The time traveller

  • | Tuesday | 27th June, 2017

My mother introduced me to the Kalki Krishnamurthy classic Ponniyin Selvan when I was 12. It led to Srinivasan translating Ponniyin Selvan and Kalki’s Sivakamiyin Sabadham. Unfortunately, many of the existing translations in Tamil are stilted — you can’t have Harry Potter speak like a character from Ponniyin Selvan. She hasn’t been too far off the mark — Srinivasan works closely with the soil, and reads, researches and writes on history. “As a child I wanted to be an archaeologist,” says Pavithra Srinivasan.

“As a child I wanted to be an archaeologist,” says Pavithra Srinivasan. She hasn’t been too far off the mark — Srinivasan works closely with the soil, and reads, researches and writes on history. In the years between, she has been a film journalist, translator, artist and editor, but when we meet at Amethyst one sweltering afternoon to discuss her latest book Yester Tales, it is her love for all things past that she wears on her sleeve. Soft spoken and proficient in both English and Tamil, the writer is unapologetically bookish in her interests. “I schooled partly in the Gulf, partly in Madras, and graduated in Commerce. My mother introduced me to the Kalki Krishnamurthy classic Ponniyin Selvan when I was 12. It was her way of keeping me rooted to my native language. When it was first published as a series in the 1950s, it weaned a lot of people from the idea that historicals are difficult to read. Kalki is the Alexandre Dumas of Tamil fiction. I was hooked. In a house crowded with lawyers and accountants, wanting to study history was offbeat. So, I did it at my own pace.” In love with the classics It has been a love affair that has lasted. It led to Srinivasan translating Ponniyin Selvan and Kalki’s Sivakamiyin Sabadham. “I’ve always toyed with translation. My notebooks were heavy with translations of Agatha Christie and Alistair Maclean. Translation requires more than just the ability to know both languages. Unfortunately, many of the existing translations in Tamil are stilted — you can’t have Harry Potter speak like a character from Ponniyin Selvan. The classic has emotional depth and characters you can sink your teeth into. When I translated it for my blog, Westland commended my language and approached me to do the book,” says Srinivasan, whose has also translated Jeffery Archer and Amish’s Shiva trilogy, a work that invited praise from the author himself. For a writer who loves travelling back on the wings of a good book, the period after the decline of the Cholas was anathema. “My favourite historical character was Princess Kundhavai, Raja Raja Chola’s sister. She helped consolidate a fractured State. I was heady with the history of the Cholas. Anything after 1300 AD didn’t exist,” she says. The view from the farm Then, her family decided to try its hand at farming; three years ago, Srinivasan found herself exchanging the bright city lights for the star-lit fields of Maanickamangalam, a village in Thiruvannamalai district. And suddenly, everything left in the sieve of history in this area distilled through. “I was an armchair traveller who stumbled upon the Nayaks, Marathas and the British, and in between growing paddy and peanuts and raising livestock, set off to explore the countryside. I stumbled upon crumbling edifices, battlefields and mosques set amid beautiful hills. This wasn’t Tanjore with its rich past or Madras with its reams of documentation. This was the Jain hinterland of Tamil Nadu, the area that Thomas Munro, Scottish soldier, colonial administrator and one of my heroes, wrote home about in one of his letters.” In the midst of the seven acres fed by lakes, growing sesame that found its way to a coldpress to be sold as organic oil, and power outages, Srinivasan found herself writing stories that decentred the grand narrative and increasingly focussed on the small and the forgotten. “I’m a city girl who loves book clubs and art galleries. I still miss Chennai. Even the villagers were puzzled at our choice. But the village gave me a sense of time and place,” she says. Storyteller and miniaturist And, the girl who first wrote a story simply titled The Trip, found herself throwing light on the stories within stories, spanning continents and centuries. They found their way into a column in The Hindu Young World, and 30 of them went on to be published as Yester Tales (Vishwakarma, ?300). Srinivasan’s stories wear her research lightly, treading the fine line between scholarly ramble and imaginative ending, with flair. “I write for eight to 10 hours, and if the Internet gets patchy, take a turn at art,” says Srinivasan, also a miniaturist whose drawings of Raj-era Madras are reminiscent of the work of landscape artists, Thomas and William Daniell. Yester Tales runs the gamut between Arab trade routes and fire temples to a poignant exhibit at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial and the reason we rally around our National Flag. Srinivasan, who is now immersed in British India, especially the lives of the memsahibs, says, “When I read a book, something usually stands out and I build my story on that. In Valpaarai, I came across a book called Enge Vaa, a delightful compilation of colloquial phrases for British tea planters lost in the wilds of Tamil Nadu.” Srinivasan, who is writing a series for young adults beginning with the charming Royapuram Railway Station, says, historical fiction always had a good market. “The past is exciting; it always has a good story to tell. People just need to get over that hurdle in their head.”

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