Soliloquies Of An Exiled King

Maharaja Duleep Singh's life has been one of the most intriguing topics among historians. Navtej Sarna (50) has attempted to get into Duleep Singh's thought process, the emotions the prince went through in his "historical fiction" The Exile (Penguin India). The book talks about the life of the last Sikh kings, who changed his religion twice and who encountered deceptions and injustice at every stage of his life. Sarna, a former MEA spokesperson, will soon assume his new role as the Ambassador to Israel. He tells BW Online's Sanjitha Rao Chaini the reasons for writing this book and why it had to be in the fiction format.

What is the kind of research you took to write this book from different points of view? When did you get the idea of writing this book?
It has been on my mind for a long time and I have been actively working on it for nine years. I had to really struggle as to what I could do with the subject. We have had some non-fiction books on Maharaja Duleep Singh. But they were not purely by Indians. And they were restricted to whatever facts were available. I had to struggle with what is the sort of format to work on.

For instance, since I was trying to do a novel I had to capture the details. For instance, you knew that he stayed in Elveden, but what did it feel like when he stayed there? What did he see when he walked out of his house in the mornings? What was the weather like? What was the scenery like? So, it was a lot of very wide ranging research.

I walked around streets of Paris, into every house that he stayed in. The man, at that point of his life, was really obsessive about not staying in one place and also not telling people where he stayed. I found the address and the roads. Very often, I found the buildings were long gone. But you could imagine what it must have been like.

I went to Lahore and walked around the fort several times. To get what it is to look outside the fort, to see the river, to see the brickwork on the floor of the fort. And somewhere all these go into the descriptions. It has been a long research. Actually, I started reading about the book much before my previous book came out (2003). There were gaps. I was writing the other book and was completely off this. Then I picked it up again. There was a lot of reading to be done around the subject.
 
How did you manage between travelling/ researching for the book and your job?
This is actually all the time taken beyond my job. Luckily, a lot of my travel came work-related. For instance, I could not have been to Lahore but for my job. We did have many visits to Pakistan in the process and I took a few hours every time to look around. Paris, I did it on leave. Moscow, I worked there, so I knew Moscow.

What has been the response so far, from within the Sikh community?
I have never really thought it from the community view point as such. The book is a broader subject purely than the Punjab and the Sikhs. Yes, that is the core, but the book is beyond that. It does involve the British Raj, Indians princes being usurped, Indian provinces outside the Raj being annexed and the treatment of the princes. It's a far bigger issue that we are looking at. He [Duleep Singh] happens to be the last king of the Sikhs.

And also at a very human level, it was a story about someone who had an extremely difficult and tragic life and the impact it had on its personality. That was the main attraction to write the book. You see the various kind of deception he undergoes and how he reacts to them.

Having said that, there has been lot of interest in the book. The Anglo-Sikh Heritage Trail is a week-long series of events that they hold in England which actually commemorates events related to Sikh history during British times. They had asked me to give a talk on the book in London and they received it very well. So, I think there is a considerable interest.

Do you think making it into a novel was an easier way out?
Not because I have done it, but I don't think it is an easier way out. You see, one is to stick to historical facts that are known and write the history — I am not a historian. So, I don't even have pretentions to want to do that. I am not an academic, I cannot even claim to do the kind of research that academics would have done. I won't say it's lesser, or better, or worse. I won't use any comparative terms.

I used the novel format for two reasons. A pure non-fiction work does not allow you to bring in the emotional dimension. You cannot say what he was thinking, what he was feeling. I could not explore these dimensions in a non-fiction format. So, there are areas where you can write what you want, purely in terms of what you think he would have seen and would have felt. You can create characters which are not major. Like for instance, the Mangla character in the book. She was a historical figure, she was actually a footnote in history. You don't know much about her. You don't know what she thought. You know that she was extremely influential, that she was the favourite of Rani Jindan. So, I had to really invent her entire story. And I could give myself the freedom to do that knowing it was not distorting history.

The line that I had to draw for myself was — yes, I will use everything that is available in history and where it is not available, I can create and fill in the gaps. The idea was to tell Maharaja Duleep Singh's story from his point of view. Or at least from points of view of people who would be able to throw some light on the emotional aspects of his life and this was the only way to do it.

So, how much of this is fiction and how much non-fiction?
I would say it's fiction. Fiction based on history. So, every time when we are talking about any real events, they are all correct. The dates, the places, the story in a sense — are all correct. Where the fiction comes up is in the colouring of the minor characters and the emotional aspects of the protagonist. But even in this, where I could get history to shed a light on that, I did. For instance, I used his letters to show what he felt at some stages. I used his conversations recorded in the memoirs by Lady Login. She writes, he came to me, he was laughing, he was feeling like this. That is all history.

But it is difficult to draw an exact line in every paragraph between fiction and non-fiction, as you end up mixing it. That's the advantage of writing the novel. But what you can safely feel is that history has not been distorted. I haven't changed historical facts. I may have added some colour, but that's it.

This book evokes a lot of emotions. How did you find the objectivity while dealing with the injustice of the British towards Indian princes or the ways in which they treated Maharaja Duleep Singh.

Yes, that's true. But I wanted to bring out the fact that annexation of Punjab was based on false premises. I wanted to bring out the fact that Duleep Singh did not get the treatment which was even agreed by the British in the Treaty.

There is no point in doing it with anger. I think that you have to bring it out as an impact of characters through what happens to them and how they manage to pick up the pieces of their lives. So, it cannot be done as a political tirade. At least that's not what I wanted to do. I wanted to bring it out without making it polemical.

Page after page, one reads only tragedies in the book. How did you manage to stay detached while putting this down?
To be honest, you feel attached, and only when you feel it you can write about it. So, I don't think I was detached. I suppose the attempt was to let the tragedy come out to the reader without the writer talking about it.

Why did you name it The Exile, especially when your book says Duleep Singh went to England on his own?
First, I don't think he went completely on his own. He was only a child, you must remember. And he was only a child when he converted to Christianity and when he left for England. So he would have wanted to go. He was almost tutored into thinking that this was a better life.

Second, he was put into a situation where he had nothing left here. He was a king, suddenly he had no kingdom left. He was separated from his mother. And he had no religions left, no servants that he grew up with. Each one of things were snipped off. So there was nothing left to hold on to.

So, he probably must have thought, I may as well go. But it was never with the intention of not coming back. He went to Mussouri and he then left for England. In fact even, Lord Login had the idea that he would come back and they would buy an estate in Mussouri and live there. He had no idea that he wasn't coming back. Thereafter, every time he tried to come back he was not allowed to come back. So I think this was an exile.

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