In this episode, I’m thrilled to be joined by historian Dr. Ruby Lal.
When I first started thinking about this interview more than a year ago, I read Ruby’s book Vagabond Princess: The Great Adventures of Gulbadan. I was swept away by the book, which is a history biography of Princess Gulbadan in the early decades of the Mughal Empire. Ruby is also the author of Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan, another remarkable narrative about a remarkable woman in the Mughal Empire. But before I had a chance to interview her, Ruby came out with another project: Tiger Slayer, which she describes as an illustrated remix of Empress for a young adult audience. I can’t tell you how excited I was to talk about all of these projects, and how Ruby brings these narratives from hundreds of years ago to life in such vibrant, enchanting books. Dr. Ruby Lal is a professor of South Asian History at Emory University. In addition to the books I’ve already mentioned, she is also the author of two academic books, Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World, and Coming of Age in Nineteenth Century India: The Girl-Child and the Art of Playfulness. And as you’ll hear in the episode, she thinks deeply and beautifully about crafting historical narrative and the stakes of bringing these stories to readers of all ages.
Mentioned in this episode:
- Tiger Slayer
- Vagabond Princess: The Great Adventures of Gulbadan
- Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan
- Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World
- Coming of Age in Nineteenth Century India: The Girl-Child and the Art of Playfulness
- Artist Molly Crabapple
- Jason Reynolds
- Amar Chitra Katha comics
- Olga Tokarczuk, especially The Books of Jacob
- Teju Cole
- Walter Benjamin
- Gayatri Spivak
[Note: Book links may be affiliate links to bookshop.org. If you purchase books through these links, Drafting the Past gets a small commission that helps to keep the show running.]
Transcript:
Kate Carpenter 0:00
Welcome back to Drafting the Past, a podcast about the craft of writing history. I’m Kate Carpenter, and I’m happy to be back after a few months’ hiatus. I hope you’re ready to dive back into to talking about writing, because I have a whole bunch of great interviews ready to go for you. First up is one I’m especially excited about: in this episode, I’m thrilled to be joined by historian Dr. Ruby Lal.
Ruby Lal 0:22
Thank you. Thank you, Kate. I'm really excited about this conversation.
Kate Carpenter 0:27
When I first started thinking about this interview more than a year ago, I read Ruby’s book Vagabond Princess: The Great Adventures of Gulbadan. I was swept away by the book, which is a history biography of Princess Gulbadan in the early decades of the Mughal Empire. Ruby is also the author of Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan, another remarkable narrative about a remarkable woman in the Mughal Empire. But before I had a chance to interview her, Ruby came out with another project: Tiger Slayer, which she describes as an illustrated remix of Empress for a young adult audience. I can’t tell you how excited I was to talk about all of these projects, and how Ruby brings these narratives from hundreds of years ago to life in such vibrant, enchanting books. Dr. Ruby Lal is a professor of South Asian History at Emory University. In addition to the books I’ve already mentioned, she is also the author of two academic books, Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World, and Coming of Age in Nineteenth Century India: The Girl-Child and the Art of Playfulness. And as you’re about to hear, she thinks deeply and beautifully about crafting historical narrative and the stakes of bringing these stories to readers of all ages. Here’s my conversation with Dr. Ruby Lal.
Ruby Lal 1:44
You know, basically, I am trained as an academic historian. I grew up in India. I did my early degrees there, and then I went off to Oxford in England to do a PhD, and that was was because a lot of the archival sources I work with are housed in the British Library in London and other places. And then I, you know, came to the United States. Johns Hopkins was my first institutional home, and now I teach at Emory University. But really, so I did, you know, a couple of academic books. I am a Mughal historian. And right from the start, there were two things that were really of great interest to me, which is why I became a Mughal historian. One is, you know, various forms of storytelling that I grew up with. So these were very much part of my consciousness, although in the late 90s, when I was training to be an academic historian, you know what we have today, this great interest in storytelling as history really wasn't the thing. The other thing that interested me, particularly about the Mughal Empire, was that, you know, despite phenomenal histories. They were, they were mostly male histories written by men, about men. You know, agriculture, institutions, military victories, wars, what have you. All, you know, classically male enterprises. And you know that it was a big gap I felt as a, as a, as a beginning student at that time, I felt that the whole world was missing. So, you know, those were the early points. So I did that work and wrote a couple of books, particularly about the feminine experiences in the Mughal empire. My first academic book is called Domesticity and Power In the Early Mughal World, in which I really, you know, went after this whole idea called the haram, or harem, which was taken for granted. Imagine that women always lived in the harem, and yet, you know, people didn't care to find out what really it was. And basically, I was fascinated by the Mughals because, you know, this was an itinerant dynasty. We are talking the pre nation states in the world. And like much of the world, people were moving and migrating, you know, conquering, building, homes. So the harem really wasn't there in the early stages. So I charted that history anyway, over time. As I was finishing my second academic book, an editor in India asked me whether I would write, these are her words. She said, there is no definitive history of Nur Jahan. Would I? Would I write that? And I got very excited, and I also, of course, started scolding myself, because I had grown up hearing Nur Jahan's story from my mother as a girl. So somewhere along the line, it was, it was, you know, seeped into my consciousness. But anyway, so I, you know, decided to do this book. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this was the moment in which I wanted to, you know, A, place the only woman, ruler of the empire onto the world stage. But also second, this was my chance to really bring together, you know, history and storytelling both, both concepts, as it were, are really up for grabs for me, have always been. So this is really the trajectory from very solid archival work, but also in that I was mapping the feminine, I was thinking about these, you know, vast experiences of human life that have gone missing, and once you delve into them, histories look very, very different. So that, in a nutshell, is, is how I moved.
Kate Carpenter 5:55
You're such a beautiful writer. Did you always see yourself as a writer? I mean, was, was craft always a focus for you?
Ruby Lal 6:03
You know, it's, I will say outright that people in the in the academy, don't think seriously about writing as a craft. There's a very different it's a very valuable form of writing, which is academic debate. It's laden with jargon. You know, it takes a lot of strength to think through those things. I think there are great philosophies, so I come from that strength. So I thought more about philosophy of history. I thought more about feminist-- so the work was very kind of rich, I think, and supple with feminist thought, highly theoretical, those sorts of things. It's only when I moved with the third book, which is Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan, that I began to take not only because I was writing non fiction, but also there was this whole inheritance I had right of storytelling. What did storytelling mean? I mean, that was not a given to me. I think it's commonly touted about, oh, set the scene, you know, you know, write story. But to me, I had to really think. I had to think what storytelling would mean for me. I mean, I wanted to capture, for instance, just to be concrete. How would I capture the glint in my mother's eye? She told me the story of this amazing, you know, woman, so that the storytelling in which the both the writer, the reader, listener, you know, everybody is transformed, and so is the story, right? How was I going to capture all of these things and yet at the same time, keeping very much the integrity of the archive. It's a lush but very complicated archive that I, I work with. So, yeah, that, you know, that's where I actively got into craft. And it has not left me. I mean, you know, I since Empress, have done two other books, and I'm going on to do more. So it's the craft in the end, that's, that's, you know, bore me well.
Kate Carpenter 8:02
I'd like to ask some nosy questions about your writing process. So when and where do you like to do your writing?
Ruby Lal 8:09
I never do my writing at work. That is never at Emory, that office space is mainly for students, for teaching, for meetings. I have these very demarcated ways of working, but they seem to work really well for me. In Atlanta, my working space is this, where we are talking, you know, it's surrounded by books, as you can see, there is a Mughal screen behind us. There are all sorts of things from the, you know, of the people that I write about, the fabrics, you know, the lush materiality of that world. So this is really where I write much of the time. Of course, when I was completing my second to last volume, Vagabond Princess, that I wrote, the entire first draft I wrote in Sweden. It was Covid, and I was on an international fellowship. And you know, it was extraordinary to be writing about one of the most itinerant women in this dynasty while, you know, we were, we were locked down, you could not move. So that was a really beautiful experience of silence.
Kate Carpenter 9:18
How do you like to organize your research?
Ruby Lal 9:21
With the academic books, there was a lot of, you know, it was, again, sort of the word I use was demarcated, you know, the research part happened first, and then at some point when I was very bogged down by research, I thought, gosh, now I have to give this some some frame. And the same story actually continued with Empress. I wrote down first, my first draft of Empress was really what my Norton editor, when she looked at it, she said, Oh, God, this is a Cambridge University Press draft, and I had intended it to be that way because, you know, it had to be very solid on the documentation, and then the lifting from there happens. But with Vagabond Princess, because I'd already been 20 years into this world. I mean, I, I will say this slightly hesitantly. I don't want to say that I know all the documents, but I do know a fair bit. So I was actually reading. I was working through the archive and writing simultaneously with that, and that has now become my form. I just, as soon as I, partly because the frames are clearer to me, the structure. I mean, I usually with every book. Now there is a bigger frame. There is a bigger arc or architecture. There's a story I have in mind, storyline, and then there are eight chapters. So there is kind of, you know, work going on about sorting out chronology, movements, character. There are intense geographies here. You know, that I have to work through those sorts of things, textiles, events, and quite quickly, I think I'm able to to make a picture in my mind. And then for each chapter, this began with Vagabond Princess in Sweden. So just to give you a concrete example, this is the most itinerant woman. She's a, you know, she, she's the only woman Mughal historian of the empire, called Gulbadan, or Princess Rosebody. And she her way of thinking, in a way, this very, very paripatetic way of thinking, really inspired me. So one of the major sort of contributions of that book is when she leaves India and sets out on this very adventurous pilgrimage towards Arabia. So when I got to Sweden, I was writing that chapter on when she leaves from India, that is, she boards the ship for, you know, that they would cut through the Arabian ocean, go through the Indian Ocean, and onto the Arabian Peninsula. And in Sweden, I was at the Swedish Collegium for for Advanced Studies. And quite early on, we were gathered there for lunch, we fellows. And there was a beautiful 16th century painting of a ship that just caught me, and that became the visual in my mind. And so I, as soon as that got imprinted in my mind. I began writing that chapter. I began asking myself, well, you know, what did 16th century ships look like? What were they doing for three weeks? What was happening? So the visual became the directing point of, you know, the chapter, and I think that's how I've gone subsequently, there's a visual for every chapter.
Kate Carpenter 12:42
What kind of revision and work does it take to go from a Cambridge University Press draft to a Norton draft?
Ruby Lal 12:51
It's, it's, it's the most generative. So the back breaking part, very, very tough part and very demanding, because I think you can't make this stuff up, right? Is actually putting that first draft down. That's the that's the hardest for me, because I kind of physically tire with that kind of thing. After that, it's a lot about it's the most aesthetic part in that I'll spend full days in my study, when I have them just sitting on that one visual, say, for example, the ship, right? I will think about the words in the document. So in Persian, jihaz, for instance, right? What is the size? And quite often the shapes were like that of a camel in the front of the ship, right? Things like that. So then the rearrangements begin to take place, right? Where do you make a most effective move in a chapter? Right? How do you capture a reader straight away. In Nur, for instance, with Empress as well as Tiger Slayer. My remix, you know, the the comet, the great comet, was a very lovely image. I mean, it's, you know, it was there as baby Nur at that time. Here was the, she was not born. Her mother was pregnant. They were they were leaving Iran. And so that, that comet became a very powerful symbol. So I began the chapter called Miracle Girl, in both cases, with this comet that was glowing overhead and then built the story. So I think the transformation is more, at least in my own writing, more visual, more sort of very clear-cut narrative, no chronological mixing, no passive voicing, basically being very succinct and and lightening it as far as possible. And I don't mean tamping down. I mean the prose has to lighten at some point. I don't know if this makes sense.
Kate Carpenter 15:00
And you know, you were just talking about how much you're evoking the visual as you're doing that revision and that work. And yet, of course, you don't have photographs to work with, which is often what historians tell me they use. What do you draw on then to really bring that, that visual to life for the reader?
Ruby Lal 15:20
You know the Mughal world right from the start. I mean, this long dynasty that came from Central Asia through Afghanistan. And they were very drawn by traditions, Persian traditions, because that was the way to be civilized at that time. And they were very strong, painterly traditions. So they came with that some Persian masters came along later on in India. And then, of course, you know, India has one of the most succinct and gorgeous painterly traditions from time immemorial. And so they started blending these traditions and painting by the time of the third Mughal emperor called Akbar. You know, he was really the man who established, from the peripatetic itinerant mode to more, the empire of the cities and, you know, palaces. And he's the man who really builds the first haram of the empire that I was mentioning earlier on. And he established, establishes one of the finest ateliers in the in the, painting atelier, in the dynasty and painting, so it's called miniature painting, because on a small let's say, you know, usually, I mean the sizes vary, but a gorgeous image of Nur loading the musket is drawn on a paper board, which is, I think, approximately 10 by 13 centimeters, something like that. But the detail is breathtaking, I mean, and this is a single portrait that was drawn of her, the Mughal miniature style was really what we call many temporalities within the same painting. That is, you know, three or four scenes are shown taking place. So there is a birth of a royal child happening inside. Just outside the scene is this kind of, you know, very intense activity of the messenger taking the news outside. And then there's this third scene of activity where the people are milling around and music is taking place because the news has been forecast. So, you know, things like that. So there is this kind of, you know, 1000s of these miniatures. Some accompany manuscripts themselves. You know, that would produce the textual manuscripts. Some are loose folios, and they are in collections all over the world. They are in India. They are in the British Library in London, Victoria and Albert Museum in London. In the Smithsonian in Washington, DC. One of the finest collections is in the Cleveland Museum of Art in Cleveland that I have used quite a lot. But here's the thing, I mean, with painting I, you know, so I was trained. So these are these really strange demarcations people do in the academy, right? You're a historian, you're an art historian, you're so my training was textual, but quite early on, I began to, in a way, challenge these boundaries. And so in order to challenge those boundaries, I sat with some immense, great art historians, and began learning what these traditions were, who was drawing, why were they using some of the colors that they were using. What's the palette, right? How is it actually produced all of this just made my world rich, in a way. I think my words got quite affected by the visuality of this world. It's such a rich and visual so, not only paintings, but also architecture, right? I mean, the Mughals, of course, are known for the symbol of India, the Taj Mahal, but there's kind of huge number of buildings before that, all around so it's a lush archive. And I think all of this helped with the words.
Kate Carpenter 19:21
I want to ask a little bit about Tiger Slayer, which is your newest book, and you've called it a remix of Empress for young adults, which I love that way of describing it. Could you talk a little bit about how that project came about, how it came to exist?
Ruby Lal 19:39
I think writing for young adults, of course, is a craft, as is all these crafts that we've been, you know, discussing. I hadn't really, this was not in the plan. It's not something I had ever thought about. But when I was on the road with Empress, virtually in every event that I did, somebody or the other would stand up and say, Would you not write this for our girls, my daughters, young adults, right? This question kept on coming up for for the two years that I was on the on the road, and during that time in, you know, in various in the literary festival called the Jaipur Literary Festival in Boulder, in Colorado, in Beirut, and in Jaipur Literary Festival Jaipur in India, I met Molly Crabapple, who's a very fine, you know, painter based out of New York, and we became friends. So we knew each other. And by about 2020, two years later, as I had just mentioned, I was in, I was in Sweden, and I did a couple of lectures there, and the same question actually came up, why not for young adults, at which point I realized this was fated, and fated because I knew, I think, I think Molly, in a way, her presence inspired me. So I we were writing letters to each other. By this time, she was sending me her art, which I was, which is, you know, strongly lush and feminist and feminine. And so I called her from Sweden, and she was on straight away. So it's really the collaboration of, I don't again going by words. I don't like that word because I think it's very decided. So we started co creating, and it was not that I was doing the text, and I'd done the text, and then she drew this was happening simultaneously. We were discussing things. I was, so going back to the visual. I was sending her all these pictures from the Mughal world, and she was studying those closely. Of course, she'd for a very long time, she'd had very deep interest in this form, the Persian and the Indian Mughal form. As a girl, she used to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and look at these paintings so but her recreation, she sticks to the Mughal form in in the in the gorgeous illustrations that she's done, she sticks very close to to the iconography. And yet, you know, creates this splendor, a new in a way which has the old and yet the new feel. We also decided that paintings were not going to be inserts, but that they would spread, you know, so in a way, words and pictures come in conversation with each other.
Kate Carpenter 22:34
Because of the recent publication of Tiger Slayer, I wanted to do something a little different so that I could talk with Ruby about how she reimagined one of her books for a younger audience. I asked her to read two excerpts, one from Empress, and a corresponding section from Tiger Slayer so that we can do a little comparison. First, here’s Dr. Ruby Lal reading from Empress, Chapter 8, titled “A Key for Closed Doors.”
Ruby Lal 22:59
When Mihr returned to Agra in 1608 after more than a decade in the wild and open spaces of distant Bengal, the capital was even grander and more crowded than when she left. Along the banks of the Yamuna River stood many more mansions than before, surrounded by luxuriant gardens and groves. ‘Everyone has tried to be closer to the riverbank,’ a vising Dutch trader wrote, ‘and consequently the waterfront is occupied by the costly palaces of all the famous lords, which make it appear very gay and magnificent.’ The sleepy village of Sikandara, just outside of Agra, was not bustling with workers completing the tomb of Akbar. It had been renamed Paradise Town in honor of its new status as the Great Mughal’s burial place. The Agra Fort, on the western bank of Yamuna, was as imposing as ever. A drawbridge over a moat led to the fort’s front entrance, Akbari Darwaza, or Akbar’s Door, a colossal spiked gate richly decorated with golden loops and rings. That would be the first halting point for an entering regiment, where imperial orders would be presented to the guard. The equally magnificent Elephant Gate (Hathi Pol) to the west served as the public entrance; from there, an open bazaar led to the courtyard of public audiences with the emperor. After passing through Akbar’s Door, Mihr and her young daughter were taken to the harem, called the Jahangiri Mahal, though it was built by Akbar. A grand garden marked the entrance of this multistory palace for royal women, dominated by high domed turrets and separated from the rest of the fort complex by thick walls. The harem, viewed form the public courtyard, or from outside the walls of the fort, was visible only as a succession of rooftops and cupolas. Mihr was thirty-one years old, attractive, dignified, and well trained in the behavior and duties required of noblewomen connected with palace society. She had visited the harem as a girl, and knew she would soon be part of a restrictive existence very different from her relative independence in Burdwan. But she had no idea what her precise role there would be.
Kate Carpenter 25:35
And again, here’s Ruby reading from Tiger Slayer, Chapter 4, titled “When Mihr became Nur.” See if you can hear the similarities and differences.
Ruby Lal 25:44
When Mihr returned to Agra, the capital was even grander and more crowded than when she’d left. Along the banks of the Yamuna River stood many more mansions, surrounded by luxuriant garden and groves. The Fort of Agra, also on the western bank of the Yamuna, was as imposing as ever. A drawbridge over a moat led to the fort’s colossal spiked front entrance gate, decorated with golden loops and rings. After passing through this door, Mihr and her young daughter would arrive at the front of the harem, a multistory palace for royal women. Mihr was sent to the harem rather than to the mansion of her father or older brother because both were under suspicion. The head officer of the harem would escort Mihr and her daughter to the inner areas. Lavish carvings in floral patterns decorated the walls; vases were carved into niches and etched with leaves and flowers. Blue and red chandeliers hung from the cupola ceilings. Numerous entrances and passages connected a series of open, paved quadrangular courtyards that were lined with trees and pots of plants and flowers and surrounded by verandahs. Behind the verandahs were the royal women’s apartments. Every apartment was spectacularly decorated. There were domes of sandstone, arches so intricately carved that they looked like netting. Although each passage, courtyard, and set of rooms had a distinct style, they were in harmony. Mihr had visited the harem as a girl. Now she was thirty-one years old. Attractive and dignified, she knew the behavior required of noblewomen connected with the palace, but she had no idea what her role there would be.
Kate Carpenter 27:36
Well, perhaps the most obvious difference between these two versions of the story, as listeners might guess from the different chapters that are are here, is that Tiger Slayer is shorter. How did you think about what should change and what should stay the same as you were remixing and what could be taken out?
Ruby Lal 27:59
Yeah, that's a great question. And yes, so it's, you know, chapter eight and four already tell you the difference. But also, Empress is just, you know, technically speaking, it's about 85,000 words plus. And Tiger Slayer is 31 point something. So. But the important thing, as I was writing. And again, this, this, you know, speaks to the form. I didn't want to tamp down the story. I didn't want to, I don't think of young adults as half adults. You know, they are young people where they are. And, you know, apart from the esthetics and the beauty and the power of the story, there is also the politics around this work that I do, which is that, because, nominally, the Mughals were Muslim, although they were very experimental and very, you know, multi denominational and playful, but because, you know, they are a Muslim dynasty, they've been wiped out from school textbooks and college curriculum. Over the last they've been slowly being wiped out and now completely done because of the demand of the Hindu right wing state in India. And so, you know, I see my task as a task of responsibility and of of memorializing this history, but in a way that not only that the books are available, but that also that this history remains in the consciousness of this people, right of young people, because they are the citizens. Because if you gerrymander histories and books, then you're taking away a very beautiful vision of the world. So that's really at stake. That's the politics of it. But onto the decisions about a lot of the information in Tiger Slayer was also, you know, I thought about sidebars and we created very visual side bars. So for instance, instead of bringing a whole narrative on, what is a haram, what is the difference between Mihr's life in Bengal versus, which is a mansion and upper class and a noble woman, versus when she comes to the palace, instead of making the narrative heavy. I created a sidebar on the haram, right? What is the small sidebar? What is the history of the haram? And, you know, when does it come to be etc, this title, for instance, when Mihr becomes Nur, right? Again, it's very hard sometimes to grab to, you know, grapple with this information that she's born as Mihr-un-Nessa. But then, you know, when she marries the Emperor twice over, her name changes, and it changes because of very serious reasons. It's a form of elevation. It's a form of honoring. And Nur Jahan, light of the world, is actually very deeply involved in declaring her a co sovereign, which is what she comes to become. So some of that information, for instance, was in the sidebar. And then there are all these, you know, delicate visuals to build the story. So here we have the weight of the pictorial and the sidebars that are doing the same amount of work. So these were some of the, I think, decisions I was taking as I was writing.
Kate Carpenter 31:30
Did working with an illustrator affect the way you think about your own writing? Did you approach it differently?
Ruby Lal 31:35
So there was a there were two sets of things that were happening. You know, at that time when I was working with Molly, a, of course, I know the pictorial archive, but when I would send her stuff, she would say, for example, but you have not sent me the seat perched on the elephant. Can you? Can you send me? So then I would think, Oh, exactly, where can I find that kind of thing? Or we had this really very funny conversation. At one point, she had drawn this glorious scene of the of the haram, you know, women learning in the in the haram, and she had put a cat there. And I wrote to her saying, I said, Molly, you cannot have the cat because cats don't come into the pictorial tradition till the 18th century. And then she said, Okay, I'll, right, so this is this one I can do. But once I'm drawn, it's once I've drawn, it's very complicated, etc. We had this exchange. And then a few emails later, I think it was the third time I said to her, have you taken off the cats? And she was quite upset, and I said to her, I said, you know, this is not just an esthetic thing, because I would be taken to task if the cats show and we quite often laugh about this, right? So I was, you know, paying, in a way, paying attention to things that I was holding each detail in my worldview much more actively, I think, getting even closer to paintings than I had. And I think that's what I mean, once I did that, that affected the words, right? I mean, I'm often told that my sentence sentences are very visual. It's because I'm constantly thinking through textures. And I'm thinking through, you know, the feel of the trees, the kind of smell of the landscape. And these are very active in my writing. And by that, I mean, you know, scholars will often think of this kind of stuff we are talking about that is the, you know, the dresses or the or the paintings or the buildings or the or the rivers or the valleys as backdrop, right context, to use the academic word, but I don't think of them as as as context. I feel it is, it is history. I think it is the story.
Kate Carpenter 34:03
In the process of remixing the story, was there anything you had to leave out that was particularly painful?
Ruby Lal 34:11
No, I think, I think, no, I'm, I think it was ready for, for this new form. And I wanted to, I wanted to work within the terms of that form, in the sense that learning about the form from many, many people that I've read, such as Jason Reynolds, you know, he's, he's particularly superb on this. But also the, you know, Amar Chitra Katha editions that I grew up reading. These are, these are the translation would be immortal picture books. And mostly these are, these were read both by adults as well as children in India, and they're still there. In fact, one of the scenes of when Nur goes on the battle to save the Emperor. We, I actually, you know, brought out the Amar Chitra image for Molly, and I said, we can use this, because these, some of these things, are not in the archives, right? So we had to use the archive and yet create some, some some new pictures.
Kate Carpenter 35:17
Has anything surprised you about the reception to Tiger Slayer versus the reception for Empress?
Ruby Lal 35:26
I mean, Empress, I'm just so, so grateful. Empress has done superbly well. And here, I don't mean monetarily, right? I mean, it's done well in terms of the debate. It's generated the form. But also, you know, writing these histories is an act of responsibility, as far as I'm concerned. So to me, and both, you know, younger men and women, various forums. I mean, it's been seven years since Empress came out. I'm still talking about her, and now with Tiger Slayer, really, I mean, I didn't know what to expect. And it's just done, you know, it's just because, literally, you know, a few months ago, this, this history, was completely removed from the National by the National Council of educational research and training called the nCrt in India, from school textbooks. And, you know, I think the reviewers and, you know, podcasters and the press is picking up on that, because, of course, now, again, I hadn't planned this, but the book came out right in the thick of that debate. So I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm just delighted, because, like the Amar Chitra Katha form, both younger and older people are picking up this book. And I really my intention, somewhere along the line, was to write in the genre of young adult, but I felt, you know, I wanted both younger people as well as older people to be able to read this. In fact, I'm teaching a freshman seminar called India's Women at Emory, and I discussed the two and they wanted to read the young, younger books. So that's fantastic.
Kate Carpenter 37:13
I don't want to leave Vagabond Princess out of our conversation either, because I loved it as well. And it also came out fairly recently, and I really wanted to talk about it's so compelling. It's such a good read. How do you go about creating a narrative that is so gripping when there are so many things we can't know about Gulbadan from the sources?
Ruby Lal 37:38
Just so that our listeners are clear, this is Princess Rosebody. She was the daughter of the first Mughal emperor called Babur. Was one of the loveliest poet emperors. He was a, he was dedicated to this itinerant life. And he leaves from, I mean, you know, after various patterns, etc, he was settled in Afghanistan. And then he's the man who does early conquests in India and establishes the, you know, the beginnings of the Mughal empire. And Gulbadan is in the first caravan of women, the first girl at age six, who comes to India at the invitation of her father. And like him, she spends her life in and out of various, you know, territories. And she is the only woman historian of the empire writes a rather unique prose. Most women later on wrote poetry. So she, you know, when she was older, in her 50s, her nephew, the third Mughal that we were talking about, Akbar builds the first set of haram quarters just outside Agra, which was part of the Imperium, of settlement, of saying, you know, we've arrived. We are the great Mughals. And so Gulbadan, along with generations of women, is requested to live in the in the haram, in the sequestered cloisters, which is an act of elevation that you know now you are the women of the great Mughal. You cannot be seen by any Tom, Dick, and Harry. So it's from the haram quarters that she takes this voyage along with 11 other women of the family, ostensibly for a pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina. I knew all of this. I had begun my career with this woman and her book. I'd won a scholarship to go to England to study this book that is housed in the British Library in London, and that led to that haram history that I was talking about. So I knew this much. And then after Empress, so along with Tiger Slayer, Gulbadan was coming up in people's questions, because as baby Nur was making her way to India, Gulbadan was leaving with the women for, for Arabia. And so there's a, you know, she's a, she's a, let's say, a minor character in Empress. And people started asking me about her, and I thought, Oh, my God. I mean, she really this woman, you know, I must write about her, but I didn't want to do, do just a life and times kind of thing. So there were two things that came back to me. One was as the only copy of her book that is housed in the British Library, it breaks off mid sentence in folio 83, that was one thing that had never left me. And the second thing, as I thought deeper about this book, I found out that she had actually, along with the women, lived in Arabia for four years. And in those days, you could make those trips and be back, you know, between one month to three months. And I thought to myself, My God, what were these women doing for three, for four, four years. And so the thing I had to do was to move from the Mughal world to learn the sources in Arabia. And I found out five eviction orders against her that are housed in the National Archives in Turkey. And basically the women had gone about. It was very raw times. And you know, Arabia, including the holy cities, were under the protection of the Ottomans of Turkey, called a man called Murad the third he was a contemporary of Akbar. And it was because they were not Arab, because in you know, they just the holy cities had become theirs by conquest. So they had to make an argument for why they should rule, and the argument was basically that they would be the servitors and protectors of all. And here you had the harem women of Akbar the Great for four years, handing out bounty to all and sundry. So the generosity becomes a very, very big ground, because literally, that would mean that they're walking in the footsteps of Murad. So this became the story I wanted to write. So I think to your question, then this detail is, I think, important in understanding, you know, how then to do this kind of gripping history, because the history itself is gripping, right? So I wanted to think it made it more gripping for me, because the bulk of the book is about that time in Arabia, which nobody knew until now, what had happened. So that was very exciting. But also, what did travel look like? Where all did they go? So the pilgrimage in 16th century was totally different. I found out from what we know of it today, right? There were tons of other things that that these women, you know, were doing, and what was Arabia like? I mean, it was so interesting to learn about all of that, and then they return. I mean, they did not want to return home. This is stated in one of the documents. So for me, it became a question about, I believe, she left the harem on the grounds of wanting to do the pilgrimage that was part of the world. And surely she wanted to do that, but it was also this commitment to an itinerant life, to not wanting to be cloistered, to once again, even for a few minutes or years, experience what being in the open country would mean, something she was used to, and I believe she would come back transformed. And I think the missing pages are to do. I believe they have something to do with this journey as I as I discuss.
Kate Carpenter 43:49
in the last bit of our time together, I'd like to ask a little bit about your inspirations. Do you have a writing community, or a group of writers that you turn to for feedback on your work?
Ruby Lal 44:01
Yeah, I had a very long standing, until Empress, I had a very long standing group of colleagues, three of them. They were all experimental. They are all experimental themselves. And we met monthly to read each other's work. And it was really fantastic. Towards the end, I did something I, you know, I practice. I mean, we all have our practices. I'm a great fan of yoga. And I have, you know, three friends in my yoga circles who are not academics. And so they were very fascinated by this history when I began telling them what I was doing. And so one of them started housing us for monthly potluck dinners, and I would read the chapters aloud as I was writing. And I think that reading aloud is an extraordinary practice in writing. You know where you're getting stuck, you know where things are not working? Thinking the moves are not right, right? And just listening, you know, their reactions are really quite extraordinary. But increasingly, I think it's become more and more a solitary exercise. I think I'm getting more into that space where I show work very late, I guess, more hesitation as you're writing more or perhaps getting deeper into the craft. I don't know.
Kate Carpenter 45:32
What's the most influential writing advice you've ever received?
Ruby Lal 45:36
Actually, from my agent. You know, she said to me at one point, if there is a writer or a book you like, just take one passage and read it out many times and then try to see if you can without reading again, replicate something like that in your writing. And I think that was wonderful. Of course, you know, it's changed a lot for me. I usually my evenings are almost always reading all kinds of writers that I deeply admire. And you know, one of them, I think, the top for me, who I actually, you know, discovered only in 2022 in fact, after I'd written Vagabond Princess, or no, actually, I was finalizing Vagabond Princess. And I think that last chapter, called "The Books of Gulbadan," is inspired by this great Polish writer. Of course, I read her in English. Her name is Olga Tokarczuk, and you know her phenomenal The Books of Jacob. It's a 936 pages long book. As the, you know, the Swedish Academy said, this is her magnum opus. She's phenomenal because, I mean, I have an affinity with her. She's very interested in figures and spaces in movement, before the nation states. You know what was, what was it like for people who were roving the world of manuscripts, the world of eccentrics, particularly eccentric women. And so this is somebody I and also she challenges these boundaries of fiction and nonfiction. She's very deeply historical. So I'm a great, great admirer of hers. I've recently been reading, and I think I've pretty much read most books of Teju Cole, who I think is a brilliant essayist, and of course, he writes, you know, very beautifully on photography, so a very different pictorial mode from me. Nonetheless, I think there are, there are thoughts that are very compelling. You know, the great Walter Benjamin, particularly, he's, of course, there's tons of very serious and dense academic volumes, but he's written a lot on storytelling. And so I visit his pieces a fair bit. A very complex thinker from India. You know, she's, she's one of our most phenomenal feminist thinkers, Gayatri Spivak, who teaches at Columbia, not for writing, because her writing is extremely abstract, but I love to sit with her words, because it's extremely inspirational. I mean, how lovely to be talking about this, right? Yes, I can sit here and talk to you non stop about the books I love.
Kate Carpenter 48:35
Well, those are wonderful, wonderful writers you've mentioned. You know, I know that you are quite busy right now talking about Tiger Slayer and continuing to talk about your other work, but you did hint that there are future books in your life. I certainly understand if you were taking some time not to write right now. But do you have future projects that you were beginning to dabble in?
Ruby Lal 49:00
Actually, turns out I do, and I'm I'm both fatigued and I'm very excited. I you know, we just struck this deal with Basic Books, Hachette New York, with a really tremendous, I think, visionary editor. So I will be writing a deep history of the Taj Mahal. That's my next project. You know, there's kind of fabulous writings on the Taj Mahal, on its architecture, on the documentation reception. I want to dive deeper into, you know, this was built as a memorial to Shah jahan's wife called Mumtaz Mahal, who dies while birthing her 14th child. So like I said about human beings, who was she? Who is he? Right? What? What steps of the making of grandeur does he walk in? What's the situation? I mean, he's forlorn at her death, right? He cries so much that he begins to wear glasses overnight. I mean, there's some so. So I want to, as with all my works, I want to deepen. I want to just write about the moment, from the moment of her death till the till the Taj is fully on the river, and I must say, so. He is the stepson of Nur Jahan, our Empress. And the Taj is inspired by the mausoleum that Nur Jahan builds for her parents, which is just across the river from the Yamuna. And ironically, today, people you know, in Agra where it is they call Nur's parents' mausoleum, the baby Taj, which I think the Taj is the baby Taj in some senses. So, yes, I'm writing a book on the Taj Mahal, and there are two others that are commissioned, also with Basic Books after the Taj Mahal, I think I will probably write a big narrative story of the entire Mughal empire. And if I'm still alive and not completely drained by writing books, then, of course, the magnificent 13th century Queen Sultan Razia of Delhi. Her father was a slave, and he becomes the first Muslim emperor of Delhi, and then nominates his daughter to the throne. Her story is pretty tremendous. So these are things that are brewing. I mean, I think it is just fantastic to be living amidst these and but like I said, I'm excited and extremely nervous.
Kate Carpenter 51:49
Well, having read these books, I am eagerly awaiting each of those. Dr Ruby Lal, thank you so much for speaking with me. It has been a pleasure and a joy to talk about writing and books with you.
Ruby Lal 52:03
Thank you likewise.
Kate Carpenter 52:05
Thank you again to Dr. Ruby Lal for joining me for this episode, and thanks to you for listening. You can find show notes and links to the books we talked about at draftingthepast.com. I have many more great interviews coming right up, so if you enjoyed this conversation about writing history, please subscribe to the podcast and tell a friend. If you’d like to support the show even more, consider leaving a five-star review on your favorite podcast app. It’s a great way to help people find Drafting the Past. Until next time, remember that friends don’t let friends write boring history.
