Kir an Nagarkar

Cuckold
 Chapter-6

KIRAN NAGARKAR

CUCKOLD

Kiran Nagarkar is an Indian novelist, playwright; film

and drama critic and screenwriter both in Marathi and English.
He is one of the most significant writers of postcolonial India.
Kiran Nagarkar was born in 1942 in Mumbai, Maharashtra.

His novel Cuckold on mystic Meerabai’s husband, Bhoj

Raj, was published in 1997 and won the 2001 Sahitya Akademi
Award. It has been translated into a number of languages and
has become one of the most beloved contemporary Indian
novels, both in India and in Europe.

The quotation from Makarand Paranjape’s review of

Cuckold in The Pioneer (April 5, 1997) is an appripriate
appreciation of the novel :

Kiran Nagarkar’s Cuckold is a most extraordinary novel.

Alas, I doubt whether we have the means and ability to
appreciate it, applaud it, and promote it in a fitting
manner. Our book industry or culture of reading is just
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not equipped to recognize what a splendid achievement it

is. (Paranjape 1997, 5)

Cuckold is a masterpiece, take a well known legend, turn it on

its head, weave a historically authentic mantle around it and
add a cast of complex, yet real characters, and you have the
Cuckold in a nutshell.

Kiran Nagarkar, writer, litterateur and playwright is

considered by many as a rarity in India for his proficiency and
ease with bilingual mediums - Marathi and English.

Cuckold followed a few years later in 1997. In essence,

it builds on the story of the Bhakti Saint, Meerabai. The tale is
set in the early sixteenth century, drawing the reader to a
Mewar at the height of its glory. It is a few tantalizing years
ahead of the Moghul ascendency over India and Mewar is
uneasily heding political bets with the sultanates of Malwa,
Gujarat and Delhi, unaware of the larger threat that looms.

The tale is focused on and narrated from the perspective

of the Maharaj Kumar, Meera’s husband and crown prince of
Mewar. Hindu legend, for the large part, either ignores this
person or occasionally glorifies Meera at his expense, by
adding his cruelty to the list of tribulations she triumphed
over. Nagarkar creates a flesh and blood flawed and complex
person from these footnotes history has afforded him. In the
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Maharaj Kumar, he creates a fond son, a master statesman and

war strategist and at times, “an achronistically forward
thinking crown prince. He is also the arrogant crown prince
who, incredulously finds himself cuckolded by a rival he
cannot fight the Divine Flautist - Lord Krishna.

The tale retains the bare scaffolding of the original

legend - beauteous and devout Meera is wedded to the young
and promising prince Bhojraj, son of Rana Sangha. Through
her unorthodox beliefs and practices, she offers enough fodder
for her husband’s rival to besmirch his name and honour in
Mewar.

Nagarkar takes a refreshingly original view of the valour

and honour system of Rajput tradition. Through the indulgent
yet pragmatic eyes of the Maharaj Kumar, Nagarkar explores a
society obsessed with the mythical standard of heroism and
sacrifice it has set for itself.

The Cuckold is populated by many powerful characters

and in a few deft strokes, Nagarkar attributes depth and
credibility to each of these. The course of the book layers the
already complex relationships - a few merit particular
mention, such as the delicate balance of relationship. The king
allows himself with his eldest son or that of the Maharaj
Kumar with his rival and erstwhile guide, Lord Krishna.
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Nagarkar makes Cuckold a veritable philosophical

meditation on the human condition, while still making it read
as if it were a thriller. Cuckold, the last to date of the novels,
is Nagarkar’s masterpiece. It represents the fine honing of a
rich sensibility and presents an engaging story operating on
many levels. It is a mosaic of different personalities (some of
them bearing some resemblance to legendary figures), of
different value systems and patterns of life.

Hira Steven (2004) looks at the co-existence in

Nagarkar’s Cuckold of the old and the new primarily in two
areas : that of the moral values and codes of conduct presented
within the novel, and that of form and technique in the
construction of the novel. In the first case the 16th century
Rajput ethos and codes of conduct are seen through the
essentially modern sensibility of the Maharaj Kumar. The
result is a fascinating study of a highly complex character and
his inevitable conflicts - internal and external - which spring
from the fact that he is a man before his time. In the handling
of the novelistic form, Cuckold seems in many ways to go
against current literary fashion. It is a historical novel on an
epic scale essentially in the realistic novel tradition, in that
the text is transparent, not drawing attention to itself and
taking for granted a shareable reality. But Cuckold also
contains a number of experimental elements : the modern often
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colloquial English of the narration, the switches between first

and third person narrative, the figure of Bhootani Mata (is she
real or imagined ?), the endings, among other things.
Ultimately Cuckold is a multilayered, multifaceted work of
great complexity.

Kiran Nagarkar is in good company. Hosts of well known

writers who used history as the backdrop of their fiction from
Walter Scott to Bankimchandra Chatterjee have disavowed the
label ‘historical novel’.

Nagarkar focuses more on the Maharaj Kumar’s

loneliness, his inward looking, self critical brooding nature
which are at odds with the Rajput’s heroic code of honour. A
Rajput prince who worries about wanton bloodletting and
shrinks from motiveless violence cannot gain the respect of
his people. Nagarkar deliberately interrogates the paradigm of
hyper-masculinity that was valorised by the Rajputs
themselves and endorsed with admiration by generations of
readers who were fascinated by these narratives of heroism
and bravery.

Cuckold is indeed that kind of the novel in which “what

happened next” is very important, whether or not you are
interested in the subtler play between fact and fiction, realism
and symbolism or pragmatism versus idealism, merely at the
level of story it is a totally riveting read. There are passages
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of incadescent prose or incidental reflections on life where we

might want to slow down the pace to prolong the moments of
pleasure, but otherwise from page one to six hundred and two,
it is a suspenseful and fast paced journey.

Cuckold is much more than a narration of the events and

experiences in the life of the Maharaj Kumar, the elder son
and heir apparent of Rana Sanga the ruler of Mewar, mostly
presented from the viewpoint of the Maharaj Kumar the hero
of the novel. The political character of the Maharaj Kumar is
essentially conceived as a counter to the milieu of feudal
Indian with all its possibilities and problems. At places he
reminds you of Muhammad bin Tughlaq and at many places in
the novel his attitude towards military and other matters is
highlighted deliberately in contrast to feudal practice. By
reconstructing the military experiments of the Maharaj Kumar,
Nagarkar is able to critically examine the military mentality of
feudal Mewar. This underscores the importance of examples to
the study of military history and theory as mentioned by
Clauzewitz, the modern philosopher of war. This dictum has
been put to good use in Cuckold since war is a human activity
like social, economic and political activities. Its conduct is
never free from the influence of social mentality. In fact
military history is often little more than the examination of the
dialectics of mentality and military activity. In this
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connection, Cuckold is an admirable commentary on the

mentality of the warlike Rajputs. (2004:83, 84)

Cuckold reiterates the combination of individual courage

with the freezing of the Indian way of warfare in medieval
India. This freezing seems to have occurred in the ancient
period although it appears most visibly in medieval India.
According to Rosen’s well conceived volume, the ferocity of
individual warriors was the chief characteristic with the
organisation and cohesion of armies brought into India by
invaders from Alexander onwards. In the Ancient World,
according to Rosen, two army models seem to have emerged.
The first was the professional army which became cohesive
due to the long campaigns it undertook. These armies, like
those of the Spartans and Macedonians and the Roman
Legions, were divorced from their societies by means of
military training, traditions, messing, campaigns etc. The

second model was the largely temporary “militia-type” army

produced by Indian society.

Kiran Nagarkar’s Cuckold is a multifaceted,

multilayered work which like its central motif Shri Krishna, is
difficult to pin down, slot and categorise. Is it a romance or a
realistic novel ? Or is it a modernist/postmodernist work ?
Again, looked at in another way, is it a historical novel or a
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philosophical novel or a psychological novel or a love story ?

As a matter of fact it is, or at least has elements of all these.

The world of Cockold is the world of 16th century

Mewar, a world which appears to be straight out of romance.
Belonging to the past, distanced from the reality of the
reader’s life, it is a world governed by rigid codes of chivalry,
honour and loyalty, which are accepted on authority and never
questioned. It is inhabited by several larger than life
characters.

Cuckold is a historic novel on an epic scale. It deals

with momentous time in the history of Mewar and its
neighbouring states when the course of Indian history might
have taken a different turn. As a historical novel it focuses on
kings and princes, alliances and battles, providing also a
fascinating account of intrigues and power struggles within
Mewar and the neighbouring states. At the same time,
however, it puts under searching examination ideas of
kingship, valour, loyalty and codes of chivalry and honour,
beside invoking vividly a sense of the lived reality of the
times - the reality of ordinary people living ordinary lives.
These last two aspects of the novel take it out of the world of
romance into the realm of realism.

Cuckold is a philosophic novel. Its main theme is the

single, simple versus the multiple and complex. It is evident in
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the protagonist’s questioning of the Rajput code of honour and

chivalry already discussed.

If wider implications of cuckoldry are considered, then

this appropriation can be expanded to include more than the
act of cheating a husband. It can also include taking exclusive
possession of someone (other than a spouse) or something
belonging to another, to take or make use of without authority
or right. And so the object of this ‘looting’ can be a person or
a thing. Further, the idea of cuckoldry can be stretched to
include the preventing of someone’s attaining something that
is rightfully his or hers (a kingdom, for example). Even
further act; cuckoldry can work upon its object, making the
‘seduced’ one indifferent or even hostile where attachment
formerly existed : the ultimate estrangement. Alienation itself,
a component of cuckoldry, implies the giving up of the values
of one’s society and family.

The novel takes place at a time when the course of

India’s, political destiny is about to undergo a change so vast
that contemporaries caught on the brink of it cannot begin to
foresee the outcome. The work is, however, a good deal more
than a recounting of events leading to the coming of the
Moghul dynasty signaled by Babur’s victory over Delhi. In
fact, Babur plays a very minor role in the book, ‘offstage’ as it
were. Although we never actually ‘see’ the raider from Kabul,
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we are treated to glimpses of him during his march towards

Delhi through bits of his diary smuggled out by means of an
intricate intelligence web. They contain lovesick verse as well
as coldly thought out battle plans and add a third dimension to
the familiar, two-dimensional profile of the Babur of
miniature paintings. There are the battles Mewar wages in turn
against the Sultanates of Gujarat and Malwa, inadequate dress
rehearsals for the final confrontation with Babur’s army for
possession of Delhi. At the same time the struggle over
succession within the Chittor palace itself proceeds.

Far more than the usual action packed historical novel,

Cuckold is a work of substance that exists on many levels. It
is the story of a love so overcharged that it has its being in a
feverish, overwrought world hardly recognisable as our own.
It is an exploration of the nature of kingship and statecraft. It
offers a fresh vision of sainthood. It questions sexual
identities. It contains depictions; deftly drawn, of the
confusion and mayhem of the battlefield. It is a panegyric to
the power of music. “There is only one art of an earth which
echoes the perfection of God, “the Maharaj Kumar declares in
a scene where he is practising the flute.” “It is music, and in
music, the most perfect and complete godhood lies within each
note. You cannot add to it nor can you subtract from it. It has
no reason and no rationale. It is sufficient unto itself.” (250)
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Throughout, Nagarkar plays on the theme of cuckoldry

with many a variation. In the person of the introspective hero
he gathers the various notes of the raga together to achieve an
artistic exploration of this very human concern in all its
nuances. It is well worth the reader’s while to pay attention to
how he does it.

Nagarkar adds emphasis to the quality of objectivity in

his hero by his choice of point of view. It is always a big issue
when one sits down to write fiction. Who is going to tell the
story or through whose sensibilities will it be told ? It is a
pleasure to see how this very technical decision contributes to
the characterisation of the Maharaj Kumar. The author has
chosen two points of view here ; the first person narrator (the
Prince) and the third person observer who has access to one or
more character’s thoughts. Nagarkar does this seamlessly,
while we are not looking. The effect is to allow us into the
Maharaj Kumar’s innermost feelings while giving weight to
his ability to see things straight. Using the third person point
of view solves the additional problem of how to handle scenes
where the protagonist cannot be expected to be present.

There is yet another technical decision. Nagarkar has

made that turns out to be ‘right’ and that is worth mentioning.
He states it in a note at the very beginning, before starting his
story : “One of the premises underlying this novel is that an
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easy colloquial currency of language will make the concerns,

dilemmas and predicaments of the Maharaj Kumar, Rana
Sanga and the others as real as anything we ourselves are
caught in ...” (Nagarkar 1997:V) The effect is to force us to
compare our own times to the past, and to regretfully admit
that things haven’t changed all that much. The greed for power
has not diminished, and the civilising of human relationships
still has a long way to go. Again, universal concerns.

We are living in an era of demythologisation and

desacralisation. Nothing is certain. We are tired of grand
narratives which look suspiciously like special pleading to our
sceptical dispositions. Sociologists and cultural historians
have studied the Bhakti movement and the vast array of
literature it has produced from perspectives very different
from the ones that marked traditional hagiographies and
histories. Counter-culture movements have thrown up
formidable challenges to orthodoxies of various kinds. The
result is that much of the writing produced in the last two to
three decades has been intensely preoccupied with ideological
issues of centre and margin, the oppressed and the oppressor.

In Kiran Nagarkar’s Cuckold, the Maharaj Kumar, on the

one hand and his wife the Princess, who is sometimes referred
to as Greeneyes, or the little Saint, on the other, represent
these two conflicting worlds, through them, the reader is able
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to explore two conflicting worlds. Through them, the reader is

able to explore two modes of being; the rational dialectic one

of the Maharaj Kumar and the imaginative, intuitive,

spontaneous world of Greeneyes. Through them, the writer is

able to create a fine tension between ‘reality’ and ‘illusion’.

Based on historical events in medieval India, the novel

has multiple layers. The hero, the Maharaj Kumar, is

struggling to retain his right to inherit the throne of Mewar

from his father Rana Sanga. At the same time, he has to fight

against other kingdoms in order to achieve territorial

expansion or sway. At another level, his heart is troubled by

his wife’s ‘treason’, and his love for other women is shadowed

by misfortune. We witness battles in the open field, hate and

intrigue among members of the same family and dynasty, and

sorrow and grief in the Maharaj Kumar’s soul.

Nagarkar portrays an extraordinarily rich tapestry of

characters and events that depict with great immediacy the

feudal world of 16th century India, the world of magic and

religion as well as the world of everyday life, creating a sense

of the mysterious, enigmatic India of the time.

The Maharaj Kumar is never divested of the intense

sense of belonging to India, the sense of the continuity of his

life with that of his predecessors. He says :

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We are a country of bards and minstrels and storytellers

and troubadours. They never tire of telling stories of the
heroic exploits of my ancestors ... I think we breathe in
less air than we inhale these stories. Our anecdotes are
all history. The bed-time stories of our children are
about these larger than life monarchs and warriors from
the past. Our arteries and veins are clogged with them.
Sometimes I think we have no present, only past. (54)

The immediacy of this world is enhanced by descriptions of

gardens, palaces, cities that are so real that one can penetrate
into even the tiniest detail. Their materials, shapes, colours
and smells strike the reader with their enormous beauty and
sensuality, like on the occasion when the Prince is invited to
dinner at Adinathji’s house where the “Daal bati, rotis of
cornflour, Khatti daal chawal, gatte ki sabji, kanjiwadas and
maal pohe” are put together to form an inviting still life
painting.(4) or, the wedding ceremony, where the ritual takes
place with great glamour and splendour and where the writer’s
appetite for detail is also felt :

He was suddenly at the threshold. He had alighted from

the elephant. The priest had performed the puja and tied
a string around his father's silk purse to make sure that
the Rana didn't spend even a copper while he was a guest
of Mewar. The drums and trumpets were still blaring ...
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He touched the toran on the lintel of the gate with his

sword seven times to signify that he had fought and won
his bride in battle ... His aunt made him sit on a low
wooden bajot, and put a tilak on his forehead. “Open
your mouth” she said and fed him curds and sweets. Then
she took out a gold tanka from the purse at her waist and
stuck it over the tilak ... He sat down on a carpet. His
bride walked in. The chunni which covered her head fell
over her face .... (44)

Life in Mewar is sometimes marvellous, but not ideal.

Financial problems, crime, sickness and other misfortunes take
place and as the reader turns the pages he sees the image of a
harsh and complex society which is able to enter and
experience. The atmosphere of beauty and enchantment is
broken again and again by scenes of the sick, the wounded,
abused women, dirty ditches and puddles, or cruel and
devastating scenes of war. With naturalistic zeal (like Zola
and Balzac), Nagarkar describes the horrible sensations of
festering, rotting flesh in a wounded leg or the sickening
odour of infection and death, as well as the magical beauty of
a momentary rapture.

The quality of realism is connected to the personality of

the Maharaj Kumar as narrator. The writer has endowed the
Prince with a brilliant intellect and a cool mind. The negative
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side of a scene is seen with the same objectivity as the

positive side.

Re-examine, question, doubt. And if need be, but only if

the advantages more than outweigh the ill effects, don’t
hesitate to swim against the tide. (109)

Both Meera and Bhojraj are never named in Cuckold. The

lyrics Nagarkar gives to the Princess are passionate, even
frenzied : the language of love making is used most
uninhibitedly. To begin with, she is reviled, given appellations
such as ‘nautanki’ or ‘nautch-girl’ because she quite
innocently dances to her own singing. This of course, allows
Vikramaditya, the Maharaj Kumar’s brother who lusts after the
throne, to build up a scandal to ruin his elder brother so, that
he may stand ridiculed in his father’s eyes. In a letter of which
every word is insidious and treasonable, Vikramaditya writes
to Prince Bahadur of Gujarat, offering him a valuable stolen
horse in return for military help in overthrowing the Rana.
One of the reasons he puts forward for doing this is that his
brother, the Maharaj Kumar, regent of Chittor, is weak and
unassertive, his wife is a national scandal and while she leads
him a song and dance, he broods and vacillates and is, even
after so many years of marriage, without issue (36). Mewar
watches in fascinated agony as this court drama of the Maharaj
Kumar and the Princess unfolds. (The Maharaj Kumar is a
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great favourite but if he cannot subdue his wife, how will be

rule the state ?)

Since the Princess is based on the real life character of

Meera, there are a great many myths and legends ascribed to
her; making it impossible to separate biographical detail from
the apocryphal history that grew around her. History tells us
that she was a prolific writer, a superb musician and dancer. In
the novel, however, she is a different type of character, not as
sanitised as the Meera of tradition. In the novel, the Princess
gradually gets a following and people forget their earlier
distaste of her ways, and she succeeds in enthralling them with
her devotion to Krishna, People begin to attend her sessions
and even ask for her blessings when faced with calamity.

The story of the Maharaj Kumar is a different one

altogether. History has mainly ignored him, if not presented
him in an unkind light. Kiran Nagarkar in his superb novel has
taken up the challenge of filling in this gap in history in his
usual intrepid way, and attempted to make the Maharaj Kumar
a man who was truly remarkable.

Indeed, one of Kiran Nagarkar’s triumphs in this novel is

that he positions the reader into looking at the legend of
Meerabai from an unusual and unexpected angle. Some critics
have taken exception to the sexual imagery in the novel. If
explicit sexual images are used they are not meant to titillate,
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or to raise the sales, but to provide important clues to Meera’s

frenzy, drawing the almost imperceptible lines between the
physical and metaphysical.

Cuckold is a first person narrative for the greater part.

The remarkable dexterity with which Nagarkar moves from
first person to third person narration creates the right kind of
distancing, as in the instance when right at the end of the
cholera epidemic the Princess too is infected. In the third
person account (Chapter 25) we are told that the Meharaj
Kumar at first doesn’t worry too much. After all, ‘the Flautist
didn’t turn up to rescue Draupadi till the Kauravas were well
into disrobing her” (320). Her saviour would arrive, but only
in the nick of time. However, the Prince’s indifference is
assumed : he is still carrying the weight of his hurt on him.
The dying Princess mutters, “No man and no God has your
fortitude or your dignity. You did not deserve someone as cold
and ungrateful as I ... I have loved you. A strange love, but
love nevertheless. Thank you” (321-22). The Flautist still does
not appear. The Prince is appalled :

“... however great your grievance don’t abandon the

people who are yours” (322).

So he sets out to meet challenge once again, nursing her

selfless day and night and ultimately managing to save her.
The whole of Chittor celebrates her recovery. But the Prince
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and his wife are exiled to Kumbhalgarh, ostensibly to

supervise repairs to the fort, which is clearly in perfectly fine
condition. Obviously the jealous Karmavati has learnt of the
change in the status of the now adored Princess. The Prince
can be slandered, even murdered. But touch the little Saint,
and she would become a beloved martyr : so he has to be
exiled. At Kumbhalgarh, the Prince has all the time in the
world to think about life, even to write about it. One of the
most significant conclusions he comes to (and this is closely
linked to the way his own end is projected), is the profound
Upanishadic concept of interchangeability, or “the oneness
that the individual living creature shares with the cosmos and
the Almighty” (342).

Using excerpts from Annette Susannah Beveridge’s

translation of the Baburnama, Nagarkar weaves these into his
story to reveal the first Moghul’s determination to be the
Emperor of Hindustan. These excerpts are skillfuly deployed
at critical moments in the narrative to point to the inexorable
movement of history, and to make for a really sharp contrast
between Moghul ambition and the overplayed and effete
chivalric Rajput code. Through all this telling, the narrator
often pauses to comment on the conflict between the personal
and the public in life. War is not something the Maheraj
Kumar has ever liked, and now that he is so close to it once
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again, he thinks of the hundreds of women in palace waiting

for their husbands or lovers. “Who would sooth their
loneliness ?” he asks (393)

Epics are, therefore, not tragedies. They are meant to

reveal the true moral fibre of mankind, with a little help from
the gods. And this is what Nagarkar’s Cuckold does. It leaves
behind, not sorrow, but a whole host of philosophical
questions prompting the reader to look into himself, and at the
world, making Cuckold an intensely thought provoking novel.

Kiran Nagarkar’s novel Cuckold, which deals with 16th

century Rajput and, to some extent, Indian history, presents a
revisionary picture of the life of that period, which is perhaps
even more convincing because it is not limited by a particular
social perspective. An additional merit of this historical novel
is an exclusive focus on the women characters situated as they
were in period. The contention is that the way the women
characters have been depicted in the novel, and the roles they
play, challenge the modes and assumptions of traditional
historiography as well as the more recent attempts at
reworking these representations.

The novel also portrays a variety of different ways in

which the women characters attempt to move out of the social
and sexual confines set on them. Not all the women in the
novel are concerned with the political life of the time, but
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insofar as they impinge in some way on the life of the Maharaj

Kumar, the heir apparent and the narrator, they can be said to
play a role.

As Cuckold is basically a historical work and this is one

of the important aspects under consideration here, it is
necessary to analyse the dimensions of the ‘history’. The New
Penguin English Dictionary defines it as the ‘branch of
knowledge that records and interprets past events’ (660) while
the Little Oxford Dictionary defines it as a ‘continuous record
of (esp. public) events; study of past events; total
accumulation of these’ (298). Taken together, these two
definitions bring out the principal issues and assumptions
concerned with history, the important among them being the
act of interpretation and the recording of events.

Cuckold can be considered ‘history’ in precisely this

sense. It includes not merely a list of the wars that the
Maharaj Kumar fought, or the treaties that Mewar signed with
other kingdoms. Presented mainly in the guise of the memoirs
of the Maharaj Kumar, the novel also deals with a number of
other behind the scene activities. These include the manner in
which the royal Princess (based on the character of Meerabai)
rose to sainthood, which could be considered one of the major
cultural events in the entire history of Mewar; the
machinations of Queen Karmavati to get the crown for her son
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- a political event with wide-ranging implications; and the

various relationships that the Maharaj Kumar has with
different types of women ranging from his wife, whom he
sometimes refers to as Greeneyes or the Little Saint (the
Meera of legend) the washerwoman Sunheria, Kausalya his
wet nurse and Leelawati, the child who matures into a woman
- all part of his personal history. It is when all these aspects of
the Maharaj Kumar’s life are taken as parts of a whole that the
pictures of his life are taken as parts of a whole that the
picture of his life and of an era can emerge.

The other very popular kind of rewriting is to fill in the

gaps or silences in traditional histories. This is based
primarily on the realisation that the writing of history involves
narrative strategies like the choice of incidents to deal with
involving rigorous selection and rejection. The decision
regarding which events will be left out or interpreted in what
light will depend upon the view or ideological stance of the
historian. This stance may be (and often is) unconscious and
such ideological underpinnings are rarely overtly visible. It is
only in the process of rewriting that they are made explicit.

The Bhakti movement has been one of the most fertile

areas in India’s cultural history by itself and in the number of
reinterpretations that it has allowed. Essentialist, almost a
historical, readings of the songs of many Bhakti poets have
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been soon replaced by a notion of the movement itself as a

form of widespread social rebellion. Hence, many of the poets
were seen as victims of society either of its caste system or
gender politics. Kabir has today been appropriated by the Dalit
movement just as Meera and Andal have been seen as victims
who raised their voice against the oppression of women.
Cuckold, however, moves even beyond this kind of a
re-appropriation of the past. The novel in depicting Meera not
merely in her role as saint, but also as a Rajput Princess who
had the potential to affect political decisions and personal
actions, reads her as a woman character who influences both
the Maharaj Kumar as a man and Mewar as a nation.

It is here that novels like Cuckold set in historical

periods have an advantage, because they deal with historical
events as well as the personalities of the characters. Cuckold,
on the one hand, is based on solid historical facts that, for the
most part, cannot be disputed. On the other hand, Nagarkar
invents the characters of the Maharaj Kumar, for hardly any
evidence exists about the historical figure of Bhojraj. The
Maharaj Kumar’s wife, who represents the saint Meerabai, is
very different in character from the Meera of legend. The
focus in this perspective is not on the events alone, but on the
silent figures, in this case behind the purdah, who influence in
subtle, and not so subtle ways, the people who act and make
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events happen. One may remember the television series Yes,

Minister, also remade in Hindi as Ji, Mantriji. The series
showed in its inimitably humorous way the Chief General
Secretary to the Minister insidiously shaping the decisions
that the Minister took.

Cuckold brings out this behind the scenes machinery of

history. In doing this, it deals with yet another area about
which histories are often relatively silent - the role of women.

While women would appear to be marginalised in nearly

all societies, this is certainly true of India where the space for
a woman is clearly demarcated and restricted. In the
traditional family, she is to stray largely within the house or
within the zenana quarters. But always away from the larger
concerns of society and from public events - away, in other
words, from all that constitutes history. To reinforce their
isolation, the system (shall we call this patriarchy ?) opposes
all deviations from the norm. Queen Karmavati in Cuckold
refers to the Maharaj Kumar’s wife as a “nautch girl” (9),
cleverly using all preconceived public assumptions about
feminine decorum as ploys in getting the crown for her son
Vikramaditya. She subtly turns public opinion against the
Maharaj Kumar by imaging his wife as a prostitute because
she sings and dances, and for coming out of the seclusions of
the zenana quarters. In effect, Queen Karmavati is using all
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available discourses about what constitutes masculinity and

feminity as her ammunition. A man who cannot control his
wife is traditionally seen as weak and ‘unmanly’ patriarchal
discourse does not give a man space to indulge in compassion
or the ‘softer’ emotions - certainly not Rajput men. For
women, it also defines boundaries and limits, outside which
lie freedom of choice, singing and dancing, and other such
activities.

The Little Saint and all the other women in the novel are
depicted as belonging to their times. The Little Saint, for one,
is a consummate archer and this is much in keeping with the
historical tradition where Rajput princesses had to be taught
certain martial arts. Similarly, she also knows how to read and
write - again something she would have been taught as a
Rajput Princess.

Cuckold is not merely the story of the Maharaj Kumar

and his exploits. It is also a depiction of the social, cultural,
political and sexual climate of the times. Within the climate,
the women achieve some kind of satisfaction and self
awareness. The fusion of historical content and the novel form
makes it possible for the text to look into aspects of human
relationships and the impact of these all-too-human feelings
on public events. Historical novels like those of Scott, Dumas,
Bankimchandra and Kalki used history as a background for
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dealing with the private lives and aspirations of the makers of

history. With the more recent interest in alternate modes of
historiography, the focus in novels like Cuckold is on the
invisible but strong forces that subtly work these histories -
not merely in political terms but also in social, cultural and
religious terms. It is that gives the novel so much space to
look at the women characters and the ways in which they move
out of or get further trapped in the socially generated confines
of the age.

The foregoing analysis of the novel, Cuckold amply

reveals the author’s engagement with history. In representing
the historical facts of the 16th century Indian history in
fictional form, Nagarkar has made some disgressions which
are expedient for a historical novelist. He has shown mastery
in the art of blending history and fiction in a very effective
manner. While trying to fictionalize the life and history of
Maharaj Kumar, Meera’s husband, he has allowed alternative
history to take its place. For this reason, precisely, Cuckold
offer itself as a fine specimen of the problematic nature of the
relationship between novel (fiction) and history (fact). Both
fact and fiction are so organically merged that one feels at a
loss to separate one from the other. The novel has other merits
too as it seeks to fill the gaps and silences through fictional
representation of women characters whose voices and
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personalities remain unheard and invisible in the written

historical accounts and records. So, Cuckold can be genuinely
celebrated as a triumph in the genre of historical fiction.

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