Listen to the episode
Edited excerpts from the interview
Your latest book ‘The Lion and the Lily’. Why don't you tell us what it is about?
I wanted to add a layer to our understanding of 18th century India, which is a really interesting time. It was full of you know chaos and volatility, but also exciting change.
It has been represented to us as the slow crumbling of Mughal power. But what we haven't been told as clearly is that apart from the British , who were very much present there, there was another very important player: the French. While the Mughal centre was crumbling, there were all sorts of exciting things happening in the so-called sub-imperial centres like Hyderabad and Awadh .
I wanted to show how these non-imperial powers were becoming very important centres of political power, but also cultural power. They were sort of the inheritors of all the Mughal cultural elite who started migrating out into these provinces.
I was interested in showing how the French, whom we have you know forgotten entirely from our history, were very involved right through the 18th century in many different ways, essentially trying to block British progress. The British eventually won out, and they made sure that all the evidence we have relating to the presence of the French was completely obliterated.
Whatever was left was presented to us in a very perfidious manner. The French were always the sort of interfering characters. In fact, the French had a very powerful impulse to stop the rise of the British and to encourage the Indian rulers to resist the British. These were the sort of things I wanted to show the lay reader who may not know a great deal about this period.
How do you find your footing in all of this and decide where to start?
I've always felt that I have the role of a mediaeval detective really, because I'm looking at all sorts of evidence. Very little is left in manuscript form. A lot of it has been willfully destroyed.
When the British were beginning to pull out of the empires from 1947 onwards, in India and all the other colonies they had, they brought in an operation called Operation Legacy. This was specifically aimed at destroying all the manuscripts, all the evidence that incriminated their behaviour, the way in which they had established and maintained control over these empires.
Obviously, we now know that it was in a very violent, extractive manner. They made sure these documents would not fall into ‘sensitive hands’, by which they meant the locals.
They replaced these documents with other findings, because what they wanted to do was encourage the ex-colonies to keep a sense of respect and fondness towards them. This tells us something about the British, the way in which they ruled and the way in which they wanted to control information.
To find a counter-narrative can be extremely challenging. In the case of this particular book, what was very useful for me was to find French sources, because luckily I can read and write French.
My mother was French so it's been an ace up my sleeve, because I've been able to get to sources which have never been looked at before. I've been able to use diaries or letters from French adventurers. I've been able to source personal archives lying around in France and use this knowledge to bring to light a counter-narrative to the one the British have left us.
I also want to bring the Indian sources who write about their own histories, obviously in very different ways to the way in which the British left it. So for example, a very important source for me was the memoir of a historian who was writing in Awadh from inside the zenana.
This was an extraordinary document which was hardly mined at all for the information it tells us about the way in which the women in the zenana exercised their power and the amount of power they had. They are not the sources that talk about the elite men or British men.
You have to have a sense, when you're setting out looking for sources, to look at things which have been ignored, and say, ‘why is this less important? What does it tell us about those times? What new information does it bring to the table that I can sort of thread into the main narrative and thereby enrich it?’
You obviously blend in information from different sources to bring it together, isn't it?
I often think of it as a tapestry. I have different coloured threads and they're coming from different sources.
I'm always interested in what the women were up to and, more importantly, how the men perceived them. So how the British and the French perceive these powerful women so that I can show the reader what these women were up against. The sort of ingrained prejudice that they were up against.
I found time and time again that the British men seem to have so many preconceptions about what Indian women should be and should not be, especially powerful Indian women. It comes really from the way in which their women were treated back home in England, and women had far less power. They were not meant to be seen at all and they were not meant to have autonomous control over their money.
When men like Governor General Hastings encountered a woman like Bahu Begum, he's absolutely scandalised. He cannot imagine that women in this country can ever presume to appoint a minister, which is exactly what Bahu Begum was proposing to do.
For example, Bahu Begam, once Shuja-ud-Daula had passed away, had a little more freedom in terms of her purdah. She wasn't quite as sequestered. Even though physically she had to stay hidden, she could now start to communicate. She could write letters to these men.
And she starts writing letters to Hastings and to the men in Calcutta. She tries to make a very strong case for being allowed to rule in her own name and the men are just aghast at this.
And her son writes to her and says, ‘I cannot imagine that you have written to a British man, how dare you do this? While my father was alive, your voice was never heard by any other man.’ She's a wonderful and feisty woman. She writes back to him and says, ‘I have no lessons to learn from you about propriety.’
But imagine what she was up against. She was not even supposed to have her voice heard by an outsider. Despite all of these constraints, she was able to fight her cause to such an extent that in the end it was Warren Hastings who was called back to England. His behaviour vis-a-vis Bahu Begum is considered so egregious that he faces a seven-year trial for impeachment for having behaved very badly with an elite woman in India.
In a sense, she wins out despite having so many restrictions.
You’ve written five books . You were more tentative earlier, the first book is quiet, polite and civil. Then comes along this book and you are in your element.
Thank you.
I think I'm much more furious now than I used to be early on. I just know how everything is stacked against Indians when it’s vis-a-vis these women. I am much more sure of myself.
Take this chapter on the Bada Imambara and a light divine. What were you doing there? It's so brilliant.
I had to work very hard on that because I realised during the writing of this book how Shia Islam was such an integral part of the belief systems of the Nawabs of Awadh. How it was actually threaded into their life, their culture, the form of resistance.
I really do feel that the culture that they created was very syncretic in the end because it pulled in all aspects of Awadhi life and everybody became involved in this. The Shias, Sunnis, Hindus, Jains, everybody was part of this culture.
I realised that this was really, really integral to anything that I wanted to say about Awadhi culture. So I really went deep into Shia Islam, how it came about, what is the essence of it, this magnificent essence of resistance of a minority against the injustice of a huge army. Initially, of course, at the Battle of Karbala, but it symbolises resistance by a tiny oppressed minority in the face of overwhelming might. And the willingness to sacrifice everything for this single truth.
I think that is such a universal message that I wanted to make very sure that I got it right. So that people today in the 21st century, a non-Shia person, a non-Muslim person, any Indian, anybody reading it would understand how very attractive and seductive that message was for anybody in the 18th century.
I'm glad you liked it because it was a chapter I worked really really hard on. I worked on the religious aspect of it, the cultural aspect. Then, as I like to do in many of my books, I like to create a sense of space for the reader to see what the seventh century CE would have been like in Karbala. What did it feel like to people? And then in Lucknow, how did it feel like to recreate that culture through the Imambaras and through the celebration of this divine light.
The other thing I like is the way you position nonfiction and fiction side-by-side. The fiction to make that historical event accessible to a modern reader.
Correct. I think that's where the human element can come through.
When I'm doing this, I'm very careful to not stray too far from the nonfiction because this is a book of nonfiction and I'm not going to invent things. I'll do research even into things like what was the weather like? What was the flora and fauna like in the seventh century?
I really do try, even when setting a scene or context, to not stray too far. I just tried to create a sense, or an ambience, of what it must have been like, so that the reader feels that they are pulled into that century.
For us, in the 21st century, things are very different. Our lived space, our lived environment, our day-to-day is so very different from those times that I am trying to reach back to, that I feel it's very necessary and it's an important part of my work is to make the reader feel that they are living in those times along with the main you know people they're reading about.
So it is very much pushing the envelope of the non-fiction genre. But I try not to step out of that envelope too much.
That explains why when one gets immersed in your storytelling, it’s a good story that one reads and when you finish with it, you realise that’s a slice of history you’ve familiarised ourselves with.
Yes, that's exactly right, because after all, what is history? It's just the lives of men and women really. There's no rocket science to it is what I feel.
Just listing things out in terms of dates and battles does a disservice really to the very exciting lives that people have lived. I’m really not here to judge things or to lecture my readers. It’s really to set the scene and bring these people to life.
Then it’s for the reader to decide, you know, what they feel about them, what they feel about what they have been presented with.
I read your books and I've seen how you developed as a writer. Do you think you have changed?
I think I have. I think in the past 20 years, we’ve seen a big resurgence in the interest in non-fiction writing and narrative history in India in particular. There are lots of wonderful, talented writers coming up now who are writing in this genre.
I think all of us do the same thing. We look for these ingredients to bring stories to life. For me personally, what has changed is that I guess I’m able to judge material more quickly now. I have more confidence in looking for non-traditional narratives. I have more confidence in quoting women and non-elite sources because I know that they have only been ignored because it’s the patriarchal constructs which ignore those sources.
Early on, I was not sure. I would look for counter arguments to see whether these were sources that could be relied on. Now I know that they can. It is just that they have been ignored. That’s why you might have noticed my books are getting bigger as well because I’m able to cover more material because of the increased confidence.
Does being a trained scientist have anything to do with this temperament of an eye for detail and the need to be precise?
Yeah, I definitely think so. I did study for years to be a scientist, and it teaches you some very basic skills like how to process archive material, how to judge it, how to know whether a source is reliable, how to know who is writing, for whom they are writing, and what is the purpose of those writings. So these are things that are ingrained in anybody who’s doing the sciences as well.
Science writing is much more precise and almost written with a scalpel, so that helps me even in my history writing to remain true to a certain truth which I know and to not stray too far from. There are many skills that a scientist can bring to something like historical non-fiction as well.
Edited excerpts from the interview
Your latest book ‘The Lion and the Lily’. Why don't you tell us what it is about?
I wanted to add a layer to our understanding of 18th century India, which is a really interesting time. It was full of you know chaos and volatility, but also exciting change.
It has been represented to us as the slow crumbling of Mughal power. But what we haven't been told as clearly is that apart from the British , who were very much present there, there was another very important player: the French. While the Mughal centre was crumbling, there were all sorts of exciting things happening in the so-called sub-imperial centres like Hyderabad and Awadh .
I wanted to show how these non-imperial powers were becoming very important centres of political power, but also cultural power. They were sort of the inheritors of all the Mughal cultural elite who started migrating out into these provinces.
I was interested in showing how the French, whom we have you know forgotten entirely from our history, were very involved right through the 18th century in many different ways, essentially trying to block British progress. The British eventually won out, and they made sure that all the evidence we have relating to the presence of the French was completely obliterated.
Whatever was left was presented to us in a very perfidious manner. The French were always the sort of interfering characters. In fact, the French had a very powerful impulse to stop the rise of the British and to encourage the Indian rulers to resist the British. These were the sort of things I wanted to show the lay reader who may not know a great deal about this period.
How do you find your footing in all of this and decide where to start?
I've always felt that I have the role of a mediaeval detective really, because I'm looking at all sorts of evidence. Very little is left in manuscript form. A lot of it has been willfully destroyed.
When the British were beginning to pull out of the empires from 1947 onwards, in India and all the other colonies they had, they brought in an operation called Operation Legacy. This was specifically aimed at destroying all the manuscripts, all the evidence that incriminated their behaviour, the way in which they had established and maintained control over these empires.
Obviously, we now know that it was in a very violent, extractive manner. They made sure these documents would not fall into ‘sensitive hands’, by which they meant the locals.
They replaced these documents with other findings, because what they wanted to do was encourage the ex-colonies to keep a sense of respect and fondness towards them. This tells us something about the British, the way in which they ruled and the way in which they wanted to control information.
To find a counter-narrative can be extremely challenging. In the case of this particular book, what was very useful for me was to find French sources, because luckily I can read and write French.
My mother was French so it's been an ace up my sleeve, because I've been able to get to sources which have never been looked at before. I've been able to use diaries or letters from French adventurers. I've been able to source personal archives lying around in France and use this knowledge to bring to light a counter-narrative to the one the British have left us.
I also want to bring the Indian sources who write about their own histories, obviously in very different ways to the way in which the British left it. So for example, a very important source for me was the memoir of a historian who was writing in Awadh from inside the zenana.
This was an extraordinary document which was hardly mined at all for the information it tells us about the way in which the women in the zenana exercised their power and the amount of power they had. They are not the sources that talk about the elite men or British men.
You have to have a sense, when you're setting out looking for sources, to look at things which have been ignored, and say, ‘why is this less important? What does it tell us about those times? What new information does it bring to the table that I can sort of thread into the main narrative and thereby enrich it?’
You obviously blend in information from different sources to bring it together, isn't it?
I often think of it as a tapestry. I have different coloured threads and they're coming from different sources.
I'm always interested in what the women were up to and, more importantly, how the men perceived them. So how the British and the French perceive these powerful women so that I can show the reader what these women were up against. The sort of ingrained prejudice that they were up against.
I found time and time again that the British men seem to have so many preconceptions about what Indian women should be and should not be, especially powerful Indian women. It comes really from the way in which their women were treated back home in England, and women had far less power. They were not meant to be seen at all and they were not meant to have autonomous control over their money.
When men like Governor General Hastings encountered a woman like Bahu Begum, he's absolutely scandalised. He cannot imagine that women in this country can ever presume to appoint a minister, which is exactly what Bahu Begum was proposing to do.
For example, Bahu Begam, once Shuja-ud-Daula had passed away, had a little more freedom in terms of her purdah. She wasn't quite as sequestered. Even though physically she had to stay hidden, she could now start to communicate. She could write letters to these men.
And she starts writing letters to Hastings and to the men in Calcutta. She tries to make a very strong case for being allowed to rule in her own name and the men are just aghast at this.
And her son writes to her and says, ‘I cannot imagine that you have written to a British man, how dare you do this? While my father was alive, your voice was never heard by any other man.’ She's a wonderful and feisty woman. She writes back to him and says, ‘I have no lessons to learn from you about propriety.’
But imagine what she was up against. She was not even supposed to have her voice heard by an outsider. Despite all of these constraints, she was able to fight her cause to such an extent that in the end it was Warren Hastings who was called back to England. His behaviour vis-a-vis Bahu Begum is considered so egregious that he faces a seven-year trial for impeachment for having behaved very badly with an elite woman in India.
In a sense, she wins out despite having so many restrictions.
You’ve written five books . You were more tentative earlier, the first book is quiet, polite and civil. Then comes along this book and you are in your element.
Thank you.
I think I'm much more furious now than I used to be early on. I just know how everything is stacked against Indians when it’s vis-a-vis these women. I am much more sure of myself.
Take this chapter on the Bada Imambara and a light divine. What were you doing there? It's so brilliant.
I had to work very hard on that because I realised during the writing of this book how Shia Islam was such an integral part of the belief systems of the Nawabs of Awadh. How it was actually threaded into their life, their culture, the form of resistance.
I really do feel that the culture that they created was very syncretic in the end because it pulled in all aspects of Awadhi life and everybody became involved in this. The Shias, Sunnis, Hindus, Jains, everybody was part of this culture.
I realised that this was really, really integral to anything that I wanted to say about Awadhi culture. So I really went deep into Shia Islam, how it came about, what is the essence of it, this magnificent essence of resistance of a minority against the injustice of a huge army. Initially, of course, at the Battle of Karbala, but it symbolises resistance by a tiny oppressed minority in the face of overwhelming might. And the willingness to sacrifice everything for this single truth.
I think that is such a universal message that I wanted to make very sure that I got it right. So that people today in the 21st century, a non-Shia person, a non-Muslim person, any Indian, anybody reading it would understand how very attractive and seductive that message was for anybody in the 18th century.
I'm glad you liked it because it was a chapter I worked really really hard on. I worked on the religious aspect of it, the cultural aspect. Then, as I like to do in many of my books, I like to create a sense of space for the reader to see what the seventh century CE would have been like in Karbala. What did it feel like to people? And then in Lucknow, how did it feel like to recreate that culture through the Imambaras and through the celebration of this divine light.
The other thing I like is the way you position nonfiction and fiction side-by-side. The fiction to make that historical event accessible to a modern reader.
Correct. I think that's where the human element can come through.
When I'm doing this, I'm very careful to not stray too far from the nonfiction because this is a book of nonfiction and I'm not going to invent things. I'll do research even into things like what was the weather like? What was the flora and fauna like in the seventh century?
I really do try, even when setting a scene or context, to not stray too far. I just tried to create a sense, or an ambience, of what it must have been like, so that the reader feels that they are pulled into that century.
For us, in the 21st century, things are very different. Our lived space, our lived environment, our day-to-day is so very different from those times that I am trying to reach back to, that I feel it's very necessary and it's an important part of my work is to make the reader feel that they are living in those times along with the main you know people they're reading about.
So it is very much pushing the envelope of the non-fiction genre. But I try not to step out of that envelope too much.
That explains why when one gets immersed in your storytelling, it’s a good story that one reads and when you finish with it, you realise that’s a slice of history you’ve familiarised ourselves with.
Yes, that's exactly right, because after all, what is history? It's just the lives of men and women really. There's no rocket science to it is what I feel.
Just listing things out in terms of dates and battles does a disservice really to the very exciting lives that people have lived. I’m really not here to judge things or to lecture my readers. It’s really to set the scene and bring these people to life.
Then it’s for the reader to decide, you know, what they feel about them, what they feel about what they have been presented with.
I read your books and I've seen how you developed as a writer. Do you think you have changed?
I think I have. I think in the past 20 years, we’ve seen a big resurgence in the interest in non-fiction writing and narrative history in India in particular. There are lots of wonderful, talented writers coming up now who are writing in this genre.
I think all of us do the same thing. We look for these ingredients to bring stories to life. For me personally, what has changed is that I guess I’m able to judge material more quickly now. I have more confidence in looking for non-traditional narratives. I have more confidence in quoting women and non-elite sources because I know that they have only been ignored because it’s the patriarchal constructs which ignore those sources.
Early on, I was not sure. I would look for counter arguments to see whether these were sources that could be relied on. Now I know that they can. It is just that they have been ignored. That’s why you might have noticed my books are getting bigger as well because I’m able to cover more material because of the increased confidence.
Does being a trained scientist have anything to do with this temperament of an eye for detail and the need to be precise?
Yeah, I definitely think so. I did study for years to be a scientist, and it teaches you some very basic skills like how to process archive material, how to judge it, how to know whether a source is reliable, how to know who is writing, for whom they are writing, and what is the purpose of those writings. So these are things that are ingrained in anybody who’s doing the sciences as well.
Science writing is much more precise and almost written with a scalpel, so that helps me even in my history writing to remain true to a certain truth which I know and to not stray too far from. There are many skills that a scientist can bring to something like historical non-fiction as well.
