I made use of many books while researching this novel. Epigraphs come from the following sources: The Sacred Books of the East, vol. 30, edited by Max Mueller (1892); The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in Medieval India by David Gordon White (2012); Manu Smriti via the Sacred Texts archive, and The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream by H. W. Brands (2002).
The Tale of the Bombayan Gold Digger is based on “the Hindu,” one of the chapters in a German travelogue by Friedrich Gerstäcker called Scenes of Life in California, which I accessed via the Library of Congress online. The San Francisco Call announced the death of a “Hindostan” in Happy Valley in 1850. I have borrowed some of its language directly here.
I further relied on the following texts about the gold rush and its ensuing eras in California, in addition to Gerstäcker and Brands: Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush by Susan Lee Johnson (2000); Foreigners in the California Gold Rush by Seville A. Sylva (1932); Gold Rush: A Literary Exploration edited by Michael Kowalewski (1997); Gold Dust and Gunsmoke: Tales of Gold Rush Outlaws, Gunfighters, Law Men, and Vigilantes by John Boessenecker (1999); The Rush: America’s Fevered Quest for Fortune, 1848–1853 by Edward Dolnick (2014); California as I Saw It by William McCollum (1960); Riches for All: The California Gold Rush and the World edited by Kenneth N. Owens (2002); Returning Thanks: Chinese Rites in an American Community by Paul Anderson Chace (1992 via ProQuest dissertations), and the Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco.
On alchemy, in addition to White, I referred to The Alchemy Reader: From Hermes Trismegistus to Isaac Newton edited by Stanton J. Linden (2003); Indian Alchemy: Soma in the Veda by S. Kalyanaraman (2004); “Alchemy: Indian Alchemy” by David Gordon White in Encyclopedia of Religion edited by Lindsay Jones (2005); and Chinese Alchemy: the Taoist Quest for Immortality by J. C. Cooper (1899).
I also read and learned from The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession by Peter L. Bernstein (2000) and The Early History of Gold in India by Rajni Nanda (1992).
The history Ramesh Uncle refers to comes from many sources, but I want to thank Barnali Ghosh and Anirvan Chatterjee for running the Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour. Anirvan surfaced the San Francisco Call article. Thank you as well as to Samip Mallick and the South Asian American Digital Archive.