What clear and beautiful writing! At the outset, I didn't expect to be enthralled by a historical fiction set in the times of dynasties and kingdoms of the 16th century, but this was such a fascinating read! ( )

We were that rarest of couples. Even after years of marriage we were madly in love. I with her and she with somebody else.

Cuckold is set in early sixteenth-century Mewar, one of the many smallish kingdoms occupying the area of what's now Rajasthan state, in northwest India. Frankly you could tell me anything about sixteenth-century Mewar and I would have no reason to disbelieve you; my complete ignorance of the period and place is one of the things that made reading this book such a fascinating experience for me. Nevertheless, within India the story being told here is familiar – it fictionalises the circumstances of Meerabai, a princess-bhakta who, after marrying into the royal family, ignored her husband and claimed to be married to Krishna; she is still much-loved and her devotional songs and poetry much enjoyed today.

So you can think of Cuckold as a kind of Indian Wolf Hall, which is, from a narrative point of view, its contemporary. (Hey, HarperCollins, feel free to use that if you ever deign to publish the thing outside India.)

Our narrator is Meera's earthly husband, the Maharaj Kumar (i.e. crown prince). He is intelligent and witty, amused, thoughtful, more sinned against than sinning – overall a very charming person to spend time with, which is of no small importance in a book of more than six hundred pages.

He is also tearing his hair out with desire for his wife, who refused him marital relations on their wedding night and has continued to do so ever since. Despite our narrative point of view, Nagarkar allows us to sympathise with The Princess, who after all has been dragged from her home and married off to someone she's never met. The final visit she makes to her maika, or maternal village, before leaving forever, is described very movingly (something that also struck me, in a completely different context, when I read [book:The Kalevala|400869] – someone should do an anthology of this stuff):

…ŧhe sound of the school bell and the sound of a sandstorm and of rain hissing into the sand, her aunt beating the water out of her hair with a thin towel, the bucket at the well hitting the water some hundred feet below. And the smell of the sun burning the sand, of dry kachra frying in oil and spices, the powdery, bleached smell of her father's armpit when he came back from a long day of surveying their lands, the fierce smell of the kevda leaves in their garden. All these she must etch on her memory.

Still, it's hard not to feel for our poor narrator, too, who is placed at the centre of a series of studies in sexual desire and sexual frustration running throughout the book. The passages later in the novel, where he dyes his body blue with indigo and sidles into her room playing the flute in an attempt to seduce her, manage to be sexy, funny, and unsettling all at the same time.

Cuckold interleaves these sultry scenes of palace intrigue with a parallel political narrative. Mewar is a kingdom of Rajputs – that is, Hindus, with a few Jains – but they are surrounded by Muslim states, namely the kingdoms of Gujarat and Malwa and the sultanate of Delhi. Political tensions become identified with interfaith tensions, in a process that has clear parallels with later Indian history down to the present. The Maharaj Kumar worries about this a lot, and puzzles over the links between violence and religion:

Why did Mahavir, who founded Jainism, and Buddha find Hinduism inadequate and look to other ways for moksha or nirvana as Buddha would call it? Why did they reject violence so totally? Did it not amount to denying one of our deepest human impulses? Was that one of the reasons why Hinduism has reasserted itself in our land and squeezed Buddhism till there's only one drop of it left in Sri Lanka? Jainism, it is true, survives but only in a marginal way…

I compared this earlier to Wolf Hall, but it's worth saying that the approach is very different. I happen to dislike Hilary Mantel's slavish adherence to historical fact, and so I was happy to see that Nagarkar is more concerned with his novel as fiction than as history. ‘The last thing I wanted to do was write a book of historical veracity,’ he says in his Afterword. ‘I was willing to invent geography and climate, rework the pedigrees and origins of gods and goddesses, start revolts and epidemics, improvise anecdotes and economic conditions and fiddle with dates.’ Hear, hear! Similarly, he does not try to reproduce sixteenth-century language, and happily adopts a modern idiom for the novel, which I can see has annoyed some other reviewers. Personally I thought it worked well (though one reference to ‘the time-space continuum’ did jump out).

Of more interest to me was how very Indian the narrative voice felt. It was not just the different usages I was already familiar with, like ‘quantum’ for ‘quantity’, which is so common in the papers here but hasn't been current in English English since the days of Fielding and Sterne. It was also the general garrulousness of the sentence structure, a willingness to mix metaphors, to choose exuberance over concision, to take the first half of a phrase from one source and the second half from another. (Nagarkar talks, for instance, of ‘advantages and demerits’.) This sense of changing horses in midstream extends even to tenses, sometimes with jarring effect: ‘We are face to face finally. He embraced me…’.

But most of all, my sense of pleasant dépaysement came from the huge – really huge – number of words that were completely new to me. This is something that doesn't happen to me much any more and I loved it. On page 44 alone, I had to look up ‘bajot’, ‘mandap’, ‘saat phere’, ‘odhani’, ‘siropa’ and ‘mogra’, only one of which was in the OED; and these terms are not italicised as foreign borrowings but unmarked and natural elements of Nagarkar's Indian English. To me (and I realise this is a naïve response) it was fantastically exhilarating.

This sense that there's a shared pool of insider references is also reflected in the plot. Meera herself is never referred to by name in the book, so without prior knowledge or some research you have no chance. Similarly Babur, who emerges as a major antagonist towards the end of the novel, was unknown to me, but if you have a better grasp of subcontinental history you will recognise this very famous figure as the founder of the whole Mughal dynasty. A lot of foreshadowing and dramatic irony sailed over my head.

The result was that this felt more Indian than any other Indian novel I've ever read; it seemed not to be aimed at me, and this is a feeling I enjoy and respect. Perhaps that's why it hasn't, as far as I can tell, been published outside India yet, despite how popular it was in its home market. It's a shame, because it really deserves a wider audience; everyone can enjoy the skewed love story, the politics is desperately relevant, and although Nagarkar is relating a tragedy he does it with such admirable wit and humour that it's impossible not to get behind his narrator's central, world-weary philosophical conclusion:

Pain may be the only reality but if mankind had any sense it would pursue the delusion called happiness. All the philosophers and poets who tell us that pain and suffering have a place and purpose in the cosmic order of things are welcome to them. They are frauds. We justify pain because we do not know what to make of it, nor do we have any choice but to bear it. Happiness alone can make us momentarily larger than ourselves. ( )

Cuckold was my first experience with "historical" fiction. And, I found it pretty amazing. Set in the Mewar kingdom, the book delves deep into the life and character of an otherwise unknown king, the husband of famous saint Meera. The character is developed slowly into a person who is intelligent, a little stubborn, and prone to misunderstandings. He is the heir apparent, surrounded by conspiracies to deny him the kingdom, and to top it all, his wife is always lost in thoughts of his beloved - the blue god. Cuckold is a story of his struggles, his idiosyncracies, and ultimately, his tragedy. ( )