Outlook Anniversary Issue: The Labour Of Historical Fiction

I don’t know if I can pinpoint when the idea to write fiction took root in my mind, but five years into working as an oral historian of the 1947 Partition, the landscape of what would become my first novel had grown too insistent to ignore. It didn’t arrive fully formed, but came to me in images—gestures, dreams, conversations, memories—blending together as a composition. The novel was about smell, about a family of perfumers devoted to the beauty and pursuit of ittar.

When I first conceived of The Book of Everlasting Things, its world was small. The story followed a boy named Samir, growing up in Lahore in the 1930s-40s, training to be a perfumer under the tutelage of his uncle, Vivek, who carries a secret from his time on the battlefields of the First World War. For decades in the novel, the secret stays dormant, untouched, irrelevant even, until it reveals itself in the years after Partition, when Samir is exiled in France. There, in his uncle’s journals, he discovers the buried truth, and this is how The Great War spills into the novel—coating its chapters in trench systems and regimental diaries, censored letters and slaughtered soldiers, war-sounds and war-stench, and a collision of Empire and allegiance that would reverberate across generations.

As an adult in Paris, Samir recalls to his wife, Léa, that during his childhood, he knew that his uncle had been to war, but always wondered “what perfumers did in battle”. Building this particular historical world—where a young man goes into war as a soldier, and comes out of it as a perfumer, changing the tides of his future generations forever—became in itself a great act of imagination. In fiction, I could search for the private rupture that would transform a soldier’s senses and set him on an unforeseen path.

I didn’t know enough about the Indian contribution to WW1 when I began writing this novel, least of all, that undivided India had sent over 1.5 million soldiers. The novel was to travel from Lahore to Paris, Flanders to Grasse, move between the past and present, navigate flower fields and battlefields, but I assumed that being a nonfiction writer, the war sections would be the easiest to write. Factual, restrained, almost documentary in tone; a terrain that my soldier-perfumer protagonist, Vivek, could be inserted into. But one of the misfortunes is that in the subcontinent, while WW2 still lingers in collective memory, WW1 feels too distant, surviving mostly in family stories or regimental archives. And while there have been significant works of non-fiction in recent years, few novels chronicle this period— Talbot Mundy’s Hira Singh, published in 1917; Across the Black Waters by Mulk Raj Anand, published in 1939; and later works like Crimson Spring by Navtej Sarna and Major Tom’s War by Vee Walker. So, what did it mean to reconstruct a world in fiction that had vanished from public memory and consciousness?

To construct this forgotten world into a novel, I needed not just historical accuracy, but the emotional and psychological scaffolding often absent in official archives. It had to be imagined to its potential, convincing and compelling enough for readers to spend time in. And so, I began to understand the hearts of soldiers through the letters they wrote home. But what I wasn’t prepared for was the tenderness of their words, the poetic quality of their sentiments, their moral complexities, and the various subjects that they corresponded on—often at odds with the language one may expect from a battlefield.

An unnamed Sikh soldier writes to his father in India, “I am now about to return to the trenches. There is no hope that I shall see you again. For we are as grain that is flung a second time into the oven, and life does not come out of it.” From a hospital bed in Rouen, Ser Gul, a Pathan of the 129th Baluchis, writes to barber Machu Khan, serving in the 57th Rifles at the front, “I have no need of anything, but I have a great longing for a flute to play. What can I do? I have no flute. Can you get me one from somewhere? If you can, please do, and send it to me. Take this much trouble for me. For I have a great desire to play upon the flute, since great dejection is fallen upon me.”

These letters, in a way, allowed the soldier to speak for himself, to offer testimony. But this collection is not without its complexity or colonial mediation, for the only reason we have it is because these letters were censored. A common practice during wartime, both outbound and inbound letters were translated—in this case, from languages like Urdu, Gurmukhi, Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Garhwali, Bangla—and examined by the British Censor Mail, to make sure soldiers weren’t giving out critical details, but also to discern morale.

On multiple occasions, I found myself trying to counter-translate these letters, in order to imagine what the men must have seen, dreamt, missed, hoped for, and, of course, felt and smelled, for even the war research had to be sensorial. But this process— where layers of language and meaning are continually lost and gained—was itself a work of fictionalising. What words captured the fighting of a war that did not belong to them? What memories served as respite? Did time collapse or expand on the front, stretched thin by fear or thickened by fatigue? The novel did not necessarily need precision, as much as an outline to consider.

Kala Khan, a soldier in the Indian Labour Corps, writes to his friend, Iltaf Hussain, in Patiala, “You enquire about the cold? At present, I can only say that the earth is white, the sky is white, the trees are white, the stones are white, the mud is white, the water is white, one’s spittle freezes into a solid white lump, the water is as hard as stones or bricks.” To build Vivek’s world on the front, I had to step into the fog of unrecorded feeling. In my novel, this imagined architecture became atmospheric rather than forensic—the texture of mud in a dugout, the colour of first blood on Vivek’s hands, the memory of balmy, golden sunshine, the exhaustion of language itself.

Then there were the rare instances when history handed me a detail of such startling clarity, where smell collided with war in a significant enough way, that it felt ready to be placed into the novel intact. From the work of a fragrance historian focusing on wartime, I learnt that the yellow-green poison gas unleashed during the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915 smelled like a pungent combination of pineapples and pepper. In a scene that felt both visceral to imagine and write, Vivek emerges after this attack, shocked that he has survived, and tries to search for any other survivors. Even in the darkness, the air feels so thick that he can reach out to touch the particles of gas suspended within it. Tied tightly over his mouth is his turban cloth, soiled with blood, mud, debris, and the residue of his own vomit. On the battlefield, none is alive—corpses of men, foaming at the mouth, all having inhaled their way to death.

Several months into his posting on the Western Front, when the texture of warfare had fully revealed itself to young Vivek, he concluded that there was “no warmth to be derived from the outside world. All heat, all hope, had to emerge from within”. The stench of daily death, waterlogged trenches, and disease surrounded him. So, he begins to rely on the precision of memory, choosing smell as the one thread that could pull him away from the battlefield. He dreams of the sweetness of khus curtains in his home, the spicy oil from the mango pickle, the luxurious sandalwood paste his mother applies daily. He takes refuge in such moments. The imagined home becomes not just an escape, but a way of survival. And perhaps this is the moment that a perfumer’s nose awakens—sharpened by the sheer need to endure the unbearable smellscape of war.

The Great War is but a section of this novel. Yet stitching together archival fragments with the odorous dreams of a fictional character taught me something essential about the labour of fiction. A novel is a fragile formation, and historical fiction, in particular, suspended as it is between fact and invention, draws more from the writer than we may realise. The Book of Everlasting Things allowed me to traverse a century of a family’s private history—from service in the First World War to displacement and exile after Partition—all through the lens of smell. Slowly, this world, rooted in research, textured with historical detail and fragrant geographies, and shaped by its own social frameworks, became complete enough for me to dwell in it for years.

This article appeared as ‘The Labour Of Historical Fiction” in Outlook’s 30th anniversary double issue ‘ Party is Elsewhere ’ dated January 21st, 2025, which explores the subject of imagined spaces as tools of resistance and politics.

Aanchal Malhotra is an oral historian and writer based in New Delhi. She is the author of three critically acclaimed books, Remnants of a Separation, In the Language of Remembering, and The Book of Everlasting Things, and co-founder of the Museum of Material Memory