I interviewed my husband about Sherry Thomas’s new release, Not Quite a Husband, which I loved (my review to come). NQAH follows the adventures of divorced couple Bryony Asquith and Quentin Marsden as they journey back home to England through the North-west frontier of India at the time of the Swat Valley Uprising.

Here’s a nice summary of the event, from a longer article connecting those events of over a century ago to current events (the Swat Valley, now part of Pakistan, is where Taliban forces have led an uprising to enforce sharia law in the past two years):

The uprisings of 1897 began in the Swat Valley, when Sadullah a local holy man (the British, predictably, dubbed him the ‘Mad Mullah’) preached the need for jihad against the foreign government in mosques and marketplaces. In late July, at the height of summer heat, tens of thousands of armed Pathans attacked government forts. After having ignored the trouble building up along the Frontier for several years, the authorities in the summer capital at Simla finally decided that a major response was required.

Three full battalions designated as the Malakand Field Force were sent from the plains up into the hills. Accompanying them as both soldier and free-lance reporter for London’s Daily Telegraph was young Second Lieutenant Winston Churchill.

By the end of August, the force had reached the difficult and remote upper reaches of the Swat Valley. But Mullah Sadullah had evaded capture and was now raising followers in a wide area, reaching down to the Kyber Pass well to the south. Storming through the Pass, tribesmen threatened to occupy Peshawar itself — unless government forces were withdrawn from Swat.

Eventually the Raj put an even larger army of 60,000 well-armed men into the field. After bitter fighting with heavy government losses the British undertook a ruthless scorched-earth campaign in which villages, wells and orchards were levelled. The approaching winter more than British might forced the rebellious tribes to sue for peace … for the meantime.

My husband is a history professor, who specializes in the British Empire of the late Victorian period. Although his exact specialty is the Boer War (more on that below), he knows something about India as well.

Here’s me picking his brain:

Me (reading NQAH on my Kindle): Were there such things as “punitive expeditions”?

Him: Punitive uprisings were when the British army would punish an African or Asian power which they felt had challenged their authority in the region. That’s in your book? Really?

Me: Yes, really.

Him: Wow.  Are you reading a romance?

Me (in a warning tone): Yes.

Him: Hunh.

Me (pondering chucking my Kindle at his head. Deciding against it. After all, it’s a pretty expensive little toy): Yes, and the descriptions of the siege of this British fort are really chock full of details, and intense, yet easy to follow. Having read both of your books, I can say with authority that she gives you a run for your money.

Him: Let me see that. [Grabs my Kindle and reads several pages of the siege]. I’m impressed. She’s got the bit right about the rebels using older weapons with black powder against British soldier using breech loading weapons and smokeless powder. That would be an easy detail to miss. And look, the hero’s reference to the Russians — the competition between Russia and Great Britain for control of Central Asia was referred to as “the Great Game.” Kipling wrote about it in Kim (1901). [Hands Kindle back to me]

Me [Thrusting Kindle back to him]: Keep reading.

Him: Well…. it’s really very accurate, as far as I can tell. Remember this is not my area. I would think you only need to read one or two primary sources to get it right.

Me:  She has.

Him: Hmmm. Well, here’s one thing that strikes me. The way she describes it, it’s as if soldiers are firing all the time. That could have happened. But it would have been unlikely. Until the mutiny there was an Indian army run by a private concern, the British East India Company, but afterwards power over the sub-continent was transferred directly to the government in London.  A government appointed viceroy ruled locally for the cabinet and later the Queen in 1876 was crowned Empress of India. The Indian Army became part of the British army. You find white officers but you don’t find many other whites in the army. The army was predominantly an army of Sepoys, a term used for native soldiers.  Upon India’s very large and disparate population, the British attempted to impose a kind of order that made sense to them, by elevating certain groups or “races”, like Sikhs, which they deemed to possess “martial” qualities above other more “feminine” races.  But still the army was predominantly a native army.  This was always a concern for both civil and military authorities.  So in 1897-8, the British, relying on soldiers who they often under-valued, utilized very traditional square tactics in which the officer would give the order to fire. This way the officer could control the movement and the fire of their troops. Kind of like in the movie Zulu.

[He totally typed in about half of that last comment after the fact. Sheesh. Never let a source review your interview.]

Me: Here’s something that struck me: the heroine thinks that using Dum-Dum bullets violates the Geneva Convention. I thought the Geneva Convention came later?

Him: You’re not asking me to go through this and find errors? And then blogging about it? This isn’t history. It’s fiction. And I’m not a jerk. Usually.

Me: No no no. I heart this book. We’ll talk about other things in a minute.

Him: Did you just use “heart” as a verb?

Me: Yes, but I reserve it for very special books.

Him: [Looking at me with worry.]: Ok, there was an early Geneva convention, in 1864, but it covered mostly the care of wounded soldiers and prisoners of war. The Geneva convention we talk about today is, of course, largely the creation of the post war (World War II) world. At any rate, the Geneva Convention did not regulate weapons. That would have been the Hague Conventions, the first of which was 1899, two years after the action is taking place in the novel. Although certainly there were legal discussions in the 1890s about acceptable weapons in combat.  But I would have to double check to be 100% positive. She has done a lot of good research.  By the way, Winston Churchill, whom you say she relied on for this book, ironically was caught with Mark IV, or dum-dum bullets, during the Boer War.

Me: How about race relations? Why would Indians have agreed to do all of this scut work for the British travelers?

Him: Well, like everywhere, people need money.  The British imposed a rigorous tax system over much of India or utilized systems which were in place prior to their control.  Many Indians even sold themselves into indentured servitude. They ended up all over the world, in South Africa, the Caribbean, and elsewhere. Perhaps some viewed this as a better option.

Me: What do you think of the word “coolies”?

Him: The English would have referred to most Indians (and Chinese as well) as “coolies” but a historian today would never use that word, at least not without scare quotes. It’s like the n word. Also, the author suggests, when she writes, “The Swatis don’t have much of a reputation as fighters — the other pathans look down on them”, that ethnic and class divisions were inherent among Indians, but it’s very complicated.  British rule helped establish these distinctions and hierarchies. As I mentioned, the British had a very strong belief in the idea of “martial races”, that some Indians were capable of doing certain things, like fighting, others not so much. The British themselves had a sense of who was a better fighter.

Me: You have read and taught a lot of postcolonial literature and historiography. From that perspective, what do you think of a book like this?

Him: Well, someone like Chinua Achebe would say she is using the Orient merely as a backdrop to tell a story about white people that will engage white readers. It is a colonial narrative. She’s writing for a certain audience.

Me: Yes, I think that’s how it functions as well. I think a lot of romance writers start with the characters and then put them somewhere. The focus is on the romance, and the romance is normally between white characters. On her blog, Thomas talks about choosing among three different dramatic settings for her story, one of which was South Africa during the Boer War. She says that it didn’t meet her needs for a dramatic landscape. Care to comment?

Him: Well, no, there’s nothing as dramatic as the base of the Himalayas in South Africa. But the Kalahari desert, the coastline, the Drakensberg mountains – these are certainly very dramatic. The kopjes (hills) and the number of passes the British tried to control during the war could be an interesting setting.

Me: Ah, yes, kopjes. Are you still mad at me for summarizing your first book as “They ran up the hill. They fired. They ran down the hill. The end.”?

Him: Until just now, I had forgiven you for that.

Me: Moving on. Give me some ideas for a romance set in South Africa during the Boer War.

Him: You should write one. I’ll help you. And we can test out the love scenes. [Leers.]

Me (witheringly): You clearly have no respect for the craft. Answer my question.

Him: Well, you don’t want to have a stereotype of the dashing cultured British officer sweeping rural hick Afrikaner off her feet by his charm. The Boers were a very tight knit old community, with very set morals.  A Boer woman may have gone off with a British man, but it would have been very rare. The thing to do would be to have a dashing young British officer — of which there would have been many because they were volunteers — and you could have an English nurse or an English colonial, or [really getting into it now. Shit. He looks like he's about to write a synopsis. Help!!] a Frenchwoman who was traveling through to go on a safari and then the war broke out. In Zulu they stuck some Swedish missionary woman in to the mix. There are plenty of ways to do it. It could be set in one of the besieged cities (Kimberly, Ladysmith or, the most famous — because it is the longest siege — Mafeking).

Me: Thank you for not waggling your eyebrows when you just said “missionary”. That’s a lot of self-control from you. One last question. You read historical fiction, when you are not reading bios of hippie musicians. What do you think about the issue of historical accuracy in fiction in general?

Him: Well, take this book. It is very unlikely that you would have a female surgeon, that she would be traipsing as a single woman throughout India, that she would know the things she knows about the political situation, and international law, and that her ex-husband would be not only a famous mathematician but also….. [mild spoiler] ……….. a spy who just happened to take aerial photos from a balloon of the very region they are in. …………..[end spoiler] But it works because (a) all of the background details are right (landscape, technology, warfare, clothing, etc.) and (b) nothing impossible is posited. There likely was at least one actual case of each of these people or events.  Sure, there’s only a very remote chance they would all happen this way, but you don’t get thrown out of the story because everything else feels right, it hangs together.

Me: Thank you for giving me the time  you would otherwise have used to watch Dr. Who edit your article. One last question. Do you remember this?

June 1996

Him (smiling): Yep.

Me: Happiest day of my life.

Tags: Not Quite a Husband, Sherry Thomas