EMBROIDERED LEGEND OVER HISTORY

The Moghul ascendancy in India lasted, effectively, for one hundred and eighty years less the fourteen when the Suris snatched the kingdom from Humayun and then lost it to him; that is, from 1526 with Babur’s victories at Panipat and a year later at Khanwa till shortly after the death of Aurangzeb in 1707, as the kingdom went swiftly into decline thereafter: Bahadur Shah Zafar’s imprisonment and death in 1862 made up a mere postscript, the Britons had seen to that. Without question, more than any other single, uninterrupted dynasty in history, these one hundred and eighty years have had our creative juices flowing in torrents. Imagine five Arthurian legends, back to back. Babur started it all with his diaries, and passed on his love to his descendants who recorded directly, or had ghost-written, both the trivial as well as the unique in their time. Rembrandt painted Jehangir and Shah Jahan using court paintings as his source material, cash-rich museums sent their buyers all over the world searching for Moghul miniatures and artefacts; today there are all kinds of both serious and ridiculous research work, fiction, expositions and films and theatre and television programmes and government tourism initiatives on the dynasty, and publisher’s eyes light up when anything to do with the Moghuls lands on their desk. I recently met someone who has launched a series of books about a fictional detective in the Moghul court. The franchise keeps growing and everyone’s invited. It’s not difficult to understand why this is so, given not only the fecundity of those years but notably the contradictions central to the period. Working carefully within these umbrella ideas in a domain fostered as much by the strength of legends as of recorded fact, many have tailored theories to validate their favourite points of view and even the very unlikely ones have clung like lichen to the masonry of the house that Babur built. For me, the main reasons lie close to each other. First, all the five monarchs were alpha men, who transcended the push and pull of their times and all others in their enormous supporting casts, including their women who developed recognizable characters only when their monarchs willed it. Second, by some bizarre genetic coding, all the five exhibited identical personality extremes, that of a very cruel and brutal monarch who was also a vastly enlightened, indulgent ruler. They wrote great prose and poetry, were mostly brilliant in battle, laid and built splendidly, prized the good life but subjected themselves to severe hardships when circumstances required it, generally treated their women well, killed off their brothers and cousins and made their parents suffer hellishly. Great grist for the writer’s mill. Given these triggers, even a neophyte could soon find his calling here and Alex Rutherford is no such being, to begin with. The husband-and-wife writing team, using the pseudonym, have degrees in English and history from Oxford under their respective belts and aren’t new to the Moghuls, having earlier written on the period; their book on the Taj Mahal, cleverly titled A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time, sold well, although I doubt whether they were familiar with Rabindranath Tagore’s vision of an introspective, self-questioning and angst-ridden monarch. Their current book, on Jehangir and Mehrunissa, is the fourth in the line and one expects at least two more of the same genre, which for my money, is instant, lightly researched, histo-drama. Mike Brearley, arguably one of Test cricket’s cleverest captains — never mind that many didn’t think so — once said that the majority of sportspersons would maximize their success through relentless application of technique and of mindset, honed in well-run academies under superior teachers, more than through a rush of natural talent. I believe that the craft of writing is no different. Whilst talent is clearly advisable, training, nonetheless, is a distinct advantage. However, the fact is that a perceptive reader can always tell the difference; she will know where that writing is coming from, even if sometimes, when the lessons have been well learnt, the job is an awkward one. Alex Rutherford’s (sic) writing is diligently planned, every image is precisely selected, the responses serve a clear and specific need in the context of the narrative, the entire arrangement of the book is just so. Reading his story, one yearns for some measure of unpredictability, randomness even, in the narrative to lend it a texture, and in spite of a surfeit of happenings, you’re rarely likely to ask, what’s next? Rutherford, in the manner of George MacDonald Fraser, fights shy of history; he’d rather have fun with legends, which is a pity because his rich source material obviates the need for one to look beyond its verities. In dealing with Mehrunissa/Noor Jehan’s political ambitions and hunger for total control, Rutherford’s book paints her in shades of an Oriental Lucrezia Borgia, though less virulent, and in the process uses large dollops of history which I’m not sure happened, like for instance, Noor Jehan’s slow poisoning of Sir Thomas Rowe, England’s first emissary to the Moghul court. In point of fact, in an epilogue to the book, Rutherford goes to some lengths to justify the devices he has used, like the application of dramatic licence, a “little embroidering” and the creation of “composite” characters. A postscript. To the legend-loving Bengali, Mehrunissa was an admired presence in Moghul history, largely due to poets like Satyendra Nath Dutta and others who romanticized her as a deprived girl who married Sher Afghan, the governor of Bengal and later rose to great heights as a dominant queen in Jehangir’s court to quietly fade away after the emperor’s death. Unlike Rutherford’s scheming, power-mad surrogate ruler, the popular view was of a brave, beautiful, loving woman who could do little wrong. Both Noor Jehan and Mehrunissa were born of legends. All of which is of little consequence to Rutherford, as long as there’s a story in it, waiting to be told. Source http://www.telegraphindia.com/1120706/jsp/opinion/story_15639506.jsp#.UAkC72thhP4