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India Booked | A Colonial Whodunnit
82 Plays4 years ago
‘Twilight in a Knotted World’ is the third novel by journalist and historian Siddhartha Sarma that uncovers the many layers of the Phansigar problem and a hierarchy of stranglers through the investigations of Captain William Henry Sleeman, unearthing mysteries and bleak, uncomfortable truths about India.
In the 18th episode of India Booked, discussing the period of colonial India, host Ayushi Mona and Author Siddhartha Sarma unravel the aspects of history and the gaps that are filled by fictionalizing it.
The podcast delves into the reasons for bringing out the book and the solid portrayal of major female characters in it, the construction of conversations between them and the thoughts that went into vivifying the untold stance of the characters in history.
Tune in now to discover the underlying facets of the colonial rule and a list of historical fiction recommendations that will get you absolutely hooked into the genre, if you aren’t already!
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Transcript
Introduction to India Booked Podcast
00:00:11
Speaker
I'm your host Ayushi Mona and you're listening to India Booked, a podcast where we lean into the idea of India through its literature and we speak to authors who bring this to life.
00:00:29
Speaker
Hello everyone, I am Ayushi Mona, your host on India Booked, a podcast where we lean into the idea of India through its literature.
Historical Fiction Spotlight: 'Twilight in a Noted World'
00:00:39
Speaker
Today we are discussing Twilight in a Noted World, which is historical fiction set in the early 19th century in India. It's written by Siddharth, who joins us today.
Meet Siddharth Sharma: Author and Historian
00:00:50
Speaker
Siddharth Sharma is an author, historian, a journalist.
00:00:53
Speaker
His debut novel, The Grasshopper's Run, received the Sahitya Academy Award as well as the Crossword Book Award for Children's Literature. Even if you're not a child, it's a book worth exploring and across Facebook book groups, you will continuously see people jostling Siddharth or asking for a sequel to this.
00:01:15
Speaker
Siddharth's second book and his second novel was Year of the Weeds, which received the Neve Book Award and the 10th Anniversary Special Award at the KLF. His most recent non-fiction book has been Carpenters and Kings, which is a comprehensive history of Western Christianity in India. It's quite an interesting spectrum of things that Siddharth's, you know, cradling, whether it's writing historical fiction or children's literature, he's a former investigative journalist
00:01:45
Speaker
He's covered Insurgency, Crime, Law, Foreign Affairs and was very recently till recently assistant editor with TOI in New Delhi.
Siddharth's Non-Fiction Exploration of Western Christianity in India
00:01:55
Speaker
But currently he's based in Toronto. Welcome to the show Siddharth and it's fantastic to have you with us. Hi Aayushi, I'm very happy to be here and a big hello to all the listeners of India Booked. I look forward to our conversation.
00:02:11
Speaker
So Siddharth, let's begin with the blurb.
Setting and Era: 19th Century India and the East India Company
00:02:15
Speaker
The book starts with this premise that the soil of central India hides more than the bones of long dead giants.
00:02:23
Speaker
And the blurb calls out saying that the East India Company is a master of almost the subcontinent, but real power is with the crown. And then there is this whole game of cat and mouse with Captain Sleeman. And there is this action-packed series of events that happens in double court district.
00:02:45
Speaker
and there's a certain involvement with Calcutta and you literally transport us to a 19th century India. My first question to you is, why did you choose to write about the topic? Of course, I do understand your affiliation as a historian, but why this particular niche within the spectrum of historical fiction that you could have written?
Mythos of Thugs: Crafting a Complex Narrative
00:03:11
Speaker
Thank you Aashi, that is actually very interesting question and it goes to the root of why I decided to write this story. There are many things which are connected to this, the thugs, mythos as one may call it. One reason I wanted to write it is, it has been written about in fiction, you find it in cinema and various places, but it is a large and complex topic.
00:03:35
Speaker
And while the non-fiction works on the thugs or the fancy guards, the stranglers, the non-fiction works are very high quality by several noted scholars. In terms of fiction, I was a little disappointed with the kind of works that exist about this. So I wanted to write a story of my own about it. That's one reason. The other reason is most of the central characters in the book, including Sleeman, some of the fancy guards,
00:04:03
Speaker
Some of their contemporaries, they are all very interesting people. They had very complex lives. They had multiple interests. Lehman himself was an archaeologist. He was a philologist. He was interested in India's culture. He did a lot of pioneering work in various fields.
00:04:18
Speaker
And of course, he was an administrator as well. And he wrote quite a bit. There are several books by him which are still around. So, there are several aspects to these people that I wanted to explore. I also wanted to talk about the Orientalists, people like James Prinsep or Horace Wilson. Their works about India were the beginning of our understanding of ourselves.
00:04:41
Speaker
So, these are very interesting characters in non-fiction and otherwise. So, I thought to write a fictional story about them would be a good exercise in historical
Colonial Legacy: Evolution of Modern India
00:04:49
Speaker
fiction. The third and equally important reason is modern India owes a lot to this period, the early 19th century.
00:04:57
Speaker
So, you know, a lot of our systems are inherited from that period. I mean, that's where all this begins. Our police apparatus, law enforcement, legal system, bureaucracy, even ways of looking at the people, for instance, our understanding of caste, census, so all these things.
00:05:17
Speaker
began effectively from that period. So, I thought I talk about this period, I talk about these people and I would also explore how India was or rather modern India was being formed. So, all of these went into the story. Because I think you mentioned principle like
00:05:37
Speaker
So now when you are say writing about a scholar who say as brilliant as James Frincep, what is the level of granularity right? And this is a question of pandering more to a curiosity from say a writer's perspective than the reader's. How do you know what is the extent of research that you say need to get into to get these nuances right? Because of course that is that
00:06:05
Speaker
there's a rigorous research that you do in terms of just getting
Historical Accuracy vs. Creative License in Fiction
00:06:09
Speaker
the period right. But when say somebody has, you know, when somebody is a linguist or a metallurgist or an astronomer, how do you ensure that you know nuggets of what they do professionally to tie in into your story in terms of like a plot loophole or an information that they give someone?
00:06:31
Speaker
So, that is where the work of a historian and the work of a historical fiction writer intersect. Now historians job is I mean among many other things is to look at a certain period in history and to give a clear picture about it. A historical fiction writers job is slightly different that granularity which you are talking about that one. So, you know these historical people, these events the idea is to bring them to life with a kind of immediacy.
00:06:58
Speaker
to fill them up, to make them more than two-dimensional cardboard cutouts. So, it's not just about people and events and dates and names and places but also about the lived experiences, their inner thoughts and other aspects of a person's life. That's where fiction comes in.
00:07:18
Speaker
You get a very good idea about James Pinsett's interests, his scholarly pursuits, from his works, from his numerous notable contributions, as you mentioned, to fill up his personality or to talk about his inner thoughts or to talk about the things that he did otherwise.
00:07:34
Speaker
that requires a certain kind of engagement with him and of course you need to imagine what he must have been thinking about because a lot of a persons lived experience do not enter the historical record even of famous people right you have some very good examples of very well-known people with numerous biographies written about them and yet you know sometimes you feel that their inner thoughts their inner lives are missing from the record because mainly because
00:08:01
Speaker
you know history does not deal with these things that's where a fiction writer comes in so a lot of it has to do with me imagining how life must have been from his eyes and that's not such a difficult task because James Princef you know
00:08:17
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He's a personality type, he's exceptionally brilliant, he doesn't miss things and clearly he's not very good at small talk for instance. So these aspects of his personality are not that uncommon, it's there in almost all really brilliant people. So you create that kind of character for the story and that's how you fill up the gaps.
Scarcity of Historical Fiction in India
00:08:41
Speaker
When you see our writing historical fiction, were you dismayed at the lack of historical fiction that sort of exists for, you know, I mean, of course, say internationally, you have like
00:08:57
Speaker
so much written about in popular imagination of historical fiction something like say Philippa Gregory right or you have so much Hillary mantle exactly I'm just trying to think that not even just say through literature but also literary adaptations on screen right are numerous.
00:09:16
Speaker
which is not the case for us right most very much to this dynamic between like a Gandhi and a Bhagat Singh aspect that that that is continuously talked about twisted around or whatever right but a lot of other things happened right for instance there's very little in by way of literature or cinema about Anglo Indians or the interaction of
00:09:41
Speaker
Englishmen or with Indians beyond the spectrum of you know being the white sahab, right? I mean a movie like Lagaan perhaps showed it in your book a character like Hudson, right? How about this aspect Siddharth and of course I think I'm sort of extending and building on what you said about the inner lives of people, right?
00:10:01
Speaker
So just as there were people who were bygods, they were sympathizers, and there's a whole dynamic of being the conquered versus the conqueror. But for you, from a perspective of this book or in the general scheme of things, how did you want to pin down the interaction between the British and the Indian? Because obviously, there's a fancy good problem.
00:10:28
Speaker
But there are other aspects also of how the characters are engaging and living with this country that they've come to.
Perspectives on British Colonizers and Indian Experiences
00:10:40
Speaker
So, if we go back to what you asked about historical fiction, now one of the things you will find in really good works of historical fiction is the writers are if not professional historians that is academics, at least they have an extensive grounding in the subject.
00:11:00
Speaker
Good historical fiction writing is not possible unless one has a good grounding in history or at least that aspect of history or that subject or that topic because it has to do with research, it has to do with familiarity, it has to do with knowing the broad picture, the larger picture. One problem in India has been the good historians that is the academics do not write historical fiction.
00:11:27
Speaker
for various reasons, maybe they choose not to write it, maybe they do not feel inclined to take to fiction because for them, non-fiction is satisfying enough, whatever, it is their choice. The problem is the few pieces of historical fiction that you find are or might have been written by people who might not necessarily have a thorough grounding in the subject.
00:11:50
Speaker
in which case they might not have access to primary sources or have a thorough understanding of the subject to begin with. For instance, if somebody is writing a fictional story based in the Mughal period or in the middle ages and that person does not know Persian or early Urdu, it's very difficult for that person to conduct research in primary sources. So, when that rigor does not exist,
00:12:14
Speaker
The basic framework of your story is weak. That's one of the problems with historical fiction that you will not find in good works of historical fiction. Hillary Mantle, as you mentioned, is a very good example. She knows her subject very well. She knows it as well as a professional historian, as an academic. Therefore, when she writes fiction, her extensive knowledge of the subject comes into play.
00:12:38
Speaker
Now, in my case, I have to clarify my background is not either in Indian history or in the colonial period. But I, you know, my background is in medieval European history. But I do have some degree of familiarity with the colonial period. So it helps me do research in terms of primary sources. So it does help one. That's the process. The second thing that you mentioned, and I'm really glad you did, because this is a very important point.
00:13:08
Speaker
In India, in the popular imagination, the popular discourse, the colonial period is mainly about binaries. So, you have the colonizer versus the colonized and the colonizer is usually depicted in extreme terms in the sense that, as you mentioned, the bigots or the people who exploited and looted.
00:13:35
Speaker
For the life of me, I can't even remember a visual depiction of a colonizer who's not like a bristling white man with a mustache in an army uniform. But they came in all forms and shapes and sizes, from working class people to spouses to courtly older traders.
00:13:58
Speaker
There were all sorts of people and broadly the way I see it, you can divide them into three kinds of people apart from the class and the gender distinctions. The first kind are the bigots and the exploiters.
00:14:11
Speaker
The second kind were the apparatchiks. The bureaucrats, the people who came, did a job, went back. So in the first case, there was a marginal kind of engagement with India, mainly in the form of an exploited piece of property, you could say. Then the apparatchiks or the bureaucrats merely treated India in the way that bureaucrats treat any piece of land or people as statistics or as things to be administered in a cold-blooded kind of manner.
00:14:41
Speaker
But then you have the third and you know statistically the smallest group.
00:14:47
Speaker
which is people who actively engaged with India objectively, sometimes with love, but mainly with a great deal of curiosity and a great deal of objectivity. Sleeman belongs to this category. Most of the early Orientalists belong to this category. People like Jim Corbett, for instance. Of course, Corbett is a slightly different case. But there were a lot of British people who lived and died in India.
00:15:16
Speaker
They were also a part of this. So, the problem as you mentioned is no hands. When we look at historical characters or events as binaries, we tend to forget that there is very little black and white in history. There is always sheets of grey.
00:15:33
Speaker
And it is these shades of grey that get lost when there isn't enough discussion about them. For instance, if you invert the topic to the colonized instead of the colonizers, you will see that the colonial experience was different for different
00:15:50
Speaker
kinds of people, the princelings, the noblemen or the ex-noblemen, whatever you call them, then the emerging middle class, the early English speaking elites benefited from British rule. So when they say that the colonial period was exploitative, people tend to ignore the fact that there were a lot of Indians who actually benefited from the colonial period.
00:16:11
Speaker
So, who did not benefit? Mostly it was the lower castes, the Dalits, Adivasis, women of course have been exploited throughout history. So, I do not even need to mention that. So, the colonial experience was different for the colonized
00:16:28
Speaker
in many different ways. So, these nuances these grey areas tend to be lost if you look at things only in terms of sharp binaries and that is something that we need to start talking about.
Beyond Colonizer-Colonized Narratives
00:16:41
Speaker
So, that is one of the things that I have tried to do here and you mentioned the working classes that is very important because among the colonizers also the working classes did not benefit.
00:16:51
Speaker
Right. British working classes who came to India during the colonial period didn't make a lot of money. They just barely survived. Most of them lived in terrible conditions. They went back home. Their families lived in equally terrible conditions back home. So that never changed. Yeah, but you know, Bazaar history is true. We believe every British show who ever came to India went with like a Kohinoor in one hand and a bunch of peacockism. Yeah, that's quite an image. I will remember that. Yeah.
00:17:20
Speaker
Of course, I'm not taking away anything from the kind of exploitation that the British did and the rampaging of all Commonwealth nations. I think the next thing I really was very curious about is the women in the book. And of course, another tendency with historical fiction sometimes, and often largely because it's
00:17:48
Speaker
caters to royalty or people in power, right? Because those are the kinds of marriages that we find exciting to read, right? And we often don't really read off women until unless, you know, there's like some there's a love affair or there is
00:18:04
Speaker
you know like in the in the capacity which is like either a lover or a mother or something like that right or a queen or or along those lines but but i think a melly uh stream in a very fascinating character so and and she has such refined taste and then you know and there's a certain
00:18:22
Speaker
I mean not a certain anger there's a definite resentment that she has about how women are being treated and her contempt etc is very obvious and so is the fact that she has an interest in a lot of things right because again the image that we tend to have of colonial women is that they all wear gowns and
00:18:41
Speaker
and they host events and anti-parties. Tell us a little bit about Melly Sleeman and then writing a woman character as well as how she sort of comes into play in the context of the fancy girls.
Role of Historical Female Figures
00:19:00
Speaker
So, I will talk about Amelie Sleeman and also about the two other major women characters in the novel because they are all in many ways connected even though they never meet in the story. So, Amelie is a historical character. The background that I have given in the novel is actually what she was. She was a daughter of a French nobleman who was dispossessed during the French Revolution.
00:19:21
Speaker
So, he fled from France with nothing and then he reestablished himself. Ultimately, he lived and died in Mauritius. He was a plantation owner. Amelie came to India when she was in her late teens. She lived in Calcutta with the posh set and then she got bored with them and she went travelling in central India. She met Sleeman. She liked him and they got married. Like most other women from the colonial period,
00:19:49
Speaker
She does not get mentioned much. This is one of the problems that I have with Freeman because as she mentions in the book herself, he does not notice women. It is not that he is a misogynist, it is just that he comes from a generation which
00:20:06
Speaker
does not really think about women. Beyond the point, there isn't much of a serious engagement with women. Although he is concerned about women's rights, he was one of the first administrators in central India to ban Sati, before Sati was banned throughout the country. But that serious kind of engagement does not exist.
00:20:24
Speaker
So he does not write much about her in his books and I felt that that was a lacuna, that was a gap that needed to be addressed. So I worked on Amelie's character for the novel as I worked with other women's characters. I tend to spend more time working on the women's characters in my fiction because as a man I need to be really careful about how I portray women. Certainly I put more work into it than I do in most of my other characters.
00:20:53
Speaker
So, Amelie had a lot of interest certainly, we just don't know much about them. We know that she assisted her husband in his investigation. We know that she was present at the exhumation of several mass graves and we know that she worked with him in translating the code language of the Farsikars. But beyond that, the record is silent on her as expected. So, I had to fill up that gap. So, I worked on a certainly a very intelligent, a very perceptive woman.
00:21:23
Speaker
Some of the anger that I have portrayed her feeling is actually drawn from early feminist literature, including from reading between the lines of Alston Craft and some of her intellectual successors.
00:21:38
Speaker
So, the views that she expresses are not that uncommon among European women of the early 19th century. In the Victorian period, it changes a little bit, it becomes a little muted. But in the immediate pre-Victorian period, it was a slightly more gender equal kind of domestic arrangement. So, I have tried to show that as well.
00:22:06
Speaker
The other two women characters are also interesting if I may talk about them a little bit. So, one of them and again both of them are historical characters, one of them is a Brahmin widow, a sliman met and after her husband passed away, she insisted on committing
00:22:21
Speaker
Sati and he could not prevent her from doing that because she said, if you do not allow me to commit Sati, I will kill myself through other means. In either case, I am going to kill myself. So, he could not prevent her from killing herself.
00:22:36
Speaker
and he entered that in the record. But description of the conversation is very bare in the sense that partly he felt out of sympathy for her predicament. He did not give full details of the conversation.
00:22:52
Speaker
So, I had to imagine a lot of it, I had to reconstruct the conversation between them to understand the pain that she was feeling, you know, because what she says and no spoilers here for the listeners, I will try my best not to give spoilers, but she says that, you know, Satya has been banned, but what happens to the widows
00:23:13
Speaker
Afterwards, you know, what kind of a life can they look forward to? Because there isn't much else that they can do. So, you know, these are some of the problems that Indian women had to face. And this is what through her I have tried to show the third woman, third important female voice in the story is that of Kudzia Begum, who was the Nawab of Bhopalayan, very interesting character. She was the first of four generations of women rulers.
00:23:40
Speaker
This is unprecedented in South Asian history, probably unprecedented anywhere else in the world. So, in no other Islamic polity will you find four successive women rulers who governed with near absolute power. So, she was very remarkable that way after her husband died under very tragic circumstances in an accident.
00:24:02
Speaker
She took over and she ruled despite the disapproval of other men of the household and of the Khazis. So, she was very good at politics, she was very good at handling the British and the Khazis and she ruled very well. Bhopal was doing very well in her time. A woman in the public sphere ruling as an equal to men and in fact doing a far better job of it which is not surprising. I wanted to portray her character.
00:24:28
Speaker
So, these are the three main characters that you'll find in the novel and they show different aspects of gender relations in the early 19th century. Interesting. In fact, I actually wanted to ask you a separate question on the Sati piece and I'm glad that you sort of woven this and then you spoke about it.
Engaging Younger Audiences with History
00:24:51
Speaker
For me, I think that, you know, what
00:24:55
Speaker
And this was the first book, you know, that I'd read by you and what I really do love the way you write. However, you know, I actually, and this is, I don't know, a note to your publisher, maybe, I think the book can be very much, you know, a young adult in a new adult book. And I know, of course, it's about historical fiction.
00:25:22
Speaker
But I think like more younger people write teens, late teens perhaps, right? So read books like these because, I mean, because they just grow out of school reading a very, a very dry and brittle version of history, which tells you, oh, this is when the Quit India Movement happened. This is what was done under Swadeshi, right?
00:25:43
Speaker
And central India, of course, is never spoken of. So you have your Mughals and occasionally you'll have passing mention of your Kholas, etc. And I mean, before we started speaking, I had a gentleman named Vikramjit Singh Ruparai, who's written a book on the Bawli's
00:26:03
Speaker
India he has been working on compiling a lot of historical data and you know I asked him that you know Vikramji tell me what you know tell me a little more about these things I don't know about like say the Chola Kingdom because all I ever grew up reading about was Akbar Babar Humayu Shah Jahan you know and then later of course you know the whole piece around the movement
00:26:29
Speaker
Not saying that those aren't critical as those that we should not be reading about.
00:26:35
Speaker
But there's so many of these, so voices and stories we never hear about, right? Nobody ever says speaks about a Bursa Munda. So I think, I actually think that maybe your publisher should push it to a lot of people in their early 20s or, you know, in college and even high school. Because to me, a lot of this could be very, very interesting for somebody in that age.
00:27:00
Speaker
Yeah, thank you Aishi. I think that's a very good idea. I mean, I'd be happy if they read it. I write books for, you know, meant for everyone. So I hope they take it up. That'd be great. I have a question and you know, which is more from a writer's POV, right? How do you decide, right? For instance, the book and the way it stands is
00:27:22
Speaker
takes a slightly literary route, right? It's not one, it's a lot of context setting, it's a lot of conversation, it's very driven by dialogue, right? So it's a series of events, right? It's not negative with, you know, an explosion happens here, someone was found hanging here,
00:27:44
Speaker
I mean, of course, elements of suspense and the story gets driven. I am just trying to say this in as many ambiguous words as possible. Not at all. The explosions part is actually quite interesting. Maybe I should have done a Michael Bay somewhere in the middle. Yeah, so for me, right, and probably while I really enjoyed reading the book and I loved every single aspect of
00:28:09
Speaker
the historical element attached, and maybe because I'm just used to reading maybe racier historical fiction. I think I'll put it that way. Then I was kind of hoping for something which would be a little racier in pieces, which doesn't take away from the fact that this was great to date. It was eloquently written. It had had
00:28:32
Speaker
extremely well constructed sentences, it had great character, it had good detailing, but not obnoxious amount of detailing that you're just reading detailing in the other story. So in every way that a book is meant to be enjoyable, it was enjoyable to me. But I think some of this is my again, my own personal bias, right? Because every every book is a reader's own personal experience, which is why some people are proud of doing some people hate it.
00:28:58
Speaker
And for me, I think I just had, like, cheap little life too much. So I would have loved this, this little ratio. But it still is a great read. And I think one of the best written books that I have read, sort of the subject matter also that you're dealing with is far more complex than, of course, you know, writing something just in the here and now.
00:29:24
Speaker
Thank you. So, talking about the racy part, you know, one of the reasons that I mentioned, one of the
Accurate Representation vs. Racy Narratives
00:29:31
Speaker
reasons for writing this book is some of the existing works on the Strandors of India have had this problem of misrepresentation or actually misrepresentation is a very strong word, problem of you know, a kind of you know, the problem
00:29:48
Speaker
was in representing both the thugs and the imperial officials. If you look back to the book which started this whole trend, the book which established the thugs in the popular imagination, a book called Confessions of a Thug by Philip Meadows Taylor. So now that's racy. There is a certain exoticization of characters, a certain way of looking at India, a certain way of looking at the stranglers.
00:30:17
Speaker
And most of it was not historically accurate because the man who wrote it was not directly associated with the campaign against the fancy girls. Philip Meadows Taylor, he made a lot of claims about himself, most of which were not true, but so his book is certainly entertaining, but it is a historical.
00:30:37
Speaker
Now, I wanted to address problems like that and therefore, at the expense of removing or not dealing with some of the more exotic aspects of the story, I wanted to talk about people and characters, motivations, inner lives.
00:30:57
Speaker
and the larger socio-cultural milieu rather than the more fantastic aspects of this problem. So, that's why if you see there are very few actual crimes that happen on stage in the story.
00:31:15
Speaker
There is very little actual violence that happens on stage most of it is referred or indicated you know even the one major action scene that supposedly takes place towards the end involving Sleeman and another fellow again no spoilers.
00:31:32
Speaker
I, you know, it's so difficult to talk without giving up a spoiler. I know. Yeah, that's what I have to really watch my words. But so even that takes place off stage, only the the the set, you know, the the ambience is described that evening that, you know, the lamps have been lit and then this sort of turns off. If you recall the passage that I'm talking about. So I have I have mainly tried to, you know, it's a crime novel.
00:32:02
Speaker
but it talks about the why of crime rather than the whodunit aspect of it. It is a detective story, but I am trying to deal with motivations and background here rather than with the actual crime because you know actual crime basically the actual crime is a few guys driven because of poverty and other reasons.
00:32:25
Speaker
They go out and massacre thousands of people that is the crime. Now I can keep showing endlessly all these strangulations and murders and you know other aspects of it, but that will merely be you know what I would think would be you know they would be certainly thrilling, but I thought that has already been done by other authors. So, I want to deal with these other aspects.
00:32:47
Speaker
And I think you've succeeded marvelously at Siddharth.
Further Reading on Indian History
00:32:51
Speaker
As I said, I think it's one of the best written books, you know, most well-written books. So, Siddharth, I think before we wrap up, and at the beginning of this conversation, you said that there are a bunch of good
00:33:05
Speaker
non-fiction resources but if you had to recommend right for the listeners a couple of books right or whether it's fiction non-fiction but you think would be interesting eye-opener around Indian history which are a few books that you'd recommend? Which period because there's so many of them really good ones which period? Okay.
00:33:30
Speaker
But I think let's go with the colonial period because what if somebody finishes this and then they want to read like more adjoining fiction. Yeah. Yeah. So a very good introduction to the Orientalists, including Wilson, but to a larger extent, James Princef and William Jones.
00:33:50
Speaker
A very good introduction is India discovered or is it rediscovered? I need to check that by John Key. John Key is of course a great historian, a great teacher but also a very good writer. So, he is a rare bird that way. He is a great scholar but he can also write very well.
00:34:14
Speaker
That one then another book of his history of the East India Company, it is called the Honorable Company. Both these books are quite popular in India. So, I am sure our readers have already been through them. So, the Honorable Company is a very detailed account.
00:34:30
Speaker
of the East India Company till the beginning of the mid 18th century. So, before their rise to prominence. So, that period then you have you know this book on the Orientalist, if you want to read up on the Fassigars.
00:34:46
Speaker
There is of course Lehman's works, there is rambles and recollections of British official and there is his translation of the language of the Thugs, it is called the Ramasiyana. All of these are available in digitized form these days. So, you know getting them is not really a problem. So, these are some of the books from that period which could give you a good useful background on you know both British officials and India of that period.
Book Availability and Audience Recommendation
00:35:15
Speaker
lovely and I think the book is India discovered by John Key that's for everyone wanting to look it up it's it's spelled as K-E-A-Y not K-E-Y
00:35:30
Speaker
So I just thought I'd let this out so that in case somebody is Googling, they know what to look for. Siddharth, thank you so much for this lovely list of recommendations and in this very, very, you know, articulate and I must say inspiring conversation because you've written in a way which is not just, you know,
00:35:55
Speaker
detailed or which just not seeks to do justice to the subject matter. I think that you were dealing with, but I think you've tried to really take a stand on the way you wanted to do this in terms of how you portray characters and issues. And I think that's commendable. Thank you. Thank you very much, Ayrshi, for this conversation. I really enjoyed it. I wish it could be a little longer.
00:36:19
Speaker
Thank you, Siddharth. And thank you everybody for listening in. Siddharth's book, Twilight in a Nautic World, is available on Amazon, Flipkart. You can look it up on the Simon & Schuster website. It's also available at independent bookstores like Crossword and Barysens and other bookstores near you. Please grab a copy.
00:36:40
Speaker
do read it. As we discussed, it really can be read by people of any age group and you must give this book a read because it's one of the most, as I'm saying for the third time during this conversation, well-written books I've read this year. Thank you so much and thank you everyone. Thank you very much Aishi. Thank you everyone and hope to see you guys again or hear you guys again.
00:37:11
Speaker
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