The brave Kota Rani played a critical role at a historic inflection point in Kashmir’s turbulent history and the tale of this last Hindu ruler of medieval Kashmir inspires a new novel.
“The Last Queen of Kashmir”, set in 14th-century Kashmir, by Rakesh K Kaul is a sweeping saga of a civilisation in peril and also the story of one of the greatest queens of the land.
The beautiful and regal Kota had once known love and dreamt of happiness but that was before the murder of her father and before she became Rani.
As invaders and immigrants disturb the tranquility of her land, Kota looks for a way to protect her people but at some personal cost. She weathers the political intrigues and power-play of the court and succeeds in preserving the splendour and diversity of her society.
Kaul says he stumbled upon Princess Kota by accident when he was researching the Dhar clan of Kashmir.
“Who was this Kota Rani? Who was this inspiring symbol of feminine resistance that was central to the social history that Kashmiri Pandit women carried with them over the intervening centuries? The bare facts were easily accessible, but did not justify the banner that Kota represented for Birbal’s wife in 1819; clearly there was much more hidden behind the veil of time. Thus began my 21st-century journey through the detritus of Kota’s 14th century world to try and put the pieces together,” he says.
What Kaul discovered astonished him and challenged every single preconception that he or anybody else might have had about Kashmir.
“What I had tripped upon was a treasure that held the supreme secret for humanity. What shone bright was Kashmir’s beacon to the known world, and Kota was its keeper,” he says.
According to Kaul, the brave and beautiful Kota Rani played a critical role at a historic inflection point in Kashmir’s turbulent history.
“An icon of resistance against invaders and a symbol of the universal values that Kashmir’s civilisation stands for, her enduring message, ‘we were we will be’, is especially relevant to the challenges of contemporary times,” he says.
Kaul says in his zeal to be true to Kota, he wanted his story to be both educative and entertaining.
He claims his book as the first literary property to be published in the English language that uses Kashmir’s formidable literary principles.
“After the Mahabharata and the Rajatarangini, ‘The Last Queen of Kashmir’ is the third and only book to be written in the Virasa rasa style, which is considered to be an impossible style to capture in words.
“Virasa rasa is very different from the catharsis of Greek tragedies, but instead reflects the bitter-sweet taste of Santa rasa, the peaceful rasa. It is the play of dharma in an imperfect world of moral decay; it is a distasteful inoculation, but one that hopefully leads to a healthier life,” Kaul says.
When penning a book of Bengali short stories, it is only natural to begin with Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘Kabuliwallah,’ the iconic tale of friendship between an Afghani dry-fruit seller and a 5-year-old girl, that continues to be recited till date in homes and classrooms across Bengal and beyond.
Award winning translator, Arunava Sinha who has taken upon himself the task of translating Bengali literature into English and make it accessible to a wider audience, has compiled a selection of what in his opinion are the 21 ‘Greatest Bengali Stories Ever Told,’ in the form a book of the same name.
Although the book opens with one of Tagore’s stories, Sinha’s selection reflects a thoughtful yet personal curation that gives equal prominence to almost all the literary stalwarts that Bengal has ever produced and also those who remained unheard of.
There is Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s rare combination of sharp societal observation and high emotional quotient along with the subaltern studies of Bibhutibhushan and Tarashankar Bandopadhyay.
Satyajit Ray’s introspective lense finds resonance with Sunil Gangopadhyay and Nabarun Bhattacharya’s deep plunges into the darker recesses of the heart and mind.
And with writers of the likes of Buddhadeva Bose, Premendra Mitra, Ritwik Ghatak, Mahashweta Devi and Ashapurna Debi, there are also narratives laden with political, social and gender consciousness.
However, Sinha insists that it is “not a potted history of the Bengali short story” and the choice has not been determined by any form of critical sieving or literary era.
“These are, simply, stories I have loved and that have made a deep impression on me,” he writes in the introduction, titled “My love Affair with Bengali Stories” to the book.
The anthology, he says, is devoid of any design and showcases the “rich variety to be found in Bengali literature – whether in terms of form, voice, setting or subject.”
Those who have read the stories in Bengali will know that loss in translation is inevitable, but it cannot be denied that Sinha has tried to retain the fervour of the original to the best of his capacities, using phrases both in Hindi and Bengali here and there, to suit the narrative.
What binds the 21 stories together is really a very personal emotion felt by the translator alone and therefore, he admits to have given many renowned and “expected” names a miss.
Having grown up in dingy lanes of north Kolkata that continues to reek of musty history, his attachment with Bengali literature is an amorous one. And, his acceptance of a story as his “own”, he says, depends on his transformation from a being reader to becoming a character “right in the middle of the action.”
For the popularly acknowledged “great short stories” that are not a part of his latest feat, Sinha, very innocently reasons, “It is just that I have no romance to recall with their stories, though I have read, admired and marvelled at them. But somehow I haven’t found myself in them.”
