"My aim is to try to put women back into history where they belong. "
A conversation with writer and historian Dr. Devika Rangachari
Well-written historical fiction is one of the delights of a history lover’s life, and is a huge favourite with me—the pleasure of a deep dive into history to engage in real time, as it were, with people and events from the past, is quite unique. Historical fiction in English about India is relatively rare, and when it comes to historical fiction about women, it is practically non-existent. So imagine my joy when I found Dr Devika Rangachari’s outstanding novel Queen of Ice, an account of the life of Didda, who ruled Kashmir, first as regent and then as queen in her own right, from 958 to 1003 CE! Written for young adults and published by Duckbill, it was on the White Raven list, won the Neev Young Adult Book Award, was shortlisted for the Sahitya Akademi’s Bal Sahitya Puraskar, and has now been optioned for a movie and is part of the Penguin Classics series.
I had the privilege and immense pleasure of a conversation with Dr Rangachari a few weeks ago. She answered my questions with patience and grace, her erudition, passion and commitment to her work evident in every word. An hour passed much too quickly!
Here are some extracts from our conversation, which I publish with her permission and my grateful thanks.
RC: You have done a great deal of very interesting work in history and gender. During Covid, I taught creative writing to children, and one of the books I read with my students was Queen of Ice. They, like so many young people, didn’t really care about history, leave alone Indian history, as a subject, nor had they given much thought to the place of women in history. And suddenly they were reading your book and loving it, asking questions and wanting to learn more. Several of them, I know, then read your Queen of Earth on their own.
DR: Thank you so much! That means a lot.
RC: So my first question to you: what got you into history and then into writing for children?
DR: What got me into history—and I think many of us have had a similar experience—was reading. I was a voracious reader in school, reading way beyond my age range. We had a wonderful librarian who introduced me to historical fiction. I developed a fascination for Henry VIII and read whatever I could about Tudor England. Ancient Egypt, too. It was such a wonderful journey! I maintained that keen interest in history and read way beyond my textbooks all through school. Later, when choosing what I would study in college, I toyed between English and History but ended up choosing the latter.
Writing for children was not a conscious decision. I am, in fact, a very reluctant writer, being more of a reader; all my publishers know this and have enormous patience with me! I entered a competition for children's writers organised by the Children's Book Trust (CBT) way back in 1994. I hadn’t a clue, then, about the writing process but managed to win a prize. I wrote for CBT for a few more years—but as the field of children’s writing in India is very small, when you write for one publisher, you invariably end up writing for another. So that's how I found myself writing for children in a more structured, professional way—and, later, for young adults.
RC: Can you tell us more about your writing for young adults?
DR: My writing for young adults stems from my doctoral and postdoctoral research, which was on the manner in which women have been written out of history, specifically in the late ancient or early medieval period (the 7th to 12th century CE) in the north and the east. There is enough evidence on the enormous influence that women had in this timespan, which flies in the face of gender-blind narratives that stress the irrelevance of women to the narrative. So my aim is to try to put women back into history where they belong.
At the time, I was also conducting book-related sessions in schools and whenever I spoke about history, I was met with looks of dread and/or boredom. History isn’t a universally popular subject among students—a factor of the manner in which it’s taught! I soon discovered that their knowledge of women in the past was abysmal. The usual suspects would figure—Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi, Jahanara, or Mother Teresa—but they would draw a collective blank if I asked them to go further back in time and name some women.
I once had a conversation that completely rattled me and I have since repeated it in different schools across the country. ‘If you go all the way back to the Indus Valley Civilisation,’ I said, ‘do you think women existed then?’ The instinctive answer was ‘No’—and it has remained so 99.9% of the time. This, of course, would be followed by sheepish looks and dawning puzzlement. ‘Why don’t we read about the women?’ the students would ask.
Well, you don't read about them because the writing of history is male-centred and apart from a few token names, women are considered largely irrelevant or trivial to the past.
This fact impelled me to write about the women I had researched for young adults who would otherwise not have access to the relevant material. I started with Queen of Ice, the story of Queen Didda of Kashmir, one among many remarkable women who ruled or were powers behind the throne but who either remain unknown or are vilified for having dared to exercise power and authority.
RC: The evidence/sources that you mention—could you tell us a little more about these?
I focused on Kashmir, Kanauj, Bengal, Bihar and Odisha in the early medieval period, and the source material that I consulted varied from region to region. Epigraphic evidence (inscriptions) is very useful for reconstructing the Odishan past but in the case of early medieval Kashmir, there are barely any inscriptions, so the reliance is on textual evidence in the form of the Rajatarangini, a history of Kashmir written by a 12th-century poet, Kalhana, who aimed to be the first true historian of his region and look at sources preceding his times in order to write a history of Kashmir from the earliest period till his own. It is a wonderful text! It tells you so much about women that you realise that modern texts often carry a heavier load of gender blindness than earlier ones. Kalhana talks about remarkable women, royal and non-royal, who are not just rulers but also women behind the throne, decision-makers, court participants and donors, and who are hugely effective in different ways. If you are seeking to understand Kashmir's ancient and early medieval past, you have to use this text.
When it comes to Kanauj, you have a balance of textual evidence and inscriptions. For Bengal and Bihar, it is largely inscriptions and some texts. So the kind of sources I consulted were region-specific; broadly, textual, epigraphic and numismatic, even sculptural, where it corroborated the former.
RC: Could you give a little more detail? For example, when you say you are looking at numismatic evidence, or at sculptural evidence as corroborating – could you explain how such sources might corroborate other evidence?
DR: I will give you two examples.
The Rajatarangini tells us that Didda, the subject of Queen of Ice, was a very powerful queen who ruled for around 50 years—25 as informal ruler, 25 as formal. She is supposed to have issued some inscriptions and her own coins. Her husband, Kshemagupta, was so fascinated by her that he issued coins under the nickname that they were known by in contemporary society: Diddakshema, a precursor to ‘Brangelina’ or ‘WillKat’, if you will! It was thrilling to see these Diddakshema coins in the museum in Srinagar, as well as those that Didda herself had issued, and to note how a detail in a text can be corroborated by material evidence. Inscriptions pertaining to Didda are not very well-preserved. As a historian, you are usually taught not to rely too much on textual evidence if there is epigraphic evidence available but here, it is actually the other way around, where the textual material is more important, while the epigraphic evidence merely corroborates it.
The further back in time you go, the fewer your sources are as compared to, say, the colonial period. The closer to modern times you get, the more profuse the documentation. For the ancient and medieval period, you don’t have so many sources and there are large holes in our knowledge, huge gaps that you have to try and cover, somehow, in a plausible way. So it is very satisfying when evidence comes together in this way! Let me cite Didda’s example again. She is referred to by both male and female titles in her inscriptions (deva and rajni), a fact that Kalhana points to in his text. Once again, there is a neat corroboration of textual and epigraphic evidence.
When you look at the history of Kanauj, Harshavardhana/ Harsha is seen as the most powerful ruler of the 7th century CE but what the narratives don't tell you is that he actually got the throne through his younger sister, Rajyashri, who is completely invisible in the inscriptions of his reign. His biography, Harshacharita, written by his court poet, Banabhatta, portrays her in a very stereotypical way: weeping and helpless and completely dependent on Harsha. However, the Chinese sources indicate that she was a very dynamic person who might have ruled Kanauj jointly with her brother for a period of time. She accompanied Harsha on military campaigns and was very vocal in court debates, particularly as regarded religion. Harsha is known for embracing Buddhism later in his reign. She was a Buddhist before him and could very well have influenced his religious proclivities. So if you are only looking at inscriptions, she does not exist, but if you look at textual evidence, she does.
RC: The textual evidence you have looked at—Kalhana, Banabhatta, the Chinese sources—did you study this in the original or in translation? I ask because in my experience, translation can often be biased…
DR: For the Chinese sources, I looked at the English translations. All the other sources are in Sanskrit, so I studied them in the original. I also looked at the English translations but, yes, these could be biased depending on who the translator was and how they interpreted particular words. So I think it is very important to look at sources in the original context, as far as possible.
RC: Are you ever asked questions like: ‘Why is history important? It’s only stones and broken buildings after all. Is the past even relevant to us?’ If so, how do you answer them?
DR: Yes, all the time! Yet how can you know what you are in the present and even proceed towards the future unless you know where you came from? You can’t write sentences unless you know all the letters of your alphabet. You can't build a house from the roof down; you need a base and then you build upwards from that. Knowing your past helps you shape your identity. It could be your personal identity within the family or your collective identity as the citizen of a country. Having a base makes your identity more solid and as you move towards the future, your goals become more concrete. And so, knowing your history, your past, is very important.
By extension, I have a huge problem with adult gatekeepers who monitor children's reading. I have come up against ridiculous arguments, even with librarians of progressive schools in big cities, who say to me, ‘Oh, Queen of Ice has violence. How will 15-year olds be able to handle it?’ I want to say—'Look around you, look at social media, look at the news! There is conflict and violence everywhere.’ Grown-ups have a distressing habit of underestimating the intelligence of children who are, in fact, extremely discerning readers. The very fact that they are engaging with a book means that they are processing complex thoughts. They will take what they want from a book and leave what they don’t, perhaps returning to it at a later stage to engage with the content. Just because they read about someone robbing a bank today does not mean they will go out and emulate that tomorrow. Books provide a responsible and balanced way of introducing a young mind to the brightness and darkness of our world. And so, an indiscriminate censorship of children’s reading is a huge mistake.
RC: Your books involve an enormous amount of research, which is both time-consuming and demanding. What compels you to write the books you do?
DR: Well, Didda of Queen of Ice and Prithvimahadevi of Queen of Earth were women that I had already researched for my doctoral and postdoctoral studies, respectively. So I already knew the pertinent facts. However, for The Mauryas, my first foray into writing history for adults—narrative non-fiction with all the facts but written in a humorous, accessible way, which came out last year––I had to do a lot of research because this was not really my area of expertise.
As for what compels me, one reason, of course, is the urge to set the historical record straight, particularly as regards women. You can’t say that women rose and fell in status during the early medieval period like an amorphous, undifferentiated group on a seesaw—as is the wont of most historical narratives of this period. Their status is context-and-region-specific. The different categories of women, the influence they had vis-à-vis men and the dents they made in the patriarchal structure need to be considered. Women are usually portrayed in textbooks or general histories in terms of the clothes and jewellery they wore, conveying the impression that women all through the past were obsessing over how they looked to the exclusion of all else, which is far from the truth. While it isn’t always easy to find information on women and their actual roles, it is possible to look at a period and ask: Are we getting the real picture here? This question drives me.
If, as in The Mauryas, I have begun writing history for the general reader, it is because it is a subject that seems to be within everyone’s purview but that most people know precious little about. We wouldn’t dare make assumptions or generalisations about, say, Physics or Chemistry without a solid background in the field. But as regards history, everyone feels equipped to make assertions without any knowledge, which can lead to a lopsided and incorrect understanding of bygone times. Historians undergo rigorous training to handle sources and derive information from them so as to fill the gaps in our collective past. For this to be dismissed or for history to be used as a weapon to fit an agenda is something that I have a problem with. Therefore, with my background in writing and my training in the field of history, I felt it incumbent on me to do my little bit in correcting somebody's picture of the past somewhere. I'm not saying that the entire world is going to read everything I write but whoever does will, hopefully, not look at history in the same way again.
RC: Thank you so much for your time, your insights, and sharing your thoughts and opinions here. We look forward to many more books from you, books that will continue to ‘set the record straight’ and give your readers innumerable hours of delight.
In addition to Queen of Ice, Dr Rangachari’s books include The Mauryas, Queen of Fire (Parag Honour List 2022), Queen of Earth (Parag Honour List 2021; shortlisted for the Neev YA and the JK Women AutHer awards), The Train to Tanjore (shortlisted for the Neev award), 10 Indian Monarchs Whose Amazing Stories You May Not Know, Tales of Love and Adventure, Swami Vivekananda—A Man with a Vision, Harsha Vardhana, The Merry Mischief of Gopal Bhand, The Wit of Tenali Raman and Growing Up (IBBY Honour List 2002). She also received a prestigious national fellowship of the ministry of culture in India to research aspects of gender and historical fiction in Indian children’s literature.
Her academic works, based on her doctoral and post-doctoral research on gender in Indian history, include Invisible Women, Visible Histories: Gender, Society and Polity in North India (Seventh to Twelfth Century AD) and From Obscurity to Light: Women in Early Medieval Orissa (Seventh to Twelfth Centuries AD). She has also published widely in academic journals and been the recipient of several distinguished academic fellowships from the University Grants Commission, as well as the Charles Wallace India Trust.
Did you enjoy this conversation? Do write in with comments and questions. It is pleasure to here from you.
Thankyou Rohini, writing about conversations such as these bring history alive!
so wonderful! Thank you for this introduction and interview! I particularly cheered when reading her response to why we need to know history: "you can't write a sentence w/out knowing the alphabet and you can't build a house from the roof down - you have to have a foundation." Yes!!