Happy Monday!
I had the opportunity to watch PS-1 (Ponniyin Selvan Part 1) last week, and now I’m on a bender of all things Chola. Which is fun, because the Chola empire lasted from about 300 BCE to the 13th century, though the exciting parts seem to be in the 10th and 11th century. First there’s the game of thrones bit, in the late 900s (which is what Kalki’s novel, and the movie is about). And then there’s the Southeast Asian expansion and influence, as well as the campaigns that go up north all the way to the Ganga (thus earning the king the epithet of “Gangaikondan”, the one who brought home the Ganga).
Anyway, here’s a rough guide to everything I’ve been into:
Ponniyin Selvan is a historical novel in five parts by Kalki Krishnamurthy, serialized in the magazine Kalki, in the 1950s. After many filmmakers ruminating over the years to make this into a movie but never quite getting started, Mani Ratnam has made the novel into a rather amazing movie. Here is the trailer. I highly recommend you watch it. It’s going to be on Prime.
The novel is brilliant in Tamil. It’s been in the public domain for a long time now, which has spawned a lot of translations, audio recordings, and whatnot. I don’t need to link to the novel in Tamil. Anyone on here who can read Tamil has already heard of the novel. If however you aren’t proficient in reading Tamil, but can understand the language, here’s the entire book on Spotify!!
When I first came across the novel, I was in college, and the Internet was in its infancy. People would attempt to translate the book into English, but it is a 2500-page epic, and they would lose steam after a book or two. There was one lady who had the whole book translated on her blog, but just as I started reading, she removed it, because apparently a publisher had acquired it, and we didn’t see the actual book forever. So when CV Karthik Narayanan translated the whole book, and it was published in print too, with beautiful covers, I was thrilled. I have the whole series. Here it is on Kindle.
Some might, however, find the elaborate descriptions in the novel to be slowing down the pace of the action. It is quite an action-oriented novel. There’s palace intrigue, battles, cloak-and-dagger spying, assassinations, you name it. But Kalki stops to admire the scenery a little too much sometimes. So Mr. GC Mouli is publishing his own abridged translation, which is more oriented towards the action. It’s free to read, and he’s translated three books already, so get reading!
I’m just amazed at how this work has stood the test of time, and how the director has managed to bring it to life so well. Especially since just last week, I was rueing the trailer of Adipurush, which had made me worried about how this epic movie would turn out.
I need not have worried! There’s a few differences between the novel and the movie, but they are mostly in the interest of telling the story more tersely and translating it to film. And since the descriptions just become camera instructions, the plot and action can come forth and shine. With the novel, I had found myself getting lost in the elaborate plot, but just giving the characters faces has made it so much easier for me to follow the plot. I’ve been rereading the novel after watching the movie, and wow, it’s actually an enhanced experience! I cannot stop gushing about the movie and the books and the whole ecosystem around it.
Artifact of the week: Chola era figurine of Nataraja in the National Museum of Denmark. It’s interesting how this and other Chola sculptures found their way to Denmark. That most modest of colonial powers, Denmark had a colony on the east coast of India. This tiny area spanned the little town of Tharangambadi, which the Danes called Tranquebar. They established it as a trading post in 1620, and in 1845, they sold it to the East India Company. If they themselves could gather this absolute treasure trove of Chola era artifacts, imagine what the British have looted, having been around for over 200 years, with much more absolute power and cruelty and greed.