Near the end of Rana Safvi’s debut historical novel, A Firestorm in Paradise, a short poem by Zebunissa “Makhfi” (one of Aurangzeb’s daughters, a poet and a princess) is quoted:
…Through the green boughs the bulbul’s note is heard,
And, wing-clipt and imprisoned, my heart’s bird
Flutters against the barriers, wild for flight.
A Firestorm in Paradise
A Novel on the 1875 Uprising
Penguin
Pages: 416
Price: Rs.699
The front cover of the book may well be an illustration of these lines. The stylised bulbul, the crimson flowers, the green leaves, the billowing clouds: natural beauty, framed in a scalloped arch of what looks like red sandstone. It requires little to make that further inference, that this is the Lal Qila, where that immortal verse is inscribed: Agar firdaus bar rue-e-zamin ast, Hamin ast-o hamin ast-o hamin ast (If there is Paradise on earth / It is this, it is this, it is this).
But turn the book over and the back cover tells a different story. The red flowers and verdant branches have been replaced by orange-red fire: Paradise, wrapped in flames.
On the banks of the Yamuna
The change, from Paradise on earth to Paradise destroyed, is what Safvi describes through the story of her protagonist, the fictitious Falak Ara, daughter of Emperor Bahadur Shah “Zafar” from a concubine. Falak Ara, who has lived all her life within the closely guarded, cloistered confines of the imperial harem has little chance to interact with the outside world except through her faithful maid-cum-nurse, Mubarak, who lives in the city. And, every morning, Falak Ara sits in a riverside pavilion and gazes at the world on the reti (sandbar), on the bank of the Yamuna. It is on this reti that she first sees the handsome young man she falls in love with. Mirza Qaiser is one of the salatin (member of the royal family), his father a distant relative of Bahadur Shah, and for him, too, it is love at first sight.
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But neither Falak nor Qaiser, nor Mubarak and her friends both inside the fort and outside, realise just how ephemeral their paradise is. This, after all, is 1857, a watershed year in the history of Delhi, and everybody is already wondering how the Mughal court, despite the excesses of the East India Company’s officers, is able to not just make ends meet but also maintain what seems like a lavish lifestyle. There are rumours of a buried treasure within the fort. There are also gathering storm-clouds of discontent and dissent: of people making special chapattis and sending them out, of murmurs of cartridges greased with the fat of cows and pigs.
Safvi’s standing as a historian of repute comes to the fore even in this work of fiction: she draws on what is obviously extensive research to create a vividly detailed panorama of life in the Lal Qila in 1857. Whether it is the nitty-gritty of the rituals and traditions governing everyday life in the fort or highly detailed insights into the clothing, jewellery, relationships, and rivalries within the imperial family—all come through sharp and clear in Safvi’s descriptions.
In A Firestorm in Paradise, Safvi describes the story of her protagonist, the fictitious Falak Ara, daughter of Emperor Bahadur Shah “Zafar” from a concubine. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement
Equally evocative is Safvi’s recreation of the world outside the fort: not just in the tangible sounds and sights and smells of Shahjahanabad but also through its people. The bangle-sellers, the dhobis, the maids, the courtesans, the students at the Delhi College. The poets, the nobility, the saints, and the charlatans. Each social class has its own distinctiveness, whether it is in the brash, bold karkhaandari zubaan spoken by Mubarak and her ilk or the refined, poetry-laced begumaati zubaan of the upper classes. There are many ways in which the classes intersect, too, for instance at the festivities centring around the annual Phoolwaalon ki Sair (procession of the flower sellers, celebrated by Hindus and Muslims alike).
The Phoolwaalon ki Sair represents a crucial element of A Firestorm in Paradise, in that it is one of the ways in which Safvi is able to illustrate the syncretic culture of Dilli in the 1800s. This is reflected too in the customs of the imperial family, many of which were derived from Hindu tradition (there is, for instance, a fascinating description of the anniversary celebrations of the emperor’s coronation, which begins with the making of moong dal vadas). The communal harmony of the period comes through in the book with an easy fluidity, a matter-of-fact acceptance that religion is just one aspect of life, and one that need not necessarily divide.
Believable characters
Against this backdrop of events, Safvi’s characters—the doomed lovers, their friends and family, other peripheral but important figures like Hira and Hariyali—play out their lives, convincingly depicted and believable. To heighten that sense of transporting its reader into the period, Safvi bookends each chapter with a short verse from classic Urdu or Persian poetry. Always a carefully chosen verse that reflects the emotion or the times perfectly, this serves to make the novel even more reflective of Delhi’s culture, its poetic traditions going all the way back to Amir Khusro.
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If there is a lacuna, it is in the slightly careless editing in the first one-third or so of the novel. Besides the occasional (relatively rare) typo, there are several instances of repetitions; for instance, the episode of Ghulam Qadir Rohilla’s attack on the Lal Qila in 1788 and his subsequent ravaging of the fort and its residents is recounted in a few places.
But this, I will concede, is a minor niggle; it is a good novel, a worthy companion to Safvi’s fine corpus of narrative history.
Madhulika Liddle is a novelist and short story writer.
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