We ask our amiable readers to kindly disregard the present, and climb into the boat of imagination, that we may take a little journey across time, unmarred by beginnings and endings.
—Kalki Krishnamurthy, Ponniyin Selvan, volume 1: Fresh Floods (translated by Pavithra Srinivasan)
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 noncooperation 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.
Now, treasured Believer, we blaze forward through the decades and turn to the second hero of our tale, the Tamil director Mani Ratnam. Ratnam has been trying to film Ponniyin Selvan his entire working life. His first attempt was in the late 1980s with star Kamal Haasan, fresh off the success of their gangster epic Nayakan (1987), and again in 2010 with mononymous megastar Vijay attached as the lead. Neither production materialized, but Ratnam had adored the novel since he read it in college, and considered filming it to be his dream project. It was the first serious novel he read in Tamil instead of in English, and he felt that “the transition from [Tamil] literature to Tamil cinema has been really limited,” as he said in an interview. He continued to push until he got a green light for his two-part epic starring Vikram and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan.
Ratnam rose to prominence with a trio of feel-bad melodramas about doomed lovers thwarted by political and religious violence: Kashmiri terrorism in Roja (1992), Hindu-Muslim riots in Bombay (1995), and the Assam separatist movement in Dil se.. (1998). In condensing Ponniyin Selvan, he returned to this theme, focusing on the caste divide between the high-born Prince Aditha Karikalar (Vikram) and the orphan Nandhini (Aishwarya Rai Bachchan), of unknown parentage. Their curdled passion, twisted into a sadistic pas de deux—one of dozens of plot strands in the book—is positioned at the poisoned heart of the film. And, oh reader, I wish I could spend time detailing all the deceptions, pitched battles, secret identities, and assassinations that emerge from the book like hives on my feverishly excited face, but instead I’ll direct you to the handy color-coded family-tree flow chart on the Ponniyin Selvan Wikipedia page, as a treat.
Ratnam was scheduled to shoot both parts of the feature back-to-back starting in December 2019, but production was shut down twice due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Loyal reader, whatever malevolent force kept Ponniyin Selvan off the silver screen for seventy years continued to give 110 percent effort, but Ratnam and his team persevered. Ponniyin Selvan I was released in September 2022, with Ponniyin Selvan II appearing in April 2023. Both were among the top-grossing Tamil films of their respective years, and they once again thrust Kalki’s novel into the spotlight, spurring new English translations of the book and of MRM Sundaram’s 1976 biography of Krishnamurthy. But they also aroused criticism from devotees of the novel about what the script left out. “The adaptation was not the easiest of tasks,” Ratnam told Variety. “We had to take the heart of it and stick to that and do it as one stream.”
Both novel and film follow the fate of the Chozha dynasty’s royal family—the ailing King Sundara Chozhar and his three children: the charismatic elephant whisperer Arulmozhi Varmar (nicknamed Ponniyin Selvan, “beloved son of the River Ponni”), the brutish Aditha Karikalar, and the canny political strategist Princess Kundhavai. A cabal of Chozha militants conspires to unseat the ailing king, while their territory has been infiltrated by Pandiyan rebels intent on assassinating the king and both princes, and thus taking over the throne. If I were a craven seeker of algorithmic blessings, I would describe it as an ancient Indian Game of Thrones, but as an avuncular all-knowing narrator, I would never do such a thing.
Aditha Karikalar attempts to destroy the Pandiyan dynasty by decapitating the king in front of his former lover Nandhini, a gruesome murder that transforms their lust into posttraumatic stress. Aditha becomes a suicidal masochist, while the vengeful Nandhini uses her beauty to attract chaos, aligning herself with every faction trying to overthrow the crown.
Cinematographer Ravi Varman uses a circling camera to give the Aditha-Nandhini dyad a sense of dizzying dread, and their final encounter in her chamber reaches a pitch of escalating pleasure-pain that is one of the peaks of Ratnam’s cinema. After receiving multifarious reports of Nandhini’s conspiratorial dealings, Aditha still accepts Nandhini’s invitation to meet at her castle home. Delirious with guilt over his brutal execution of the Pandiyan king, and still drunk on Nandhini’s beauty, he wishes only to be killed by her hand. But at the climax of her epoch-shaking plan, she seems reluctant to grant his wish. Perhaps she realizes that death would be a gift—that true revenge would be to let him suffer in life. Or maybe a glimmer of their youthful infatuation still shines in her impassive eye. It’s hard to know. “Our esteemed readers would have doubtless noticed that some of the characters in our epic display contradictory speech and behavior,” Kalki writes. “We wish to inform you that we are not responsible for this. Human nature is seldom unchanging. Circumstances shape one’s state of mind and force a change in one’s behavior; and so, those who spoke and behaved in a certain way until yesterday show different colours today.”
Ratnam embraces this essential ambiguity, his camera’s vertiginous movement distancing itself from the death-eyed lovers as they embark on their darkened path. And while they embrace, a secret battle rages in the honeycomb of hidden passages connected to Nandhini’s room, between Pandiyan rebels, Aditha’s loyal servant Vallavarayan Vandhiyathevan, and Nandhini’s cuckolded husband. Against the chaotic swirl of firelight, a dagger is thrust. The moment of murder is as obscured as their motivations. “A dreadful wail rose from her throat in a chilling blend of boundless anguish and manic laughter,” reads the book. It continues, “Even the inanimate articles in the chamber appeared to be touched by her hysterical lament. They trembled restlessly at the awful sound; why, even the bed seemed to quiver.” Aishwarya Rai Bachchan conveys unsettling intensity and calm malice, embodying the roiling contradictions of the perpetually out-of-reach Nandhini.
Amid the dozens of major characters, the rakish spy-without-a-country Vandhiyathevan is granted pride of place at the start and close of the novel, which shifts perspective from the self-perpetuating drama of the royals to the world outside: the everyday life of a Tamil in the tenth century. He is a wisecracking spy for the Chozha regime who, between secret missions, listens to the songs of the villagers, savors the local cuisine, and flirts with every eligible female in sight. He is an accidental folklorist, the mouthpiece for Kalki to describe traditional folk dances like the kuravai koothu, the verses of the Hindu poet-saint Nammalavar, and songs from the earliest Tamil epic, Silappathikaram, a tragic love story. And oh, my precious handlers of this page, allow me to praise the performance of Karthi, who gives his Vandhiyathevan the devil-may-care flair of fellow shirtless swashbuckler Douglas Fairbanks.
Mani Ratnam, like Kalki, is a booster of Tamil culture, though he wasn’t a village kid fantasizing about ancient history on the Ponni River. Rather, he was a middle-class city kid riding the family car around Madurai, whose father worked in the film distribution business. He imbibed the subversive social dramas of directors K. Balachander, Mahendran, and Balu Mahendra, impressed with their experiments in visual storytelling. But they were the exception. Much of Tamil cinema was still stage-bound, and Ratnam said, “The rest of the films, predominantly, were still not good. Tamil cinema had stagnated. You felt you could do better even if you didn’t know anything about cinema.” Ratnam was on a path of corporate respectability, getting an MBA in finance and a job as a management consultant, before becoming bored and ditching it all for the entertainment business. So he lit out for Chennai and started his career in Kollywood, which is often conflated with Mumbai’s Bollywood (where he would eventually work as well), but is a completely separate industry. “I have tried my best not to get classified into a ‘kind of director,’” he told an interviewer; adding that he wanted to “basically keep all options open and not get bracketed into one genre.”
Until Ponniyin Selvan, the only way one could pin him down was as a contemporary melodramatist who focused on relationships, no matter if he was shooting a gangster movie, a chase film, or a romantic comedy. When approaching stories drawn from ancient epics, he updated them to modern times, as with the Mahabarata-inspired Thalapathi (1991), a male weepie about the love between two men of different castes; and the 2010 kidnapping thriller Raavanan (also starring Aishwarya Rai Bachchan and Vikram), based on a tale in the Ramayana. One of Ratnam’s great strengths as a filmmaker is his location shooting, which allows Chennai to pulsate with neon-tinged life. But in Ponniyin Selvan, there is a weightlessness to the computer-generated architecture that fails to live up to Kalki’s granular descriptions. Still, Ratnam expertly captures the sheer narrative velocity of the book, in which stories accumulate upon stories until you start to believe it will never end. It’s a thrilling sensation I find only in cinema, most recently in Mariano Llinás’s fourteen-hour choose-your-own-adventure masterpiece La flor.
But end it must, reader. The final scene in the novel—not present in the film—emphasizes the essential unknowability of the ancient figures Kalki has otherwise so lovingly brought to life. They are, in the end, phantoms beyond our grasp. At one point, Vandhiyathevan comforts the young Manimekalai, who goes mad with grief upon hearing false reports of his death. She opens her lips to whisper in his ear, and he “strained every nerve to listen, but was not able to understand what she said. Why must he know? How does it matter what she said?”
I couldn’t help but think of the last lines of Touch of Evil (1958), spoken by Marlene Dietrich’s fortune teller after the death of Orson Welles’s corrupt cop: “He was some kind of a man. What does it matter what you say about people?” When events eclipse the descriptive power of words, Welles and Kalki step aside and let the mystery speak. As logophilic as Kalki is in Ponniyin Selvan, the most powerful moment in the book lies in what is left unwritten.
