Writing Historical Fiction (6): Jason Goodwin

Recently on goodreads.com, I got an opportunity to ask few questions to Jason Goodwin —  the author of The Snake Stone,The Janissary Tree and  The Bellini Card, featuring Investigator Yashim — on writing historical fiction.

  1. Research for historical fiction can be never ending. So do you write the plot first and then add in the minor details later? Does research and writing go in parallel?

    2. …the research can be, could be, endless, so there comes a point when you have read a hundred books, hoovered the floor of the car again, washed up and fixed the leaky tap, looked at some notes, and you just have to get going. Clinging to the fragile hope that this, your story, is true in spirit, if occasionally outrageous in the details. But not, ever, anachronistic.
    A dozen minor details can be cleared up as you go, via the internet – a name, the position of a building, was he alive at this date? etc. Alan Paton, who wrote Cry, the Beloved Country, says he researches each chapter before he writes it, chapter by chapter. My chapters are tiny, usually, so that’s not the way I do it.

  2. How much liberty do you take with history to make the plot interesting? Did you have to make such a choice in any of the Yashim books?

    3. When I started writing The Janissary Tree I vowed to let mystery come before history, but of course it doesn’t come that pat. The Valide, the sultan’s mother, is drawn from Leslie Blanche’s The Wilder Shores of Love, which lays out in detail the old rumour that Mahmut II mother was a French girl from Martinique who sailed to France to finish her education. En route she was taken by Algerian corsairs, and wound up in the sultan’s harem where, by dint of her intelligence, charm and determination, she secured the top spot in the female hierarchy of the Ottoman Empire. Astonishingly, a childhood friend from the remote Carribean island became Napoleon’s Empress Josephine. Some island!
    Is Aimee’s story true, or merely a suggestive and irresistible flicker of a muslin dress across the darker pages of history? Who cares? The Valide, much older and wiser, is one of my favourite characters, and I won’t be doing without her even though, in truth, Mahmut’s mother was certainly dead by 1836, when the novel unfolds.
    Fast and loose? Maybe. But when I wrote the janissary tree I needed a third fire-tower in Istanbul, so with a certain unease I invented one and put it in a specific part of the city. Not long afterwards I happened to be leafing through the pages of an exquisite volume of engravings of Istanbul, made by a French ambassador in the late 18th century – and there was my fire tower. I’d invented it, slap-bang where it had actually stood. (I think I’ve mentioned the Library Angel on another post).

  3. Adding too much historical detail can make the book look like a history book. Adding less will not transport the reader to the 18th century. How do you come up with the right mix of spices? Do you have any guidelines?

    4. Too much, too little – who can tell? I go with the feel of it, and sometimes a reader objects that I’ve overdone the history lesson (never, I think, the other way round). I’m sorry they feel that, but I’m not deeply moved. When I began writing, when I was younger and greener, I cut my teeth on travel narratives, travel books, and the craft of it taught me a lot about using one’s eyes and ears and sense of smell in evoking an unfamiliar scene. The historical novel is travel of another sort, into the past. If a reader doesn’t want the stunning detail which evokes a period, or fixes a place – well. There are other books they can try! So, like a chef, follow your nose and do what you want.

Briefly Noted: Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972)

Aguirre, The Wrath of God (via Wikipedia)Recently four Americans were kidnapped and killed by Somalian pirates off the cost of Oman. Two of them — Jean and Scott Adam– spent the past decade, sailing the oceans offering Bibles and doing missionary work. In 2004, Kim Sun-il, a Korean missionary was beheaded in Iraq. In 2007, 23 Korean missionaries were held hostage by the Taliban in Afghanistan and two killed. In the 16th century too, missionaries made such suicidal trips to hostile places motivated by religious fanaticism and imperialism. Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God tells the tale of one such mission in the Peruvian rain forest in 1560 CE.
The movie starts with a convoy of Spaniards and their slaves snaking their way across the high Andean passes with women on palanquins, a priest, animals, heavy canons, and the Bible. Under the leadership of conquistador Gonzalo Pizarro, they are off to find the mythical El Dorado as well as save some souls. As they go through humid jungles, muddy terrain and reach the Amazon, Pizarro decides that they cannot proceed further. He sends a scouting party on four rafts through the rapids. One raft gets separated and the next day all people on it are found dead, killed by mysterious attackers.
From this point the lunacy starts. The leader Don Pedro de Ursúa decides that they should go back to Pizzaro while the second in command Don Lope de Aguirre disagrees. Aguirre argues that if they move forward, they will discover El Dorado and become rich like Hernán Cortés. The mutiny becomes violent: Ursúa is shot and wounded and a nobleman is chosen as the emperor. Aguirre reads a proclamation that  Don Fernando de Guzman is the emperor of the New World and not Philip II of Spain.
Following this they set off on the raft and rest of the movie happens on this raft. While the crew starves, Emperor Guzman feasts. The movie moves at the leisurely  pace of the Amazon and is disrupted a few times when they see native villages and  find that some of their missing compatriots had been used as food. They move in constant fear of being attacked but do foolish things like letting their horses go. Some enervated Spaniards want to escape from Aguirre and return to Pizzaro. But the crazy leader, who took over after Guzman was killed, would not tolerate any talk of retreat.  One day they see two natives on a boat and the first question the priest has for them is if they have heard of Jesus Christ. Even in the hostile atmosphere where their survival is at stake, their bigger concern is in Christian burial and after life.
The cruise along the river continues and finally, everyone is killed by the natives who fire arrows from the river banks. Undeterred, Aguirre goes forward claiming he is the Wrath of God and will gain untold riches one day.
This movie is considered a classic and is on Time Magazine’s Top 100 movies, but it was quite boring. There are many loose ends in the movie. For example, why is Aguirre such a crazy guy? Did they know he was crazy and still let him be in command? Unlike Ridley Scott’s 1492: Conquest of Paradise there is no back-story to explain his behavior. Another point: Why did “Emperor” Guzman forgive Ursúa after the mock trial which sentenced him to death? Even Aguirre who hoisted Guzman as the emperor looks surprised at this verdict, but does nothing. When Aguirre takes over as the leader one of his first acts is to hang Ursúa. Much later in a disconnected scene Ursúa’s wife walks off into the forest and disappears.
The movie at 100 minutes is not long, but since it is done in an artsy/symbolic way, even the dramatic moments do not seem dramatic. There is a scene when the members of the team are collecting wood and iron. Since Ursúa had not given the order, he is sure that Aguirre is behind it. In a confrontational scene they both stare at each other reminding you of  all those award winning Malayalam movies of the 80s. There is another scene when one of the slaves tells his story — about how he was a prince and was converted by the Spaniards — in an unemotional monotonic narrative as if he is reading from a piece of paper during the script reading session. In approximately 90% of the scenes, there is no emotion in the face of any of the characters.
But the movie makes up for all this by providing by some stunning visuals and it is no surprise that it has influenced film makers like Santosh Sivan. Right from the initial scene of the over the Andes to the raft journey along the Amazon, you experience the grandeur of the landscape. In his review Roger Ebert wrote that  the movie was supposed to provide a feeling and not deliver artificial action. Since the movie is like a documentary, it does not provide much feelings. The only thing that stays with you is Aguirre’s madness.

A 2nd century Jaina in Kerala


(Image via KCHR)
The picture shown above is the broken rim of a pot found at the Muziris Heritage site at Pattanam, Kerala. The words, written in Tamil-Brahmi, read “a ma na” which means a Jaina and attests to the fact that Jainism was present in Kerala in the second century CE.

Mr. Cherian, who is also Director of KCHR, said the discovery “excites me as an excavator because it was for the first time we are getting direct evidence relating to a religious system or faith in Kerala.” The pot might have belonged to a Jaina monk. The broken rim with the script was found at a depth of two metres in trench 29 in the early historical layer which “by our stratigraphic understanding could belong to third-second CE period,” he said. The associated finds included amphora sherds, iron nails, and beads among others.
In a trial trench laid earlier at Pattanam by Professor V. Selvakumar, Assistant Professor, Department of Archaeology and Epigraphy, Tamil University, Thanjavur and K.P. Shajan of KCHR, a pot-sherd with the Tamil-Brahmi letters reading “ur pa ve o” was found. Later, another Tamil-Brahmi script with the letters “ca ta [n]” was found.[Tamil-Brahmi script found at Pattanam in Kerala (H/T Nikhil, Dr. Cheriyan)]

See Also:  An Appeal for Bicycles

Indian History Carnival – 39: Aryan Invasion, Carnatic Music, Victorian Holocausts

  1. After attending a lecture on the latest in Harappan excavations, Koenraad Elst writes that there is still no trace of an Aryan invasion.

    2. So, a very simple question would be: did Cameron Petrie, as a field archaeologist fresh from the recentmost excavation, ever come across actual pieces of evidence for an Aryan invasion. He smiled and agreed that he too had no such sensational discovery to announce. So: as of 2011, after many decades of being the official and much-funded hypothesis, the Aryan Invasion Theory has still not been confirmed by even a single piece of archaeological evidence.

  2. Why is there a Malabar Hill in Mumbai? Maddy explains

    3. The original name of the Malabar hill, point area was Shrigundi. The story is described thus: Shri-Gundi is called Malabar Point after the pirates of Dharmapatan (That is near Tellichery – Curious!), Kotta, and Porka on the Malabar Coast, who, at the beginning of British rule in Bombay, used to lie in wait for the northern fleet in the still water in the sea of the north end of Back Bay. The name Shri-Gundi apparently means the Lucky Stone.

  3. In a two part post (1,2)Sriram writes about the German links to Carnatic Music.

    4. Schwartz became poet, guide, philosopher and friend to Sarabhoji. Among the many subjects he taught the avid prince was an appreciation of Western Classical Music. This led to many new influences in the field of Carnatic music as we shall see later. In order that Sarabhoji did not feel lonely, Schwartz brought in Vedanayagam (1772-1864), then a boy of 12, to be the prince’s companion. Vedanayagam came from a devout Christian family of Tirunelveli. In course of time he became a great scholar and was referred to as Sastriar.

  4. In a long post Natalie Bennet writes reviews  Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World by Mike Davis

    5. In my political science studies I’d encountered the theory that underdevelopment was a process, not a “natural” state of being of certain countries but a degradation inflicted on them by force and geopolitical circumstances, but what Davis does in this book is brings that reality vividly, painfully, awfully to life. But what’s more, he debunks many of the traditional claims of the imperialist apologists – that the crises in India and China were Malthusian in original – the product of uncontrolled human reproduction

  5. In his post Anthropometry and Anglo-Indians, Fëanor writes about the anthropometric studies of  20th century Bengal.

    6. As it happens, not all the anthropological conclusions of that 1925 paper are held valid today. Mahalanobis was correct in his assertion that Bengal Brahmins resemble other Bengal castes more than Brahmins elsewhere in India. However, later datasets have invalidated his claim that only the Brahmins among the people of Bengal have admixtures from the Punjab. ‘Moreover, as far as the Anglo-Indian community is concerned, it is now believed that Mahalanobis had probably confined his study to a sample from the upper stratum of the community, and hence his conclusion of resemblance to upper caste Hindus is applicable to the upper class Anglo-Indians only

If you find interesting blog posts on India history, please send it to varnam.blog @gmail or as a tweet to @varnam_blog. The next carnival will be up on April 15th.

A Home for the Mongoose

Madhusree Mukherjee’s Churchill’s Secret War tells an interesting story which happened in 1943 in Bengal. One night Krishna Chaitanya Mahapatro, a seventeen year old courier for the secret parallel government, reached Tamluk carrying copies of their newspaper. He had to make sure he was not caught by the soldiers who were out to catch the freedom fighters. As he hid behind some trees, a farmer, recognizing who he was invited him to spend the night in his home.
The house was a one room shack. The walls were mud plastered on bamboo and the roof, some leaves. Mahapatro noticed that the farmer was walking around as if something bothered him.

“Whatever the villagers had in the house — some fermented rice, some puffed rice–they would offer. But he was so poor he had nothing.” Kanu asked him not to worry. It was the middle of the night; he should just go to sleep. The farmer went inside, but soon emerged. “Babu, you had nothing. I am feeling bad,” he said wringing his hands. Kanu tried again to reassure him, but to no avail. In a little while the man got a small brass pot out of the hut, washed it in a nearby pond and milked the cow. “Please have at least this,” he offered. “I drank the warm milk, and his love brought tears to my eyes,” Mahapatro said [Churchill’s Secret War]

This incident happened in the midst of the Bengal Famine in which at least 3 million people died. If the famed mongoose had visited this farmer’s house, his body would have turned golden.

Harappan Toys

Archaeologist Elke Rogersdotter, who was investigating the Bronze Age civilization at Harappa, has an interesting observation. Every 10th item found is related to play: dice, gaming pieces etc.

Repetitive patterns have been discerned in the spatial distribution, which may indicate specific locations where games were played.
“The marked quantity of play-related finds and the structured distribution shows that playing was already an important part of people’s everyday lives more than 4,000 years ago,” says Elke.
“The reason that play and game-related artefacts often end up ignored or being reinterpreted at archaeological excavations is probably down to scientific thinking’s incongruity with the irrational phenomenon of games and play,” believes Elke.“The objective of determining the social significance of the actual games therefore, in turn, challenges established ways of thinking. It is an instrument we can use to come up with interpretations that are closer to the individual person. We may gain other, more socially-embedded, approaches for a difficult-to-interpret settlement.”[Play was important – even 4,000 years ago]

The entire Doctoral dissertation is available for download.

Movie Review: 1492: Conquest of Paradise

When Ridley Scott’s 1992 movie on the voyages of Christopher Columbus starts, Columbus(Gérard Depardieu)  is seen pitching his idea of a voyage to the Indies to the people of University of Salamanca. Marco Polo had traveled to and written about the gold and spices of the East. By trading and conquering the East, Columbus argues, that Spain can be an empire. But his logic of sailing West — because the land trade is controlled by the Arabs and the voyage around Africa takes too long — does not find supporters. They doubt his calculations and think he is a spoony dreamer. Also, what Columbus did not know at that time was that the Americas lay in the path between Spain and the East.
Someone asks him to meet Queen Isabella (Sigourney Weaver) and he succeeds in creating a favorable impression in her mind. To her suggestion that his voyage is an impossible one, he retorts if she thought Granada would ever fall. Isabella and her husband Ferdinand had just conquered the last Muslim stronghold on the Iberian peninsula. Impressed, she overrides the concerns of her advisors and remarks that it would be quite a loss if Columbus decided to be a monk.
In the next scene, we see sailors saying farewell to their families and boarding the Santa María, Pinta and Niña. The Spain Columbus was leaving was mired with religious wars and superstition; there is a brutal scene where he witnesses Christians burning witches to death. Economically, Europe was not a major power and had nothing valuable to contribute to Asia. A few years later when Vasco da Gama reached Calicut and displayed the gifts he had bought, my ancestors in Kerala laughed.
In all, Columbus made four voyages to the New World and the movie spends time on the first three. In the first voyage, he reached Bahamas and claimed it for Spain. From there he went to Hispaniola and after leaving some people there, he returned to Spain as a hero, taking with him some of the indigenous people. As he is about to leave Hispaniola, Columbus tells the local chief that he would come back with more people. When asked why he would be back, Columbus explains, “to bring the word of God.” “But I already have a God”, the chief replies. Columbus, then says, he will bring medicines and chief replies that he has enough medicines too. This conversation continues in Spain when a curious Ferdinand asks Columbus about the God of the natives.
In the colony, the relationship between the colonizers and the indigenous people proceed like any such relation. The Spaniards had arrived expecting gold and other riches, but were shocked to find neither. So they made the indigenous people, who lived freely so far, to scavenge for gold. In one incident, when a man turns shows up without any gold, one of Columbus’ crew members chops off his arm. On hearing about this, Columbus imprisons him, but this forces a split in the camp. Soon every one is at each other’s throat. Columbus goes on a rampage — like the British in 1857 — and kills the natives as well as his mutinous compatriots.
He is unflinching in his goal: He wants to build a New World, he tells a priest who is sickened by his cruelty and wants to leave. But his New World does not last. In one storm, everything is destroyed. Complaints against him cause the Ferdinand and Isabella to send a replacement. Columbus is jailed and the credit for discovering the mainland goes to another Italian – Amerigo Vespucci. He is eventually pardoned and sent on a voyage by Isabella.
Columbus’s life was very eventful and this movie does not capture the entire drama. For example, initially, he spent quite some time wandering in various countries trying to get funding for his voyage. Towards the end, his fourth voyage turned out to be a disaster. He got caught in various storms and hurricanes and got stranded for a year. But if these were included, the movie would have been extended by a few days.
When it comes to such movies, you also have to pay attention to what is not said. Isabella was not being magnanimous by partially financing Columbus’ first voyage. She had no other option. The wars against the Moors had bankrupt the empire and they had to find new lands to plunder. In the movie, Isabella comes across as this wise motherly figure which she was not. One important event, which happened few months before Columbus’ voyage and not shown in the movie is Isabella’s expulsion of Jews from Spain by the Alhambra Decree and the forced conversion of the Muslims of Granada.
Even the portrayal of Columbus is not without issue. The movie is quite sympathetic to him and his spirit of adventure. To counter Columbus, a troubled soul by the name of Moxica is introduced. Moxica is the one who tortures the indigenous people and is greedy while Columbus acts like a statesman. What is missing is a critical look of the influence of the Papal Bull of 1493 on later voyages and what effect the Conquistadors had on these people. The movie ends with Columbus narrating the voyage of his tales to his son to redeem his name. That scene should have been interspersed with what happened to the indigenous people.

Indian History Carnival – 38: Yoga, Hindu Colony in Armenia, Brahmi

  1. If you have not been following the debate on the origins of Hatha Yoga, you can start by reading this and then this. Now kupamanduka looks at the arguments of Dr. Elst, Sarvesh Tiwari and Meera Nanda.

    2. Before I conclude this section, a word of complaint about historians’ tendencies to attribute ideas that were/are current in India. They make something out of the lack of Hatha Yoga texts dated to before the fourteenth century. Let us keep aside the dating issues for this post. Did it ever occur to them that a similar lack of reference should weaken the case of the Chinese origin theory as well? One should always also take into account that Indians have done a very terrible job of recording their practices and keeping the records alive. Also we should try to acknowledge that some authorship claims can just not be settled, instead of building one conspiracy theory on top of another.

  2. When she read that it was Asoka’s inscriptions that introduced writing in the Indian sub-continent, Arundhathi decided to investigate.

    3. In the Northwest, the inscriptions are in Kharoshthi, Aramaic and Greek. In other parts of his empire, the inscriptions are in Brahmi. Now why would different scripts be used in different parts of the country? Most probably because these scripts were already in use in those regions. If Ashoka was introducing a script for the first time in most of India, why not simply repurpose one of the preexisting scripts such as Kharoshthi instead of going to all the effort of inventing a new one? After all, for people learning a new script, why would it matter whether it was an existing script used elsewhere or a completely new one invented for this very purpose?

  3. Maddy looks at the  Hindu colony in ancient Armenia

    4. But it was not to last, for St.Gregory the Illuminator arrived with his troops, and had the many famous temples of Gisaneh and Demeter razed to the ground, the images broken to pieces whilst the Hindu priests who offered resistance were murdered on the spot, as faithfully chronicled by Zenob who was an eye-witness of the destruction of the Hindu temples and the gods. The Christians believed that the temple of Kissaneh was the “Gate of Hell and Sandaramet, the seat of a multitude of demons. On the site of these two temples at Taron, St.Gregory had a monastery erected where he deposited the relics of St John the Baptist and Athanagineh the martyr which he had brought with him from Ceaseria, and that sacred edifice, which was erected in the year 301 A.D., exists to this day and is known as St.Carapet of Moosh (Mus).

  4. S.D., at the Economist blog, writes about the loan words from Farsi, Arabic and Turkish in Hindi and Urdu

    5. It happens the other way around too. I was once with a Palestinian friend who had recently arrived in Delhi. At one point, in the middle of a characteristically heated exchange with an auto-rickshaw driver over the condition of his meter, she turned to me and said “Is he speaking Arabic half the time? I feel like I understand every fifth word.”

  5. Sunil Deepak has a post on the works of Acharya Chatur Sen (1891-1960)

    6. I have read two of his works related to ancient India –
    (a) Vaishali ki Nagarvadhu (वैशाली की नगरवधु, The courtesan of Vaishali, first published in 1949 by J. S. Sant Singh and Sons Delhi for Hindi Vishwabharati) about a courtesan called Ambapali during the time of Gautama Buddha, a few centuries before Jesus.
    (b) Vayam Rakshamah (वयं रक्षामः, We are Raksha, first published in 1955; from the edition published by Rajpal and Sons, Delhi 2009) about Raavan, the mythological king from Ramayana.

If you find interesting blog posts on India history, please send it to varnam.blog @gmail or as a tweet to @varnam_blog. The next carnival will be up on March 15th.

Indian Army after 1857

In his post, Punjabis in the Indian Army, Fëanor writes about the composition of the Indian army in the 1870s. He notes that there were more Punjabi Muslims and Sikhs in the army compared to others.

Because most fighting by Indian troops from the mid-nineteenth century onwards was in north-west India, it was thought that troops recruited from amongst the local Kshatriya castes were best suited in those military spheres; further, recruits from the local peasantry were thought to be more impressionable and more easily commanded than the Bengalis and Tamils in the erstwhile Indian armies – higher caste folks with far too many opinions on the ways and means of the world than were good for them.

Between 1881 and 1893, the proportion of these martial races went up from 25% to 50% of the entire Indian infantry.[Punjabis in the Indian Army]

Madhusree Mukherjee’s Churchill’s Secret War mentions this change in demographics of the recruits to the army and offers a different explanation. Following the Anglo-Indian war of 1857, Queen Victoria took direct control of the colony after dismissing the East India Company and military strategists had to think of ways to prevent incidents like 1857 from happening again. So the native portion of the Army was filled with “martial races” — Sikhs, Muslims or Rajputs — from the regions that had not gone to war in 1857.  Also recognizing the unity among various religious groups in attacking the English, they were segregated so that a Sikh regiment would fire into a Hindu regiment or vice-versa without any qualms.

When some groups are named “martial races”, the implication is that the others are not. What about the Native Infantries from Eastern and Central India that rebelled and quickly liberated various towns and cities in 1857? What about their leaders who planned the war, conducted internal and external reconnaissance, and recruited soldiers? Were they not “martial” enough?

The Missing Tibetans of New Nalanda

Under the leadership of Amarta Sen, there is an effort to revive the Nalanda University which was destroyed by Bakhtiyar Khilji in 1193. Recently at the Indian Science Congress at Chennai, he gave a lecture on the significance of Nalanda. Anirban Ganguly of Vivekananda International Foundation explains the problems with this effort (H/T Michel Danino). The most important one: the Tibetans are left out.

Why, for example, does the Mentors Group of the proposed university comprising of public intellectuals, scientists, academics and bureaucrats not have a single representation from the Tibetan community. A glaring omission considering the historic-religious link that Tibetan Buddhism and Nalanda had and the fact that successive Tibetan monarchs in history, had through their munificence, hosted and established in Tibet a number of masters from the Nalanda Mahavihara. It was, in fact, through the efforts of these teachers from Nalanda that the ‘Golden Age of Tibet’ was inaugurated.[Recreating Nalanda – Is the Deeper Raison d’être Missing? ]

The answer probably lies here:China announces donation for Nalanda University
When asked, why the Dalai Lama was not involved with the effort, Dr. Sen gave the laughable reply that as a religious leader he was not suited for religious studies. This reply..

… speaks volumes of the group’s ‘understanding’ of the essence of religious studies and practice within the Indic paradigm. Being religiously active was an essential pre-requisite for the study of religion in the Eastern context. The religion and philosophy of India was the ‘Science of the Self’ (Adhyātma-vidyā)7 and it was only through an assiduous study of this vidyā (Science) that one could begin to practice it. In the ancient Indian scheme of things, at least when the older Nalanda was in its full bloom, the dichotomy between being religiously active and studying religion did never really exist.[Recreating Nalanda – Is the Deeper Raison d’être Missing?]