In spite of the image created in different chronicles and the songs bards sang from time to time about her, Habba Khatoon's persona has remained a mystery, an illusion as a hologram. This novel is a highly fascinating and cleverly webbed work of fiction. The author, with unflinching faith in Kashmiri identity, has through his imagination laid an interesting graph to build the persona of this little known village woman. He has given her a local habitation in a unique cultural ambience to establish her strength of identity through the most powerful medium, that is fiction in literature, whereby he has given this simple village girl a personality of dignity, royal grace and talent that gave her immortality.
'Moon of the Saffron Fields' embraces the entire range of Kashmiri society of Habba Khatoon's time with Habba at the centre of the whole spectrum: right from her birth, early childhood, her girlhood, woman of exceptional talent and charm to being queen and finally her tragic end to becoming a legend.
If creative literature, to its ultimate meaning, is imaginative reconstruction of life (Coleridge) or giving "name and local habitation to airy nothing" (Shakespeare) Pran Kishore's new novel "Moon of the Saffron Fields" is a very significant work of fiction. It is at the same time, the author's concern with the particular historical, social, and political conditions of the chosen era, that is the sixteenth century Kashmir. It is a historical novel written first in English and at the same time transformed into Kahmiri the language that has produced only a few novels that include Pran Kishore's two earlier novels "Sheen Ta Vatapod." (English translation Sheen: Snow and the Bridle Path) and" Gul-Gulshan- Gulfam" (English translation of the same title.)
The choice for a semi-historical Kashmiri woman of the sixteenth century as the protagonist of the novel gives the author complete freedom to re-construct a personage who is hardly known. The enigma like Zoon, a peasant girl gifted with talent of composing highly emotional songs, rose by chance to become the queen of an equally romantic king Yousuf Shah Chak. This is all that we know in "history" about the woman. The same woman, nevertheless, rose to tremendous, unparalleled popularity in the mid of the twentieth century when writers used all manner of fancy to represent her not only as a leading poet, but also as a symbol of Kashmir identity. A few plays, books, films and television serials o were written. Under the influence of all this literature and visual tuff, Zoon, is so widely accepted as a solid historical person that any doubt about her is considered no less than cynicism. In spite of this phantasmagoria about Zoon, she remained a mystery, an illusion as a hologram. Pran Kishore, with unflinching faith in Kashmir identity, enthusiasm for reviving the fast disappearing cultural, aesthetic, and ethical mores of the people with a distinct language and cultural variety has through his imagination, laid a graph to build the persona of Habba Khatoon. He has decided to give this little-known woman a local habitation in a unique cultural ambience to establish her strength of identity through the most significant medium, that is fiction in literature.
Thereby he has given this woman a persona of dignity, grace and talent in that unique social and cultural atmosphere.
Pran Kishore with artistic freedom in using intellectual imagination to use historicism in giving shape to a hazy cultural ethos. He has had a first-hand knowledge of the lost social, cultural, ethical economic, and political "facts" because, up to the first four decades of the last century, there was considerable homeostasis in Kashmiri society. A state of equilibrium between various interdependent elements in terms of dress, dwelling, diet, accepted behavioural norms, collective fears, trepidations under the threat of external aggressions, and similar aspirations, dreads and dreams were at play.
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