(This essay appears in its entirely in The Punch Magazine, under the title, On Writing: Discovering Virinara.)
I don’t think I’ve ever had an idea for a story simply fall into my head. Other writers seem to get Ideas —or so one hears — but not me. My historical novel, The Legend of Virinara, did not begin with an idea. No plot point struck me in the shower. No character strode forward, fully formed from the mists of My Imagination, declaring their inner life and intentions, grabbing me by the hand to lead me along a journey through their world. No, nothing like that. Now that the finished book sits before me, in fact it’s difficult to look back and remember with any clarity how it was at the beginning, how the first words fell upon the page, barren and loose as blown leaves.
But I’m quite sure that before I began, it wasn’t my intention to write a story about a forsaken princess who falls in love with an enemy warrior. Nor of a young king caught up in a battle for succession to the throne. The pieces of the story emerged slowly over time, shaped by my reading and life experiences and the milieu in which I was living, especially about a decade ago. I was traveling around India, visiting its most ancient ruins and reading up on its history, immersed in the multiplicities of its pasts. Fragments of disparate stories and images stuck in my head. In the National Museum in Delhi, I saw a 2nd century stela depicting a woman drunk among her friends.
In Khajuraho, I learned about the Chandela dynasty, whose founders, likely embarrassed by their subaltern origins, invented a glorious Kshatriya lineage for themselves, aided by the Brahmins in their courts. I saw one of Emperor Ashoka’s paternalistic edicts, which he had inscribed on stone pillars across the subcontinent; in one of them, he entreats the forest dwellers who live beyond the cultivated lands to behave, else face punishment. I read about the decline of matrilineal social systems that once existed commonly in India, only the most meager, thwarted vestiges of which remain, especially since British Colonial times.
I read about the shifting and dissipation of rivers, changing habitats and urbanization, the ongoing destruction of the forests, which today cover the merest fraction of what they did in Ashoka’s time. I read about the millennia of trade that brought products and ideas from distant shores, and also carried them away. I read ongoing discussions regarding the Aryan migration and considered the mythologizing of identity, the construction of meaning, and the often impenetrable fog of history. I was also learning about India from friends and relatives and people in ordinary streets, trains, homes, and wedding halls. One of my friends, who lives in a small, rather left-behind Indian city, used to surprise me with her particular style of independence and her willingness to question authority, to go against the grain, so much more than others of her conventional social set. I admired her as a woman of intelligence, curiosity, and candor.
I learned that, in spite of her gifts, her value in the marriage market had dropped to zero at a young age, when she was found to be barren. Seeing how this had ultimately proven both devastating and liberating for her in her life gave flesh to musings I’d long had about growing up under the Indian style of patriarchy (which I had largely — though, not entirely — escaped). But it’s misleading to suggest that The Legend of Virinara was actually born in India. It was a slow accretion of story that began before I immersed myself in Indian history, before I read about Ashoka and the Carvakas and the spread and dominance of Sanskritic culture, maybe before I’d even studied anthropology. Even before that there were discussions, questions, matters of wonder that preoccupied me and that would eventually find their way into this story. For even as I learned more about India, in some part, I was merely struck by its parallels to everywhere else.
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