Nandini Sengupta: “In many ways, animals are more evolved than us”
The author of ‘The Blue Horse and Other Amazing Animals from Indian History’, who won the Sahitya Akademi Bal Puraskar 2024, on her relationship with animals and about retelling history through the their perspective
How does it feel to win the award?
It feels unreal. When I first got the news from my agent Kanishka Gupta, all I could say was, “Are you sure?” It still feels surreal in the most spectacular way but it’s just about beginning to sink in. This is a huge honour and I am so grateful. It is particularly special since The Blue Horse and Other Amazing Animals from Indian History is a book very close to my heart. As a history buff and animal lover, this book is a double bill favourite and I am so happy that it has received this recognition. The book did very well when it debuted in 2020. It was shortlisted for the AutHer Awards 2021 and made it to the Parag Honour List as well but this is the ultimate validation.
In the book, you write, “I have always wanted to burrow myself inside an animal’s head to figure out what it’s thinking.” What led to this curiosity? Tell us a little about your relationship with animals.
I have grown up with dogs and we’ve almost never not had a home without a dog. Dogs are, of course, the soft landing one can take into the animal kingdom but my love for them has taught me that in many ways animals are more evolved than us. They normally don’t hurt another creature unless in self-defence or for hunger, and they know how to exist in a cruel world where a species like humans is on top of the food chain. The animal world has every emotion we pride ourselves for and yet they know how to exist as part of a food chain without disrupting the chain itself. That’s fascinating and that’s something we humans need to learn from them. On a lighter note, my first dog Snoopy would watch cricket with the rest of us and invariably bark every time we clapped at a Sachin Tendulkar sixer. I would like to imagine that she knew her square cuts from her pulls and would have made a mean slip fielder. But imagine reacting to a game you do not understand, looking at some weird moving pictures that mean nothing to you and repeating a trick over and over again simply because it delights your family. That ability to think outside of themselves without ego or self-regard is what makes animal thoughts special. Snoopy was my window into that world.
In a 1994 interview with Jerome Brooks for The Paris Review, novelist Chinua Achebe said, “There is that great proverb — until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” Many people have written about history from the perspective of oppressed communities but it’s rare for humans to think of how animals are oppressed. When you hit upon the idea of retelling history through the viewpoints of animals, what convinced you that it was an idea worth pursuing?
As a history buff, I came across many animal stories while doing research for my other books (The King Within, The Poisoned Heart, The Story of Kalidas: The Gem Among Poets etc). I realised that in most of the stories, despite their hair-raising heroism, the animal remains in the background. Even in their martyrdom, the animals do not get their voice back. This was my attempt to give them a voice because history to me is not just his story and her story, but also their story.
You have used sources like inscriptions, miniature paintings, historical treatises, tribal songs, and museum records as research material to write the short stories that are part of this book. Could you recall for us some moments of sheer joy and tremendous frustration during this whole process? Also, how did you motivate yourself when you were unable to locate something that you desperately wanted?
Honestly research is the best part of writing stories based on history. As you track the trail of a story through time you feel like a latter-day Indiana Jones (though without the Harrison Ford smirk-smile, in my case). The animal stories in this book literally jumped out of the pages of history books to grab my attention. Sometimes, the human character was someone I was already fascinated by and so digging deeper into their relationship with animals was an extension of that process. Rani Durgawati (on whom I have written a narrative non-fiction biography called Rani Durgawati: The Forgotten Life of a Warrior Queen) is a case in point. Research wise, the most difficult character to trace was King Jayakesi and I had to trawl through several early medieval manuscripts and match characters and timelines to get the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle to fit. I started with a single line in Upinder Singh’s book A History of Ancient & Early Medieval India and for a while there was simply nothing more about this enigmatic Kadamba king. Finally, I found a 14th century literary work called Prabandha Chintamani by Merutunga, which narrated the story in greater detail. It was a hurrah moment for me because it seemed like the parrot in the story was somehow helping me join the dots more than a millennia later.
In the story Akbar’s Cheetahs, you explore how deeply jealous and sad the cheetah Samand Manik is. He says, “Being the emperor’s one and only for so long had spoilt me. I hated the idea of the spotlight swinging away from me. But more than that, I missed Jalal’s affection and respect. I missed him patting my head.” What was it like to put yourself in the cheetah’s situation and think of his inner life?
The cheetah is a majestic animal, born free and meant to roam free. But in the Mughal court, these animals were paraded around as pets, wearing jewelled collars and often blindfolded. What would a proud, beautiful beast like Samand Manik feel about becoming a feline trophy to sundry humans? That’s the point I started from and for a while I led a schizophrenic existence transforming into the Mughal khasa cheetah. I imagined Samand Manik as someone who understood Jalal (another name for Akbar) because he was as proud, unbending and majestic as the emperor himself. That connect between the two is what the story talks about.
In the story Rani Durgawati’s Elephant, we get to hear the injured war elephant Sarman talk lovingly about the queen. He says, “Durga spent hours with me, calming me down, giving me my favourite sugar cane to munch on, telling me it was going to be alright… my mother never stopped caring for me. She would prepare the balm herself and visit me in the stable to make sure it was applied properly.” Your own affection for animals really comes through in the way you write. How have children responded to this story, especially the way in which you depict the human-animal bond?
Here’s a fun fact – Rani Durgawati’s affection for her Sarman is so well known that if you visit her samadhi in the outskirts of Jabalpur, you’ll find murtis of both the queen and her elephant and the local Gonds offer diya bati (light offering) to both on the queen’s birthday and her balidaan diwas. The details of how she took care of the elephant come from Gond songs sung by balladeers to this day. Young readers have almost unanimously loved the human-animal bond described in the stories though some of them asked why so many of the stories end with the animals dying. I had to explain to them that these are not stories that I have made up. They are taken from the pages of history, and history remembers martyrs more than survivors. But there are some light-hearted stories as well and those are universal favourites.
You have also written stories revolving around Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj’s dog Waghya, and Maharana Pratap’s horse Chetak. Both these animals have had statues installed in their memory. How do people who visit these places interact with these statues? Do schools that take students on excursions get children to think about the contributions of these animals in Indian history?
I have had instances of readers taking pictures of the book at both samadhis – Chetak’s and Waghya’s. They have been very kind and shared these pictures with me and I have posted them on social media. It’s exhilarating when a story resonates enough for the reader to actually connect the tale with the real history behind it. That’s truly my purpose – to find the story in history.
While the book focuses on animals from Indian history, you have also included some from Greece, Italy, Sri Lanka, Egypt, China, UK, and USA. Tell us about the animals that you had to leave out of the book due to space constraints.
I did leave some famous animals out – Jhansi Rani Lakshmibai’s horse Badal is a case in point – because their stories are already very well-known and my focus was on unearthing lesser-known animal heroes. Internationally too, there are many animal stories which I had to leave out because I tried to pick stories of animals other than the horse and the dog, the two species closest to humans. Hence Thomas Jefferson’s bear cubs or Queen Isiemkheb’s gazelle made the grade.
Illustrations play an important role in children’s books. Tell us about the process of working with Damini Gupta, the illustrator of this book. How did you collaborate?
It was a wonderful experience working with Damini because she is so thorough in her approach. For each of the illustrations, she asked for actual historical reference points like photographs or miniatures so the illustrations remained historically faithful. For example, I sent her a picture of Roshanara of Junagarh so she knew what breed that beautiful dog (Nawab Muhammad Mahabat Khanji II’s dog) belonged to. Similarly, I shared pictures of hero stones (very common all over Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, and many of them are devoted to dogs) and screen grabs from the Akbarnama miniatures; so, she knew her subject well, and she has done a phenomenal job representing these characters. This would not be the book it is without Damini’s amazing illustrations, and I am so grateful for this collaboration.
What are you working on? Are you excited to write more historical fiction, or keen to try out other genres? Would you write a book set in Pondicherry, where you live?
My first historical narrative non-fiction biography Rani Durgawati: The Forgotten Life of a Warrior Queen published by Penguin India debuted in November 2022. I am currently in the process of researching the life of another medieval veerangana and mentally I am somewhere in the 17th century. Till that story writes itself, I cannot think of anything else. A book set in Pondicherry is an intriguing idea given how much history lies littered around us; maybe I will attempt it sometime in the future.
Chintan Girish Modi is a freelance writer, journalist and book reviewer.