Summer potboiler: This Tamil classic is being compared to Game of Thrones

One summer, when my cousin was in college in Chennai, she wandered into a bookstore and found an English translation of The First Flood, the first book in the five-volume Tamil novel Ponniyin Selvan (Darling of Ponni). She took it home, started reading, and didn’t put it down until she had finished. Desperate to know what happens next but also broke, she returned to the store pretending there was a mix-up: she had really intended to buy the second volume. She pulled off this trick once more before her outraged mother intervened.

The incident says a little about my cousin — resourceful or shameless? — and a lot about the hook of that book. A sprawling historical romance set in the Chola period, full of tongue-twisting names, quotations from classical Tamil poems, and asides on religion and history, Ponniyin Selvan is not your standard summer bestseller. Yet even in translation, the story by prolific Tamil writer ‘Kalki’ Krishnamurthy is as engrossing and popular as it was when first published more than 60 years ago.

How popular? When Kalki first wrote the story in serialised form in the early 1950s, the illustrated tale singlehandedly boosted the readership of his eponymous weekly magazine. The epic has since been re-serialised three more times. The five-volume book version was bought by every circulating library, then photocopied and bound by borrowers. In recent decades, English translations have taken the book to non-Tamil-reading generations, especially in the diaspora (some of whom set Quora on fire with questions like “Is Game of Thrones inspired by Ponniyin Selvan?”).

Adaptations keep coming. A graphic novel series by Nila Comics was launched last year and a web series is under production. Plays have been staged, most spectacularly by Chennai troupe, The Magic Lantern. Only a movie remains elusive: M G Ramachandran, Kamal Haasan and Mani Ratnam have all tried.

That film would have ardent viewers, or critics, across generations. K Jayalaxmi, 77, first encountered the story as a young woman, reading the weekly instalment out to neighbours as they washed the dishes. She was instantly entranced, she says. “Kalki has a way of taking you right there to that time and place.” Twenty-something Kalaiyarasen read his uncle’s copy one summer, then decided to retrace the hero’s journey from Veeranam Lake to Thanjavur on a college road trip. “I wanted to see what those places were like,” he says. He now organises weekend tours for fans, an experience he suggests can be eye-opening. In the book, for instance, the Cauvery is often in marvellous spate but his recent trips have found the Chola-made lakes to be bone-dry.

Historical setting has much to do with the novel’s popularity. Translator and historian A R Venkatachalapathy says Kalki was among the first to write historical novels in Tamil, readable, family-friendly stories that were not set in a fantasy land but in a concrete place and time. Kalki’s research, mining historian Nilakanta Sastri’s new work on South Indian history and travelling the length of the Chola empire right up to Sri Lanka, is part of the book’s lore. His ‘Sivagamiyin Sabatham’ is a better novel, Venkatachalapathy notes, but “the Chola period has more purchase than the Pallava”.

Ponniyin Selvan is a paean to the Cholas, and the river that nourished the delta kingdom. The Cauvery — the Ponni of the title — is described as a young bride rushing to her husband, its tributaries a hundred reaching arms. The picaresque hero, the warrior Vandhiyathevan, navigates a landscape of fertile fields, prosperous temple towns, and marching armies. It’s the period before the ascension of Rajaraja Chola I. There are palace plots and romances, storms and omens, scar-crossed warriors and beautiful women of both kinds. There is even a comic trickster figure, a Vaishnavite who brawls with every passing Shaivite and the odd Vedantist.

These characters stay with you even as the story taps into a deep cultural pride, says Pritham K Chakravarthy, translator of Blaft’s anthologies of Tamil pulp fiction. “Today, I tend to question some of the depictions but I don’t really want to,” she says. Another key to the novel’s staying power: the story is left open-ended, allowing the reader to imagine what happens afterwards. “There are also things in the story that you don’t understand as a child,” she says. “So your understanding of the story changes at different stages in your life.”

Venkatachalapathy believes that Kalki, a prodigious writer, would have been disappointed to be remembered mainly for his historical novels. Popular fiction can be gateways into a literature but he often meets people who have not ventured beyond Kalki’s romances. “Ponniyin Selvan is unfortunately the sum total of their reading in Tamil,” he says. Nevertheless, he adds, “a young person who has not read Ponniyin Selvan has missed out on something.”