Cuckold

"If you grow up with a Hindu background in north India, Meera Bai is a major religious figure. My parents, for example, would sing bhajans —popular devotional songs that have been written by different writers and composers across the centuries. They are not high scripture, they are not Sanskrit chants or shlokas . They show how popular worship of gods and goddesses can take place through song. Among these are many Meera Bhajans – songs written by Meera that still move people today. Meera Bai is very famous, because she was a queen of Mewar and a very beautiful woman. Something flicks inside her and she becomes devoted to Krishna, as many people are, but for her the devotion becomes very real and tangible. Her songs to Krishna are full of love and imagery, which have resonated with people down the centuries. This book is a kind of reimagining. You know that novel James , about the other guy in Huckleberry Finn? Or that novel from the perspective of Captain Ahab’s wife? Well, Kiran Nagarkar looks at Meera Bai and sees a woman who is no longer fulfilling any of her duties to her husband, who is the king. So the ‘cuckold’ of the title is the king, but he is cuckolded by God. It is the spiritual God who takes over his queen’s body, mind and soul every night, in every living moment. So, who is this guy, and what does he do? It’s done beautifully. You don’t understand what is going on at first. Then you see this king at work. He’s actually a smart king. As you said, India is then made up of various smaller and bigger kingdoms. The invasions by Muslims from Central Asia, Turkey, Persia have begun. The spread of Islam across India has always been two steps forward, one step back. At this point, you have the Rajput kings of Rajasthan, who look at themselves as macho warriors—similar to the Vikings and the Mongols. Their ethos is all about fighting and dying. If you survive, great, but if not, you’re immortal, you become a legendary warrior king. But then there’s this guy, Meera’s husband, who is looking instead at sanitation and sewage and health. In those days, the Hindu armies were not simply Hindu armies. They quite often had Muslim generals. It was nothing like the black-and-white thinking that the Hindu right in India likes to lay out now. A Hindu king would get his Muslim mercenary general and his Hindu soldiers to attack his neighbour, take over his kingdom. Then, as a stamp of authority, they’d burn down the neighbour’s temple. So, it wasn’t always Muslims burning things down—sometimes it was, but sometimes it was the Hindu kings themselves who desecrated temples. Hindus were also desecrating Buddhist sites, again to establish their hegemony over that territory, and over spirituality in that territory. The Turks and the Persians relied on cavalry, muskets, cannon. The old style of Hindu fighting involved masses of soldiers and elephants, the king charging on an elephant and bulldozing the opposition. So, these were light, mobile armies versus sluggish large armies, and the small armies usually won. The Rajputs had no concept of strategic retreat. You know, stuff like: draw the enemy in, pull back when you’re losing, live to fight another day. It was just charge and die. But the king in Cuckold starts to actually plan for retreats. If the day doesn’t go well, he says, we shouldn’t just commit suicide. We should pull back and see if we can defeat them the next day. So, he’s doing all this, and at the same time, he is frustrated by his love and desire for this woman who he can’t attain, who is now in the women’s chambers in his castle. That push and pull is done very beautifully. It’s funny and moving, and at the same time dovetails into the Meera Bai songs, and the whole legend of Meera Bai quite brilliantly. It’s very different. It’s not set in the 20th century. It’s not about Modernism. It’s about relationships between men and women, spirituality, the nature of rulers, and so on. No, it’s unusual. There is Sunil Gangopadhyay, who writes in Bengali but is translated into English. He writes about the 19th century. And now people are writing more and more about the times of the Mughals , or even before that. But when Kiran came out with this book—he was a friend who has sadly passed away—it was very unusual. He took a very Indian subject, a subject in which there are no western actors, no reference to things that Europeans or Americans or people from the Occident would recognise. I think it was very clever and inventive."