fiction, and not fact. (Even though it isn’t fact!)
I give Colonel Mackeson a background—he’s our hero, after all in this part of the narrative—that was well researched, and somewhat common to British men in India at that time. All of my potential criminals—Lady Anne Elizabeth Beaumont, Tom and Mary Booth, William Huthwaite, Arabella Hyde—similarly have carefully, and believably researched motives for wanting the Kohinoor. The commercial steamer, I name the SS Indus, but every description of the boat—from its tonnage, the number of crew, the amount of food brought onboard, flour, malt, hops, champagne, madeira, everything—is from published accounts of ships making this very same voyage from Bombay to Suez. You meet a Parsi shop owner, importers of American goods, Dossabhoy Merwanjee, at the beginning—I found an advertisement for his shop in one of the books I read. Mr. Merwanjee sold ‘sarsaparilla,’ a pick-me-up tonic—and he does so in the novel also!
So, the only fact I really changed was putting the Kohinoor aboard the SS Indus and not the HMS Medea, but everything else, could and would have been plausible if this had actually happened.
So, I wrapped the timeframe of the novel from 1817 until about 1893, and focused on who the diamond’s last Indian owners were, and how they lost the diamond to the British, and what that loss meant to them.
At the end of most of my novels is an Afterword, where I explain what’s fact and what’s fiction. Here’s an example of how I manipulated fact into my fiction in THE MOUNTAIN OF LIGHT.
In 1850, the Governor-General of India, Lord Dalhousie, takes the Kohinoor (which belonged to the Punjab kings) to Bombay and sends it, very, very secretly to England on board a Royal Navy Steam sloop called the HMS Medea. Only the two men carrying it, a Colonel Mackeson and Edward Ramsay, know of the diamond being on board—even the captain of the Medea has no idea of the precious cargo he’s carrying. This is fact.
When I came to this part of the novel, about midway through the book, I knew that I wanted this last voyage of the Kohinoor diamond to be more…dramatic, perhaps is the word. So, I changed this one fact. In LIGHT, the Kohinoor travels aboard a commercial steamer, still in the care of Mackeson and Ramsay, but all of a sudden, as you’ll see in the book, a slew of unsavory characters come to life, all wanting to steal, or merely just catch a glimpse of this precious stone that once belonged to the Gods in India.
This chapter in LIGHT is titled ‘An Alexandria Moon.’ And though I’ve messed with facts a bit, almost every other detail you will read has some factual accuracy to it. If I didn’t do this, put careful attention on the details, then my fiction will read like…well, fiction, and not fact. (Even though it isn’t fact!)
I give Colonel Mackeson a background—he’s our hero, after all in this part of the narrative—that was well researched, and somewhat common to British men in India at that time. All of my potential criminals—Lady Anne Elizabeth Beaumont, Tom and Mary Booth, William Huthwaite, Arabella Hyde—similarly have carefully, and believably researched motives for wanting the Kohinoor. The commercial steamer, I name the SS Indus, but every description of the boat—from its tonnage, the number of crew, the amount of food brought onboard, flour, malt, hops, champagne, madeira, everything—is from published accounts of ships making this very same voyage from Bombay to Suez. You meet a Parsi shop owner, importers of American goods, Dossabhoy Merwanjee, at the beginning—I found an advertisement for his shop in one of the books I read. Mr. Merwanjee sold ‘sarsaparilla,’ a pick-me-up tonic—and he does so in the novel also!
So, the only fact I really changed was putting the Kohinoor aboard the SS Indus and not the HMS Medea, but everything else, could and would have been plausible if this had actually happened.
Indu Sundaresan
My favorites are books usually. Love and Longing in Bombay by Vikram Chandra; The Mistress of Spices by Chitra Divakaruni; Malgudi Days by R.K. Narayan; A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. Naipaul; Staying On by Paul Scott (he's not of Indian origin, but this book, the fifth after the Raj Quartet is perhaps the best of the five.) Thanks for asking, Artie Solomon!
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