Zelaldinus: A Masque
By Irwin Allan Sealy
Published by the Aleph Book Company,
with Almost Island Books (2017)
Paperback, 168 pages | ISBN-13: 978-81-860210-7-6
On a camel’s back hill beyond Agra stands a redstone citadel altogether different from the white marble Taj Mahal. Fatehpur Sikri is the capital Akbar built to honour the saint who foretold the birth of his first son. In the inner court of the king’s palace is a broad stone terrace with a chequered pattern that resembles a game board. Here, accounts say, Akbar played a kind of chess using human pieces from his harem of three hundred. Costumed in various guises, his women would have presented lively masques upon this stage.
Zelaldinus mounts such a pageant, glittering and fantastical, where past and present, nobles and commoners, history and fiction rub shoulders. Its variety of verse and prose forms evoke the carnival spirit of a masque. Underlying the depiction of a rich and varied court life at Sikri are reflections on kingship, a meditation on fathers and sons, and a plot within a plot that tells a crackling story of love across the Pakistan border—while through it all strides the nimble ghost of Akbar himself. Jalaluddin (Zelaldinus) Akbar.
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PRAISE FOR THE BOOK
“In this age of marketplace-modulated publishing, where the success of a writer is measured in bite-sized celebrity trivia, the almost exacting idealism of Irwin Allan Sealy’s life — a spartan if cheerful artist’s-retreat-of-a-home in Dehradun — and work — consistently experimental, pushing the boundaries of narrative frames a little further with each book until we arrive at Zelaldinus, a slender epic for our post-modern age — reminds us once again of the purity of the writer’s quest ... As humorous as it is dashing, as adventurous as it is experimental, Zelaldinus is the sort of brave book that reminds us all that we must be thankful because, ever so often, there comes a writer who does not care about numbers or nataak, but stays at the page for hours and days, until the ghost is prepared to come and stay.”
— Devapriya Roy in OPEN
“His latest, Zelaldinus: A Masque, a novel in verse, which straddles the “porous” borders between poetry and prose, is a lyrical and lustrous testament to Sealy’s virtuosity as a writer juggling multiple forms. ”
— Shireen Quadri in Scroll
“Allan Sealy is a restless, innovative, learned novelist. His latest book is his most ingenious and daring...”
— Bruce King in The Indian Express
“The royal masque in Akbar’s glittering court at Fatehpur Sikri is occasion for Sealy’s exquisite poem-prose, decorated with words, absences and old longing.”
— Anjana Basu in Outlook
“[W]herein he brings the Mughal emperor Akbar alive through his ghost, and easefully marries history with fiction, past with present while presenting the story of love across the India-Pakistan border.”
— Bhavana Akella in The Asian Age
