The Last Queen

The Last Queen (2021) is a historical novel by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, published by HarperCollins India on 20 January 2021. Told in the first person by Maharani Jind Kaur, the last queen of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, it follows her from girlhood to her death in 1863 in four parts: Girl, Bride, Queen, Rebel. It won the 2022 International Association of Working Women Award for Best Fiction and was longlisted for the 2022 Dublin Literary Award, and it is Divakaruni's first historical novel.

About the book

The novel is 354 pages long and takes one of the least written about figures of nineteenth century Punjab and gives her the whole book. The publisher's note states the contract plainly: this is a work of fiction based on historical fact, and while the character and story of Jindan Kaur are based on a historical figure, all other situations, incidents, dialogue and characters in the novel, with the exception of some well-known historical events and public figures, are products of the author's imagination. Divakaruni sticks to the main historical facts and imagines Jindan's emotions, conversations and some of the supporting characters, so the history is real and the inner story is invented. It is the first novel of hers set entirely in the past, and the first to be told by a queen.

The story in four parts

In Girl, Jindan is born the daughter of Manna Singh Aulakh, the overseer of the royal kennels at Gujranwala, a girl from a village whom the Maharaja marries in 1835, making her his youngest and last queen, his favourite. In Bride, she learns the politics of the court and the zenana, finds allies to keep her place, and gives birth to her only child, Duleep Singh, on 6 September 1838. Ranjit Singh dies in 1839, when Duleep is barely a year old, and the young widow is left in a court of rivals. In Queen, when the army proclaims the five year old Duleep Singh Maharaja in September 1843, Jindan becomes regent. She casts off her veil, holds court in public, reconstitutes the Supreme Council of the Khalsa and reviews her troops, and she leads the Sikhs through the First Anglo-Sikh War of 1845 to 1846. In December 1846 the British replace her with a Council of Regency under their Resident. In Rebel, in August 1847 the British imprison her in the Samman Tower of the Lahore Fort and then at Sheikhupura, and separate her from her nine year old son. Exiled to Chunar Fort near Varanasi in 1848, she escapes in April 1849, disguised as a maid, and travels 800 kilometres through forest to sanctuary in Kathmandu, where she lives for eleven years. In January 1861 she is at last allowed to join her son in Calcutta, and she sails with him to England, where she dies in Kensington on 1 August 1863.

What is true and what is imagined?

The spine of the book is history, and the flesh is invention. The dates, the regency, the war, the imprisonment, the escape and the exile are all matters of record, and so are the people around her: her brother Jawahar Singh, her handmaid Mangla, Datar Kaur, Nau Nihal Singh, and her son Duleep. What is imagined is what the record cannot give: her girlhood before the court, her feelings in the zenana, her conversations, and the more debated passages of her life, such as her relationship with the courtier Lal Singh, which Divakaruni handles with a humane and matter-of-fact approach where the record is silent. The novel's closing movement, in which she wins her son back to the Sikh faith on her deathbed, is the author's imagining too, and it is the book's answer to the thirteen and a half years the British kept mother and son apart.

ਵਿਸ਼ੇ

The first theme is a woman history forgot. Jindan is remembered far less than Ranjit Singh, despite her immense political role, and the novel restores agency and voice to her, making her the lens through which the fall of the Sikh Empire is experienced. The second is motherhood against empire: the book is, in the publisher's phrase, a parable of the indestructible bond between mother and child, and the annexation of Punjab is presented not merely as a political event but as a personal loss. The third is loyalty and betrayal, in a court where allies turn and the British reward the men who helped them. Running through all of it is resistance: Jindan's refusal to be silenced, her public address to her troops, her escape from Chunar, and her eleven years of waiting in Kathmandu.

ਲੇਖਕ

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (born 1956, Calcutta) is an Indian-born American author and poet, the Betty and Gene McDavid Professor of Writing at the University of Houston. She began as a poet, and her first book of stories, Arranged Marriage (1995), won an American Book Award in 1996. Her best known novels are The Mistress of Spices (1997), Sister of My Heart (1999) and The Palace of Illusions (2008), a retelling of the Mahabharata from Draupadi's point of view that was a national bestseller in India for over a year. The Last Queen is her first historical novel, and the first to be told by a queen. She has also written the young adult fantasy series The Brotherhood of the Conch, and her work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker. In 1991 she co-founded Maitri, a helpline in San Francisco for South Asian women facing domestic abuse. Her full life is told in her people entry in this Kosh, created together with this page.

Reception and legacy

The Last Queen won the 2022 International Association of Working Women Award for Best Fiction and was longlisted for the 2022 Dublin Literary Award. Reviewers praise the lucid narrative and the first person voice, which lets readers feel Jindan's triumphs and sorrows intimately, and the balance of history and emotion: the history is real, and the inner story is invented, and the two are held together by a woman who refuses to be a footnote. Not every reviewer was won over: one, rating it three out of five, called it well researched but suggested first time readers start with The Palace of Illusions or The Forest of Enchantments. For this Kosh its place is clear: it is the novel that brought Rani Jindan, the last queen of the Sikh Empire, to a world readership, and it pairs with the Maharaja Ranjit Singh people entry, which tells the other side of the story, the king whose empire she tried to save.