The introduction of the railways in India by Lord Dalhousie was a one-line toss-away in our school history textbooks. From this meagre beginning, author Anuradha Kumar builds a story of suspense and thrills in The First Train (Curato).
The First Train by Anuradha Kumar
The beginnings of the book, says Anu, actually goes back to a decade ago when she was writing the Atisa series and The Dollmaker’s Island . “I wanted to do interesting things with history but was unsure how my writing efforts would be received,” she recalls. “But because there was such a gap and this idea seemed so novel and untried that I went ahead pigheadedly, despite all the discouragement I received this time.”
- When: Through the morning hours, and then late at night.
- Where: Anywhere I can take my laptop, and where there’s no one around.
- What: Other books near at hand.
- How: Laptop, and a notepad to take notes.
Set in Bombay in the early 1800s, the plot revolves around the railway line from Thane to Bombay, the people — both British and Indian — who have a vested interest in seeing it succeed and those who want it to fail. The city comes alive in Anuradha’s prose and this she credits to her 13 years living there, for eight of which she worked at the Economic and Political Weekly (EPW). “The EPW is a rich archive of scholarly essays on Bombay, and I could always dip into the old bound issues as and when I needed,” she recounts when asked about her research and goes on to offer a few snippets of other reading: “OUP brought out two books on Bombay by Alice Thorner and Sujata Patel; Prof. Miriam Dossal’s wonderful work; Govind Narayan’s Mumbai by Murali Ranganathan; Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy, which gives a glimpse of the Bombay merchants involved in the opium trade in the early 1840s; and the gazetteers related to Bombay Presidency.... Most of my reading was somewhat tangential, but it all helped.”
While her hero Carsten is fictional, the cast comprises a number of historical characters, prominent among them being Dalhousie and Nana Saheb. Anuradha says her choice of characters “reflected, quite aptly, Bombay’s cosmopolitanism. It was made by people who had their feet firmly planted in the city but possessed such a fascinating worldview.”
For Carsten, the son of an Irish soldier and daughter of a thugee, “I wanted someone who was a sort of ‘in-between’ person; someone unsure of his past, yet able to straddle different worlds on his own, and make something of himself in a city — that even today, in some respects — allows a person this freedom.”
- Authors: Quite varied. Hilary Mantel, Carlo Ginzburg, Robert Darnton, Graham Greene, Amitav Ghosh, Andrew Miller, Marilyn Robinson and Conn Iggulden for his racy pace of telling a good historical story.
- Books: too many but one I am reading is an older publication. Joan M Jensen’s Passage from India: Asian Indian Immigrants in North America tells the story of the early South Asians who risked a lot as they made a new life for themselves in the United States.
- Historical Fiction: Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad, among others.
- Movies based on books: I am honestly not a movie person, but I think I loved The Prisoner of Zenda, Pride and Prejudice and, thanks to my daughter, the Harry Potter movies.
Anuradha is known for her historical fiction, both Young Adult and literary. Her last work was a fictionalised retelling of the life of Chandragupta Maurya, Emperor Chandragupta . Historical fiction might sound an oxymoron, she says, but there is a lot of history in it. She feels it’s important to distinguish between historical fiction and “works of mytho-speculative-fantastical fiction that rules the best-seller charts these days.”
She is also worried by how history has become a tool for “fake news makers, who use it as an instrument of hate, to spread all kinds of canards and false information.” Is there a way to counter it? Yes, she asserts, by “working on our historical thinking — which, as I read somewhere, combines the ability to be scientifically analytical with being imaginative and empathetic. Historical fiction is a way of trying to do this.”
Lastly, I ask if readers will see more of the swashbuckling teenage Carsten. “I hope so,” she says, wryly adding, “it’s all so sales dependent.” And this brings her back to the point she made earlier about “how history mixed up with myth seems to sell better than historical fiction. I am not sure if this relates to how we understand and perceive history. In that case, there’s really a lot of work to be done. One way is to try and write good historical fiction. Which doesn’t sell. So its like a chicken-and-egg conundrum. But I’d love to write more Carsten books for this period is a fascinating one.”
