Amita Kanekar
[1] Kanekar's second book was a guidebook to Portuguese sea fort architecture of the Deccan, while her third was another novel, Fear of Lions, published by Hachette in 2019.
Her maternal aunt was Mitra Bir, educationalist, who was sentenced to twelve years in jail at the age of 22, and later went on to open schools for girls at Madgaon (Margao), Verem, Kakora and other locations in Goa, as also centres for adult and vocational education for women, before her death in 1978.
The parallel narrative is that of the chronicler, Upali, a Buddhist monk living in the time of the Mauryan Emperor Ashoka, three hundred years after the Buddha's death.
Upali, an embittered survivor of Ashoka's infamous conquest of Kalinga, attempts to recover from the horror of war and destruction by writing the "deglorified and factual" story of the Buddha's life and teachings.
This turns out to be a difficult, even dangerous exercise, for Upali is swimming against the tide, at a time when the Buddha's Sangha is poised to rise to immense imperial patronage and splendour under Emperor Ashoka.
In a statement released about the book Kanekar says she has seen the Buddha as a "historical figure who lived in the foundational epoch of Indian civilisation, whose life and struggle are now almost completely lost in myth, and whose ideas evolved to mean very different things to different people, yet continue to resonate with an all-inclusive and rational message of peace even today, 2500 years after they were first propagated."
Yet, to him Emperor Ashoka, the "self-proclaimed Beloved of the Gods", entrusts the task of putting the Buddha's life and teachings down for posterity.
Research for her novel began at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi over one extended Diwali vacation, under the initial guidance of Prof. Kunal Chakraborty, of the Centre for Historical Studies at the JNU.
Quotes from Ashokan edicts... which we know of as history but couldn't really relate to... now come alive with a new imagery..." Outlook magazine from New Delhi wrote: "Amita Kanekar's novel about Emperor Ashoka and the Buddhist monk Upali... successfully captures the stress and strains of monastic life, and brings alive the centuries following the death of the Buddha.
While many historical fictions make only tenous [sic] references to real history, the present one doesn't... An interesting mix of erudition and historical imagination..." Deccan Herald of Bangalore commented: "Amita Kanekar's debut novel, A Spoke in the Wheel, is an attempt to strip away layer by layer such fanciful stories surrounding the Buddha and reveal him as an ordinary man who had an extraordinary approach to his problems.
The rebels were 17th century followers of Kabir's radical social ideas, a small and short-lived peasant community that eschewed caste, religious and gender divides.
They rose in revolt in 1672 against the social oppression and economic exploitation of the time, and managed to set up their own administration in a few towns and villages south of Delhi before being crushed by the Mughal armies.
