Excerpts from The Believer: Ancient to the Future
How director Mani Ratnam managed to adapt Ponniyin Selvan, a 2,500-page serialized historical epic and one of the bestselling Tamil novels of all time.
Dear Believers, come gather ’round the flames of the hearth as I spin the adventurous tale of Kalki Krishnamurthy—shamelessly adopting his intimately omniscient tone in order to illuminate his prodigious life and work. Ramaswamy “Kalki” Krishnamurthy was an Indian freedom fighter who was imprisoned three times by the British, a journalist who founded a long-running weekly magazine, and a phenomenally popular author whose serialized historical epic Ponniyin Selvan (published between 1950 and 1954) is one of the bestselling Tamil novels of all time. For Kalki’s centenary, the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu nationalized his works, freeing them from copyright restrictions, so they could remain continually in print. And in 2022, after decades of doomed film adaptation attempts, director Mani Ratnam brought Ponniyin Selvan to the screen.
Kalki was born in 1899 near the Kaveri River (called the Ponni in ancient texts), which bisects southern India and serves as both source and setting for many of his imaginings. His father died young, and he was raised by his mother and the people of his village, who encouraged his interest in traditional Tamil culture. As a kid, he performed katha kalakshepam, an amalgamation of song, dance, and the recitation of legends. He learned how to work an audience, a skill that would pay dividends after he dropped out of school to give subversive speeches as part of Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement. In 1922, the presiding British magistrate asked Kalki if he knew what sedition meant. Kalki responded, “I know it only too well. That’s what I have been doing for a year now.” He was sentenced to a year in jail.
In 1927, this relentless promoter and evangelist of Tamil traditions couldn’t help but grant himself a mythic nickname, “Kalki,” an allusion to the tenth and final incarnation of the god Vishnu, who ushers in a new epoch of existence, according to the Hindu holy texts known as the Puranas. “Those who have read the first piece I wrote as Kalki will understand the import of this pseudonym,” he told an interviewer. “I urged the discarding of old conventions and meaningless traditions to make way for the blossoming of a new era.” The nom de plume became a model to live up to, a radical self-branding exercise that he later gave to his own magazine in 1941. Both the magazine and his intricately plotted fictions were part of a wider effort to tell Tamils’ stories in their own language, which was headed toward obsolescence under British rule.
Dear all-believing reader, we have arranged the bare bones of Kalki’s life in a fetching skeleton, but it doesn’t feel like we have jolted him into fleshly existence—so let us journey back to 1934 and a moment of revelation. It was then that Kalki took a pleasure trip to the port city of Mamallapuram, by the Bay of Bengal, to visit its religious monuments constructed during the seventh and eighth centuries, during the era of the Pallava dynasty. It was this fateful trip that inspired Kalki’s turn to historical fiction. Sitting by the water, the temples looming before him, Kalki had a vision in which…
… Thousands of boats appeared on the sea. On the shore, crowds of men and women milled around. Terraced mansions and towering spires rose in the distance. Flags with insignias of bulls and the lion flew blithely on their pinnacles. Intoxicating music flowed from pleasing instruments on all four sides. Sculptors were working with their chisels on every rock in sight. Someone, somewhere, was dancing with anklets around her feet. Forms and faces could be distinguished as they appeared before me. Ayanar and Sivakami, Mahendra Pallava and Mamalla, Parthiban and Vikraman, Arulmozhi and Kundavai… all flashed upon my inward eye as they rode on a ceremonial procession. And as they came on and on, they came to enter and reside in my heart.
These are the characters of Ponniyin Selvan, coming to life in his mind’s eye. Ponniyin Selvan drops the reader into tenth-century Tamil Nadu amid a cloak-and-dagger battle of royal succession, rampaging elephant attacks, and a romance doomed by decapitation. It is a 2,500-page forearm workout, serialized over the course of four years in the magazine Kalki, before appearing in novel form in 1955. It takes a ground-level view of the grievous sacrifices necessary to gain and hold power, with passionate digressions on Sangam poetry, the construction of Hindu temples, and the clashing and cooperation between religions—it is a mammoth fusion of Kalki’s multifarious interests. But the epic has been under something of a curse: Kalki passed away seven months after the final chapter was published, and until 2022, every attempt to film Ponniyin Selvan has fallen apart, beginning with an injury suffered by superstar actor-politician M. G. Ramachandran (popularly known as “MGR”) in 1958.