Books & Poetry

Why did you choose Akbar as a character?
‘Like everyone else who grew up in India, I got force-fed the Mughals as a kid and for a time I wanted nothing to do with them – the way English children get force-fed the Tudors and get sick of Elizabeth I. I certainly had my anti-Mughal phase. But one of the things I’ve learned about myself is that the things that stick around in my head are the things I eventually have to pay attention to. Both the character of Akbar and the character of Machiavelli have been sticking around in my head for as long as I can remember. It never occurred to me that I would write about them in the same book. But it became clear to me over the years that these were figures with which my imagination was very engaged and with which I would have to deal at some point. One of the attractions of the period is that many of the things that we now recognise in the modern world had been born. You’re looking at the world in which we now live coming into being.’

Were you drawn to Akbar because he represented the cosmopolitanism of the Muslim world?
‘One has to say that for every Akbar there’s an Aurangzeb [his fundamentalist great-grandson]. There were people in Akbar’s court who strongly criticised him for not being Muslim enough. The historian Badauni, who is a minor character in the novel, genuinely did believe that he was coming very close to betraying Islam with his syncreticism and his interest in other faiths and philosophies. So even at the time, there was a dispute about what he was up to. But I do think that that period, which goes from Akbar to Shahjahan, is when Indian Islam developed its much more open, multiple, pluralistic philosophy which embraced and was affected by the other older belief systems of India. That’s what’s interesting about it and in the end along comes Aurangzeb and it all breaks up. Sometimes I think that now that I’ve written about Akbar, I should write about Aurangzeb just to be fair. To use an absurd “Star Wars” comparison, Akbar is Obi Wan Kenobi and Aurangzeb is Darth Vader.’

Have you ever done so much research for a novel before?
‘I did a lot of research for “Shalimar the Clown”, but it wasn’t anything like this. This has been ten years’ work, on and off. I finished “Shalimar” three years ago, had a year and a half of full-time reading and a year of writing it. It’s a new thing for me. When I was studying history at Cambridge, I had a professor called Arthur Hibbert who said to me, “You should never write history until you can hear the people speak. If you can’t hear them speak, you don’t understand them well enough and you can’t tell their story.” I always thought that that was good advice for writing fiction as well.’

Your bibliography lists two books about courtesans in Renaissance times…
‘I must say that there was an enormous amount of research about sex. In both cultures, it seems to have been an openly sensual time. So as well as having to see the Kama Sutra and these other things, I also found myself in Italy having to study the activities of courtesans and their various means of bringing pleasure to their clients. So yes, it was educational.’

‘Enchantress’ seems to have the fable-like quality of the stories in thed ‘Hamza Nama’ [the illustrated book of adventures commissioned by Akbar]. Was this conscious?
‘Yes, I wrote the book as if I was discovering a story that already existed. I wanted people reading the book to have that sense that this is just a story that he wrote down and the latent story was always there. I wanted it to have the feeling of a fable, of something that was around for a long time. The “Hamza Nama” was one of the real inspirations for this book. I’ve been a student of it for years. As an insight into the character of the young Akbar, the “Hamza Nama” paintings were very helpful because they were very much guided by him and they are very interesting portraits of his imaginative world. They have a great deal to do with his self-image, with the kinds of heroes he wanted to be, and he got the court atelier to paint them into being. It was one of the starting points of the book.’

As a Muslim in the West, what’s it like to consider that the US could soon have a president whose middle name is Hussein?
‘But we could very well have a president whose first name is John! I don’t call myself a Muslim in the West – I don’t have a religious affiliation. But I do think there’s a real change in America. I do hope it won’t be a false dawn. I do think that if we have a President McCain then it’s going to be very bleak indeed. But I do think that Obama is an inspirational leader and that he has a capacity I haven’t seen in a Western politician in a long time to inspire people. I’m very interested in his candidacy. But the election isn’t until November. There’s an awful lot that could happen in the meantime.’

What are you working on now?
‘I promised my ten-year-old son that I’d write him another children’s book so that’s what I’ve got to do next. I do have an idea for a related book to “Haroun and the Sea of Stories”. The thing I like about the two Alice books is that Alice doesn’t return to Wonderland. I didn’t want to return to the Sea of Stories. That would be boring. I need to find another imaginative universe.’

‘The Enchantress of Florence’ is published by Cape at £18.99