Looking at the power behind the throne
Reviewed by Vibha Sharma

born and brought up in India, Indu Sundaresan grew up on the stories of her father and grandfather, who were both avid storytellers. She went to US for her higher studies — M.S. in operations research and a Master’s in economics. But the storytelling gene in her was too strong to get subdued by any distraction and she began writing soon after the graduate school.

She is the author of The Twentieth Wife, The Feast of Roses, The Splendour of Silence, In the Convent of Little Flowers, Shadow Princess and The Mountain Light (to be published ).

How was the idea of the Taj Trilogy conceived?

When I was in graduate school at the University of Delaware, I was homesick one winter evening. So, I took the bus to the library, typed in ‘India’ in the subject keyword, and went to the section that housed books on India — memoirs, travelogues, non-fiction books. I came home with a lot of books, one of which was on the Mughal harems and Mehrunnisa who was Empress Nur Jahan.

I read all those books over the ensuing weeks, but that particular one on the Mughal harems stayed with me after I’d finished studies. When I decided to write a novel, I began, actually with two books set in India in the late 1500s, entirely fictional…and since they were early books, not well written at all. But, they got me practising the craft, taught me how to write an entire book — the beginning, middle and end.

After I’d finished these two novels, and decided that they were no good, I began looking around for another topic to write on, and remembered that book, went back to the library to research on Mehrunnisa’s life, and wrote then, my first published novel, The Twentieth Wife, which is the first novel of the Taj trilogy.

What are the things in the Mughal dynasty that fascinate you the most?

There’s little about the Mughals that’s not fascinating. They lived larger-than-life lives — they loved passionately; they built palaces, forts, monuments fervently; they came to India to conquer and stayed on to leave an indelible mark on India’s history. The Mughal kings also kept reams of documentation on their lives, their loves, their buildings, their conquests, their fights and quarrels — a lot of these have not survived through the ages, but there’s enough to get a fair idea.

The novels of the Taj trilogy, told mostly from the viewpoint of the women of the Mughal harems, are about as accurate in factual content as I could make them, and I had plenty of material to work with.

You have written on strong Mughal women characters that otherwise get overshadowed by the royal kings in history books. What was the motivation behind this?

Most women in history are overshadowed by the men of their times and their lives — in Mughal India, it probably was due to the fact that the women lived in cloistered zenanas, were not seen by the men at court, and rarely revealed their faces (or their thoughts) to the outside world.

And yet, in many instances, they were the power to reckon with behind that veil they wore. Mehrunnisa, Empress Nur Jahan, was one such authority in the Mughal Empire. She signed on imperial documents with her own seal; had coins minted in her name; and sat at the jharokha balcony when she gave audience to petitioners. All of these were the prerogative of the ruling king of the empire, not of his wife, especially not a twentieth wife.

The first two novels of the trilogy, The Twentieth Wife and The Feast of Roses, are about Mehrunnisa. For the third novel, Shadow Princess, I skipped a generation and went on to detail the life of Princess Jahanara.

She was Shah Jahan’s and Mumtaz Mahal’s oldest surviving child, and after her mother’s death, she acquired the place of the Padshah Begum in the zenana — an unusual role even for a Mughal woman to play, because she was a daughter, not a wife, supreme in her father’s harem.

Which is your upcoming book, what is it about?

The Mountain of Light will be published by Harper Collins in India. The title of the novel comes from the Persian translation of the word Kohinoor — as in the diamond. The novel deals with the last 50-odd years of the diamond’s existence in India — when it is owned by the rulers of the Punjab Empire, Maharajahs Ranjit Singh and Dalip Singh.

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