Spice Art, Greater Noida
It takes a special genius to dream at a desk, from 9 to 5, especially if that desk is in a telecom office. It is even more 
remarkable when you stare at a British-built army barrack and are able to conceptualize the grandeur of the edifice that stood there before being torn down to replace the barrack. And then write about it. When you are not a professional historian, with a series of papers on some obscure aspect of the Mughal rule in India.
Debashish Das’ book, Red Fort, Remembering The Magnificent Mughals is exactly what a book about a historical period ought to be. Light, fun reading, answering those questions that most ordinary folk would love to know more about, but would not know where to look for the answers. Among all my shelves full of books written about the Mughal period, this one is the easiest read. The subject has been cleverly arranged so that the Red Fort itself is the central gemstone in an arrangement where smaller, matching stones are arrayed around it. Thus, while the history of the fort is the leitmotif of the book, the characters - major and minor - the culture, shopping, gardens, perfumes, entertainment, court manners and protocol, are all set out in a lucid manner that helps the layman (and I’m certainly one!) to visualize the era graphically.
The reason the author presented me a copy of the book for review is probably because of the chapter on the kitchen. This, to my mind, was the highlight of the book. According to Das, the emperor actually used to consume a tiny quantity of crushed diamonds as an aphrodisiac (it is not mentioned which emperor is being referred to). Bahadur Shah Zafar kept the most lavish table of all the emperors; many of them drunk only Ganga jal, though whether for religious or health reasons, we are not told and Akbar, Jehangir and Aurangzeb tended towards vegetarianism, quite contrary to what we are made to believe today.
Our fascination with the dynasty that built the Taj Mahal knows no bounds. We - the layman - want to know what they ate for breakfast, what clothes they wore, whether they really had harems full of ladies for their pleasure (they did not, apparently: most of the hundreds of women and girls in the harem were maid-servants; only a few were family members like mothers, daughters, wives and nieces).
If you are fascinated by the Mughal period and/or visit Lal Qila periodically and want to know more about life in it, do order this self-published book online. It has all the pitfalls of self publishing: spelling and grammatical errors and copy that has not been ‘tightened’ by a copy editor. But Das’ enthusiasm and meticulous research shines through on every page.
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