Banned Books
The books outlined here are outlawed or officially denied to exist by Singhapura and its institutions. Your Grace will find, as a general rule, that the fears of an Empire are most instructive.
The Kitab al-Azif takes its name from the Samarskand. It may be considered a work of alternate of fanciful history; it depicts a world - very similar to ours - ruled by those we know as daemons. In this world, Singhapura is named, but is a small provincial city in eternal rebellion against the Powers described. Singhapura’s official position is that it does not exist, but there is a copy in the private libraries of Taprobane for scholars.
The Book of Lost Kingdoms holds that Raavan was not a god, but one of the first human magicians. The gods, finding his arrogance intolerable, create Umesh, a wild man who becomes his beloved companion; together they slay monsters and build cities and perform other heroic works, whereupon the gods spring their trap and kill Umesh. Broken by grief and terrified of his own mortality, Raavan travels to the ends of the earth in search of eternal life, systematizing the study of magic and building one of the greatest libraries in the world along the way. He fails, but the quest gives him the wisdom to accept mortality and spend what remains of his life in the service of his people. The book contains the oldest accurate descriptions of Authority, and much of what it says on that subject remains accurate to this day. Yet, with the exception of the ruins of Samarskand, no-one has successfully located any of the other kingdoms it describes. Gachatan, said to be Raavan’s original home, has never been found; nor have any of the others. Singhapura bans it on grounds that its historical claims are seditious fabrication.
The Annals of the Elder Days is ancient Dvorak elven mythology, and its suppression is perhaps the most straightforwardly explicable on this list. According to the Annals, the Dvorak elves are dead and this entire world is a placeholder until their reincarnation into the Real World. Upon that reincarnation they will resume their eternal war with the Outer Dark. I suspect Singhapura finds it offensive to everyone in general. I have heard it described as the driveling of madmen, but praised as superlative work of poetry in the fantastic mode. However, I mention it here because it seems to share something in common with the Kitab - the concept of some great nameless darkness that will enslave the world. The Annals speaks of it in fear, the Kitab speaks of it with reverence.
The Dream of the Black Chamber is a long, multi-part work cataloguing the social and inner life of an Heir-in-Waiting in Samarskand during a period when multiple rebellions swept its outer provinces. Singhapura’s official histories prefer to consider Samarskand a golden era, a bygone ideal of perfection; it seems politically inconvenient for this ideal State to be wracked with rebellions and the romantic poetry of insecure princes.
Empire in Black and Gold was written by Gaius Hadrianus Larus, a Lusian historian of nine hundred years standing - he is Dvorak, and they live a long time. It is said to contitue the most sustained external examination of the Singhapura Empire’s actual growth. It is, in effect, an anti - Singha Chronicle: where the Chronicle presents the Empire’s expansion as the natural flowering of a legitimate order, Larus presents it as the operation of recognizable political and military mechanisms, stripped of the justifications and subject to mistakes and the demands of growing unrest. It is banned in Singhapura.
The Republic was written by the Paragon Sangamitta, who rose through the White Council of the Haugris Church, was a key figure in the history of the Taprobane Imperial Univerity, defected to the Temple of Eighteen, founded the Iron Pagoda, contributed substantially to almost every aspect of modern magical theory, and died in exile. One of the most feared and adored polymaths of her age, she suffered throughout her life from a chronic inability to remain in one place. The Republic is the distillation of her critique on the Taprobane system and the dominant understanding of magic and theory.
The Prison Diaries of the Lusian spy Antonio Noronha de Saa were written over thirty years of imprisonment in Singhapura; much of it was smuggled out by compassionate guards. De Saa writes about Singhapura’s hegemonic nature, its eternal need to expand, and its relationship to everything that surrounds it. The work has been enormously influential outside Singhapura. It is worth noting that a considerable portion of what passes for accepted political theory within Singhapura was produced by early academics who drew heavily from de Saa without acknowledgment. De Saa wrote: the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters. Your Grace will find this observation most useful, I think.