A historical novel is always an interesting proposition for myriads of reasons. The proposition gets even more interesting if it is based on the life of a rather colorful personality who watched history being created from close quarters and perhaps created parts of it from behind the scenes. However, such a venture is also fraught with risks. History is a lightning rod for controversies. Make no mistake. Controversies inevitably get engendered even when one adheres to bland and simple history. If you add novelistic spices to historical storytelling then you are certainly in dangerous but exciting territory. However, historical novels carry the additional advantage of being fertile breeding grounds for flights of imagination. The reader thus profits by being conscious of the more minute details and intricacies of stories that historians do not and should not portray. Of course, quite often, this makes such a venture a double-edged one. Rhianon Jenkins Tsang has managed to createand even recreate to advantage-the finer and livelier details of the great happenings at a monumental period in the history of modern India. She weaves with vivid imagination fictional characters that help delineate and bring a very personal touch to the story, which has two complementary sides; they are not two versions. She places the personal-and that includes the fictionwith the historical in intricate balance and harmony.

Dinesh Singh
The reviewer is an academic and former Vice-Chancellor of Delhi University

Edwina’s life, prior to her anointment as India’s last Vicereine, has a certain appeal; albeit a limited one. This is primarily due to her varied extramarital entanglements. Her life acquires a new dimension when you unveil and add her experiences in India as a natural extension beyond her life in England. Rhianon Jenkins Tsang does well to get to the India story as quickly as she can giving it irresistible intensity and colour; but with delicacy. Of course that story has been told and retold in different ways by others before this and it may appear to have lost some of its sheen. Ms. Tsang’s pen has wrought a unique path where she has crafted the device of a fictitious third person as the narrator; nay as sutradhaar that most apt of Hindi words. The sutradharwith the added advantage of being a woman-certainly holds the story well and essays it from several intimate and sensitive perspectives not all of which are centered around Edwina.

The story comes across as a personal account told through the lens of fiction that is focused on history. The characters, major and minor, real or imagined make their repeated entrances and exits from her pages with ease. Nehru’s dalliance with Edwina is always portrayed with a subtlety and in discreet ways. He is shown to weave in and out of the story with grace; as a man of destiny, sometimes vulnerable but always sensitive to his situation; a great man facing undaunted the challenges of history and the yearnings of his heart. A recommended read for those who have a fascination for the sometimes gentle and sometimes not so gentle drama of an era that marks the beginnings of modern India.