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boarding school in England, I was staying with a friend in Rajputana State, and one evening, exploring a number of empty disused outhouses behind the Residency (now Lucknow), I came across a collection of old books that looked like a large block of mud, because white ants had built tunnels all over them. I scraped off the dried mud and carefully separated the books and discovered that they were a sort of Hansard of the Mutiny trials. Everything was there - written evidence in Hindi or Urdu translated on the opposite pages - verbal evidence reported in full, and so on. In short, the lot. (If I had the sense of a white ant, I'd have pinched them.)
I read it all, each book, from cover to cover and I thought: 'Gosh, what a marvellous story it would make!' Though even then it didn't occur to me to write the story myself. What really triggered that off was another visit to Lucknow, where the then Governor showed me an unpublished letter from the Government House archives. It had been written by a girl who had been caught up in the Mutiny and survived to write this letter to her parents in England. (Her brother, captured with her by mutineers, had been shot). The letter suggested the basis of a plot and I made use of it when I came to write Shadow many years later.
Shadow of the Moon like The Far Pavilions contains far more truth than fiction. As in Pavilions, I did not need to invent, for it was all handed to me on a plate. All that was needed was to invent a hero and heroine and a handful of other characters, to do the things that real people had done. And to stretch India a bit in order to fit in an imaginary state on the border of Oudh - Lunjore'.
Since everything I had read, heard and learned about the Mutiny suggested that the seeds for it had been sown long before the actual outbreak, I decided to make it the story of two women, Sabrina, who lives in India in the period just before the First Afghan War and her daughter, who sees the long delayed Mutiny explode.
Shadow has been called a 'Mutiny' novel: and of course it is. But the actual outbreak comes very late in the book, because it always seemed to me that it was something that crept forward very slowly, getting closer and closer until it suddenly exploded with a bang, and then, after a brief and violent interval, burned itself out and allowed the ashes to cool and blow away. But India can never be quite the same again for anyone, for the prophecy of the Hundred Years - that the Rule of the Company would end 100 years after The Battle of Plessey - came true. The Crown took over from the Company (The East India Company) and less than 80 years later India gained her independence and part of her territory became Pakistan. The Mutiny had marked the beginning of the end of the Raj.
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