The Twentieth Wife by Indu Sundaresan. Pocket Books: 371 pages. $24.00.

As “The Twentieth Wife” opens, a storm rages outside a tent near Qandahar. Inside, a woman is giving birth. The baby girl emerging into the midwife’s dirty hands has an inauspicious beginning, but a destiny befitting her name: Mehrunnisa, “Sun of Women.” She will someday be the powerful Empress Nur Jahan, subject of legend and song.

A historical novel set during the Mughal Empire, Indu Sundaresan’s “The Twentieth Wife” might draw readers hungry to know more about Middle Eastern history and culture. However, despite careful attention to authentic detail and a generously supplied glossary, “The Twentieth Wife” is essentially a fairy tale fortified by popular notions of "the East."

Since no fairy tale would be complete without a fairy godmother (or father, in this case), a nobleman appears just in time to rescue Mehrunnisa and her family. They follow him to India, where they are presented at court, allied with nobility as they had been before political upheaval threw them into poverty. As time goes by, Mehrunnisa, smart and outspoken, grows worldly and learned, mainly because her doting father cannot bring himself to curtail her education, even to make her more suitable wife material.

Mehrunnisa dreams of marrying Prince Salim (known historically as Emperor Jahangir, less popularly known than his son, Shah Jahan, who commissioned the Taj Mahal). Mehrunnisa dreams that Prince Salim will listen to her political views, unlike her brutish first husband, a soldier. She even dares fantasize that she might on day influence policy.

Sundaresan seems unsure whether she wants to portray a love story or an intrigue about power and ambition. The couple’s enduring love seems unbelievable—based mainly on a couple of chance meetings in the palace garden. Prince Salim and Mehrunnisa sigh among roses, jasmine, and bougainvillea, and cry themselves out on luscious rugs, but neither really escapes the second dimension.

And Sundaresan has plenty of opportunity to set them free, for her characters’ lives have rich potential. But Sundaresan abandons these opportunities in the interest of speeding the plot along. For example, the prince spends his youth wine- and opium-addled, interested mainly in his harem. But his vices inexplicably disappear as the novel progresses, due maybe to a new obsession: snagging the throne. His battle to become a man instead of an opulent couch potato could have drawn us (and Mehrunnisa) closer to him. As for Mehrunnisa, she grows up believing she was adopted, which could make for some interesting reflection on her sense of displacement, but this doesn’t happen. If she finds out she was not adopted, it must happen off stage with very little impact on her, for when her first husband throws the whole story in her face, she seems unsurprised.

At its most captivating points, “The Twentieth Wife” is a Mira Nair movie, minus the sex: colorful and sensual, dependent on the extreme emotional close-up: “His eye was caught by the red roses on the border in heavy bloom. Their thorns had been trimmed by the royal malis, each painstakingly removed by hand to protect the royal family. Salim bent down, and the sweet aroma of sun-fired roses filled his nostrils.”

Lush, yes, but the reader may feel as veiled and protected from ugly reality as the Emperor’s wives. Mehrunissa’s family is poor at the outset, but the poverty is short-lived and from then on the novel tells us nothing new of the common people of India and thereabouts. So, while gaining a greater understanding of the Mughal Empire, we also get a skewed understanding—the fairytale version, in which one can go from rich to poor to rich again; in which a prince goes from parricidal souse to intellectual lover; and in which marrying a prince is a possibility for a girl with big dreams.

Historical fiction can be a powerful genre. A colorfully written page turner can persuade readers to feel an event or era in a way that headlines and history books cannot. Will Sundaresan’s portrayal of Mehrunnisa open up a new world for readers? Perhaps. Sundaresan sheds light on the lives of royals and prepares us to understand the unusual and powerful role Mehrunnisa was to play. Mehrunnisa’s accomplishments as empress, will be fully detailed in Sundaresan’s upcoming sequel, “The Power Behind the Veil.” At this point, however, Sundaresan mainly succeeds in capitalizing on a romanticized and shallow view of ancient India.

    Wendy L. Smith teaches English at San Diego Mesa College.