'Memoirs of Hadrian': A Bygone Era, A Roman Emperor and a French Author

The gold standard for writing history, fictional and non-fictional, was set by two women writers. Marguerite Yourcenar's 'Memoirs of Hadrian' set the standard for history based fiction and Barbara Tuchman's 'Guns of August' set the standard for popular history telling. Neither work has been superseded in brilliance or narrative or sense of history. Interestingly neither Yourcenar or Tuchman are what we can call academic or professional historians. Where Tuchman was blessed with material and access Yourcenar was not and yet she brings to us, based on very fragmentary evidence, a vivid portrayal of a bygone era when an ambitious Roman emperor sought to remake Pax Romana only to see it all crash and burn in the twilight of an illustrious rein punctuated with a very poignant love story.

Yourcenar came across a passage in a correspondence from Gustave Flaubert in 1927 that provided her with a vision to pursue an idea that was already germinating in her mind. Flaubert wrote: "Just when the god's had ceased to be, and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone". Yourcenar adds "a great part of my life was going to be spent in trying to define, and then to portray, that man existing alone and yet closely bound with all being". Aelius Hardianus Augustus, Roman emperor  117 AD- 138AD, was that man.

'My dear Mark', so begins this fictional memoir of Hadrian, written in the first person in the form of a letter from a dying Hadrian to Marcus Aurelius. The chapters are titled in Latin and the first one borrows the first line of a poem composed by Hadrian shortly before his death, 'Animula, vagula, blandula', 'sweet little soul traveling'. Hadrian is melancholic after visiting his physician Hermogenes and starts off by noting his current frailty and recalling the days of his youth when he hunted with gusto. In one sweeping passage making use of the fact that a Roman youth traveled throughout the sprawling empire Yourcenar pummels the reader with names of places where Hadrian hunted, Etrurian mountains, a Spanish forest, hunts in Tuscany, Bithynia, Cappadocia, woods of Asia, lions killed in Mauretania and even in Tibur.

Antinous. Image Courtesy Wikipedia

Yourcenar is master of the prose and glides from hunting to the joy of eating, to wine drinking, to a brief note on gymnosophists and lands on a rumination of whether it is fair to classify love as merely a physical joy. Each narrative is crammed with details that vividly brings out what a trading center the Roman empire was and how goods and ideas moved from end of the empire to another. At times it is indeed overwhelming and one does feel clobbered by information that one could lose sight of a fine metaphor or a subtle philosophical hint. This is a book to be read, re-read and re-read and digested.

Hadrian, born in Spain, is educated in philosophy and poetry. He learns grammar and rhetoric. Virgil, Ennius, Lucretius, Homer, Horace, Ovid form a part of his curriculum. Thanks to his Scaurus Hadrian studied Greek and confesses that while his epitaph maybe written in Latin it is in "greek" that he "shall have thought and lived". Overcoming the treachery of his brother-in-law Servianus Hadrian, in an astute move, becomes the bearer of the glad news that to Trajan that the emperor Nerva had died and that Trajan, therefore, will be the new emperor. A talented youth bringing good news no wonder finds himself endearing in the eyes of the recipient of the news.

Hadrian gets turned off by the brutality of Trajan's Dacian wars. He "regretted these dead whom Rome might have absorbed and employed one day as allies against hordes more savage still". The story of Hadrian and Yourcenar's narrative powers reach its apogee in the chapters describing the early reign when Hadrian brings stability, 'Tellus stabilita', and in the chapter describing his love for Antinous, aptly titled 'golden age', 'Seaculum aureum'.

Hadrian was a reformer at heart who is well that the Rome of his time will yield, in due course of time, to "other Romes", he may not live to see them but he would "have helped to mold". He resolves that she would "compose for herself from the words State, citizenry and republic a surer immortatlity". So saying Hadrian cuts superfluous laws, ensures more rights for slaves and women, even curtails slavery, reduces intermediaries in commerce and trade, expresses admiration for merchants, he sees in the army's diversity a blessing, he sanctions unions between Roman soldiers and 'barbarian women', their children get legal status too, curtails special privileges for officers, sympathizes with a plaintiff who scolds him that if he does not have time to hear her complaint then he'd equally have no time to rule but above all Hadrian wanted to be known as the Roman emperor who made peace and negotiations the corner stone of his reign.

The Parthians' chief concern, Hadrian understood, was only to reopen the trade routes between the Roman empire and India. It is interesting to see how many times the name 'India' or things connected with India are mentioned. He even has a 'Hindu servant' who prepares rice. Negotiating between Greeks and Jews he tries telling "the Greeks that they are not always the wisest of peoples, and to the jews that they were by no means the most pure". He ruefully wonders, "these races who had lived side by side for centuries had never had the curiosity to get to know each other, nor the decency to accept each other". Hadrian could be speaking very well for Gandhi or Nehru during India's partition riots. He realizes that "orders on the frontiers was nothing if I could not persuade a Jewish peddler and a Greek grocer to live peaceably side by side".

"To build is to collaborate with earth, to put a human mark on a landscape, modifying it forever thereby". Of the many landmarks created by Hadrian that survive even today the most famous is "Hadrian's Wall" that he constructed in today's England. Seeking to keep away invaders and thereby avoiding the necessity of going to war the wall, Yourcenar's Hadrian boastfully thinks, is a symbol of his "renunciation of the policy of conquest". Walls keep away enemies from without but what about enemies within? Hadrian will realize the limits of pacifism in Judea.

With a sense of achievement coursing in his veins Hadrian scoff at the stoic Epictetus for renouncing life and a Brahman who "was rejecting life itself". Hadrian perceives his relationship with a 'deity' as being 'different'. He sees himself "seconding the deity in his effort to give form and order to a world", he was a "unique force caught up in the multiplicity of things; I was eagle and bull, man and swan, phallus and brain, all together, a Protesus who is also a Jupiter".

In the 'age of gold', 'Seaculum Aureum', Hadrian's tragic homosexual love for teenaged Antinous is narrated lovingly. It should be noted that Yourcenar herself was openly lesbian and it was her partner Grace Frick that translated 'Memoirs of Hadrian' from French to English. Staying in Bithynia Hadrian meets Antinous, who slept "like some daylight endymion", Arrian of Nicomedia who wrote history and philosophy and was a good soldier too, Euphrates, who committed suicide with Hadrian's permission, Phlegm, poet Pancreatus who entertained with musical instruments that included 'delicate Indian flutes' and a Mithraic initiation ceremony that is bloody and terrifying to the greek boy Antinous. Antinous tragically commits suicide and Hadrian decided to commemorate him by deifying him and starting a cult around the catamite unlike Alexander who mourned the death of his lover Hephaistion by slaughtering many.

Finally it was the issue of whether to permit practice of circumcision that brings Hadrian's Pax Romana crashing to reality. A Roman emperor who swore to establish peace and renounce conquests presided over the bloodiest suppression of a revolt that had its beginnings in whether or not a man can slice of the foreskin from the male organ.

Judea was always restive and the peace that was so uneasy erupted into rebellion under the leadership of one Simon who called himself Bar Kochba, Son of the Star. It was brutal guerrilla war that was finally won, after 3 years, at great cost to both sides. Yourcenar who sensitively portrayed Hadrian's love for Antinous and its tragic end becomes a master for historical detail in portraying the Jewish rebellion. From the surreptitious way Jews gathered arms, to the guerrilla war style, to the brutal suppression she gives, in a few pages, a telling portrayal of the rebellion and what its end meant, not just to the Jewry of Rome but to Hadrian himself. The Jewish rebels were an "enemy could be exterminated, but not conquered". The Temple was destroyed and Jews were expelled from the city. The wailing wall was constructed. "Judea was struck from the map and took the name of Palestine by my order".

So, how much of all that is fiction and how much holds up to historical scrutiny? There is little fiction in the above and Yourcenar's Hadrian, much to the chagrin of academic historians, is considered very close to factual history over half a century since its first publication in 1951 in France.

Yourcenar traveled widely and studied volumes in the Yale university library to write the book. She practically reconstructed the library of Hadrian. The litmus test for a fiction based on history is to compare it with a non-fiction actual history book. So let's compare key points of Yourcenar's Hadrian with historian Anthony Everitt's 'Hadrian: Triumph of Rome'. While comparing we should take care to note not just parallels in incidents cited, that's unavoidable given that both Everett and Yourcenar were referring to common materials, chiefly ' Historia Augusta', but similar incidents being identified as key events for the same reason by a fiction writer and a historian attests to the historical acumen of the writer. Let's identify a few such incidents.

Yourcenar and Everitt identify Hadrian's dash to convey the news of Nerva's death to Trajan, the murder attempt by henchmen hired by Servianus notwithstanding, as a pivotal moment in Hadrian endearing himself to a man about to become emperor.

When Hadrian ascended the throne he wanted to be known as a negotiator but Attianus executed summarily four senators who were seen as a threat. That, to Hadrian was a blot and one which though he had no direct hand he knew that he'd be blamed for it. Where Everitt blandly narrates the significance and what it meant, exactly like Yourcenar, he misses the nice fictional narrative that Yourcenar could give using the guise of fiction. Yourcenar's Hadrian recounts in his letter how he decided to chide Attianus and how derisively Attianus looked at him: "He let me run on, smiling meanwhile like a grammarian who listens to his pupil making his way through a difficult recitation".

At two points Yourcenar's sense of history is stunning. The Jews plotted their revolt very methodically by bribing the suppliers of Roman army to manufacture faulty weapons that were no doubt discarded by the army. Such discarded weapons were then remedied for use by the Jewish plotters. That a french novelist and an academic historian would both identify this only attests, emphatically, the novelists eye for history.

The other more telling incident is what Hadrian does in the aftermath of Antinous's suicide. Everitt cites the incident of Hadrian striking a man with his stylus and inadvertently blinding him. Hadrian offers to pay compensation but the victim refuses it and merely asks for the blinded eye back. There ends Everett's narration but in Yourcenar's hand the device of fiction make the incident come alive. "I raised my hand to slap him; unhappily, I was holding a style, which blinded his right eye. I shall never forget the howl of pain, that arm awkwardly bent to ward off the blow, that convulsed visage from which blood spurted". After the man turns down the compensation Yourcenar's Hardian retains him in service to serve "as a warning and a punishment perhaps. I had not wished to injure the wretch. But I had not desired, either, that a boy who loved me should die in his twentieth year".

The device of fiction is to be used with extreme caution when re-creating history. If one only lists a litany of incidents with insufficient fictionalization then one could very well write non-fiction but if one fictionalizes too much where the fictional Hadrian has no relation to the historical Hadrian then one could dispense with calling it fiction based on history. The charm and danger in fictionalizing history is in identifying a judicious mixture of history and fiction. Where to let history speak and where to embellish is what would distinguish a Yourcenar from lesser lights of that genre. A good fiction writer will use the device of fiction to fill in the gaps of history, to create hinges and to lubricate the narrative. Yourcenar's finest moment is when she enters the mind of Hadrian in ruminating over the rebellious Jewish people. What Yourcenar's Hadrian think of the Jewish rebels is not only in sync with the character but could reflect, possibly, the thoughts of the real Hadrian himself because given who the real Hadrian was the fictional rumination is so much in line with that reality.

Yourcenar's Hadrian disapproves of the militant monotheism of the Jews: "harsh Mithra admits himself brother to Apollo. No people but Israel has the arrogance to confine truth wholly within the narrow limits of a single conception of the divine, thereby insulting the manifold nature of the Deity, who contains all; no other god has inspired his worshippers with disdain and hatred for those who pray at different altars".

Disillusioned by realizing how it is the Roman legions that keep pax Romana Hadrian muses "if sixteen years of rule by a prince so pacifically inclined were to culminate in the Palestine campaign, then the chances for peace in the world look dim ahead".

Yourcenar wrote the novel in the aftermath of World War II and possibly the Holocaust was weighing in her mind when she wrote these lines for Hadrian: "Like the initiate to Mithraism the human race has need, perhaps, of a periodical bloodbath and descent into the grave....the human species in growing older would doubtless add new refinements of horror".

In George Orwell's 'Animal Farm' the ultimate parody is when the pigs start walking like men. In lines that echo Orwell's prose Yourcenar's Hadrian comes to the end of his memoir saying "If ever the barbarians gain possession of the world they will be forced to adopt some of our methods: they will end by resembling us". Then in cascading prose Hadrian presages: "bishop of Christ may implant himself one day in Rome....in his turn one of the universal figures of authority. He will inherit our palaces and our archives, and will differ from rulers like us less than one might suppose". More prophetic words were rarely spoken.

Hadrian bids good bye with "let us try, if we can, to enter into death with open eyes".

Marguerite Yourcenar was the first woman to be elected to the French Academy. For a lesbian who considered it is impossible to have made a woman the axis of the narrative because "women's lives are much too limited, or else too secret" it was indeed high honor.

The extent of Yourcenar's research is evident in the well captioned set of photographs that are provided.

References:
1. Marguerite Yourcenar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marguerite_Yourcenar
2. Memoirs of Hadrian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memoirs_of_Hadrian
3. Emperor Hadrian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadrian
4. New Yorker article of Yourcenar's research for the book http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/02/14/becoming-the-emperor
5. Antinous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinous

Perspectives on Writing History, Historians and (of course) Tamil Historians.

Tamil columnist and writer P.A. Krishnan recently solicited his Facebook friends to help research on the 'sacks of Sri Rangam'. 'Sri Rangam', of course, refers to the Vishnu temple at Sri Rangam. One of the references, another person cited, was one Sakkottai Krishnaswami Aiyangar's 'South India and her Muhammadan invaders'. The reference and the topic occasioned a lively exchange on writing history and paucity of Tamil historians of academic stature. Krishnaswami, along with K.A. Neelakanta Shastri, is of a bygone era, however flawed, of academic excellence. That a researcher in 2014 has to harken back unto a book written in 1921 shows the merit of the book and, sadly, the lack of progress in adding new material ever since. I've nothing against the merits of the book per se but the preface shed a new perspective in light of Jeyamohan's recent admonition that Tamil Nadu has a surfeit of historians who are better classified as ethnic or tribal historians who mostly focus on those chapters of history which either concerns their own clan and especially those that they consider would benefit from either revisionism or re-telling.

What an author chooses to write is his/her own prerogative as long as truth shines through. Nevertheless, fealty to truth on selective pages of history is still selective truth telling. Aiyangar had dedicated the book to the Maharaja of Mysore "who devoted his life to the cause of hinduism and made it possible for the south Indian Hindus to be the Hindus they are to-day". Aiyangar quotes Lord Morley's dictum, 'we have no business to seek more from the past than the very past itself', and hopes that he has 'kept out all bias one way or another'. I'll refuse to take umbrage at sentences that characterize the Hoysala king's effort to repel Muhammad's invasion as 'patriotic effort' or calling the war a 'great national war of the Hindus'. Western historians of that era were more blatantly racist. That said, it is indeed interesting to note and ask if Aiyangar would've received the same patronage from the Maharaja of Mysore if he had chosen to write about untouchability or child marriage or Sati?

What kind of historians do I like? What kind of writing impresses me?

A historian earns respect, first, with painstaking research of primary material. A re-telling based on other books, while still valuable for a very lay reader, cannot be called history. Nothing impresses me more than those who comb through material, especially of an ancient kind, to bring to us a long dead era in all its vividness and thoroughness without partiality.

Two women changed the course of writing history in fiction and non-fiction. Marguerite Yourcenar's research into Roman emperor Hadrian is legendary. She practically reconstructed his library. Yourcenar's powers of fiction matched her ability to research and re-create an era that was little known or little studied. For over 50 years her 'Memoirs of Hadrian', though a fiction, remained the standard book to learn about Hadrian. Historian Anthony Everett quibbled that the book was over-rated when he wrote his history of Hadrian which was dry and did not unearth much that was unknown to Yourcenar. Barbara Tuchman set a new bar for popular history writing with her ground breaking analyses of the hubris of countries that rushed into World War I in her masterly written 'Gun's of August'. Neither woman had a degree in history.

Two time Pulitzer winner Bernard Bailyn recently documented a dark chapter of US history in his very meticulously researched 'Barbarous years'. Bailyn undertook painstaking research of logs kept in slave ships and pored over documents that existed centuries ago to recreate a tumultuous era.

Lyndon Johnson, born in a home that had no toilets, presided over what can be called the apogee of liberalism as President. Sweeping civil rights legislations, a horrendous war spiraling out of control, the remaking of American polity with dreamy liberalism where the themes of a very contentious presidency that was born in a moment of great tragedy in modern American history. Biographer Robert Caro is painstakingly marching through the Johnson years with a planned 5 volume biography. Caro's research was prodigious including scouring through every scrap of evidence to find out if LBJ had indeed stolen his first senate election victory with ballet stuffing. The verdict is 'guilty'.

Soviet Russia and Stalin have always interested Western historians. I'd highly recommend David Remnick's 'Lenin's tomb' and Simon Sebag Montefiore's 'Stalin'. Remnick traces the events surrounding the fall of Soviet Union. The Russian state was so silly in its functioning that Gorbachev canvassed support for his reform agenda by threatening to cut off access to grocery stores meant for politburo members. A grocery store access was such a privilege that members fell in line. Vive la Marx. Montefiore pored over the recently opened Russian archives to give a detailed view of the grisly Stalinist regime.

The above is a very limited genre of history telling. If I were to include other histories, say of science, the list is even longer. I'd like to mention two books of 'science history'. Rebecca Skloot's investigative and researched book on Hela cells, 'The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks' and Siddhartha Mukherjee's gripping tale of cancer in 'Emperor of Maladies'. Both are great personal favorites of mine. A lighter read would be Jon Gertner's book on AT&T Bell Labs, 'The idea factory'.

Though I remain an opponent of affirmative action and reservation policies (both are different) I remain an ardent advocate of diversity in the classroom and faculty. Affirmative action is a highly flawed albeit with limited effect in ensuring diversity. Why is diversity important?

Perry Miller is a legendary historian who, possibly, got the only posthumously awarded Pulitzer that too for a book he was yet to complete. Miller's students and their students in turn have gone on to win Pulitzers. Miller, an authority on New England history, his student and later Pulitzer awardee David Brion Davis recalls, 'never mentioned the moral horror of slavery in his course on America religion'. British historian Roy Jemkins's critically acclaimed biography of Churchill fails to mention how callously Churchill dealt with the Bengal famine that killed tens of thousands. Imagine, when those texts are taught, if a black or Indian student were to be in the class what the reactions would be, let alone if the teacher was one?

For centuries it was rumored that Thomas Jefferson had fathered  a child through his slave Sally Hemings. It took a black historian, Annette Gordon Reed, to write "The Hemingses of Monticello". The book won the Pulitzer amongst many others for its impeccable scholarship.

While it is one thing for Reed, a black historian, to write such a book it is another for a man like David Brion Davis, a white, to write much acclaimed history books on slavery running into 3 volumes. Historians who step outside their ethnicity and write of a different people always amaze me. On that score I'd say that I cannot think of an Indian historian who would have written, as William Dalrymple did, "The last Mughal". Dalrymple went researched records kept in dusty museums and ill preserved libraries in several countries. He pieced together the last days of Bahadur Shah based on records he got from a Rangoon prison.

Another kind of writing history that always interests me are those which are thematic in scope. Tracing events and reconstructing the past is interesting but a higher level is to weave such data to present a thematic tapestry.

Samuel Huntington and his student Francis Fukuyama raised an academic furore with their contentiously told books, 'The clash of civilizations' and 'The end of history'. Fukuyama's second volume about the rise of liberal democracy as a form of government is to be released shortly. In this category we need to add books like Thomas Kuhn's 'Structure of scientific revolutions'. One can argue about these books, even disagree but one cannot ignore them. These are the books that help explain the 'why' of events. In that category we should include Francis Spufford's entertainingly written 'Red Plenty' which explains what the Soviet economic system set out to achieve and why it miserably failed. Erudite Marxists would be eager to include the un-apolegtically Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm.

Marxism and what passes for Marxism are deeply repugnant to my sense of decency. I am yet to see a Marxist who, though building an edifice on reason and rationality, would face truth and accept what was wrong. P.A. Krishnan, an erudite Marxist, celebrated Lenin's birthday with a column 'Another Lenin is needed'. David Remnick, Russian speaking left wing editor of New Yorker, wrote in his profile of Lenin, for Time magazine's centenary edition, that 'Stalin was a lamb compared to Lenin'.

All that said of Marxism I'd add that a Marxist interpretation of history is not to be readily rubbished. Indian school students learn of Moplah riots of 1921 as one in which Muslims butchered Hindus by the hundreds and converted many others at the point of a knife or gun. A Marxist historian presented a different angle. All the Muslims were penniless laborers toiling in the lands owned, exclusively, by upper caste Hindus. The riot was less about conversion and religion than about rebelling against landowners. It was, the author argued, an agrarian rebellion that took the contours of a religious violence. The role of economics in the partition is also a very valid interpretation.

A historian should pursue truth wherever it may lead. Nobody popularly associates the word 'radicalism' with the American revolution. One tends to think of the French and Soviet revolution as 'radical'. Historian Gordon Wood argues otherwise in 'The radicalism of the American revolution'. Newt Gingrich, a rising star in conservative GOP politics when the book was published in 1993, happily touted the book as evidence of America's innate conservatism. Asked about Gingrich's publicity in an interview Gordon Wood chuckled. Wood, like many US university professors, is probably not a conservative and even if he is one he is most certainly not a conservative of the Gingrich type. Wood had argued in his book that the American revolution upended social relationships and with its evolving focus on commerce as the unifying glue of a disparate society the revolution paved the way for a republic by papering over differences and appealing to an universal instinct in all men, making money.

'Revisionism' is a much reviled word in writing history. Yet, occasionally, there comes a revisionist history which 'revises' our understanding of the past with compelling new evidence or at least invites us to consider an alternative understanding based on newly uncovered uncertainties. The Declaration of Independence is, as historian Pauline Maier put it, America's most sacred 'scripture'. Every schoolchild learns "we hold these to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness.-That to secure these rights Governments are instituted among men'. Professor Danielle Allen argues that the period, '.', after 'pursuit of happiness', was nothing but a printer's devil and does not form part of the document. Conservatives have argued for decades, using this scripture, that America was created to protect the individual and that Government is a corollary. Allen insists that by removing the 'period' "the logic of the sentence moves from the value of individual rights to the importance of government as a tool for protecting those rights. You lose that connection when the period gets added'. A tectonic shift in understanding a sacred document. Allen, as I expected, is African-American and naturally is excited about according primacy to the place of Government in a nation.

Another instance of 'healthy' revisionism is a recent book on Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann the Nazi was kidnapped by Israel from Argentina and prosecuted in Israel for his part in orchestrating Holocaust. Marxist writer Hannah Arendt sat through the trial and wrote her immensely controversial book 'Banality of evil' where she suggested that Eichmann was not a man of intelligence and only acted upon orders as a 'banal' executioner of orders. It is a divisive theory till today. Nearly 50 years since Arendt's book Bettina Stangneth finally resolves the issue in 'Eichmann before Jersusalem'. Stangneth listened to hours of audio transcriptions of the trial and other audio documents, traced Eichmann's day in Argentina to reconstruct a man who was not 'banal' but a well read man with a keen mind. Stangnet had 'shattered' Arendt's theory.

All the above are examples I love. I also have criteria for authors I avoid.

I avoid, for instance, Harvard historian Niall Ferguson who churns out a book every year. When a historian argues that the dominance of the West is well nigh over and presents as evidence a picture of Obama bowing to a Saudi King I tend to recoil from the partisan attitude though I've great disdain for Obama myself. Anti-Obama books are a cottage industry as anti-Bush and anti-Hillary books used to be. I don't touch any of them with a ten foot pole. I've refrained from buying British conservative historian Paul Johnson's 'Modern Times' because he charges, based on the Chauri Chura incident, that Gandhi undertook his satyagraha protests with no concern for loss of life. Silly.

I prefer to buy books by authors who have devoted their lives to the subject and are engaged with the topic in all its dimensions and complexities. Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky fail that litmus test. Both of their books, wildly popular amongst knee jerk anti-Americans and shallow Marxists, are shot through with defects.

With all of the above the backdrop let me now circle back to the issue at hand.

Kizhvenmani is a small sleepy hamlet in an even sleepier Thanjavur in Southern India. On 25th December 1968 42 Dalit landless laborers were burned alive by upper caste Hindus (Thevars, I believe. Thevars, incidentally are listed as 'backward caste' thus garnering rich dividends of reservation policies). 23 of the dead where children. Till today there is no solid Pulitzer quality history book that would trace the events and its aftermath. Echoes of that massacre are still very much there. Two weeks ago a Dalit man's arm was severed for the sin of wearing a watch. It is common practice to prohibit Dalits, including children, from wearing slippers or riding a cycle when they go past colonies of upper caste members. It should be noted that K.A. Nilakanta Shastri would live for another 7 years after the massacre. Assuming he was in good health at the time of the event I'd not be surprised if the event, nevertheless, did not catch his attention.

"Children from lower caste walking with their slippers in the hand in the village Poovalamparuthi near Pollachi"

It took a black historian like Manning Marable, a supporter of affirmative action, to give a more detailed and unvarnished look at a complex person like Malcolm X. Marable was irritated with the embellished version that Alex Haley presented. It is easy to ask where is the Dalit Manning Marable or Annette Reed but one should go to what were the conditions that enabled an Aiyengar and a Shastri to become history teachers but prevented somebody like Theodor Bhaskaran.

Writer and columnist Theodor Bhaskaran wanted to become an archeologist but could not be one because one of the pre-requisites was knowledge of Sanskrit. Brahmins learn Sanskrit as almost a second language and have historically denied others a chance to learn it. Before one argues that knowledge of Sanskrit would be an asset to an aspiring archeologist and that there was nothing sinister in that requirement let us remember that that requirement existed for medical college admissions too. And, to be fair to Bhaskaran and others like him ignorance of Sanskrit is not a big impediment to an archeologist looking to analyze Tamil heritage and Tamil inscriptions. Incidentally, I am sure Aiyangar probably did not know how to analyze ancient Tamil inscriptions prior to becoming a historian and archeologist.

Stephen Greenblatt romped through history tracing the art of preserving books, book banning, monasteries etc in an attempt to retrace how Lucretius's poem was transmitted across the ages and how it became, in his opinion, the corner stone of Western civilization. I asked a visiting Tamil writer why such historical analyses does not take place in Tamil. He, not being familiar with English books or such writing, could not grasp what I asked and instead went on to his pet topic of how Kamban uses 100 words to denote 'quiver'. Before readers pelt me with replies citing Tamil titles please try reading Greenblatt's 'The swerve: How the world became modern'. The book won both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award.

Every time I read the Sangam era poetry a yearning grips my heart. Whether it is Milton's England or Homer's Greece we've wonderful books in English that would give a portrait of the society, the culture and many other aspects of that time. The poems of friendship between Kapilar and Pari, and Kapilar's poems of desolation as he tries to get Pari's daughter's married after his death in battle, are fertile grounds to do a Greenblatt. Alas I've no hope of it happening. A number of books could be written on many themes on just the war anthology of 400 poems. Poems that extol friendship between kings and poets, poems that praise learning, a poem of universal brotherhood and much more are taught in trite fashion or with oodles of chauvinistic jingoism. Any attempt to do otherwise would require patient and painstaking research in many a hamlet that dots the landscape of Tamil Nadu. Forget about the Sangam era we don't have a good history of a recent poet like Bharathi.

P.A.Krishnan himself wrote a much discussed column on the controversy of impalement of 8000 Jains at the instigation of Saivaite savant Sambandar. The lore regarding the impalement arose from a Tamil epic. Krishnan, based on several sources (mostly western), had argued that that was a fabricated event and had no basis in history. Of course, since nothing could be said with certainty he left himself some nuanced wiggle room lest any new evidence crops up to corroborate the event. Nothing wrong with any of that. But, the article had a tad eagerness to 'set the account straight' on behalf of Hinduism. Even the proposed research on the 'sacks of Srirangam' he had averred was to correct some misconceptions including those propagated by fellow Marxists. A controversial book, in this context, is Romila Thapar's book on sacking of the Somnath temple. I am all for telling history however uncomfortable it may be but a broader canvas would've done justice to such a topic. Hindutva brigade repeatedly pulls up the 'Abrahamic religions', as they call it, for 'conversions' and take pride that such proselytization was unheard of in Hinduism whereas that is exactly what Sambandar attempted. Also, the article focused like a laser on the event of the impalement alone without the larger context of how Jainism was uprooted from a land where it had thrived for centuries.

Ethnic histories, as Jeyamohan lamented, are what abound in Tamil Nadu today. Su. Venkatesan's supposedly well researched fiction 'Kaavalkottam', based on his caste members raised a few controversies. The book was based on a caste that was labeled, in the british era, 'thieves'. Thugee or thuggery or thievery was a prevalent custom of a group of people in those days for many complex socio-economic reasons. Nanjil Nadan, while praising the book, demurred 'the book seems to justify thievery. As one who hails from an agrarian heritage I find that a little hard to accept since I've seen first hand the difficulties of a farmer being robbed of his seeds'. Venkatesan, armed with a creative license, has an escape hatch.

Even the much acclaimed historians like Aiyangar and Shastri only specialized in plain history of reconstructing events mostly. They were hand maidens of then prevailing notions of history that they learned from British imperialist historians. In the 1930s Will Durant had started writing history in an integral manner in his magisterial 'Story of civilization'. Durant did not consider history as just recounting page after page of kings and battles. If one stacked Durant's 'Our oriental heritage', the second volume of his 'Story of civilization' and Nilakanta Shastri's 'History of South India' the latter would pale into insignificance.

 A thousand histories await to be written and yet I don't have much hope that that would happen.



References:

1. David Brion Davis on Perry Miller's teaching http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/books/review/the-victims-revolution-by-bruce-bawer.html?pagewanted=all
2. New York Times Book Review of David Brion Davis's 'The Problem of Slavery' http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/30/books/review/the-problem-of-slavery-in-the-age-of-emancipation-by-david-brion-davis.html
3. Annette Gordon Reed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annette_Gordon-Reed
4. Moplah Rebellion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malabar_Rebellion
5. Keezhvenmani Massacre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilvenmani_massacre
6. NYT article on latest book on Eichmann http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/03/books/book-portrays-eichmann-as-evil-but-not-banal.html
7. NYT article on Danielle Allen's analysis of Jefferson's Declaration of Independence http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/03/us/politics/a-period-is-questioned-in-the-declaration-of-independence.html

Research in Western Fiction Writing

A recent Tamil novel that was inspired, not based, upon a historical event raised some discussion on the veracity of some events described and if there had been sufficient research into the historical backdrop. I shall reserve my comments on that novel for now and write, instead, of how fiction, historical and otherwise, is written in the West.

The first English novel I read was probably Jeffrey Archer's 'Kane and Abel'. Then followed Irving Wallace's 'Seventh Secret'. It was a fantasy tale spun around the popular conspiracy theory that Hitler lived after 1945. Then in quick succession followed 'The Prize', ' The Man' and 'Seven minutes'. Irving Wallace was notorious for steamy writing especially in the salacious 'Celestial bed'. Yet, all his novels were equally famous for spinning a good yarn based on well researched facts. Particularly his 'Seventh Secret' and 'Prize' were a treasure trove of nuggets. Wallace researched, on and off, for 14 years before he wrote a novel based on the secrets he had learned of the Nobel Prize. Yeats lobbied heavily for Tagore. Anti-semtism raged in the Nobel committee before deciding to award Einstein the prize, not for Relativity, but for his papers on photoelectric effect and Brownian motion. 'Seventh Secret' takes us to the heart of the last days of Third Reich. In the West, even in a fiction, the author has to pay attention to the street names he uses, the titles of the army generals, the events depicted and more.

Then followed a season of Ken Follet. Follet's recent books on the medieval era are deeply historical and based on extensive research. New York Times book reviewer writes that Follet recreates the 'everyday minutae of an impoverished village'. Follet even asserted, the review says, that "he never attributes inaccurate or unconfirmed characteristics to his real life characters, or puts them where they could never be". And that the reviewer finds is a reason why the characters were 'more than caricatures but less than real people'. That's a perpetual conundrum in writing a historical novel. Wikipedia lists 'historical inaccuracies' in Follet's 'Pillars of earth'. Most of those if applied to the aforesaid Tamil novel the writer's fans would holler 'nitpicking'.

Even a writer of pot boilers like Tom Clancy would be a diligent researcher.

From Irving Wallace to Ken Follet to Dan Brown it is common practice to weave fact and fiction in a racy yarn. The unwritten rules are that not too much literary license is taken with how the events or persona are portrayed. Fiction seeps into the crevices where facts are fissured. Hitler's suicide remained a conspiracy for long because the invading Red Army took away all forensic proof and was loathe to share them with Western researchers. Kazantzakis used literary license to muse on Christ's relationship with Mary Magdalene and Dan Brown followed. While 'Da Vinci Code' is a pot boiler fantasy novel none can accuse Brown of playing loose and fast with facts or depictions of real life characters.

When one moves from pot boilers to literary quality historical fiction the standards are even more stringent. New York Times obituary of Barry Unsworth, author of rigorously researched 'Sacred Hunger' that depicts slave trading, says he was chided by critics for 'occasionally falling victim to his own exhaustive research'. "Most critics however praised Unsworth's  stylish prose, rigorous fealty to detail and ability to evoke entire complex societies". "Rigorous fealty to detail".

I detest Gore Vidal's politics but I respect his fiction, especially the 'empire series'. Vidal was respected, again, for prodigious research. Vidal's "1876", the centenary year of America's founding, literally transports us to the era. His descriptions of New York City hotels, elevators, streets are vivid and authentic to a fault. In a final note to his 'Empire' Vidal specifies that but for altering one minor event and imagining a dialogue all his real life characters are depicted faithfully. Vidals 'Burr', '1876', 'Empire' and 'Lincoln' skate close to documentary standards of faithfulness to history. The genius of fiction writer is to create a compelling tale while tight rope walking on facts. That needs research and great reservoirs of creativity. After all if one were to spin a fantasy with no heed to history one might as well disavow any historical nature and ask his/her readers to treat the novel as they would treat any work of pure fiction.

Marguerite Yourcenar's 'Memoirs of Hadrian' is the gold standard for any book that seeks to be called 'historical fiction' as its genre. Yourcenar's discovery of her notes for a novel about Roman emperor Hadrian is the stuff of legend. Later she pored over innumerable books in Yale library to reconstruct the finest details of the era. The book is an education of a pivotal moment in the Roman empire complete with pictures of sculptures from Roman ruins with detailed notes. Yourcenar practically reconstructed the library of Hadrian. She takes us, using the inventiveness of fiction, into the mind of Hadrian. The research is so unimpeachable that even after 50 years not a single fictional moment has been challenged as 'could not have happened' or 'Hadrian would not have thought that'.

                                                              Marguerite Yourcenar (from Wikipedia)

In recent years Hilary Mantel is admired for her research into Tudor history for her trilogy. She received an unprecedented back to back Booker Prize for the two novels she has published so far in the trilogy. Hilary Mantel wrote 'Bring up the bodies' in 5 months. A newspaper article cautions us that it was possible only because Mantel had researched and mulled over the subject obsessively. She had 'done a long professorial research into her subject...read everything-all the books, all the books about books and all the original sources'. In an interview Mantel asserts "I try to make up as little as possible".

And there is fiction, pure fiction, that though populated with fictional characters depicts an era faithfully. Can one ignore Boris Pasternak's 'Dr Zhivago' and understand the upheaval of the Soviet revolution? Can one ignore 'How the steel was tempered' and understand Stalinist era or the roots of dreamy idealism that was communism? 'Les Miserables', 'Uncle Tom's Cabin', 'Gone With the Wind' are immortal classics because they paint, faithfully, for the reader a bygone era. One can argue with Mitchell's portrayal of a genteel south and her glossing over the brutalities of slavery but can one discredit her book as fantasy? The same can be said for Pasternak too.

Even science fiction has to adhere to some level of plausibility within established laws of physics else it would be childish fantasy and for that reason alone lose its significance.

History is complex and literature, as art form, has to reflect that else it would degenerate into propaganda. That a book is a fiction is no license to either twist truth or to present it sans the multi-layered complexity. The reason Gunter Grass was hailed a genius was because he took an epoch of singular evil to write a novel that went beyond black and white.

The power of the novel is vast but its loses all virility when insincere shoddy research, cardboard characters and propaganda are strewn across. Such books even disrespect the reader. Its a sort of arrogance to write a badly researched novel.

So how does Jeyamohan's 'Vellai Yaanai' measure up? Stay tuned.

References:

1. Interview with Marguerite Yourcenar http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2538/the-art-of-fiction-no-103-marguerite-yourcenar

2. New Yorker profile of Yourcenar including how she researched and wrote 'Memoirs of Hadrian' - "Becoming the emperor: How Yourcenar reinvented the past" http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/02/14/050214crbo_books

3. How Hilary Mantel researched - 'The unquiet mind of Hilary Mantel' - http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/culture/2012/10/unquiet-mind-hilary-mantel

4. Hilary Mantel's interview in 'The Telegraph' - "I try to make up as little as possible" - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/hay-festival/9243796/Booker-Prize-winner-Hilary-Mantel-on-Bring-up-the-Bodies-the-quicksilver-queen.html

5. New York Times obituary of Barry Unsworth http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/08/books/barry-unsworth-historical-novelist-dies-at-81.html

6. Gore Vidal on writing 'Burr' - " In fact, Vidal did meticulous research of hundreds of documents to come up with his alternative reading of history. In an afterword, the author maintains that in all but a few instances, the characters' actions and many of their words are based on actual historical records." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burr_(novel)

7. NYT Book Review of Ken Follet's 'Fall of giants' http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/books/review/Boylan-t.html