GLIMPSES INTO THE GOLDEN AGE

This book is a rare achievement because here an amateur historian somewhat outstrips the professional historian in the simple art of writing an analytical narrative about the life and times of an emperor. Fergus Nicoll is a current-affairs journalist with the BBC with an eye for history. He reconstructs in this book the life of the best-known Mughal Emperor, Shah Jahan. The adjective “best-known” has nothing to do with his abilities and his achievements, considerable though they were, but with the mausoleum he built for his favourite queen.

Nicoll has immersed himself in the relevant Persian documentation as well as the accounts left behind by Europeans. He has also read the relevant secondary literature. His research is thus complete and competent. But it is the manner of his telling the story that makes for the attraction of this book. It is eminently readable because it is totally free of any kind of jargon. Nicoll does not reduce history to the telling of one damn thing after another. His account is full of details but these details never slow down his narrative. This is a book that no academic can dismiss with that damning comment: “it is popular history”. It is also a book that a non-specialist with a love for history will enjoy.

The Telegraph, Calcutta - for the full review click HERE

Friday, May 22, 2009