An Interview With Novelist Indu Sundaresan

By Uma Girish at California Literary Review (11.12.2006) :

Your first work of historical fiction, The Twentieth Wife, took eight years to research and write. Does the process get easier when you get to the third? 

In the initial foray into reading for each of the novels, there is always a lot of imbibing of the background and atmosphere, a searching for story, an investigation into details. Then, I will settle into intensive research - read and reread a few select books and manuscripts, cull points of interest, look for aspects that provide movement in my own story. That said, all research in the end depends on the book I want to write. 

My first book The Twentieth Wife and my second, The Feast Of Roses, had to be as historically accurate as possible since they are fictionalized accounts of Empress Nur Jahan's life. The Splendor Of Silence is set in India, during four days in May in a fictional desert kingdom called Rudrakot, and all the major characters are fictional. 

So in some senses, it was easier to research Splendor -- here I only had to capture the essence of the time period and imbue it into my characters' actions and words; in the first two novels, everything -- background, characters, storyline -- had to be accurate.