Mughal India from bookish, a weblog by George Girton

Mughal India . . . . . jun 7 2003 — bookish77.dat

About 400 years ago the beautiful building known as the Taj Mahal did not exist. Indu Sundaresan's romantic novel The Feast of Roses sets forth the background of how it came to be built.

Or at least I think it probably does. At the moment I'm only about two chapters in. Feast of Roses starts out as a slow-reading historical novel, rich in the ambience of the time: the harem, the emperor, the old wives and the beautiful new wife who, it seems, wants political power. Foods and fabrics, slaves at work. Then, a couple of chapters in, it becomes more fascinating. The women guarding the mughal emperor are, it turns out, Kashmiri. They're kind of tough, too, holding a spear to the throat of a eunuch delivering a message to the emperor. Kashmir, of course, exists today as a troubled region.

I enjoy reading novels to learn something about a historical period or some area of the world I'm not familiar with, and The Feast of Roses [buy at amazon] . by Indu Sundaresan looks like it's going to succeed handsomely on both counts, even though it's not a page turner that reads like a movie.

There's quite a bit of court intrigue, which for the most part I don't find too interesting, but we'll just have to wait and see where it all leads.

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