Courtesy: Surpriya Nair, Mumbai Mirror.
In 2005, Goan historian Amita Kanekar published A Spoke in the Wheel, her first novel. It retold the story of the Buddha, and of his mighty disciple Ashoka, through a Marxist lens, challenging the myths of their popular legends by restoring their political and economic narratives to them. A decade later, Kanekar published a new edition of the novel, having rewritten parts of it. The changes “were inspired largely by Ambedkarite interpretations and critiques” she added in the acknowledgements, “…all part of my own ongoing struggle against the casteism that colours the thinking and practice of every savarna person of South Asian heritage.”
I was struck by this decision, which seemed to indicate an unusual artistic humility. Perhaps another critic would argue that any story so dominated by political ideas must be a brittle and formulaic one. Certainly, A Spoke in the Wheel is sometimes exegetical to the point of being preachy, but it is thrilling and absorbing at other times. Above all, it establishes Kanekar as a writer with a generous and expansive view of Indian history.
Her new novel, Fear of Lions, reimagines a little-regarded episode of that history: the Satnami rebellion of Narnaul, Punjab, in 1672. Not far from Mughal Delhi, this community of caste-rejecting, musket-wielding agriculturists rose up against unfair taxation, and successfully fought back waves of imperial force before they were crushed. Inspired by Shaikh Raidas, as they must have called the anti-caste guru who is better known today as Sant Ravidas, the ‘Followers of Truth’ in Fear Of Lions create a proud, self-reliant community tills the land, shares its resources and teaches women how to shoot.
Their life is a rejection of the brutal humiliations of the surrounding world, where caste Hindus and Muslims alike render them untouchable, even “unseeable”. The emperor Aurangzeb is a puritan, and seemingly a zealot, but his India teems with the energies unleashed by centuries of Mughal rule. The words of Kabir flow through the societies of the Gangetic plain, seeking freedom and the light of reason. The Deccan “mountain rat” Shivaji disturbs the dreams of Hindustan’s complacent aristocrats.
Sikh gurus reject old social codes and organise against Mughal might; Catholic Goa’s Portuguese merchants and preachers alike find takers in markets upstream from the Bay of Bengal. Many of these streams feed into the story of the Satnamis. But Kanekar doesn’t ventriloquise for these revolutionaries. Instead, their story accumulates in layers, through the rumours, reports and inquiries of their enemies. One, a free-thinking intelligence agent struggling up the ranks, finds himself a reluctant admirer. Others, like the teenaged Muslim noblewoman fleeing her zenana to meet a Rajput soldier she loves, can only interpret their stories as tales of
witchcraft and madness.
As Fear of Lions unfolds, so does Kanekar’s interpretation of the story’s distortions and erasures, subject to the power structures of imperial Hindustan. There has been an efflorescence of popular writing about the Mughals in recent years, but few highlight what seems obvious after Fear of Lions – that Mughal society was deeply indebted to, and protective of, the caste system. The empire after Akbar was shaped by its influential brahmins, as well as by the Rajputs whose bloodlines intermingled with that of the imperial family. (The historian Ira Mukhoty offers a good account of how this changed the Mughal zenana in Akbar’s time in her book, Daughters of the Sun.)
There are times when historical context threatens to weigh Kanekar’s narrative down, throwing us out of the story – the array of religious influences on the creed of the rebels, for example, should expand readers’ imaginations, but can sometimes read like the author debating with opponents invisible to us. Her characters have a tendency towards public address, careful to fill in the gaps in our knowledge even in their innermost thoughts. The narrative’s own staccato asides smartly lecture readers on what would sometimes be better inferred. Still, all long and ambitious novels run the risk of unwieldiness, and Kanekar largely steers us through the dark and complex waters of her story with bold, even stubborn momentum.
The poet Karthika Naïr re-interpreted parts of the Mahabharata through the voices of the epic’s marginal characters. She called her book Until the Lions, inspired by the proverb, “Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” Fear of Lions not only recalls the truth of this motto, but infuses it with promise. The voices of free people may be stifled by powerful enemies. But rebellion against injustice, even brutally suppressed, can trouble history in unexpected ways. Erased or transformed out of existence, truth may nonetheless be rediscovered in time. It may even show up in fiction.
Courtesy: Harbans Mukhia, TheWire.in.
The year is 1673 – 15 years since the last Great Mughal, Aurangzeb Alamgir ascended the throne, master of all the grandeur, a massive landscape, vast riches that are the envy of the world, especially to the eyes of the New World, Europe. The initial hiccups of succession to the throne, following the very bloody war of succession, have subsided and some more bloodshed in battles is still a long way off. There is peace everywhere. Peace and prosperity all around. (more…)
By AMITA KANEKAR
India, said The Economist famously some years ago, is a ‘continent-sized embarrassment’. The description, which attracted outrage from sections of India’s ruling establishment, is actually a mild one, if you go by the recently-published book ‘The Ferment: Youth Unrest in India’ (Macmillan, 2019) by Nikhila Henry. The book paints a picture of contemporary India that is at once both depressing and inspiring. Depressing because it relentlessly and meticulously confirms the suspicion that must haunt every thinking Indian today: this country is just not working. Henry’s book interviews diverse young people across the country united by their involvement in protests of one kind or another, trying to find out just why they are angry. And, from almost all the vantage points she presents, the country resembles less a functioning republic and democracy than a disaster zone; a disaster zone in which millions of the weakest, poorest, most vulnerable of its citizens are trapped in poverty, violence, hierarchy, patriarchy, illiteracy, criminalisation, you name it, most of it based on caste, and with no freedom in sight.
Courtesy: Iris C F Gomes, Prutha Goa.
Amita Kanekar’s new historical novel Fear of Lions transports us into the world of Aurangzeb – a world of contradictions, where extravagant lifestyle and abject poverty are prevalent side by side…where a rebellion so powerful, led by a rumoured witch, threatens the Mughal Empire. This is Amita’s second novel after A Spoke in the Wheel which was set during the period of Emperor Ashoka’s rule.
The novel took about 15 years to reach its culmination with the interspersion of other works such as The Portuguese Sea Forts of Goa, with Chaul, Korlai and Vasai along the way. It was mainly reworking the original writing and more in depth research that took up time. ‘I changed my attitude to the story and the way I looked at how it should be written because of exposure to ideas about caste, about anti-caste struggle, because basically this is an anti-caste story,’ says Amita. The struggle of taking the research she had done and drawing a well-crafted appealing story out of it was a real one. Lack of personal knowledge or not enough information about rural conditions of the time proved a hindrance in the continuity of framing the storyline. It was finally in 2017 that Amita worked intensively to complete the novel.
Unlike A Spoke in the Wheel, Fear of Lions has all its sources listed. Amita says, ‘A big question that came up later for that book (A Spoke in the Wheel) was, “What are your sources?” I was unprepared at the time because it was my first work of historical fiction.’
There are conflicting views among the researchers she has read with regard to what the prominent problems during Aurangzeb’s rule were. Some writers say that taxation was an issue while others say it was the shortage of land to be given to those being asked to join the empire as nobles; still others say it was the religious beliefs of the time. ‘In fact, this is why I started writing fiction. When I wrote about the Buddha in my first book, I was interested in nonfiction…in social struggles,’ says Amita. The conflicting views she encountered as well as the fact that she was not an expert in the fields she was researching made taking a creative approach far more conducive in putting forth certain ideas in a book. She says, ‘When the question came of choosing between the scholars, one could take a creative decision about what could be right. I don’t justify it, I’m just going with it. Though to some extent the novels do justify it…why I think it’s right.’ There are arguments presented through characters in the book that debate ideas, and these are ideas of the scholars of today about what may have happened in the past.
Amita’s process of putting together a historical novel involves laying the foundation of the historical facts and research chronologically and then filling in the spaces with her own creativity. There are also characters in historical records whose identities are disputed. For example, in Fear of Lions there is a character called Abul Mamuri who is a government servant in the novel. The real Mamuri has written a history of Aurangzeb’s time. Earlier historians of Aurangzeb’s time say he’s a noble, an amir of Persian background, and this description of his character is what Amita went with originally in her writing.
Some of the information that forms a part of the novel has been taken from contemporary diaries of the time. These were extremely important for research because after the tenth year of his rule Aurangzeb put a stop to the tradition of maintaining a court diary about his life because he thought it was un-Islamic. One of the diaries which is written by Mamuri gives a positive picture of the rebellion depicting the rebels as being anti-caste and coming from diverse backgrounds right from sweepers to tanners to peasants, groups that never came together. These rebels did not have priests or rituals, women had a significant role to play, and they upheld the truth at all costs. There were other accounts too that portrayed the rebels in a bad light.
Mamuri’s positive approach is why Amita included him as a protagonist. She changed his role to that of a government servant after reading some more recent research on the man which says that, on the basis of his writing, Mamuri could be three different men, two Persians and a lower status individual. The writings conform to the dates of the third Mamuri, a non-Persian unknown. ‘I chose that so I could invent a background for him which could explain why he looked at them (the rebels) in a positive way,’ says Amita. Mamuri’s background also served to show that the Mughal court had people from all types of classes and having different levels of credentials. Although the main aim of the novel was to show the anti-caste struggle, Amita has tried to describe Mughal society in its complexity where even a nonentity like Mamuri could climb the rungs of prominence.
The novel brings to light the connection of Goa with the Mughal Empire and its cultural significance. Trade with the Portuguese led to changing crops in agriculture besides other artistic influences. ‘Continuously there are references to changing crops because it is based on a rural uprising. The issue of agriculture is big and agriculture is changing rapidly. Cash crops are coming in and cash crops are being encouraged,’ says Amita. Along with the Mamuri-Goa link, there is also reference to Aurangzeb and his Viceroy of the Deccan having a taste for good quality coffee brought in by the Portuguese.
The story of the uprising of the rebels of Narnaul is told from the perspective of the Mughal elites and not from the point of view of the rebels. Amita says, ‘There are some of us who belong to the privileged sections and benefit continuously from the existence of caste. If we ourselves tell the story of caste, of those who are fighting against us, we are appropriating somebody else’s story while at the same time benefiting from caste. This idea of appropriating the story of these rebels disturbed me because I have never, and probably my family has never, gone through what they have gone through, so who am I to tell their story?’
One of Amita’s main motivations behind writing a historical novel is the popularisation of history because she says most of what people believe to be history is actually myth and usually Brahmanical myth, for example, the story of Parashuram in Goa. She says, ‘This intermingling of history and myth where myth is dominant is the norm.’ If authentic historical facts are presented to the public in an attractive package, it will help educate them by making history more accessible. She says, ‘The past is really important. The past is not over. We can see the past is part of the politics of today. The past is part of our identity. It is part of what you are proud of or ashamed of.’
Fear of Lions by Amita Kanekar is published by Hachette India and is priced at Rs 399.
(This article is based on the interaction between Amita Kanekar and Dale Luis Menezes at The Dogears Bookshop, Margao, Goa.)
Courtesy: Hachette India and Scroll.in.
“The Court is crazy.”
It was that statement that the aide remembered. It took him back, to the kotha of Rashidabai, some months ago. The evening was nearly over, the music softer, the chandelier lights lower, the conversations louder and looser around empty pitchers. He was sitting on a stool behind Shamsher’s couch, watching him lose at cards. Murmurs about the increased taxation on Kafir merchants could be heard from behind a couple of pillars.
Amita Kanekar’s new novel, Fear of Lions, will be out soon. It is now available for pre-order of Amazon. You can book your copy here.
On a hot April morning in 1673, two young Mughal nobles, Shamsher and his sister Zeenat, leave Shahjahanabad for a trip down the royal highway to the market town of Narnaul. The reluctant Shamsher is on a secret mission for his father; an excited Zeenat on one of her own.
Their journey takes them through the shattered landscape of a recently crushed rebellion – one different from those the Mughal Empire frequently spawned, of petty warlords fired by dreams of kingship. This revolt was rumoured to have been inspired by Kabir and led by a witch; her militant followers, many of them women and all of them rabble, called themselves ‘Followers of Truth’. The rebels were defeated, but the questions remained: Where had they come from and what did they want? How could Kabir, the godly saint-poet of Banaras, incite violence? Why couldn’t the liberalism and inclusiveness fostered by Emperor Akbar hold the realm together? What role did the firangis have to play? Or was it all simply because of the bigot on the throne?
Set twelve years into the rule of the austere Aurangzeb Alamgir, in a time of impossible wealth and unbearable want, of brilliant architectural extravaganzas amidst ancient traditions of squalor, and of caste society on the threshold of capitalism, Amita Kanekar’s powerful and intricately woven novel tells the story of an unlikely rebellion that almost brought imperial Dilli to its knees.
By AMITA KANEKAR
The rise of the BJP owes a lot to Nehruvian intellectuals, though this is something that neither would like to accept, with both accusing the other being anti-national. The recent death of celebrated thespian Girish Karnad however brought this irony out to the fore again.
By AMITA KANEKAR
“Correa’s rise to renown was rapid, and at least partially thanks to the context of nation-building; he opened his office just eleven years after the British left, a time when Indian governments, both national and provincial, were busy in proving that the new republic was a serious, modern and historic enterprise. It couldn’t have hurt either that he hailed from a wealthy and influential family; architectural practice has always benefited from – perhaps even relied on – the right connections. He began with a bang, with plum institutional projects like Delhi’s Handloom Pavillion (1958), and the Gandhi Smarak Sangrahalaya at Ahmedabad (1958-63), along with many private residences. They showcased an ingenuity with space and form, and what would become signature concepts like open-to-sky space, the tube-house that funnels air, and the expansive oversailing roof.”
[Read the full text published in ITC Hotel’s Magazine, here.]
By AMITA KANEKAR
The above is what someone campaigning in the Panjim bye-elections said to a group of voters living next to the St. Inez creek, when they spoke up at the election meeting about how the creek had not been cleaned even though monsoon was around the corner, which usually means terrible floods engulfing the houses and their residents. Don’t complain, was the answer. You live here because of us; be grateful. But the people did not stop complaining, so the meeting ended with a lot of promises of action and improvements, none of which have been fulfilled till date.
