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Summary
Summary
This exquisite novel unfolds a story of ambition and love at the glittering court of the Mughal emperor Akbar in 16h century Hindustan.
Bihzad is the most gifted of all the young artists in the emperor's workshop, and the son of the emperor's chief artist. When Akbar decides to move his court from his ancient capital at Agra to the new city he is building at Fatehpur Sikri, he takes the brilliant young man with him. There, cut off from family and the distractions of Agra, Bihzad's troubling obsession with his master is allowed to develop. When his illicit love becomes public knowledge, Akbar has no choice but to banish his young favourite to the wildest corner of his empire.
Politics and paintings fill the pages of this vividly imagined novel.
Author Notes
Kunal Basu was born in Calcutta but has spent much of his adult life in Canada and the USA. He currently teaches at Oxford and McGill universities.
http://www.kunalbasu.com/
https://twitter.com/kunalbasu100
Reviews (2)
Kirkus Review
A most unusual portrait of the artist gradually takes shape in this Anglo-Indian author's limpid second novel (after The Opium Clerk, 2003). The story's set in 16th-century Hindustan, where the gifted youth Bizhad, son of Mughal emperor Akbar's favorite court painter ("the Kwaja"), grows up among the emperor's inner circle. Bizhad, the namesake of a legendary artist renowned for his illustrations of classic Middle- and Near Eastern tales, is raised in a hothouse atmosphere by his father and beautiful young stepmother Zuleikha, kept away from all corrupting influences (i.e., other people), and forbidden to learn to read or write. Instead, he's forced to concentrate his energies on an artistic bent that manifests itself in vivid, lurid miniatures depicting "haunting dervishes, lovers, poems of death and unrequited dreams." The most compelling of such dreams is Bizhad's unrequited love for his emperor, which he fantasizes in explicit erotic scenes showing himself and Akbar as lovers. A jealous rival reveals Bizhad's secret, and he's banished, thereafter condemned to years of wandering, poverty, and unfulfillment. But the death of a beloved friend stimulates new emotional and artistic growth, and a kind of miracle occurs. Out of Bizhad's love for one man emerges a heartfelt identification with all human life, indeed the entire visible creation: a renewed passion of a very different kind, manifested in Bizhad's much celebrated portrait of a Madonna and child, flowering in a life-affirming denial of the warning posed in the novel's epigraph (that "thou who draw pictures will be punished on the day of resurrection"). This moving parable of the manifold sources of art bears some resemblance to Turkish author Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red. But it's a richly satisfying original creation: a story that might have come out of a contemporary Arabian Nights. Brilliant work, from one of the finest new novelists at work today. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Set in sixteenth-century India, this peregrinatory novel depicts the world of the Mughal emperor Akbar in its complexity--its wealth and poverty, its cauldron of different peoples and beliefs, and its court filled with plots and courtly scheming. The first third of the story portrays the early life of Bihzad, an artist prodigy destined to head Akbar's itabkhana, or artists' pavilion, which produced the miniatures for which Mughal art is renowned. Enemies of Bihzad and his courtier father use a serious blunder in judgment to force him into exile from the court. The novel starts very slowly--its first third is filled with detail of life at court and discursive dialogue. Once Bihzad's exile begins, suspense about his fate in the chaos and political upheaval of sixteenth-century Asia energizes the plot and provides tension for the remainder of the story. Panoramic in scope, lyrical in approach, and filled with vivid descriptions of the era's violence and sexual practices. --Ellen Loughran Copyright 2004 Booklist
