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History and Fiction

Book Review Title: Conversations with Aurangzeb Author: Charu Nivedita Translated from Tamil by Nandini Krishnan Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2023 Pages: 335 History claims to give us truths and fiction really gives us glimpses into truths. Tamil novelist Charu Nivedita’s Conversations with Aurangzeb is in fact history masquerading as a novel. It is fiction inasmuch as Aurangzeb makes an apparition through a medium to the narrator who is a writer doing some research for his next novel. But it is not a novel because there is nothing that can be called a plot. It’s all conversation between the narrator and the spirit of the Mughal emperor. Occasionally a few other characters make their appearances, but they don’t add anything to the plot. How much can we trust history? This is the question that the writer explores in this novel. It is a cliché that history is written by the winners. It gets rewritten when new winners emerge. For example, India’s history is being rewritt