Jahangir + The Twice-Born + Nevermoor + Milkman + Fierce Fairytales

Earlier in November, the city of Allahabad was renamed Prayagraj; the district of Faizabad was renamed Ayodhya and Mughalsarai was renamed Deen Dayal Upadhyay Marg. All these places are in the state of Uttar Pradesh, one of the largest and most populous states in India. Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath would have us believe that the new names shake off the yoke of Mughal colonisation. (Never mind the tiny problem that without Mughal 'colonisation', you wouldn't have Allahabad, sorry, Prayagraj since Akbar — Great Mughal No. 3 — founded that city.) Except while reading Parvati Sharma's wonderful Jahangir: An Intimate Portrait, it struck me that this business of renaming that the Hindu Right loves indulging in these days is actually a very Mughal thing to do. The British did things to the names of places with their spelling, sure, but usually, they couldn't be bothered to change names completely. In contrast, the Hindu Right wants to do much more than strip a name of its Anglicised sound. They want to rename places to reflect what the Hindu Right believes is their essential quality. Which is exactly what the Mughals did in their time.

It's not just that most Mughals took on regnal names when they ascended the throne, which by the way, is confusing enough. (Zahir al-Din Muhammad = Babur. Nasir al-Din Muhammad = Humayun. Salim = Jahangir. Khurram = Shah Jahan. Thank you Akbar and Aurangzeb for sticking to the names you were born with.) They also gave new names to their wives and some courtiers. It was a mark of favour. Jahangir, for instance, first christened Mihr-un-Nisha Nur Mahal (trans: "light of the palace") and then Nur Jahan (trans: "light of the world"). The names were coined to reflect what the emperor thought of the person who was being renamed.

Ergo, Adityanath and Great Mughals are, in the words of Thai street vendors, same-same but different as far as this renaming business goes.

The similarity ends there. As Sharma shows in Jahangir: An Intimate Portrait, the reign of the fourth Great Mughal was mostly a time of peace. He inherited a stable empire and it remained that way under his leadership. He was a patron of the arts, a sensible administrator and — contemporary therapists will appreciate this — conscientious about keeping a journal. His father Akbar, son Shah Jahan and grandson Aurangzeb have traditionally got a lot more attention from historians. This is partly because his reign was largely uneventful. I wouldn't be surprised if the fact that he handed over so much power to Nur Jahan also helped sideline him. As Ruby Lal showed in her biography of Nur Jahan, the pre-eminence that Nur enjoyed horrified many in Jahangir's court (particularly ambassadors from Europe) because hello! she's a woman! His decision wasn't seen as a stamp of approval of Nur's statesmanship (which seems to have been pretty good), but as a symptom of the emperor's drugs-and-alcohol problem and his whimsical temperament.

This is not to suggest Jahangir didn't have a drugs-and-alcohol problem or that he wasn't whimsical. Sharma recounts enough episodes that show he was both, but what Sharma is able to do is underline that these don't make Jahangir 'bad'. They, along with other traits, make him interesting. Perhaps it's the fiction writer in Sharma — her The Dead Camel And Other Stories of Love is a lovely read — that enables her to appreciate the many aspects of Jahangir. He isn't always good, he isn't always bad. He's very smart on occasion and a blithering idiot at others. But then again, aren't we all?

I also loved how Sharma didn't make a spectacle of how extensively she's researched to write this book. References and quotations are woven into the text with an almost conversational ease. This makes for fluent reading, which is a claim that too few history books can make. Sharma also lets the reader watch her muse on details, ponder with her about what an omission suggests or what information may be coded into a word or a motif in a painting. Not only is this fun, it's a reminder that we're working within certain limitations when we try to understand history on the basis of existing record. No one records everything that happened and certainly not honestly. Records are usually kept to communicate specific information or establish an agenda. The more aware you are of this, the greater the chances of actually understanding a period by cross-referencing and using your informed imagination.

For me, some of the best bits of Sharma's book had nothing to do with Jahangir (and that's saying something, because Sharma does a brilliant job of revitalising him with her words). Like this snippet, for instance:

"Kabul held Babur's grave as it had once held his heart; and Jahangir referred to the province as 'home', literally 'vilayat'. The fascinating etymology of this word goes thus: originally, as Jahangir uses it, it meant homeland, the land of one's ancestors and also, specifically, the land of the ruler's ancestors. Over the centuries, however, its meaning has taken a 180-degree turn; in common parlance, now, vilayat means the opposite of home — abroad. Partly, the change may have happened during British rule, when the land of the ruler's ancestor's was England; and 'England' is, in fact, the strict definition of vilayat today. But partly, also, the changed meaning must have derived from changed context — as, over the centuries, Kabul became foreign and Lahore, Delhi, Agra became home."

Reading this, I was reminded of one Vilayat Khan (not the grumpy sitar ustad) whose music "came back" to him when he returned to India after Partition decreed he was Pakistani.

In sharp contrast to how quickly I finished reading Jahangir: An Intimate Portrait, this year's Booker prize winner Milkman by Emma Burns and The Twice-Born by Aatish Taseer took me forever to finish. The Twice-Born is Taseer's version 'Eat Pray Love', but set among the Brahmins of Varanasi. The caste and community fascinate him because he sees them as repositories of a certain kind of culture and civilisation. Taseer occupies the role of the outsider, unfamiliar as he is with their world thanks to his anglicised and elitist upbringing in Delhi and vilayat. This is underscored by the (mostly) dead, white men Taseer quotes to give us a historical perspective on Brahmins. Nothing of contemporary scholarship or the Dalit perspective or this upper caste's social dominance is mentioned. Bathed in a golden glow of exoticism, the Brahmins of The Twice-Born are depicted as "the aristocracy of the mind", but there's no acknowledgement of the fact that they get to be central because they've dominated most intellectual projects. Also, if there's an aristocracy, then there's a tacit acknowledgement of feudalism and inequality — but Taseer doesn't go there. What does unwittingly come through, however, is how firmly in place the caste dynamic is in Indian society.

Taseer was on a panel I moderated at this year's Tata Lit Live and from what I gathered, he wrote this book because he wanted to record a personal discovery of an aspect of Indian culture that Taseer feels doesn't get acknowledged enough. (By his own admission, he didn't do much research so he wouldn't be aware of the critiques that examine the upper caste dominance in Indian society.) Taseer said he saw himself as a contemporary Ananda Coomaraswamy, who is best known for introducing the richness of ancient Indian culture to the West. The Twice-Born certainly does feel like it's targeted to the foreign reader, but it lacks an engagement with the Indian context. It wilfully ignores contemporary conversations and perspectives upon caste and caste-based chauvinism, sociology, culture and economics. If you read The Twice-Born, I'd urge you to follow it up with Sujatha Gidla's Ants Among Elephants. Both authors have a certain fascination for the West and their books offer portraits of two castes and communities at opposite ends of the spectrum. Together, the two books offer a glimpse of just how fragmented and schizoid contemporary India is, I think.

Milkman by Anna Burns was more complicated and difficult to process. The novel is about a young woman who discovers she's being stalked by a powerful man in her town. He exudes the promise of violence — upon her and those she cares about — and it makes people obey him. She calls him Milkman because of the van he drives. Offering a sharp contrast is the town's real milkman, someone who also commands loyalty but in a very different way from the stalker Milkman. There are no real names in the novel and neither are there any identifying features, though if you're paying attention to the language and the dropped clues, you'll know this is Northern Ireland, bitterly-divided and sectarian. In the way people react, the trivial things that become a big deal and through the importance placed upon loyalty and social ties, Burns presents a portrait of urban, contemporary tribalism.

Burns is brilliant at crafting a voice for this young woman who is her first-person narrator. Within a couple of pages, you feel like you know her. She's funny, well-read and a little odd — all of which serves to make her absolutely endearing. A few more pages, and you feel like you can slip into her shadow. Once you do that, the menace that everyday life contains in her hometown settles on your skin like cold sweat. The narration isn't exactly 'stream of consciousness', but it's full of tangents that give you a sense of how desperately the young woman is trying to distract herself from the fear and trauma that's settled at the pit of her being. Burns is also great at conveying how we normalise violence and how fear makes you see normal things differently.

Yet for all these wonderful features, Milkman drags and you get the feeling that it's not just that the narrator who can't bring herself to talk about what happened with her stalker. Burns seems to be trying to delay reaching the conclusion. It's not a particularly fat novel, but time stretches within its pages and outside it as well because although there's a lot of tension, there isn't much suspense. You don't need to find out what happened to either the young woman or Milkman or anyone else really. Plus, the end felt like a proper anti-climax. In terms of topicality and technical skill, I can see why this would get votes from a jury. But as a reader, I found it far from satisfying. Best book of 2018? Not by a long shot.

The book that I did race through and find enormously fun was the second Nevermoor title. The Calling of Morrigan Crow is a sequel to the excellent The Trials of Morrigan Crow. The middle books are always the ones that end up being the clumsiest in a series, which is why I'm delighted to report that author Jessica Townsend does not disappoint. The Calling of Morrigan Crow is just as much fun as the first book. It's got some great settings, including a magical market that is probably every production design team's dream and nightmare. Like all good kiddie books, this one has a few moral and ethical lessons embedded in them. As far as I could tell, none of them are dodgy.

After being smuggled into Nevermoor by a ginger-haired explorer/ hotelier/ mischief maker Jupiter North, Morrigan spent book one on tests and challenges that granted her admission into the mysterious and magical Wunderous Society. In book two, it's time to go to school with the eight other kids who have qualified with her. We know now Morrigan's secret: that she is a Wundersmith, which means she has the potential to control the magical energy that powers Nevermoor. Exactly what it means to control Wunder is something that no one wants her to find out. Except the bad guy Ezra Squall, who's still holding out hope that Morrigan will get bored of the good guys and join him. In addition to being treated like an alien, Morrigan finds herself in the middle of uncovering a sinister plot when people start going missing in Nevermoor.

Especially after seeing the disaster that JK Rowling is making of poor Newt Scamander's story in the Fantastic Beasts series, it's a joy to enter Nevermoor through Townsend's book. So far, Townsend has been excellent at balancing characters, throwing intriguing scraps and clues for the inquisitive, and making sure there's just enough grey to make the cast of Nevermoor exciting. Townsend is good at showing how friendships develop in school and the fierceness with which we hate, love and support each other as kids. My only quibble at this point is that the faculty of Wunderous Society are a little, well, idiotic. Though there's hope that this will change in the next book, for now, that school is doing nothing for either Morrigan's education or self-esteem.

So yes, Ms. Townsend, feel free to release book three for Christmas. In the words of one Jamie Fraser, je suis prest.

In case you thought racing through a book is always a good thing, allow me to muddy them waters. Another book I finished in a day is Fierce Fairytales & Other Stories to Stir Your Soul by Nikita Gill. The phrase "stir your soul" should have alerted me, but I was distracted by this book's exquisite cover. Designed by Tomas Almeida, there's an old-word charm to the beige drawing that looks like an etching of forests, nymphs and animals against an inky blue background. Rarely are covers so Instagram-friendly, which makes sense given Gill is a sensation in the world of Instagram poetry, I'm told. I haven't seen her work on Instagram, so I can't say anything about it, but what I read in this book made me twitch compulsively and repeatedly.

There's nothing wrong with the messages Gill sends through her poetry and prose. They're femme-forward, earnest, politically-correct, the whole shebang. Now and then, in fragments, they do succeed in being evocative. Like this fragment from a poem titled The Trolls:

"We must face simple facts;
They now live among us,
their bridges are burned and gone.
They wear armour made of code."

The problem with Fierce Fairytales is that it's simplistic and it's trying way too hard to be fierce. Every word and every sentence is hyper-earnest and tripping over itself to be be accepted as cool. The words, awkwardly adolescent as they are, come across as more accomplished than the illustrations at least. At a time when the internet is exploding with fantastically inventive art, the decision to carry these childish scribbles does neither writer nor publisher any favours. This book could have at least looked better had it been illustrated well. Now, nothing in the volume feels insightful, which is not only the fault of the writing. It's worth pointing out that we live in a time when we're inundated with information and creativity from different platforms offline and online, it's hard to stand out as distinctive. That said, if you don't feel you have it in you, then don't agree to write a book that promises transformations.

Speaking of beautiful, insightful poetry, poet and essayist Meena Alexander passed away on November 21. She was 67.

August 14, 2004
Goldfish, icon of the journeying soul,
In a garden pond struck by muscular roots and fleshly scents,

Ferocious toil with pitchfork and spade.
How much time is enough in the life of a poet?

You can read a few of her poems here and The Wire's obituary for Alexander has some lovely excerpts of her poetry.

And now for some reading material that doesn't require you to cough up cash. Fans of Seinfeld, The Grovel is the episode you deserved but never got. In it, Kimberly Harrington offers an answer to Jerry Seinfeld who wondered how long someone who has been called out for sexual harassment has to grovel. Most of us would end up writing an essay. Harrington writes a script for a Seinfeld episode.

There's a new biography of Edward Gorey. Sold. "He collected daguerreotypes of dead babies and lived alone with 20,000 books and six cats in his New York apartment. Sporting an Edwardian beard, he would frequently traipse around the city in a full-length fur coat accessorised with trainers and jangling bracelets." How can you NOT want to read his biography? The link contains some of his weird and wonderful art.

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On that happy note, I'll sign off. Thank you for reading. Dear Reader will be back soon.