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India Treasures
By Gary Worthington
TimeBridges Publishers, 2001. 634 pages.
India Treasures is described as “an epic novel of Rajasthan and Northern India through the ages,” and it lives up to its billing.
Gary Worthington’s epic tale is actually several tales that are loosely related. He begins with a tax raid on the home of the titular royal family of the region of Mangarh. Though Lakshman Singh is now an ex-Maharajah, owing to political changes that stem from India’s independence, he and his family are rich and continue to be respected and even revered by the people of Mangarh. Political intrigue and motivation being what they are, the government of Indira Gandhi has chosen this moment in 1975 to spring the tax raiders on the ex-Maharajah’s homes to seek a suspected undeclared treasure somewhere within the grounds of the estate.
Among the leaders of the tax raid is Vijay Singh (Worthington says in a note that he was unaware that his principal character shared the name of a leading contemporary golfer until the book was well into production). Though Vijay has some authority in the carrying out of the raid, in terms of the reasons behind the raid he is merely a functionary. And despite the possibility that a successful raid might lead to career advancement, he is uneasy about participating because he grew up in Mangarh as an Untouchable and has been living far away in Delhi, where he has passed a higher-caste Rajput (the same caste as the ex-Maharajah) for several years. Should his deception be exposed he will lose everything, and the place where it most likely will be exposed is close to home.
The story of the tax raid is told in chapters that are interspersed with short stories and novella-length stories that take the reader back as far as 1503 b.c.e. These stories reveal something of the deep history of the Mangarh region through characters who are rich, poor, at war, seeking riches or enlightenment, and so forth. We meet warriors and elephant drivers and merchants and artists and even Gautama the Buddha as he travels and teaches and transforms lives.
Each of these stories is related to the tax raid story; in some way, we sense, the trajectories of all of these stories will lead eventually to Mangarh and the home of Lakshman Singh. Worthington does a good job, with the modern story, of giving the reader just enough of the pertinent factual background regarding the government of Indira Gandhi and its related intrigues. This is not a novelized history of that period, and so does not need to be overburdened by historical data. Yet it is important to ensure that the reader has a good sense of context, and Worthington successfully supplies that. For the other stories, he draws on both historical research and conjecture to provide characters, plots, and context that are plausible and immediate. The tax-raid plot is fraught with ambivalence — the reader can never be sure which characters are rightly motivated and which are pursuing an agenda for reasons that might be suspect. Worthington’s pictures of deeper history have a more black/white quality: we are never in doubt as to who is the good guy and who is the bad guy as these stories unfold.
The story that begins in India Treasures continues in a second volume, India Fortunes. Owing to time constraints I have not yet read the sequel, in which continues the story of the tax raid, and in which the interspersed stories carry the reader forward to India’s independence in 1947.
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