Almost three thousand years ago, a highway robber wrote one of the world’s greatest epics. He is now known to us as Valmiki. In the fifth century BC, a beautiful Devadasi persuaded a king to give up his violent dreams of military conquest and become a Buddhist, thus saving thousands of lives. She was Amrapali, and he was Ajatashatru, the king of Magadh. In the thirteenth century, a time when women rarely played a role in public life, Razia, Sultan of Delhi, became the first woman ruler in the Indian subcontinent. And closer to our times, in the court of the Great Mughal Emperor Akbar, there lived a musician so great that his music could cause lamps to light up. His name was Tansen. Such characters from India’s past are often more colourful than the wildest creations of fiction. In these twenty-four stories, Meena Arora Nayak takes us back in time to an India where life was lived according to extraordinary codes; where an emperor’s whim could mean the difference between life and death; where a single transgression could lead to banishment, or worse; and where an individual could change the entire course of a civilization. Filled with conflicts of love and honour, of faith and duty, of loyalty and liberty, this book is living history at its best.
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