All Hail Shakespeare

Shakespeare recently celebrated his 400th birthday, or rather the world celebrated him.  My article on Shakespeare in Navhind Times.

Astounding Human Stories!

Stephen Hawking, the brilliant cosmologist has intrigued the human world with groundbreaking theories on black holes and origin of the universe. What makes his life story extremely riveting is the pulsating life force inside a body severely affected by ALS for decades, churning out astronomical details and a family life with children and grandchildren. I was completely bowled over when I read his engagingly written biography by Kristine Larsen (a physicist and astronomer herself) a few years back. Larsen presents a candid and insightful portrait of Hawking’s personal and professional life in her book.  And then this week, I watched the film The Theory About Everything at the ongoing International Film Festival at INOX, Panjim. It is directed by James Marsh with spectacularly convincing performance by Eddie Redmayne  as Stephen Hawking and Felicity Jones in the role of his wife and love, Jane Hawking.  

The film is inspired by the memoir Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen by Jane Hawking. The writer comes across as an utterly committed,  passionate and determined homemaker, a rock behind the life and success of Hawking, the great physicist. A Ph.D. in Spanish Poetry, she writes candidly and sensitively about her 25 years of married life with Stephen Hawking. She evocatively paints the paradoxical picture of her ex- husband’s scientific breakthroughs, his rise to stardom and deterioration of his motor muscular activity affecting his physical abilities. The interwoven threads of a warm family life of fun and activity with three children, against the great odds of a chronically disabled father, add poignancy to the dramatic detailing. The lucid ramifications of the intricate black hole theory, and the ongoing synthesis of theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, provide clarity to a lay reader.

When books are adapted into films, the visual gives a concrete form to the print word but sometimes catapults it into a nameless abyss to the despair of a reader. Diehard fans of books may want to murder me, but I would say that particularly in this case, the movie does justice to the book. It is indeed astonishing to view their life together along with Hawking’s contribution to humanity. The camera is the storyteller as it stays and strays from Jane’s facial expressions and lived experience. Yet the man himself – Stephen’s mind mechanisms remain mysterious. Speaking through a voice box attached to a computer, bound helplessly to a wheelchair, he holds eminent personalities glued to their chairs with his enunciations on cosmology and quantum physics. The progressive deterioration of the body is contrasted with a spark in his eyes and wit and humor in his speech and thought. Its as if an incandescent effervescence holds him together. The dichotomy of fame and disease pervades each frame, a GREAT LESSON IN THE GREAT POWER OF LIFE FORCE WHICH HAS SUPERSEDED AND DEFIED ALL LOGIC AND SCIENCE. It makes one believe in a divine presence, though Hawking never puts it into so many clear words of faith or GOD.

If you missed seeing the movie, read the books , they are easily accessible through Flipkart or Amazon.

Ram Dass, Fierce Grace was another film at IFFI based on books by Richard Alpert. A Professor of psychology at Harvard, he is known for his experiments with LSD-25 in the 1960s  alongwith Timothy Leary and their book The Psychedelic Experience. The viewer is charmed by his sojourn to India, and complete absorption into the Eastern philosophy of karma and salvation, and his relationship with the Guru, Neem Karoli Baba, who gave him the name Ram Dass, servant of God. His study with Baba helped him evolve on a spiritual path. He surmises, “From a Hindu perspective, you are born as what you need to deal with, and if you just try and push it away, whatever it is, it's got you. I help people as a way to work on myself, and I work on myself to help people ... to me, that's what the emerging game is all about." What enthralled him most was not the fact that Baba had immense love in his heart for humanity – but in Baba’s presence, he seemed to be enveloped in love and felt love for everyone around him.  

Heir to a wealthy Jewish family estate, he accommodated people from all walks of life on his father’s sprawling golf lawns, swaying to the strains of Hare-Rama Hare Krishna. In 2013, Ram Dass released a memoir and summary of his teaching, Polishing the Mirror: How to Live from Your Spiritual Heart. All of 83 now, he feels blessed and purged of every doubt, fear and belief.  He said, "Now, I’m in my 80s ... Now, I am aging. I am approaching death. I’m getting closer to the end. ... Now, I really am ready to face the music all around me."

After a stroke in the last decade, which he perceived as a grace of God, he concluded that the hidden human qualities that had emerged in its aftermath in him would not have otherwise.  As such, each human soul has to go on, on a path of inclusiveness, accepting each experience with humble faith. He preaches on webcasts and founded the SEVA and Hanuman foundations of service to the poor and needy.

The viewer is astounded, watching his life’s trajectory - born just after the jazz age, into money and great academic excellence, indulging in drugs and psychedelic experiments to karmic Hindu philosophy, a long road to map. Been there, done that – and then to morph into a spiritual life, it is indeed intriguing to read and watch. What do we take from here?

Still a couple of days here at IFFI – we are all assimilating, reflecting, engaging ourselves.....

Kudos to World Cinema intertwined with Literature at our doorstep! Enjoy!

Shakespeare's Shylock

Shakespeare’s Shylock

We have all read Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare in school with great censure for Shylock, who was greedy, cruel and mean. He deserved to lose his dignity, wealth and religion at the end of the trial. Justice prevails and the devil always meets a gory end. A stereotype propounded and etched in the minds of children, who grew to relate to Jews with mistrust. A play used by Nazis to stoke anti-Semitic feelings during the holocaust. Shylocks or loan sharks entered the lexicon and terms like ‘pound of flesh’ became common when someone demanded onerous returns. Is Merchant of Venice a play about anti-Semitism? A moralistic play about good and evil, mercy and justice, love and greed became a major controversial work of Shakespeare with the turn of the 20^th century.

Shakespeare had good business sense and he wrote the play in the aftermath of the execution and public hanging of Roderigo Lopeza, a converted Portuguese Jew. The latter was the official physician of the Queen. In 1594, he was convicted of plotting to poison Queen Elizabeth I and was executed as a traitor. The Lopeza trial and execution inspired the revival of playwright Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, in which the play's title character is a Jew named Barabas, a greedy, cunning and murderous stereotype. It fanned frenzy against the Jews, though at the time only about 200 Jews lived in England, after they had been banished in 1290 under the Edict of Expulsion. Horrifying legends and gory stereotypical stories, about the absent English Jew became rampant; poisoning Christian children, using blood of murdered humans for passover rituals.......When Lord Chamberlain’s Men staged Merchant of Venice, it was a delightful success. The existing atmosphere of hatred for Jews gave the audience more fodder for glee and Shylock was perceived with added hatred and revulsion. The blinkers of vengeance made the masses completely miss the point of a more complex, sympathetic and whole Shylock.  

The tradition of playing Shylock sympathetically began in the first half of the 19th century with Edmund Kean, the famous English actor of his times. It established him as an actor. His portrayal of Shylock completely turned the tables on previous enactments by repulsive clowns or monsters of unrelieved evil. Henry Irving’s act of a proud aristocratic Jew in 1879 was hailed the ‘summit of his career.’ He was followed by Jacob Adler in the early 20^th century, who played the role in Yiddish in an otherwise English production. The new perspective morphed him into a proud man whose self-respect is maligned and destroyed by the so-called men of God. His actions of revenge ensue from pride and he demands justice for a blow to his individuality, profession and religion. The guardians of law – Portia, Antonio, Bassanio, make a mockery of justice and facilitate the passing of a harsh sentence, contrary to their qualities of goodness, love and justice. The final act bares hypocrisy of the so-called good and lends authenticity to the image of Shylock who walks out of court with his head held high -"would he not walk out of that courtroom head erect, the very apotheosis of defiant hatred and scorn?”

Henrik Eger writes- “Some theatres have gone where most directors dare not tread, including the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, by presenting a bare-chested Antonio with the knife of Shylock on his chest. However, few companies like the Quintessence Theatre Group have come as close to the Rembrandt-like scene with Antonio flat on his back, almost a corpse—all in the presence of the entire Venetian court, with Shylock approaching like Dr. Tulp, holding a huge knife in his hands, ready to cut out the promised pound of flesh. This naked determination for physical justice, against the background of years of having been bullied, maligned, and treated like a criminal, is a scene so direct that it is painful to watch.  Benim Foster (Shylock), originally a Jew on being interviewed said-“The play has always been a mystery to me. Something I feared. I avoided it, believing that it would just upset me too much, being Jewish. I also struggled with the thought of Shakespeare, himself, being an Anti-Semite. However, I have come to believe that he was just the opposite. He gives Shylock so much depth, so much humanity, love, pain, beauty and grief, plus his anger, stubbornness, and impatience that he shows us Shylock as human.”

Contemporary adaptations and films continue the trend of giving multiple voices to characters in the play. In the 2004 film adaptation starring Al Pacino as Shylock, the film begins with text and a montage of how the Jewish community is abused by the Christian population of the city. One of the last shots of the film also brings attention to the fact that, as a convert, Shylock would have been cast out of the Jewish community in Venice, no longer allowed to live in the ghetto and would still not be accepted by the Christians, as they would feel that Shylock was yet the Jew he once was.

‘Andrew Dickson, writing in his The Rough Guide to Shakespeare, found that audiences can view The Merchant of Venice from two different perspectives: Antonio's and Shylock's. Both sides of the story are there in this brilliant and troubling play and it's easy to feel that they're irreconcilable. “But,” Dickson continues, ''it is impossible to sit on the fence when watching The Merchant, and the issues it raises about religious intolerance and conflict seem more pressing now than ever before.'' Norrie Epstein, writing in the book The Friendly Shakespeare, calls The Merchant of Venice a troubling play, for the same reason that other critics have come to this conclusion. It is difficult to say, after you have seen it, if it is ''a tragedy or a comedy, a love story or a tale of hate.'' Epstein's conclusion, however, is that in the end, ''in its infinite ambiguity, it is quintessential Shakespeare. No sooner have you reached one conclusion about the play than it's immediately contradicted in the next scene--or line.'' Despite the fact that Shakespeare's audiences in Elizabethan times enjoyed coming to the theatre and ridiculing stock, stereotypical Jewish characters, as was a routine at that time, Epstein states that ''yet embedded within this caricature there's a real human being [in Shylock's character], and every so often Shakespeare lets him out.'' Shylock shows sadness, and he respects his own culture, Epstein writes. And he displays many other emotions in this play. ''He's like a survivor of the Great Depression who grows up valuing money more than love.'' Shakespeare's talent is demonstrated in that he is able to go beyond his ''age's prejudices'' and present ''the world from the alien's perspective.''

Thus, Merchant of Venice cannot be taught in classrooms without historical, circumstantial, political, economical and theatrical context, of the times. It remains a sensitive and highly controversial play 400 years down the line and must be dealt in multiple ways for students. The teaching must open channels for them to perceive it in a wholesome manner and exhort them to further research, to discern truth on their own.

In my humble endeavour to revisit and elaborate on Shakespearean works during his 450th year of celebration, we shall be meeting on 23^rd August at ICG to expound on the tragicomedy Merchant of Venice in the afternoon from 4-6pm. Do join us!     

Repossessing Mythology

  Mytho-Literature

Mythology lives on as the contemporary literary culture reworks, repackages and gives birth to the old in avant garde avatars.  It has become a specialized genre of writing in itself the world over. ‘Myth was there at the beginning of literature, and it is at the end of literature too.’ Myths are tales of ethereal beauty and the grotesque. They are custodians of our heritage and way of life. They house our thoughts, beliefs, social structures, secrets of creation, political hierarchies, and remote control our living in contemporary times.  Myths are iconic, legendary and have been buttressed and sanctified over centuries. Better stories have never been told. If a work of art makes a mark today, it is nothing but a repackaged myth set to modern conventions. Picasso when led to view the Paleolithic cave paintings felt that mankind has created nothing new.  Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is still an astounding piece of art because of its raw appeal, stark shapes, and basic form. No one has ever created stronger narratives or stronger characters than those the myths present to us.  Therefore, James Joyce set out to write the masterpiece Ulysses, (the Roman translation of Odysseus is Ulysses) a pastiche of the Odyssey . So, since it is a cliché that no new tales can ever really be told, authors return to the old ones, and see what a contemporary sensibility, psychology and language might make of them?  The Great Indian Novel by Shahi Tharoor is an example per se.

The reconstruction is being done from varied angles. Writers like Amish Tripathi and Krishna Udayasankar have used legends to probe and rediscover our assumptions. They seek history in mythology, by fleshing out Gods in human forms and reinterpret their stories and circumstance to appeal to our sensibilities of human trial and error. Defamilairization is a tool used by writers to give us an overworked myth from the perspective of unknown and unconventional angles. A fine example would be the big and tiny people in Gulliver’s Travels or Tom Thumb. The practice revokes the tale breaking it of all held conventions and we see it in a new light. Others have questioned and rebelled against established iconic legends like the question of whether the sacrifice of Sita was greater than Urmilla (Lakshman’s wife) in the epic  Ramayana. Similarly, Margaret Atwood in The Penelopiad reworks the Odyssey and gives space and voice to Penelope and the hanged handmaidens to tell their story and circumstances which tradition and history barred them from doing.  Panchali in Govinda by Udaysankar is married to the eldest Pandava brother only.  She questions her identity and role, and her quest is justice and individuation of women. Colm Tóibín, shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker prize, is a plaintive monologue by Mother Mary who recounts certain episodes in the life of her son, shor n  of the celestial powers that myth has empowered her with through the centuries. She pines for a comfortable home with her husband and son and wishes to be delivered of the cross that her child is ‘Son of God’ , she is a pained  mother  reliving the stings and arrows of atrocious misfortune that flesh is heir to. Myths are demythologized to unearth the history of mankind and on the other hand, they are also big literary forms to house the contemporary and let us see the present in a vivid defamiliarizing light.

 

The love affair of humanity with mythology shall continue and souls like Gandhi and Mother Teresa shall be sanctified as Gods after a few centuries. Humans will then demythologize them and rework their stories to arrive at the truth that existed then(now).

The Goa Art/Lit fest opened this week , and many a session  during the festival is based on mythology in everyday life with writers like Krishna Udayasankar and Pratibha Ray – Lets meet  there  and carry on the discussion……

Plumtopia Returns (PG Wodehouse)

Plumtopia Returns

                                             

Sebastian Faulks has dared to tread the sacred turf and impersonate the art of the PLUM, to a divided reception. Diehard fans of PG Wodehouse are outraged at Faulks sacrilegious feat of writing a sequel to the famous Jeeves-Wooster series. The other more tempered audience has expressed intrigue and admiration at his close imitation of Plum’s stylistic tropes and his sheer chutzpah to imitate the inimitable emperor of the English sentence. But I am not here to join a bandwagon and add fuel to the fiery furore.  Rather, it gives me an opportunity to celebrate and delve into the unceasing pleasure of Wodehouse utopian world – “Plumtopia” (courtesy: a blessed Plum fan)

Plum, as he was lovingly called by his dear ones, believed in the lightness of being.  He maintained a cheery disposition throughout his life. He did not involve himself in the everyday care of life, leaving it all in the able hands of his wife Ethel. Testing times of his life did not mark him adversely. On the contrary, he continued to write comic pieces and jested and broadcast humorous anecdotes after his internment with the Germans in the Second World War. The ugly   aftermath, which exiled him from his home country and expatriated him to United States, was born by him with genial happiness. Such a blessed soul could not help but paint an idyllic world in his writings, imbued with humorous phrase, wit and the comic unsurpassed.

His critics accused him of churning out the same story with variations over and over again.  And indeed, it is intriguing that his ardent readers awaited his next read eagerly, and haplessly absorbed his plots and delightful recurring characters ravenously. Many a writer has been lost to the dark recesses of forgetfulness but Wodehouse still sells along with contemporary bestsellers. The plots of his stories are intricate with neat twists and absurdity reigns supreme.  The Gentleman of gentlemen, the Edwardian Bertie Wooster, man of leisure but undyingly kind and honey sweet is pursued relentlessly by lay women and heiresses alike.  He finds himself unduly engaged, and in a mess in a country estate, not of his making, just everyday turn of innocuous events. Cogs in the chaotic situation could be more such incidents (of unpleasantness, inheritances or thefts) or men and women entangled through an intricate vicious web. Jeeves, the erudite Butler, is the only miracle man who can unwrangle the mess and set everyone free and good. Bertie and Jeeves appeared in 1915 and were reworked by the author till their last appearance in ‘Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen’ in 1974 when he was in his nineties. Non-Bertie novels, the Blandings  novels, The Uncle Fred series, The Psmith novels and stories from earlier years are indicative that his stories are somewhat repetitive in nature – but the fanatic adherence of his followers to his works is the magic of his language.  When we read him and assimilate him, the experience is like the man who drank his first glass of sparkling French wine.  The word bubbles whizz and fizz in the mind creating ripples of savory reading experience par excellence. 

The characters acquired a life of their own beyond his books.  Lord Emsworth and his pig, Mr Milliner, Jeeves…………are as alive as our real life best friends and we know them warts and all.  Their unfailing power to woo and enthrall us is bewildering beyond reason. Wodehouse, though indicted of creating scatterbrained female characters, evermore meddling, domineering and stubborn, is also credited with creating women who are feisty, bubbly, witty and with a mind of their own.  And these women were not always beautiful, young, rich or articulate to find love in their lives. The standard prerequisites of heroines in romantic novels of his age were subverted and they find love, companionship and joy irrespective of looks, age and size. A true feminist agenda. “Lord Emsworth’s nephew Wilfred  Allsop falls in love with his Uncle’s ‘pig-girl’ Monica Simmons, whose solid build and agricultural occupation could hardly be less feminine. Wilfred  Allsop objects strongly when his friend Tipton ‘Tippy’ Plimsoll points this out. “I’m sorry you think she looks like an all-in wrestler,’ he said stiffly, “To me,  she seems to resemble one of those Norse goddesses.  However,  be that as it may,  I love her, Tippy.  I fell in love with her at first sight.”  A blogger  writes , ‘In Wodehouse’s world, a man can have a crooked face and a cauliflower ear, yet reign supreme. Just as it should be.’

Psmith is the only character drawn from his own life. But he did not go on with him as an older man because he thought that what made him funny as a young boy could not be applied to an older version of him. Wodehouse always knew that wooly head Lord Emsworth living in a castle  was a hilarious character he had created and he stuck with him.  It isn’t every writer’s cup of tea to think of comic sequences. It’s only if you view life lightly, are amused at life’s twists and turns and are able to see the absurd in every person or situation , in short you are psyched with a funny bone , then you can dole out fiction like PLUM, like 100 books in his lifetime.  He read exhaustively, like Shakespeare complete works throughout his life.  And then, very skillfully he made a soufflé of Cicero,  Shakespeare and Spinoza and delivered it to his readers laced with the right dose of humor. 

He also broke the standard cliché that books sell if they have hot sex in them. The closest he came to sex in his books was a kiss on the cheek.  He felt that sex could be funny, but he refrained from it.  And wow, still his stories sell till today.

Delight in the world of PG Plum and deliver yourself from the captivity of life!

 

The Bard's Bards

                          The Bard’s Bards

Shakespeare lives on in our lives subtly, unconsciously and pervasively. If we were to pay more attention to our daily English conversational exchanges we would be astounded to note that our talk is sprinkled copiously with phrases from the Bard’s writings.

 Hot-blooded.
 I have not slept one wink. 
Love is blind. 
Make your hair stand on end. 
Neither rhyme nor reason. 
Too much of a good thing. 
We have seen better days

Wild goose chase

A fool's paradise

A sorry sight

Brevity is the soul of wit

To be or not to be

What is in a name

Et tu Brutus

His skilled use of certain common phrases lent them an air of extraordinariness, and he further devised many original phrases of his own, with special effects ( like the last one).  These ordinary and not-so-ordinary  words grouped together as conceptual units (phrases) have become a part of the modern English language through its evolutionary history since the time of the Bard. When we speak in English, our talk is intimately laced with Shakespearean quotes and phrases, being applied everyday to new situations, circumstances, events, places and people.

Now, isn’t that exhilarating?  Like being part of a greatness without a conscious effort, as if it’s a gift to all  humanity (since English is a global language) to be used exhaustively without even reading his extensive works.  An everyday example would be –

The wild goose chase led us to places which made our hair stand on end. We were a sorry sight by the end of it, we have seen better days, you see.

But the interesting facet is to know the origin of a phrase that one uses frequently.  The context in which  it was used by the Bard in his plays and verses.

The course of true love never did run smooth -This expression derives from  A Midsummer Nights Dream, 1598:

LYSANDER:
Ay me! for aught that I could ever read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth;
But, either it was different in blood,--

Many a true word is spoken in jest -The first author to express this thought in English was probably Geoffrey Chaucer. He included it in The Cook's Tale, 1390:

But yet I pray thee be not wroth for game; [don't be angry with my jesting]
A man may say full sooth [the truth] in game and play.

Shakespeare later came closer to our contemporary version of the expression, in King Lear, 1605: Jesters do oft prove prophets.

Something is rotten in the State of Denmark.
A feeling that something fishy or suspicious is going on. Hamlet: The character Marcellus states this when Hamlet is hallucinating and seeing the ghost of the recently deceased king. This phrase is especially used when describing scandals.

Fair play.

 Miranda: "Yes, for a score of kingdoms you should wrangle, and I would call it, fair play." The Tempest, 1610

If music be the food of love, play on. Let us just go on dropping bard lines, ‘cause the be all and end all of all is that the World ‘s a stage and men and women mere players , who have their exits and entrances, or stuff that dreams are made on , our little life without rhyme or reason , may not be just a walking shadow, full of sound and fury , but touching heights, for what a piece of work is man . 

Historical Fiction wins the Booker

Winging Historical Fiction !

Another historical fiction wins the Man Booker Prize again! That too, a new writer on the bloc Eleanor Catton for her tomb of a book ‘The Luminaries’, based on the gold rush in Victorian New Zealand.  Before her, the British author Hilary Mantel bagged it twice for her historical narrative on the reign of Henry VIII. Historical fiction, a specialized genre of writing, seems to be giving an edge to other forms of writing, not that it has not won accolades for authors through the times, but consecutive wins have added to its enigmatic flavor.

Historical fiction, a wonderful and satisfying blend of storytelling and history, lends an aura of mystic to the otherwise dry, prosaic and academic pursuit of history.  Historical fiction writing is like making a period film. The frames have to come alive with meticulous details of life in that period of history. The author has to conjure up the times, imbuing it with the authentic aromas of sight, smell and taste unique to that span of time. The fashion and clothes that people wore, the language and dialects they spoke, (River of Smoke by Amitav Ghosh), the belief systems that perpetuated the society, the religion that communities followed, the political  and social set-ups , the economy and trade of the people….. such that when we read the book, we enter the scene in history and breathe and feel the feel of the place and duration in time as a palpable truth ; the then becomes now. Historical narrative in the hands of a skilled writer acquires the scope of a Tolstoy, the depth of a Dickens and the pace of a thriller, a fatal unputdownable reading experience par excellence. I would any day pick up a historical narrative or watch a period film rather than pursue a historical record to explore history.  Just waiting to lay my hands on Catton’s work!

Historical novels, the winners make a long list.  My earlier reads would be Roots by Alex Hailey, Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, and Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell.  Roots left an indelible impression on my youthful mind of the long-long journey from slavery to freedom, about the trials and tribulations of men, of mastery of humans over other men, of subjugation, fight for freedom, search for identity, racism, oblivion of entire cultures and rich heritage and hybridization. Anna Karenina’s search for truth in relationships mirrors a hypocritical society mired in supercilious wealth and hollow principles. Gone With the Wind, set against the civil war background, glorifies the South and demonizes the North, centering on a sympathetic depiction of slavery and the Klu Flux Klan. My recent reads have been Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies. To be able to bag the coveted booker prize in quick succession for the two sequels of her trilogy on Tudor History is equally astounding and bewildering.  But I would rather not delve into the intricacies of the process of deciding a Booker winner, for the subject of historical fiction writing intrigues me more. Wolf Hall is a book which portrays the break from Rome, a process where one man is wolf to another and the divorce of Henry VIII from Catherine of Aragon.  Bring up the Bodies deals with the reign of the second Queen Anne Boleyn, and at the end, her execution ordered by Henry himself.  Further researching and reading the Tudor history, you discover why the cocktail ‘Bloody Mary’ is called such. The latter, the daughter of the first queen ordered the beheading and slaying of innumerable courtiers from the reign of Henry VIII, because the state reverted back to a Catholic state and the Church became  supreme again for a time.  Intervening these have been other very interesting books like The Girl With A Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier.  A story of a domestic help who, because of her intelligent disposition and sensitivity, becomes a confidante of the famous painter, Vermeer. The ensuing relationship paints a portrait of Vermeer’s work, personality, household and 17^th century Delfit town. ‘Beloved’ by Toni Morrison haunted me just as she haunts the home of her mother who mercy-killed her to save her from a life of slavery.  One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is the delineation of a fictional town Macondo and the story of a noble, ridiculous, beautiful family, a reflection of all of humanity, just as in the history, myths, growth and decay of Macondo, one sees all of Latin America.

Back home, I have thoroughly enjoyed revisiting history through the works of Amitav Ghosh. He said of his work, ‘The Glass Palace, “one can examine the truths of individuals in history definitely more completely in fiction than one can in history”. The release of the first two books of the Ibis trilogy engrossed me further. The books outdo theory as well as history in terms of its subtle treatment of colonialism.  Amitav’s broad canvas in the books is big enough to include insights into 20^th century Burma after the 3^rd Anglo Burmese War in 1885 and the Opium Wars between China and Britain – a classic portrayal of British hegemony and despotism.  Before these, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight Children and Enchantress of Florence held me captive with their stylistic writing technique of magic realism used superbly to portray the birth of a nation and in the latter, the Mughal Courts and the Medici family of Florence. The Twentieth Wife by Indu Sundaresan  transports the reader to the court of Prince Salim and his involvement with Mehrunissa, the wife of an Afghan commander, who with the turn of history becomes the empress of the Mughal empire – Nur Jahan.

History is the story of mankind on earth.  Classics, from Homers’ Odyssey,  Kalidasa’s Shakuntala, Shakespeare’s Othello,  ‘The Qissa of Heer Ranjha’ by Waris Shah to contemporary literature,  portray the tales of man which are ever repetitive.  These great classics live on and can never die, for human nature and behavioural patterns recur again and again. Historical fiction intrigues, baffles, astounds, disgusts and imbues us with more such emotions – and the question remains , ‘Do we really learn from history?’  Primary aim of life is to live it forwards, but we can learn only when we look backwards. ‘Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it’, seems to hold more true for mankind.