Love or folly?

Even while English historians and novelists like Alex Rutherford (pseudonym for Diana and Michael Preston) are recreating for 21st century readers the lives of the Moghul emperors who ruled India for 250 years or so from 1526 AD, Tanushree Podder has written a novel from the perspective of a kaneez, a female servant in the harem of Jahangir.

From a regal perspective, Babar founded the empire which Humayun just about managed to hold on to until Akbar expanded it to its furthest point through not just conquest but matrimonial alliances with Rajput princes, only to be followed by the debauched Jahangir, the megalomaniacal builder of monuments Shah Jahan, and the bigoted Aurangzeb whose reversal of his great-grandfather’s policies started the decline and fall of a dynasty which, at its peak, was more powerful and affluent than any of its contemporaries anywhere in the world.

Podder is better known for her non-fiction You are What you Eat, where she makes the point that the right kind of food can invigorate, heal, cure, elevate moods, improve memory and make the brain sharper. Her first novel Nur Jahan’s Daughter (on the sensitive Laadli who, says Podder, “is a pawn in the hands of her mother’s ambitious machinations”) takes you back to the medieval past.

Her second novel, Boots Belts Berets, is a fascinating fictionalised account of life in the National Defence Academy in the early 1970s, as seen through the eyes of four cadets, one of whom could even have been her spouse Ajoy. It could be this indirect nodding acquaintanceship with military tactics and strategy which raises Escape from Harem to something more than a historical romance since the Moghul royals kept fighting each other when not taking on the world.

Podder’s protagonist Zeenat, who is forcibly ravished by Emperor Jahangir and made a member of the imperial harem until she escapes and marries a brave soldier, is able to assess the Moghul badshahs with the objectivity of an insider who would have preferred to remain an outsider.

While what ripped the Moghul empire apart was fratricide, the saving grace, as seen through Zeenat’s eyes, was Arjumand, aka Mumtaz Mahal, who did her best to keep the family together until she died while delivering her third and last daughter.

While even a glimpse of the Taj Mahal reminds Zeenat of jannat (paradise), she tells herself after walking past the makeshift houses with crumbling roofs where the construction workers lived, “So this is where the poor people who constructed the most amazing structure in the world lived. She (Mumtaz Mahal) would never have imagined that he (Shah Jahan) could squander the wealth of the great Moghul Empire on a mausoleum for her while people living just a distance from the edifice should live this way (in abject poverty).”

All of which reminds one of the comment made on January 28 by the UP urban development minister, Muhammad Azam Khan, that, “Had people decided to demolish the Taj Mahal instead of the Babri mosque, I would have led them. Shah Jahan had no right to spend crores from the public coffers on his sweetheart”. Khan may have been using the 17th century Taj Mahal to score a point by drawing a parallel with the monuments and statues built by the former UP chief minister Mayawati, when the BSP government was in power.

However, Podder’s book is firmly rooted in the medieval past when Agra was the capital of the Moghul Empire until Shah Jahan relocated to Delhi. Since she is not constrained by the historian’s obsession with facts, Podder lets her imagination soar. Her lyrical prose takes the reader to a different time and place from the beginning of Zeenat’s narrative (“January 1610 Agra: The gnarled hands of winter gripped the capital in their freezing talons. It was one of the coldest years, people said.”) to the end (“Life will not be the same now that I have seen Taj Mahal, she sighed.

It was the end of an era — an era of sublime love that had beaten in the hearts of Arjumand and Khurram. Shah Jahan was now a different person. He was a stranger she didn’t know — transformed from a devoted lover to a man obsessed with structures and women.”). Which is one way of remembering the Moghul emperors even while we walk down memory lane to Humayun’s Tomb, Fatehpur Sikri and the Taj Mahal.

And so, what if in the first sentence of the 12th paragraph of the book’s epilogue, Podder refers to Akbar as Aurangzeb’s great-great-grandfather. Even one ‘great’ too many does not, in any way, detract from Akbar’s greatness or this book’s readability. Did the world’s ultimate monument to love have to be built on the backs of the suffering poor is the question the reader could ask when putting down this book.