Shamsur Rahman Faruqi. | Tausiff / CC BY-SA 3.0
Jate hue kahte ho qayamat ko milenge
kya khub qayamat ka hai goya koi din aur
My beloved bhaiya, Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, departed this world for the next on 25 December 2020, leaving our entire family with a lifetime of memories and an incredible legacy for generations to come. We had all gone to welcome him back home that morning, but destiny had other plans.
It was around noon when we stood around him, clinging to one of the most desperate human emotions that exist, hope, but “to Him we belong and to Him we return”. Bhaiya left us, numb and hollow. His favourite poet Mir Taqi Mir’s couplet came to my mind immediately:
‘The Last Queen’: Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s novel resurrects the history of Jindan Kaur of Punjab
Fiction is the medium of a saga of a woman that history has not given enough importance to. Jindan Kaur | By George Richmond / Public Domain
When Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni had announced the title of her latest novel on her Facebook page and asked fans to guess who the titular queen could be, the answers had ranged from Rani Laxmibai of Jhansi and Rani Chennamma of Karnataka to the Tuluva queen Abbakka Chowta of Ullal (present day Mangaluru), and even a vague “anyone from the family of Bahadur Shah Zafar”. So the Indian-American author’s decision to bring story of Rani Jindan Kaur of Punjab to the world as the heroine of her latest novel,
UPDATED: January 9, 2021 07:15 IST
Who is an Indian? That question, which was at the heart of the anti-CAA protests, also animates a crop of recently published biographies. Threaded through these life stories are debates about who counts and who does not and if the idea of India is inclusionary or exclusionary.
It is appropriate to start with the Mughals. Ira Mukhoty’s Akbar provides a wide-ranging account of an emperor who was likely illiterate and dyslexic. Nevertheless, Akbar was shrewd enough to accommodate India’s diversity through the idea of sulh-i kul (universal peace). Supriya Gandhi’s The Emperor Who Never Was responds to that fiercely debated hypothetical: what if a supposedly-tolerant Dara Shukoh had become padshah instead of Aurangzeb? Gandhi rubbishes hackneyed portrayals of the prince as a liberal who could have averted communal bloodshed of the modern era.