Circe + Daughters of the Sun + more

I’m baaaaack! It’s been a while and I’ve actually had a really good spell of reading, which would have been awesome if it hadn’t been accompanied by a dry spell of writing and a general inability to do anything other than whinge. Would you believe that I’ve actually sat down to write this newsletter at least three times, only to abandon it because inexplicably, I seem to have lost the ability to, you know, write sentences? Believe it. The proof is in that clumsy sentence up there, which is masquerading as a question when it is obviously a statement rather than a question.

Yeah, this last one wasn’t much of an improvement either, was it?

Sigh.

Still, onwards and upwards. Since I last wrote to you, I’ve read the following:

Circe by Madeline Miller (Bloomsbury)
Daughters of the Sun – Empresses, Queens and Begums of the Mughal Empire by Ira Mukhoty (Aleph)
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman (Harper Collins)
The Sensational Life and Death of Qandeel Baloch by Sanam Maher (Aleph)

If I was to pack what I thought of all four books into one newsletter, I doubt this email will ever get sent. Plus, you will age in the process of reading it, so I’m going to tell you about the first two today. Hopefully, I should be able to send you another email about the remaining two…soon.

So here we go.

No, wait. Before I hold forth, I have two links for you. If there’s one thing you read today, make it this one-sentence story by Carmen Machado. It’s such a brilliant piece of writing and the illustration by Sergio Garcia Sanchez is gorgeous as well.

And Kamila Shamsie won the Women’s Prize for fiction, for her brilliant Home Fire. If you haven’t read it, you must. It’s about how ISIS recruits people (if you’re interested in this subject, I highly recommend Rukmini Callimachi’s podcast, titled Caliphate), being a minority, grappling with one’s sense of identity and more. The images Shamsie conjures (particularly at the end) will haunt you. Meanwhile, here’s an interview with Shamsie about Home Fire.

Now, on to Circe by Madeline Miller.

The mythical Circe is a fascinating character — daughter of Helios, her name means “hawk”; she’s a witch who turns sailors into pigs on one hand but also helps heroes like Jason and Odysseus. She’s in Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series, running an island health spa (which is just such a fabulous reinterpretation of the island of Aeaea where Circe is bound to stay, with nothing to do but brew magical draughts and turn hapless sailors into pigs). Instead of pigs, Riordan’s Circe turns men into guinea pigs. Pigs are too much hard work, she says.

Geeky tangent: Circe is published by Bloomsbury, whose logo is modelled on the Roman goddess Diana, whose powers include taming animals and woodlands. Which is really what Miller’s Circe does in her island.

Circe as Miller imagines her is a strange, oddball child in the divine halls of Helios, where defeated Titans indulge their appetites to distract themselves from the humiliation of being defeated by the upstart Olympians. Dismissed by most of her clan for being weak and strange, Circe doesn’t seem to belong anywhere. She finds home only when she’s exiled.

Miller chops and changes the myths quite a bit, which is fine. For instance, her Circe is exiled because she’s a pawn in the power games that the Titans and Olympians play. Hesiod’s Circe flees to the island of Aeaea (I think the word means “wailing”; Miller spells it Aiaia) because the gods learn she’s killed her husband and taken control of his kingdom. Miller’s Circe and Odysseus have a battle of wits and words. Homer’s Circe finds herself being slammed against the wall by Odysseus, who holds a knife to her throat. Miller does use this episode (it’s a prelude to a terrible rape scene), but someone else commits this act of violence, which is an interesting choice because it serves to make Odysseus a more palatable hero. Miller’s Odysseus has his angularities, but at least he isn’t a rapist or abusive towards women. That would be some other nameless guy. (Hovering on the sidelines of this tweak is the story of Odysseus conning the cylops by saying his name was Nobody. Pseudo-anonymity has worked for Odysseus.) The decision to make Odysseus relatively non-violent makes Circe look better. Miller’s Circe falls for a man who respects her power, rather than Homer’s Circe who surrenders to a man who abuses and takes advantage of her. I’m good with that.

There’s a lot to love in the way Miller writes, particularly the descriptions of the island and its flora and fauna. As you read Miller’s passages about Circe teaching herself witchcraft, becoming familiar with the forests, it’s easy to close your eyes and let the image of this slight goddess with golden eyes swim into being. There are also charming little insights that Miller tucks into the story, like the bit where Hermes explains to Circe that because the gods “have voices of thunder and rocks”, the voices of mortals sound faint and thin to their ears. I liked how Miller conceived the divine set – you’d never mistake them for ‘normal’ humans. They’re powerful and whimsical in a way that’s unnerving.

Yet for all these strengths when the story’s threads slacken, Miller’s style isn’t enough to distract you from the fact that the plot is unravelling. I struggled to stay interested in Circe’s romance with Glaucos, for instance. Don’t shoot me for saying this, but in the way Circe, hungry for but also afraid of rebellion, constantly hovered around people who dismissed her and fell for (effectively) the first guy she encountered, it reminded me of Dirty Dancing (no one puts Circe in the corner). Only Circe’s Johnny Castle turns out to be a creep who is happy to use her. Not that she realises, obviously. Instead, Circe’s first act of magic is to turn this mortal man into a god. No one realises she’s done it and Glaucos goes from being mortal creep to creep of river god proportions. When Circe learns he intends to marry the nymph Scylla, the heartbroken goddess lashes out and transforms Scylla into a terrible monster.

The guilt of what she did to Scylla haunts Miller’s Circe for an eternity, which is another detail I liked. Men — the most persuasive of them, no less — tell Circe that she shouldn’t feel guilty, that she may in fact have ‘improved’ Scylla by making her memorable and a subject worthy of song (as opposed to being one of many nymphs that float in the sidelines of myth cycles). But Circe isn’t convinced. She turned on a woman because a man wronged her, and that is unforgivable to Circe.

Perhaps the most satisfying aspect of Circe is that Miller has taken a minor character who is usually shown as one who is punished and broken, into a heroine who fights and survives. Miller surrounds her with others who resist, like Prometheus, Daedalus and Odysseus, to subtly point out that this is Circe’s tribe; not the defeated, sulking Titans. I wish Miller had given more time to Penelope and Circe because those two characters, linked by Odysseus, share intriguing resonances.

In Homer’s Odyssey, Penelope and Circe are both weavers. Both live alone. Both deal with unwelcome visitors who seek to take advantage of the women. Both have a son by Odysseus. Odysseus chooses to live with Circe (Miller offers a lovely explanation for this – that Odysseus used the time in Aeaea to scuff the layer of warrior off himself and relearn domesticity; a kind of dress rehearsal for going home). It isn’t enchantment that keeps him on the island, but a conscious decision on his part. Finally, Circe is the one who shows Odysseus the way home to Ithaca.

The idea of Circe and Penelope meeting, and exchanging gifts is a beautiful one. But Miller spends more time on developing Circe’s relationships with Odysseus and Telemachus, and that’s a bit frustrating because really, Circe and Penelope’s relationship is the one that could really have blossomed through Miller’s storytelling.

Also on a mission to turn the spotlight on women who have been reduced to minor characters is Ira Mukhoty. Daughters of the Sun: Empresses, Queens & Begums of the Mughal Empire is about precisely what that title suggests. In her introduction, Mukhoty warns her reader that this is not a textbook that will provide an overview of the Mughal empire. She’s only interested in highlighting the women and the roles they played. Everything and everyone else – particularly the men – are included to provide context. Music to my ears.

Mukhoty’s book reminded me of one of my favourite history books in recent times, Jack Weatherford’s The Secret History of Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued his Empire. In it, Weatherford shows that women were accorded a lot of power and respect within this nomadic society and his theory is that one part of The Secret History of Mongols (the oldest surviving literary work in Mongolian literature, dating back to the 13th century) was cut away because it wrote about Mongol women who had become too powerful. In many ways, for Mongol women of privilege, there were openings and opportunities that few contemporary women can command. Case in point – how many women heads of state do you see around you? In all the photographs that we see of negotiating ambassadors and senior bureaucrats, what’s the percentage of women?

Weatherford’s book is a good accompaniment to Mukhoty’s and not just because the Mughals, like so many others, insisted that they could trace their lineage to one of Genghis Khan’s sons in-law. Like Weatherford, Mukhoty also wants to dispel popular misconceptions that the women were neglected side characters in the narrative of the Mughal family. Both she and Weatherford note that the fact of being nomadic made it possible for women — both Mongol and Mughal – to have agency, get positions of power and command respect in a way that settled communities wouldn’t allow. The more India’s Mughals, or the Gurkani clan as they would have preferred to have been known, put their roots down in India, the less space and authority the women were able to occupy.

Along with celebrating Mughal women for reasons other than their beauty (which is really all they’re known for in popular culture), Mukhoty’s intention is to emphasise the achievements that they could claim independent of the men in their families. She also wants to dispel the idea that the Mughal harem was a kingdom of indulgence and debauchery, oozing titillation and hedonism. Her contention is that these visions are a result of hyperactive imaginations of the European men who came as envoys and ambassadors. They were creating an exotic other out of scraps that they could gather and so they fashioned these demure sex objects when in fact, many women of the Mughal empire had much more to do than be birthing vessels.

Instead of looking only at the European travellers’ accounts that have been the traditional source material for historians, Mukhoty pays more attention to the writings of Mughal women of those times. Yes, they wrote – from letters to family histories to poetry. “Wherever I can, I have quoted from these women’s works,” writes Mukhoty in her introduction, “for if women’s images are denied us, we at least have their words.” Along with their writings are the writings of Mughal courtiers and the emperors themselves. It’s a rich treasure of sources and particularly heartwarming for a writer to read because these texts that Mukhoty quotes remind you of the role that personal accounts and the written word play in creating that beautiful thing called historical perspective. Ultimately, for every textbooks that is tweaked and rewritten, the future will have a book, letters, a blogpost, a diary, a self-published memoir, a bundled of thoughts tied together with words that disrupts the controlling narrative.

Daughters of the Sun is no dusty history book and the credit for this goes to Mukhoty’s elegant descriptive passages. She describes locations, battles, and emotions with a lyricism that isn’t laboured. This quality also serves to disguise how in the latter parts of the book, Daughters of the Sun is really more about the men than the women. For instance, as fascinating as Aurangzeb and Jahanara may be as characters, once Aurangzeb becomes emperor, the chapters are really more about him than Jahanara – and this is a woman whom the emperor respected and loved. Similarly, the chapters on Akbar’s reign are really more about him and less about the circle of women he trusted.

It was great – and poignant – to finish reading this book in Delhi. I’d be going from place to place and see the places that are named after the men that are celebrated from this family, all the while thinking of the work done by the women who surrounded them. Mukhoty points out all the public works that Mughal queens commissioned, which are great details that we tend to forget. The mosques, caravanserais, and gardens and markets they built, the trade the women controlled, the journeys they went on (more than one Mughal queen went on the Haj, which is quite something at a time when a stretch of the waters between Gujarat and Mecca were dominated by marauding Portuguese ships). It’s crushing to realise how much Mughal architecture was destroyed when the uprising of 1857 was quelled by the British. Mukhoty says the structures that Jahanara had commissioned for the public – caravanserais and hamams, for example – faced the brunt of British rage, and were razed to the ground.

My favourite parts of Daughters of the Sun are the bits that Mukhoty has gathered from Gulbadan’s family history. Gulbadan was a daughter of Babur, sister of Humayun and perhaps the first historian of the Gurkani clan. She was greatly respected by both Humayun and Akbar, who asked her to write a family history and this document offers wonderful insights that Mukhoty uses skilfully. There’s a little portrait of Gulbadan in the book. It shows a woman sitting with one folded leg resting on the other in a regal, authoritarian (and one might even say, masculine, pose). She’s smoking a hookah, her eyes are wide open and watching. From now on, when someone says bard, I’m going to imagine Gulbadan.

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Thank you for reading. Dear Reader will be back soon.