The Twentieth Wife (59 page)

She was weak, rabidly hungry, shaking from a want of water and food. Shuja took the armlet himself to Fakir Azizuddin, who waited at the northernmost end of the middle terrace, his face turned away from Wafa Begam. Shuja’s steps were halting, dragged on the ground.

Azizuddin examined the armlet and the enormous stone in the center, which caught fire in the light from the sun and shed its lovely glow over his dark face.

“Thank you, your Majesty,” he said.

Within the hour, servants had brought in covered dishes wrapped in red satin cloth and laid them out on a carpet in the Aiwan pavilion. Shuja, Wafa, and Ibrahim ate everything in sight, drank cups of wine, and fell onto the carpets sated and full.

The next day, they found all the entrances to the Shalimar thrown wide open, no guards around, the heated air from the plains rolling in. Freedom, Shah Shuja thought, as he watched the Englishman, Mountstuart Elphinstone, ride his horse into the lower terrace and bow his head. More horses were brought in; they jumped into the saddles and rode away south toward the Sutlej River. When they had crossed the river and entered the lands of British India, they were guided to a splendid
haveli
in Ludhiana.

The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for discussion for Indu Sundaresan’s
The Twentieth Wife
. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

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A CONVERSATION WITH INDU SUNDARESAN

1. How did you discover the story of Mehrunnisa?

Mehrunnisa, better known as Empress Nur Jahan, is quite a well-recognized figure in Indian history, though the references to her when I was in school were brief and uninteresting, merely along the lines of “she was the wife of Emperor Jahangir.” She is mostly celebrated in ballad, poetry, and Bollywood movies, for the romantic aspect of her life, with little mention of her enormous power and wealth.

I chanced upon Mehrunnisa’s story again one winter evening in Delaware, where I was working toward a graduate degree in Economics and Operations Research. My family was in India; I was homesick for them, so I rode the bus to the university library and typed out the word “India” under the subject keyword. I came home with a huge armload full of books on history, travel—anything that
would satisfy my craving for home—and among these was one on Mughal harems and Mehrunnisa.

I was fascinated by her extraordinary life, the ships she owned, the influence she had over Jahangir and consequently the empire, the amount she interfered in court and
zenana
politics. And she did all of this four hundred years ago, living in a time when women were not meant to be seen, because of the veil, and very little heard.

So after I decided to become a novelist, and after I had written two other “practice run” novels, this was the story I wanted to tell.

2. How did you go about researching and re-creating seventeenth-century India?

Despite having been an indifferent student of history, I was already familiar, through travel, visits to museums, and stories from my childhood, with the architecture and clothing of Mughal India. So when I was ready to research
The Twentieth Wife,
I was looking most for details on everyday life and the politics at court.

These I found in memoirs and travelers’ tales in the two local library systems in the Seattle area, both of which are rich with English translations of original Persian, Portuguese, and Dutch manuscripts. I read for many months, took copious notes, and immersed myself in the style and language of the period.

When I was ready to write, it was winter again, cold, dark, and raining outside, so I used physical tools to set the mood. I lit incense sticks, cranked up the thermostat in the house to a sweltering 85 degrees, drank cups of
chai
spiced with ginger. More important, I switched off all electronic toys that beeped or rang or chirped—anything that would pull me out of seventeenth-century India.

3. Why did you choose to portray Mehrunnisa as a sympathetic character as opposed to a “mean-spirited and ruthless” woman?

Most of the accounts of Mehrunnisa’s personality swing from one extreme to another, depending on when they were written. If during Emperor Jahangir’s reign, they tend to be flattering and obsequious, because she was empress then. If written during Emperor Shah Jahan’s reign (he was Jahangir’s son), Mehrunnisa is portrayed as mean-spirited and ruthless. This last was because Mehrunnisa fought very hard to keep Shah Jahan from the throne, so neither he nor his court historians were inclined to be sympathetic toward her.

I tried to find the woman between these two extremes, and I think that in the early half of her life, before Mehrunnisa married Emperor Jahangir (the story told in
The Twentieth Wife
), she had little control over her life, and no wealth to exercise that control.

She
must,
though, have possessed some slyness and cunning to have risen so swiftly to power in the imperial
zenana
and at court, and Mehrunnisa shows this through flashes of obstinacy, stubbornness, and thoughtfulness in
The Twentieth Wife
. Her cunning and ruthlessness find full expression when Mehrunnisa becomes empress of Mughal India in the sequel titled
The Feast of Roses
(Atria Books, May 2003).

At the other extreme, I do believe that Mehrunnisa also possessed
some
charm that went beyond her physical beauty, else Jahangir, who had over three hundred women in his harem, would not have been attracted to her.

4. Emperor Jahangir had an interesting fascination with tigers. Why is this? What do tigers represent?

Jahangir was fascinated with all aspects of the natural world around him. In his memoirs, he writes with an unfailing curiosity and an eye for detail. Jahangir mentions the unusual incident of the first tigress in captivity giving birth to three cubs, and of tigers being so tame in his private menagerie that they would walk about freely and unchained among humans.

He was also an avid hunter and describes his hunts in great detail, like the number of shots it took to down a lion or a tiger or a crocodile. And he could be contrastingly gentle, too, recording an instance when he worried whether the imperial elephants were comfortable in winter while bathing in cold water. (He ordered their water to be heated to lukewarm and thought that the elephants “were delighted” with this!)

5. Tell us about your writing process and how you brought these characters to life on the page—their lives and motivations.

For
The Twentieth Wife
and
The Feast of Roses,
both novels on a somewhat epic scale with the strong historical context and larger-than-life figures to begin with, I considered the research to be paramount.

Looking for actual details on Mehrunnisa’s daily life proved to be a somewhat harder task, because she was a woman living in an age when women were consequential only for their physical appearance and their ability to bear children. So when I found gaps in her life where no records existed, I went searching for particulars on the men in her life—her father, if she was unmarried, her first husband, if she was married. I followed their stories, tried to guess what she would have been doing and how these men’s actions would have influenced her life and her decisions.

One point in case: I wondered what her hobbies were; there is, of course, no documentation on that. In reading Sir Thomas Roe’s memoirs (the first ambassador from England to the court of Emperor Jahangir, who had vast dealings with Mehrunnisa), I discovered a small mention of when her father goes to Roe with muskmelons as a gift and says that she grew them herself. That seemingly trivial gift was a sign of imperial favor from Mehrunnisa to Roe, which is why he refers to it, but reading between the lines, I saw how Mehrunnisa spent her free time. This formed the basis for the scene in
The
Twentieth Wife
where Mehrunnisa is digging around the melon patch in the imperial
zenana’s
gardens!

6. Why do you think Ruqayya took such a liking to Mehrunnisa? What were Ruqayya’s motives for making her such an important part of her entourage?

Historical sources state that Mehrunnisa became Ruqayya’s lady-in-waiting around 1607, when she traveled back to Agra as a widow after Ali Quli’s death. Over the next few years, until Ruqayya’s death, Mehrunnisa and she remained very close, with Ruqayya playing a nurturing and mothering role in Mehrunnisa’s life.

I chose to expand their relationship back a few more years, when Mehrunnisa was eight, and Ruqayya chanced upon her at Jahangir’s first marriage and brought her into the imperial harem as a constant visitor. I also chose to believe that Jahangir and Mehrunnisa’s courtship spanned seventeen years, beginning when she was seventeen and betrothed to Ali Quli (see the Afterword). If this second instance is true, then the first must be, too, since both relationships were enormously significant to Mehrunnisa and could only have been fostered over a length of many years.

Ruqayya saw in Mehrunnisa an enchanting and unquestioning child, a protégée she could rear in her own likeness, since she had no children herself. Ruqayya was an unusual woman, able to maintain her position as Padshah Begam in Akbar’s
zenana
, despite bearing no heirs.

In the end, Mehrunnisa and Ruqayya were both extraordinary women (which could have well posed a struggle between them) but they were of different generations, had common enemies within the
zenana
, and a friendship that began before any discord could arise.

7. Mehrunnisa spent her life making sure that her actions never brought shame to her family. Why do you think that
the men surrounding her—her father, her husband, and her brother—all betrayed the Emperor?

This is an interesting question. Mehrunnisa is not the twenty-first-century ideal of an emancipated woman, though she certainly caused some trouble in her times. Given her limitations, she pushed the boundaries of expected roles women were supposed to play, yet she did not step beyond them. I found little credible documentation that she ever took off the veil or revealed her face to men not connected to her family.

Strictures governed the actions of the men, too—in Mughal India, the Emperor was sovereign; he had absolute control over the livings and even lives of the millions in the empire. Jahangir
was
the empire. Yet Mehrunnisa’s father gave in to his weakness for greed, her brother plotted Jahangir’s assassination, and her husband rebelled against the idea of being safely tucked away in Bengal, away from the imperial court.

I can only imagine, given Mehrunnisa’s enormous influence in her later years, that she was a woman who exercised more self-control and thought than the men, because, being a woman and a girl child, she was
taught
this. She realized her restrictions and sought to work around them rather than attempt to destroy them.

8. What types of traditions described in
The Twentieth Wife
are still practiced today?

There exists a strong sense of familial loyalty and societal responsibility in
The Twentieth Wife,
both of which still find expression in Indian society today. When Mehrunnisa decides to marry Ali Quli, even though her inclinations lie with Jahangir, she acts from a sense of obligation to the pledge her father made to her first husband.

Even Jahangir as a prince is swamped with guilt at his rebellion against his father. He has little restraint over his actions then, is easily mislead into ideas of grandeur and of his own importance, and is restive and hungry for a crown that already belongs to him—all of
which shatter the love and respect between Jahangir and his father. Despite this, both Akbar and he try over and again to reconcile, bowing to the unsaid tradition that family comes before all else, even the empire.