Meet Akbar s ghost as Allan Sealy weaves together poetry and prose

New Delhi April 19 (IANS) It s a blazing hot afternoon just outside the gatehouse of Jodha Bai s palace in Fatehpur Sikri. Tourists throng the forecourt. The air above the red flagstones is so hot that it begins to wrinkle and there in the haze -- near enough to touch -- stands the ghost of Akbar.


This ethereal yet sublime narrative forms the backdrop of Irwin Allan Sealy s latest book Zelaldinus in which past and present nobles and commoners history and fiction rub shoulders.

He looks exactly like the line drawing in my school history book; so he s easy enough to recognise. We get chatting and he shows me around his dead city. We talk about everything under the sun and naturally we don t neglect the state of India today. A plot develops a story within a story of romance and adventure that carries the emperor to the India-Pakistan border for a crackling climax Sealy told IANS about his just-released book.

But Akbar has been a recurring personality in many recent books both fiction and non-fiction. Most lately Shazi Zaman s book on the Mughal emperor gained critical acclaim. And that is not all -- a number of books have even been written on Akbar s court at Fatehpur Sikri as well. What should the readers expect from this book?

The 66-year-old writer responded saying that there s a chequered stone terrace in the Diwan-i-khas at Sikri where contemporary accounts say Akbar used to play a kind of human chess that must have looked like a pageant. These books make one imagine costumes perhaps music in a kind of charade.

My book is set up as a masque that is to say a dramatic production of the kind once staged at royal courts full of trumpets and kettledrums and incident and colour. At the same time it s not frivolous entertainment; I think the Mughal history that underwrites it breathes through the text. I hope the themes it tackles -- kingship loyalty fatherhood and sacrifice -- will be apparent to serious readers.

And I made a deliberate effort to flesh out Akbar the man rather than the king. The fact that this is poetry a novel in verse means you can t breeze through as you might with conventional historical fiction; much of the pleasure is literary to be savoured line by line he maintained.

The offering at hand is a classic mix of prose and poetry. Sealy said that they are actually the same substance like India and Pakistan but each has become a little inflexible over time. It s time the barbed wire came down.

Asked about his effortless weaving together of poetry and prose he said: Poetry is more pared back it s language under greater pressure so naturally it s less readily achieved and appreciated but prose too can be compressed and it can contain vatic elements so it s not always a simple expository medium. The weaving together you speak of came quite naturally but I would like also to think there s a mingling.

The author whose novel The Everest Hotel: A Calendar was shortlisted for the 1998 Booker prize said that many years ago a friend had dropped him off at Fatehpur Sikri. It was one of the hottest days of the year but Sealy was unfazed by the extreme weather as he sat in a water garden on the hill and came under the spell of the place.

Recalling the day the much-acclaimed writer went on to add that the place has a little pavilion with a fretted stone water race and a pool where one can sit in the sunken garden in the heart of summer and be utterly content.

I had been to Sikri before but never alone and this time the solitude wrung some poems. The next time I took a sketch book and spent a week on the hill and after that I was a constant visitor he elaborated on how the idea of this book came about.

Underlying the depiction of a rich and varied court life at Sikri in the book are reflections on kingship a meditation on fathers and sons and a plot within a plot that tells a crackling story of love across the Pakistan border -- while through it all strides the nimble ghost of Akbar himself. Jalaluddin (Zelaldinus) Akbar.

Sealy said he has tried -- with every book -- to discover forms that belong here so that the shape and the style of the artefact take on a local character. He said that he did not believe in simply telling a local story but using local techniques. It should go beyond flavour the way tea tastes different in a kulhar.

(Saket Suman can be contacted at saket.s@ians.in)

--IANS
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