Time fantasy book list: 2 PIOs share shelf with Tolkien, Dahl

One based her world on the Mughal empire, the other drew from Hindu mythology. And the two women authors of Indian origin — Tasha Suri and Roshani Chokshi — are now placed alongside JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis and Roald Dahl on Time magazine’s list of 100 best fantasy books of all time.
“In a year defined by grim reality, we look to artists to help us understand—and escape,” says the list, which goes as far back as the 9th century to ‘Arabian Nights’, put together over a year by a panel that included Neil Gaiman, George RR Martin and Marlon James. “I found out only when the list was released online, and I absolutely wasn’t expecting it,” Suri told TOI from London, where she is also a librarian. Across the Atlantic in New York, Chokshi had no idea either: “I was so shocked … The first thing I did was call my grandparents.”
Suri’s ‘Empire of Sand’, the first in the ‘Books of Ambha’ series, is a debut novel set in a world inspired by Mughal India, the Ambhan Empire. “The Mughal Empire was so vast and complex ... It felt natural to turn to it when I began thinking about building a fantasy world.” For Chokshi, whose book ‘Aru Shah and the End of Time’, the first of the ‘Pandava Quartet’, was published by bestselling author of the Percy Jackson series Rick Riordan, the inspiration lay at home. “My Ba (grandmother) was my first and favorite storyteller. She filled my head with tales of Krishna and Pandavas. What I loved about Hindu mythology was the idea that the heroes could make villainous choices... and the villains were capable of great piety and kindness.”
But for centuries, the unbridled promise of the genre had been reined in by who got to write. That’s why representation matters. In the introduction to the Time list, celebrated fantasy writer NK Jemisin wrote, “The newer storytellers on the list, many of whom hail from colonised cultures and thus have vastly different background stories from those of ‘classic’ fantasy authors, ... warn us of the realities of societal strife.”