You found Margaret Wheeler and her story during your research on 1857 for your historical fictionRani, on Rani Laxmibai…
Yes. While working on that novel I was generally researching 1857. I needed to know the background. My knowledge of history was very poor and I never really liked the subject. So I started researching that period, and because I was writing fiction I didn’t have to go into all primary sources or the archives etc. I did end up doing that too, but basically I was reading all the books that existed on the subject. Saul David, Christopher Hibert, these are all the books that I read. I think it was The Indian Mutiny: 1857 by Saul David that gives quite a lot of space to Margaret Wheeler, two paragraphs or so. Theirs’ is a tragic story. Both Amelia Horne and Margaret Wheeler were kidnapped during the mutiny, but only one of them, Amelia, came back and lived the life of a social outcast. In reading her journals, a part of you feels that hers is the more tragic story, the one you want to tell. But then I knew Margaret’s would the more interesting one, since there is a mystery around why she never came back, and what might have happened to her.
So I chased after Margaret. The actual primary sources on her are very few. She actually disappeared and then there were sightings of her wearing Indian clothes. There was no evidence. And soon after she was abducted, there were engravings of her having stabbed her captor, jumped into a well to save her honour etc. Those soon died and then the British started sending search parties out. They felt it was their honour to find their daughter. That also came to nothing. Then many years later, she contacted the priest herself, confessing that she had been living as a muslim woman and had married her captor. That was all I needed at the point. I wouldn’t have found anything else of Margaret. In any case I had enough to do what I was doing, which is writing historical fiction and letting my imagination suggest what might have happened.
In all of that, I also mentioned Margaret to Urvashi Butalia, and she said that the same thing was happening during partition. She said there are numerous stories of abductions of girls who never came back, who had decided to marry either the man or someone in the group who had abducted her, someone who had been relatively kinder. Urvashi’s book tells you that both the governments tried to make it easy for the girls to come back. But many of them took that voluntary decision.
To begin with, the book was a historical fiction on Margaret, and then the Nirbhaya case turned it into what it is now. Could you tell us a little about that?
There was a journalist who said why do you even mention Nirbhaya (I mention her right in the end). I mention her because her case was what made me feel like I should write about something more recent. When that case happened, I was halfway through Margaret’s story and I thought, it feels too false to almost pretend that these things don’t happen in India anymore.
What happened to Nirbhaya played into the book hugely. If you just think about it, for me it almost completely changed the book. At first I wasn’t sure if I could combine the two together. I have often said, and other writers do too, that we shouldn’t write with a social agenda; we are storytellers, but the fact is that it does affect us. You are a sponge absorbing things around you.
So I nearly ditched Margaret’s story at that point, feeling guilty that I was writing about something that happened so long ago, when ghastly things are happening right now. Then there was that pragmatic side of me unwilling to lose the work I had already done, so I thought maybe I can try and marry the two together.
But I needed a third character, because I had decided that I would make Margaret’s story a novel within a novel. To make a novel I would need a novelist. I had to have a third person. Let’s make her the sister.
I didn’t have to do too much switching all the time, because I already had Margaret’s story. So I had to find subtle ways to move between the two ways. That for me became the fun bit. That’s where the skill of the novelist comes in, and eight books down the line I should have idea of how to do that.
Perhaps the most difficult and complicated part of this book is the Stockholm Syndrome aspect, which plays into both Tara’s and Margaret’s story, and is a difficult bit to understand and digest…
Something I struggled with was trying to give Tara a happy story. I mean, something perfectly ghastly happened to her as it did to Margaret too. We know from Margaret’s own life that she was probably strong enough or pragmatic enough to carve a positive future for herself. And this is what women who have been through a devastating experience can try and do. For Tara, the few months after her rape and before she was killed, it’s left for her sister to come out with a positive story. But that is equally dangerous to go down that path because Stockholm Syndrome is a funny thing, and with all these rape myths, it was quite scary to think that I might be treading down that path without even thinking about it. I was very conscious of that.
At a launch I did get a question from the audience about the rape myths. My cop out is that Tara doesn’t turn to her rapist. She remains terrified of him, sees him everywhere.
In Margaret’s case I show the killer being kind to her and we are left a little uncertain about if he did it for her own protection or if he wanted her for himself.
In Tara’s case I didn’t want to shy away from describing rape. She is brutalised and raped and killed, and there is no way I could get her to develop attachment for someone who did that to her. There have been Stockholm syndromes in such cases too but I wouldn’t be able to understand it. Even I would need too much convincing before going there.
