I read almost anything that came my way, mostly from the personal libraries of friends and acquaintances. When I was growing up in India, books were expensive and cherished and so one person bought a book, and it made the rounds with many people—all books then were as they should always be, well –read!
My father was a tremendous reader, and went through a phase of buying American Westerns—I read all of those as a child. My sisters were, are still, great readers and older than me, so they influenced a lot of my reading from the bestseller lists, the popular novels, everything. I grew up with a somewhat classical education and read 18th and 19th Century British authors who were and still are favorites—Hardy, the Brontë sisters, Edgeworth, Austen, Gaskell and Margaret Mitchell and Harper Lee.
Would you say your childhood and teenage reading has had a distinct influence on how you write fiction now, and why?
I think so. I like long, epic narrations; I like extensive worlds built within books that encompass all aspects of the time—literature, politics, society and culture, setting and weather.
What did you do before you became a published novelist, and how did you come to write your first novel and get it published?
I have an MS in operations research and an MA in economics from the University of Delaware in the USA. I was going to be an economist. But, once I finished graduate school, and felt that I had satisfied what was expected of me (get a good education), I decided to write a novel.
So, I wrote one, and then I wrote another one, and then I wrote my first published novel, The Twentieth Wife. I searched for representation from a literary agent for five years, while I continued to write and polish the manuscript of The Twentieth Wife, and I’m now represented by Sandra Dijkstra of the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency, one of the finest literary agents in the USA.
How would you describe your style of fiction or your approach to writing fiction during your first few novels?
Please see the answer to the second question for this. I don’t believe my style has changed significantly in the last few years or in any of my later work.
My novel-length fiction is historical, so far anyhow, and there’s always a tremendous amount of research that goes into the writing of the books. I read for long periods in preparing to write, and read about anything from that time period. I take extensive notes about everything, sometimes astronomical events, like comets in the skies, their effect on the people then, the myths about them; the foods they ate; the gossip in the bazaar.
This last part, the gossip, comes particularly handy in writing historical fiction, with the emphasis being, of course here on the ‘fiction.’ I’ve had ideas for future work spring from gossip such as this—while reading for The Twentieth Wife and The Feast of Roses, which are set in 17th Century Mughal India, I read of two princesses, Jahanara and Roshanara, who though living in the imperial harem, managed to smuggle men in for their pleasure.
Yet another unsubstantiated story in another foreign traveler’s accounts of Mughal India led to the idea that Jahanara might have been in love with a noble at court, even though she never married him, or married at all. I put these two stories together for a very pivotal storyline in the narrative of Shadow Princess which is based on Jahanara’s life.
How would you describe your style of fiction or your approach to writing fiction now?
Please see answer to previous question.
Was your first published novel standalone or part of a series, and what advantages or disadvantages did this present for you?
My first published novel is The Twentieth Wife and is part of the Taj Mahal trilogy. Of the three novels of the trilogy, The Twentieth Wife and The Feast of Roses (first published in the USA in 2002 and 2003 respectively) are very closely a novel and a sequel. They are both based on the life of Mehrunnisa, Empress Nur Jahan, who was the most powerful woman in the Mughal dynasty in India and span the years 1577 to 1645.
The third novel of the trilogy is Shadow Princess (2010).
When The Twentieth Wife was published, I had already completed The Feast of Roses (although I made some extensive revisions to the text in that year).
Did you find writing your second novel easier or more challenging than writing your first novel and why?
I had completed my second novel, The Feast of Roses, when my first novel, The Twentieth Wife was published, and they’re both very closely a novel and a sequel, in that the first book is about Mehrunnisa, Empress Nur Jahan until she married Emperor Jahangir and comes into his harem as his twentieth wife. And the second book is about her life as Empress of Mughal India during the 16 years that Jahangir lived and ruled as Emperor and details how she came to be the most powerful woman in 17th Century India.
The challenge for me came in the writing of my third novel, The Splendor of Silence.
I had already planned a third novel, Shadow Princess, to follow my first two books, and to consequently make them all part of the Taj Mahal trilogy. But, I chose to leave Mughal India and embark upon research and setting in an entirely new timeframe—that of India in May of 1942.
The Splendor of Silence is the story of a young American soldier who comes to Rudrakot, a desert kingdom in northwestern India for four days in May of 1942, to search for his missing brother Mike, and while there he falls in love with an Indian woman, Mila. Twenty-one years later in Seattle, USA, their daughter Olivia reads a letter sent to her by a fictional narrator and learns of what happened during those four days in 1942 in an India that seethed with the struggle for independence from British rule and where the racial/class divide was very vivid. There’s more about Splendor in my Narrative Style interview.
Splendor is my most fictional work. The characters are (almost) entirely fictional. The book is not based on the life of any specific historical figure, as in The Twentieth Wife and The Feast of Roses. The kingdom of Rudrakot does not exist on the Indian map but is instead an amalgamation of various princely states during British rule in India. Sam, Mila, Ashok, Kiran, Raman, and Jai are all of my own making. I had to give them backgrounds and histories—mothers, fathers, births and deaths—I had to make them each unique and each compelling.
This meant a whole new set of books to read, information to process, characters to give life to. I had to read enough to get a sense of the social and political climate of the time, this, mostly in India. And since the book is also set in Burma and a little in Seattle, which bookends the novel’s narrative, I had to read about both places at that time. And, if you’ve read my Narrative Style interview, you’ll see that I set myself the task of moving storylines and timeframes within the story.
So, Splendor was different from my first two novels, more of a challenge in some ways in the newness of the structure of the novel, and less of a challenge in that I had already written two other novels (well, four if you count the first two unpublished books) and knew I could construct an entire book, begin it and finish it!
Who is another novelist whose fiction writing you admire and why?
This is always the toughest question to answer—I have many favorites. I like Margaret Atwood because she tries her hand at all kinds of fiction—historical, contemporary and short stories. I like Michael Ondaatje, again for the scope of his writing, but also for the sheer poetry of his prose.
There are many more, but Jane Austen was a childhood favorite and she remains one even now.
Pick a series of novels you have written. How would you describe what makes that a cohesive series with strong appeal for readers? If you have not written a series of novels, how would you describe what makes one of your favourite series by another novelist a cohesive series with strong appeal for readers?
The Twentieth Wife (2002); The Feast of Roses (2003) and Shadow Princess (2010) are the three novels of my Taj Mahal trilogy and are actually the most popular/successful parts of my work which is translated into some 22 languages worldwide.
As the title of the trilogy indicates, the three novels center around 17th Century India, and are connected with the Mughal dynasty that built the Taj Mahal in India.
What connects the three novels of the trilogy are the women of the Mughal Empire. The Twentieth Wife and The Feast of Roses are the stories of Mehrunnisa, Empress Nur Jahan, and Shadow Princess is the story of Mehrunnisa’s grand-niece, Princess Jahanara.
Mehrunnisa married Emperor Jahangir in 1611, and a year later she arranged the marriage of her niece, her brother’s daughter, Mumtaz Mahal to one of Jahangir’s grown sons, Prince Khurram. After Jahangir died, Khurram became Emperor Shah Jahan.
Shadow Princess begins with Mumtaz Mahal being brought to bed in confinement with her fourteenth child—she dies soon after this birth and Shah Jahan then constructs the Taj Mahal in her memory. At the time of her mother’s death, Jahanara is seventeen years old, their oldest child together, and she then takes on the weight of her father’s grief, becomes supreme in his harem, plays at politics in attempting to put a brother on the throne, and falls in love with a noble at court whom she is not allowed to marry.
The appeal of the stories lies, I think, in that they are strongly women-centric and are written about women who lived behind the veil, within the walls of a harem and were yet, powerful in both harem and court politics. I also research widely and in depth, and have made the novels of the trilogy as close to existing historical documentation as possible. Each novel has an Afterword also, where I talk of my sources, what is true and what fiction and why I made those fictional decisions and guesses where I couldn’t find documentation.
How would you summarise one of your novels in one paragraph?
Here are two novels summarized in one paragraph!
The Twentieth Wife and The Feast of Roses are the stories of an almost-abandoned child, who grows up to become Empress Nur Jahan, and consequently the most powerful woman in the Mughal dynasty that built the Taj Mahal in India.
How would you describe the appeal of this novel to readers?
Please see last paragraph of answer to the question before this one.
How would you summarise a chapter from this novel in one paragraph?
This is Chapter 5 of The Twentieth Wife: Betrothed to a Persian soldier by Emperor Akbar, Mehrunnisa finally meets Prince Salim (later Emperor Jahangir) in the gardens of the imperial palace and he falls in love with her. He goes to his father, Emperor Akbar, asking for her hand, but the Emperor is unwilling to grant his wish, sickened and disgusted by Salim’s previous attempt at poisoning him. The Emperor will not change his mind, and Mehrunnisa is married to the Persian solider.
How would you describe the contribution this chapter makes to the novel?
This chapter is pivotal in that it is the beginning of Jahangir’s and Mehrunnisa’s love story. She is seventeen when she marries the Persian soldier, and it will be another seventeen long years before she is widowed and free to marry Jahangir. In the meantime, Akbar dies, Jahangir ascends the throne of India, and he seeks to annul Mehrunnisa’s marriage, but her husband does not agree. When the husband dies, and Mehrunnisa returns to court, Jahangir marries her in 1611, and then makes her the most powerful woman—the power behind the veil—in the Mughal Empire.
Author website: www.indusundaresan.com
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