Towards the end of Book I of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children , Padma is very angry with the narrator Saleem, who is telling the story ...
Towards the end of Book I of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Padma is very angry with the narrator Saleem, who is telling the story of his life to her. Fed up of listening to his long backstory, involving the lives of his grandparents and parents, she demands to know when he will be born, when his story will start. Saleem is unfazed (... till the last chapter of Book I), for he firmly believes that “To know one life, you have to swallow the world”.
This philosophy, articulated in a path-breaking magic realist novel, can well be applied to a work of narrative history. Sudeep Chakravarti’s Plassey: The Battle that Changed the Course of Indian History is a case in point. Only, the backstory here is deliciously engaging.
The story of this sham of a battle for a few hours in a mango orchard in 1757 between a handful of British soldiers led by a wily company officer and the much larger (though compromised) forces of a hated Bengal nawab is well known. To whoever knows even a bit of India’s colonial history, that is. And, of course, to every Bengali, dead and alive, irrespective of whether they are, or ever were, interested in the subject.
What happened in those few hours...
