Dear Readers,
As a social psychologist and writer living in Dacca, I was hungry to learn about Bengal’s ancient history. My grandmother’s house in Lal Bagh triggered a lingering curiosity. As I began to explore, I discovered Subedar Shayista Khan: a poet, warrior, Sufi and visionary. Though Bengal flourished under his rule, he occupies only a few dry paragraphs in history text books. Thus I set out to give him some flesh (albeit, scarred flesh) so my children and others could know our hero. My kids are 5 and 7 and I daresay, Shayista’s biggest fans.
Very little is written about the Mughal experience in Bengal, even less about the women of the time. Shayista Khan, Shobha Singh, Shivaji, Admiral Nicholson, William Hedges and Wara Dhamaraja are all real characters. Nasim Banu, Champa and Pari Bibi are real too but there is scarce evidence of them. What I did find was that Champa is buried at Lal Bagh Fort and rumors suggest she might have been Shayista’s late mistress. Legends claim Pari’s ghost haunts the fortress still and she may not have been Shayista’s biological daughter but rather, war booty, a princess from Assam. These conjectures led me to play with her origin, to bring Ellora into the story. Ellora is the only character completely constructed by my imagination though who is to say our handsome Subedar did not have a few princesses on the side? As for the diamond, certainly my readers have heard of Kohinoor, the French Blue and the Pink Diamond, all of which are said to have magical powers. Perchance then readers have also heard whispers of a dark diamond?
Here are some of the books I read to write this: William Dalrymple’s White Mughal and The Last Mughal, Richard Eaton’s The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, John Richards’ The Mughal Empire, Tapan Raychaudhuri’s Bengal Under Akbar and Jahangir, Fergus Nicoll’s Shah Jahan, Joshua Ivinson’s Diamonds and East India Company, Seema Mohanty’s Book of Kali, Alex Rutherford’s Empire of the Moghuls, Hafez’s The Gift, Dr. Aye Chan’s An Arakanese from Myanmar, Abraham Eraly’s The Mughal Throne, Indu Sundaresan’s The Twentieth Wife, Richard Wise’s The French Blue, Niall Ferguson’s The Empire, Susan Ronald’s Sancy Blood Diamond, Richard Zaqcks’ The Pirate Hunter, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Nitish Sengupta’s Land of Two Rivers: A History of Bengal, and others. I also gleaned some juicy facts from a PhD titled ‘Life and times of Shaista Khan’ by Noopur Sharan of Allahabad, 2005, that was not available in print, for which I had the opportunity to visit the marvelous British Library.
What I find sad is how history repeats itself. In Bangladesh and the world today we are threatened by many of the enemies Shayista Khan fought back in the 1680s. Does this mean we are not taking the lessons of history to heart? Or is this our predestined journey?
I hope you enjoy the adventure. Thanks for reading.
Yours,
Shazia