The author chooses to focus on lesser-known characters who have been overshadowed by their more famous relations or achievements, bringing out nuggets of information and weaving them into the larger backdrop of popular history. Tales of bravery, ambition, deceit, humility and wisdom sweep through the pages and readers are introduced to the human side of legendary figures such as Vikramaditya, Alauddin Khalji and Humayun, among others.
The stories, and the lessons one can draw from them, make this book stand out; it presents history with underpinnings of philosophy. Lucidly written for the readers of today, excerpts of interviews with stalwart historians have been used to anchor the narrative in the context of modern everyday life.
This, often, given the limitations of our sources, places a heavy demand on the historians, and it is no wonder that historians so often differ among themselves-less over facts, perhaps, than over assessments. Professor Nasreen wisely takes her information from various sources by largely letting them speak for themselves, and leaves us to draw lessons ourselves.
When historians speak of causation they imply that all occurrences are correlated by cause and effect. However, it is not always easy to spot the interconnecting chain of event-impact-event or situation-response-situation. When a turnout is under process the links are unclear.
Deductions of patterns of historical repetition indicate that while subjective templates like name, place and time change, the structural construct of situations remains mostly unaltered. To navigate humans through a rerun of situations, truism emerges like a guide. Time-tested choices are passed into theory as ethics and value systems. No wonder it became axiomatic that good begets good.
Historians, as time travellers, encounter and relive extremely potent events. They call on men who have overcome death and who inspire them like muses. In ancient Greek religion, the muses were nine sister goddesses-the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory. Thus the keepers of time provide elixir to memories. Historicism is inescapable, in the sense that all humans have some story to tell and, ultimately, they themselves become stories. Thus there are boundless stories in the annals of time. Most of these remain untold. Out of those told, a few are retold. Their sporadic narration continues even at the risk of causing déjà vu and evoking the same love or hate that they might have generated in the past. These myths are valuable for their ability to flip perspectives.
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