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Love conquers all

Last Updated 07 July 2012, 12:20 IST

There are innumerable names to whom Kusum Choppra has dedicated her novel, but surely the first among them, the ‘Spirit of Mastani’, must be exulting.

Mastani alone is shown as the faultless tragedienne in this historical narrative. We have always known her as the Muslim paramour of Balaji Baji Rao I. Kusum tries her best to prove that Mastani was the offspring of the brave Kshatriya king, Chhatrasal, and not a mere dancing girl from the courtesan community.

Baji Rao was the Brahmin Peshwa of Shivaji’s son, Shahu. He was an incredible warrior of his times who never lost a battle. To him goes the credit of creating the basics of the Maratha empire, which later blossomed as the kingdoms of Holkars, Scindias, Pawars and Gaekwars. He was a worthy successor to Shivaji in battle heroism and in saving India’s vedic heritage from Islamic onslaught.

Interestingly enough, he fell in love with a Muslim girl. We have no clear idea whether Mastani came to Baji Rao as part of a treaty with Chhatrasal or if she was just a dancer who caught the eye of the Peshwa. The great conundrum is Mastani’s induction into a Brahmin household, claiming married status, and Baji Rao’s insistence that their son Shamsher Bahadur be invested with the sacred thread.

It became a matter of prestige between orthodoxy on the one hand and power on the other. So many forces at work in terms of money, love, lust and chicanery could only lead to a tragedy. Baji Rao died of high fever while he was inspecting his jagirs. Mastani did not survive him for long, but we have no idea or record of how or where she passed away.

You cannot get a more romantic tale of heroism than the Baji Rao-Mastani story and Kusum Choppra has exploited her advantages to the full. Having made herself familiar with the available historical information, she weaves a credible enough tale. Dancing girl? Kusum’s Mastani is more like Meera; she was a lover of Krishna who loved to sing and dance. Even Shamsher Bahadur is called Krishnasinh by her, as Baji Rao seeks to legitimise him as a Brahmin boy. However, Mastani herself has no Hindu name and the members of Chhatrasal’s zenana have no idea of what her original name is. Not even her mother. Some amnesia, that!

The Chhatrasal-Baji Rao connection becomes high-quality food for fiction. We have been watching our politicians with three or four wives get into a variety of succession problems these days and so, it is not surprising that Chhatrasal with his 19 wives and many more upstris should have had problems too big to handle and needed Baji Rao’s help.

One must sympathise with the ladies of the Peshwa household in a male-dominated society. Reading this novel of heroism and chicanery, nobility and avarice, love and hate, Moghul power and Maratha rebellion, we can but repeat Charles Dickens: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times… it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair”.

Throughout the crisp narrative, it becomes obvious that the despair of Baji Rao and Mastani will be the grapes of wrath destroying his dynasty in the future. Of the two versions of Mastani’s death, Kusum prefers the one in which the girl dies by consuming poison to escape the incestuous advances of her stepson. Kusum has also chosen the plausible explanation that Mastani may have belonged to the Pranami Panth, which is a mixture of Hinduism and Islam. In her references, she makes no mention of D G Godse’s book Mastani (1989), which for the first time described the dancing girl as the daughter of the famous Bundeli hero Chhatrasal. Meanwhile, two cheers for Kusum’s Mastani reaffirming the importance of historical fiction in Indian literature.

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(Published 07 July 2012, 12:20 IST)

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