12/15/02

While there is much to draw a reader to Indu Sundaresan’s The Twentieth Wife—an exotic location (India in the 17th Century), a beautiful commoner who catches the eye of the crown prince, and tales of political intrigue and bloodbaths—the novel is so clearly a set-up for future installments that it loses momentum and much of its initial fascination evaporates. The novel—and the likely one or two sequels to follow—has admirable goals: to recreate the stories, the psychology and the experiences of women who have been marginalized by mainstream history. The Twentieth Wife retrieves from the pages of history the figure of Mehrunnisa, the daughter of a Persian exile in the court of the Mughal Emperor Akbar (circa 1600), who eventually becomes the twentieth wife of Akbar’s son Jahangir and the mother of Shah Jahan, the mughal emperor who built the Taj Mahal in memory of his favorite wife, Mumtaz Mahal. Mehrunnisa is, by the way, the paternal aunt of Mumtaz.

The novel focuses on Mehrunnisa’s early life, from her birth at an encampment as her parents are being forced into exile to her eventual and much anticipated marriage to Jehangir, an event with which the novel ends. The central tension driving the narrative is whether Mehrunnisa’s resolve at the age of eight, when she sees Prince Jehangir during his wedding ceremony, to become his wife will meet with success. Along the way we see her family’s fortunes rise and fall; we see her in an unhappy marriage, experience miscarriages and the eventual birth of a daughter, and we see her sent into exile from the court. Despite these experiences and no direct communication with Jehangir, the pure flame of Mehrunnisa’s infatuation with the prince —unclouded by ambition, untainted by pragmatic concerns, and uninformed by adult considerations -- burns undiminished. Mehrunnisa’s infatuation never seems to mature from that of the child she was when she first saw Jehangir.

This failure is symptomatic of the central shortcoming of the novel: the characters remain undeveloped; their motivations are not plumbed to any level of psychological complexity, and their actions, while linked to historical facts, do not seem to rise from the depths of their natures. Thus, we end up with caricatures or stereotypes: Jehangir’s second wife, Jagat Gosini, is depicted as the “evil wife;” she is vicious, jealous and conniving and Mehrunnisa’s archenemy (with the help of the harem eunuch). Jehangir himself is presented as a lout. He is a drunk who “would be king,” swayed by avaricious advisors first to attempt the murder of his father and then to engage in outright rebellion. The attraction is hard to fathom.

Part of the problem lies with the hybrid form of the novel Sundaresan has written. It is, after all, a historical romance. The novel struggles to balance its presentation of the rich and complex history of the Mughal reign with the far simpler dictates of the romance form—girl gets prince! What drives the historical novel is the central character’s ambition, desire for power, and vision; what drives romance is the movement toward union with the beloved. The historical novel dilates events to show the catalytic action of opportunity on character and event; romance strips the complexity of life down to one unwavering and simple desire. Romance cannot support the weight of the historical material Sundaresan wishes to present, especially because the historical crises and events are presented not as integral to the romance, i.e., as obstacles geared directly to prevent its consummation, but as external and contextual occurrences that do not inform the feelings of Jehangir and Mehrunnisa for one another. If Sundaresan had freed her heroine from the simplicity of girlish romance, and allowed her ambition and desire for power to be inextricable from her relationship to Jehangir, the marriage with which the novel ends would not only have consummated the romantic relationship between the two, but would have consummated, as well, the marriage between her historical project of retrieving the lives of women from the margins of our textbooks and the narrative of romance.