The Machiavellian
Story
Hilary Mantel, the twice booker prize winning English
writer, has made waves with her credits and writing. As Indians, we have always
been familiar with Chanakya, the king maker and writer of the ancient Indian
political treatise ‘Arthashastra’. And now, Mantel’s award winning books brings
to life another Machiavellian historical character Thomas Cromwell. 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.
Writing of historical fiction is a specialized genre akin to
making a film. It involves gargantuan research of a particular period in
history; fiction rooted in truth and reality. The writer has to conjure up the
whole scene of the era; the political, social and economical undercurrents. The
frames or chapters bring alive the
fashion of the time, language that people spoke, the belief systems interweaving
the societies in question. With great dexterity, the writer then threads
together historical personalities with fictional characters in the book which
holds the entire fabric of the theme together. The fictional characters are
figments of his imagination, intimate and thorough, whereas the real life
historical characters are elusive and distant. They have a life of their own,
already lived and fleshed out. In the hands of an acclaimed author like, Mantel
and Amitav Ghosh (whose trilogy on opium wars is equally enthralling), the book
acquires the quality of a classic, the depth of a Dickensian prose and the pace
of a thriller. A humble form of writing, wherein the writer has to metamorphose
and tell a true story that already exists. What a colorful and interesting way
indeed of reading and understanding history compared to dry historical
treatises. Its subjectivity is another
story altogether, a topic for another article.
Hilary Mantel in her books ‘Wolf Hall’ and ‘Bring up the
Bodies’ (the latter the winner of the 2012 Booker Prize) has delineated the
reign of Henry VIII in Britain in the first half of the sixteenth century. She
never trained as a historian, though she had wanted to study history in
college. The notion that art students ended up as teachers, did not entice her
a bit. Working as sales girl in a store, she would visit the library and cull
information from books; the revolutionaries interested her the most. Since she did not enjoy making things up, she
relied mostly on facts but experimented with form. She frequented Brechtian plays
and dialogue became her narrative.
Henry VIII was the legendary tall and handsome king who lived a life of
sensory pleasure, and at the same time was equally well versed in politics and
foreign relations. He divorced and married six times and in the process changed
the entire frame of the Roman Catholic Church with the Pope as a mere puppet in
his reign. And the man who actually brought this heretical act about, with the
consensus of the common man of the times, was Thomas Cromwell who strode
through the corridors of power, a remorseless reformer and legislator. ‘Lock Cromwell in a deep dungeon in the
morning, and when you come back that night he’ll be sitting on a plush cushion
eating larks’ tongues, and all the goalers will owe him money.’ ‘A blacksmith’s son abused in his childhood;
a streetfighter, who knew the entire New
Testament in Latin, at home in a coutroom or the waterfront; could draft a
contract, train a falcon, draw a map, quote from Plato to Plautus, furnish a house or fix a jury’. He was the prime mover behind the "Tudor revolution
in government" – the first glimmerings of the modern English state and the
break from Rome. . ‘Pitting himself against the parliament, the political
establishment and the papacy, he reshaped history to his own and Henry’s
desires’. He staunchly opposed religion which invokes dread in the masses and
sits on amassed wealth of the people, which could be put to better use. "Among the ignorant," he observed,
"it is said that the king is destroying the church. In fact, he is
renewing it. It will be a better country, believe me, once it is purged of
liars and hypocrites." His strategy to go to the common man to vote
against the church which demanded a tax on births, marriages and deaths and
have the people’s representatives in the parliament to pass the bill was his
masterstroke. ‘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 research and reading the Tudor history, you discover why the cocktail ‘Boody 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. Queen Elizabeth, the virgin queen and last of the Tudors, was the daughter of Anne Boleyn and maybe she did not marry because of her mother’s history. Hilary Mantel doesn’t mess with factual history but experiments with the gaps in history and that becomes her playfield as a writer. She has been successful in fleshing out personal to national to international agendas in the Tudor history of flux and immense change, through the agency of powerful characters.
When I was reading the books, the resonance between
Chanakya and Thomas Cromwell kept recurring to me through the read. I marked
portions in the book where the characteristics and strategies have overlapped
and they on reflection have echoed to me another time and a legend who changed
the history of India. Ashwin Sanghi’s ‘Chanakya’s Chant’ and Manoj Joshi’s lay
staged at Kala Academy was fresh on my mind and the comparison impressed on me
more forcefully. They also conform to the theory put forth by the Italian diplomat Niccolò Machiavelli, who developed a code
of political conduct for rulers and administrators in the sixteenth century
that is independent of moral and ethical character. An action or technique is
right as long as it serves the larger purpose of the state irrespective of its
ethical status and responsibility. It is the legendary treatise on politics and
thought which was followed by politicians throughout the world, and is the
present day ‘Mantra’ of the corridors of power.
Machiavellian characters are interesting. Spend time with them and write to me if you find resonances too!
No comments:
Post a Comment