| |
BOOKS
AUTHORSPEAK
SHAHANA DASGUPTA
Princess
For Posterity
The
book is titled Razia-The People's Queen (Rupa), raising alarming associations
with the more celebrated, now deceased People's Princess. Fortunately
schmaltzy sentiment is furthest from author Shahana Dasgupta's mind. Her
first piece of what belongs to that hybrid genre-faction-is part biography
and part social history of the life and times of Razia Sultan, empress
of Delhi and one of the most striking members of medieval Indian royalty.
Razia is Dasgupta's first venture into the world
of "fighting" Indian women, with Rani Laxmibai planned as the
second in a series of biographies that could include figures as contemporary
as Captain Lakshmi Sehgal of the Indian National Army. The 42-year-old
author has spent 15 years away from home, living in Berlin, raising two
children and "trying to set the picture straight". The picture
being that of Indian women who the West believes, she wryly says, "were
all dying every minute". It's been a winding road to Razia, which
started out when the US-educated Indian lawyer, married to a German law
professor, was asked to write a primer on her country in English to form
part of a German high school third language course. While the publishers
gave her a free hand on other subjects, they had one specific request:
to include a chapter on the "status" of the Indian woman and
how she coped with arranged marriage, dowry and oppressive in-laws. "Writing
for the school text triggered off the thought process about fighting Indian
women."
She hasn't seen the rainbow-hued Kamal Amrohi-directed
Hema Malini-starrer on Razia. Her sources are conventional academic texts
and the writing style even tempered. "I try not to exaggerate or
overglorify. Keep the facts as balanced as possible. It's probably the
law training." Dasgupta previously wrote a book called This India.
Targeted at pre-teens, it proved to be a big hit with NRIs looking to
give their children the motherland in a nutshell. "Unless you show
children something different, you can never know what sells." That's
one member of the Indian literary diaspora who thinks posterity does not
necessarily mean a personality cult.
—Sharda Ugra
|
|
METRO TODAY
Web
Exclusives
