One of the risks of being a “literary rockstar” as the book jacket claims, is to almost make the packaging (and thus the framing and marketing) of the book more interesting than the book itself. So, for Amish’s Suheldev – predictably, movie rights have already been sold – the consequence of such stardom include a cover with a towering, muscular male, the announcement of the millions of copies sold, the grandiose subtitle of “The King Who Saved India” (with, crucially, no sense of the said king’s temporal or spatial location), and the rhetoric of enemies – “barbaric…plundering, killing, raping, pillaging”.
There seems to be a deliberate blurring on whether this is history or fiction or myth or historical fiction – the dates (1025 AD), named historical groups (Turks) and places (Bahraich) do make it seem historical non-fiction. The gushing blurbs…