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The Age of Shiva
Sources and Further Reading
The most time-consuming research for this novel went toward getting the history right. I will confess that even though my mother used to teach high school history in Bombay, it was my least favorite subject (she also taught English, which of course I enjoyed). The problem was that we had to cram facts, and more facts, and nothing else. In grades 8 and 9, all we seemed to do was memorize everything about the architectural monuments in India - who built them, why, when, where, with what distinguishing features. I remember the board exam had photos of two temples printed on the test paper, and we had to not only identify them (out of the thousands of temples in India) but also be able to regurgitate dates, ruling dynasties, and artistic styles as well. And something truly shocking: for my batch, the curriculum only dealt with Indian history - there was no component on world events (trifling episodes like the two World Wars included). In contrast, the literature curriculum was Eurocentric enough to include not one but two plays by Shakespeare, with only a stray short story or two by Indian authors.
Reading for this novel has been an amazing experience. For the first time, I realized how fascinating history can be when one analyzes motives and interprets movements and events, rather than just commits facts to memory. There is a wealth of books on the Partition and the history of independent India, some of which I have listed below. In addition, one of the most engaging components of the research was simply to read through old newspapers to absorb the mood of the country during the various decades covered in the book. Over the course of many visits to Mumbai (and to the microfilm library of the Times of India in particular) through the years, I found out what people thought and did (even what they ate) during those times. One of the treats was to read the first edition of the Times of India ever printed (called the Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce then), preserved from November 3, 1838.
The danger of collecting a lot of compelling historical material is that one is tempted to load it all onto the narrative. It took me quite a bit of trial and error to decide on what to include and what to leave on the editing floor. My aim was to keep the focus always on Meera’s story, with history only a supporting character that remained in the background. The hope was that some readers would find India’s story intriguing enough to learn more - for them, I have indicated which of the references below might prove particularly appealing.
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India after Independence 1947-2000 by Bipan Chandra, Mridula Mukherjee, and Aditya Mukherjee (India: Penguin Books, 2000)
Wonderfully rich and deeply analytical, this is an absorbing account of the founding and evolution of the country. The authors have included personal assessments of key figures such as Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, and do an excellent job in bringing out the drama of major post-independence events. I used this as my primary historical reference book, but it is also a great read for those looking for a book on post-independent India. The more recent India after Gandhi by Ramachandra Guha (New York: Ecco, 2007), which came too late for me to use as a reference, is another fascinating account, even more comprehensive, which I also highly recommend to readers.
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Origins of War in South Asia: Indo-Pakistani Conflicts since 1947 by Sumit Ganguly (Boulder, Colo. And London: Westview Books,1986)
Detailed analysis of the wars with Pakistan - a fine reference book (originally the author’s PhD dissertation) for all sorts of fascinating facts that I put in my novel - many of which I later edited out, for reasons of pacing. The long quote by Nehru near the end of Part II of my novel, showing his disdain for religion, is given on page 25 of this book.
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Indira: The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi by Katherine Frank (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002)
A page-turner of a biography, not only of Indira but also of India itself. It helped me understand the complex relationships which existed between Indira and her larger-than-life father Nehru; her estranged husband Feroze, who died in his forties; and her son Sanjay, who held her completely in his thrall. Reading Frank’s book again recently, I couldn’t help but notice the parallels with the men in Meera’s life (some of these parallels are fleetingly mentioned in my novel). A related biography, Nehru: The Invention of India by Shashi Tharoor (New York: Arcade, 2003), contains an excellent summary chapter assessing Nehru’s strengths and weaknesses.
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Jinnah of Pakistan by Stanley Wolpert (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984)
In addition to being a riveting look into the psyche of the man responsible for the creation of Pakistan, this turned out to be a good source of information on the Partition, as did the popular account Freedom at Midnight by Collins and Lapierre (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975).
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Punjabi Century by Prakash Tandon (London: Chatto and Windus,1963)
A delightful account of various bridal, dowry, and other cultural traditions practiced by Punjabi families in the first half of the twentieth century, which proved quite helpful in writing Part I of the novel.
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Elephanta: The Cave of Shiva by Carmel Berkson (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers,1999)
Although I have been to the Elephanta Caves on the island near Mumbai many times, it was helpful to have the diagrams and picture plates in this book to map the scene that takes place there. The essays on the style, architecture, and Shiva mythology represented in the caves were also very informative. As in the case of The Death of Vishnu, I found a wealth of mythological information in the books by Devdutt Pattanaik on Shiva in Shiva: An Introduction (Mumbai: Vakils, Feffer and Simons,1997) and on Parvati in Devi: The Mother Goddess, An Introduction (Mumbai: Vakils, Feffer and Simons, 2000). Other useful mythological references include Siva in Art, Literature and Thought by Shanti Lal Nagar (New Delhi: Indus Publishing Company, 1994) and The Presence of Siva by Stella Kramrisch (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988). Finally, two great sources, separated in time by a millennia or two - the ancient Hindu texts called the Puranas, and the modern repository of information called the Internet.
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The Colors of Violence by Sudhir Kakar (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996)
Kakar is an engaging author, and this deeply insightful academic work brings out the various cultural, religious, and socioeconomic factors that play such major roles in communal violence in India. Another reference text that proved quite useful on this topic was Communal Riots in post-independence India, edited by Asghar Ali Engineer (India: Sangam Books, 1984). Some of the long-standing tensions constantly simmering beneath the surface (of Bombay in particular) are brought out very well in more popular works like India: A Million Mutinies Now by V. S. Naipaul (New York: Viking, 1991) and Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta (New York: Knopf, 2004).
On a related topic, while the HRM group mentioned in my novel is fictional, I read several books to better understand the political evolution of Hindu organizations and ideas since independence. Two that I will mention here are Hindutva: Exploring the Idea of Hindu Nationalism by Jyotirmaya Sharma (New Delhi: Penguin, 2003) and The Saffron Wave by Thomas Blom Hansen (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999). (The comprehensive history books mentioned in item 1 above also provide good accounts.) Several organizations maintain their own Web sites, which I found quite useful in understanding their self-image.
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Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution by Adrienne Rich (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976)
Although I consulted several works, including this classic feminist text, to find out more about the underlying eroticism in the son-mother relationship, there was almost nothing I found that explored this topic from the point of view of the mother (the standard focal point being the son, as in Freud’s work on the Oedipus complex). On a related topic, the book Fear and Envy by Rita Ransohoff (New York: Painted Leaf Press, 2001), which was pointed out to me only after my novel was complete, addresses the closeness that exists between mothers and sons in India, a bond much more intense than in Western societies. |
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