CHENNAI : It isn’t mere aesthetic appreciation of Andal’s poetry that draws people to it in the 21st Century, but the underlying longing for love and touch deeply familiar to many readers, feels award-winning author Sharanya Manivannan, on the eve of the official launch of her fifth book, The Queen of Jasmine Country. Published by HarperCollins India, Manivannan’s second novel chronicles the life of the 7th Century Alvar saint, Andal, when she was known as Kodhai. In an interview with City Express, the author shares her thoughts on the writing process, her relationship with Andal, and the challenges she experienced while writing her novel, which will be available on paperback and Amazon.
What drew you to the story of Andal that you would write a novel about her life?
Andal was always a poet to me, foremost — so it was very surprising when I had two sort of religious dreams about her a few years ago. In one, she told me to not pray for marriage because the available options were unworthy of me. In the other, she told me to write a novel about her.
When I eventually came to this manuscript, it was not Andal (the venerated one) whom I wrote of, but Kodhai — the girl who doesn’t know she will become a goddess.The amount of research involved while preparing for this novel must have been extensive. Did you stumble across a particularly interesting story about Andal, and if so, what did you find interesting about it?
In several ways, the oral hagiography around Andal and what is implied in her poetry do not necessarily match up, so my challenge was to merge the two. Dennis Hudson’s work on Vaishnavite Tantra helped me a great deal in this. If you notice, the Nachiyar Thirumozhi picks up exactly where the Thiruppavai stops, but the tone between the two works is dramatically different. So the plot point I developed for Queen, inspired by Hudson, is that when the collective vow she has undertaken with her friends fails to bring her a husband, Kodhai then embarks on secret rites to Kamadeva, the god of carnal love who was most definitely worshipped in medieval Tamil Nadu.
The novel depicts Andal (Kodhai) retreating to poetry as a form of comfort and way to chronicle her struggles. As a poet, does writing give you the same solace? If so, how hard was it to separate your views on poetry and release from your protagonist’s?
Writing and reading have given me solace since I was a child, and the knowledge of this solace was something that really helped me write this novel. At 16, I was a lot like the Kodhai in the book too — passionate, sullen, rebellious, lonely, and already beginning to be recognised as a poet. I used these experiences to give her form and life, to fill in what her nights and days were like, to live between her own lines.
Why is it significant that this book is released during the beginning of the Margazhi month?
The novel technically came out at the end of October, but it’s sheer coincidence that the official launch function is on the first day of Margazhi! Queen is very much about the writing of both her Thiruppavai and Nachiyar Tirumozhi, and it is on the first night of Margazhi — having initiated a vow that she hopes will bring her a good husband — that Kodhai sits by lamp-light in a cowshed and begins to write…
Were there any writing challenges you felt when chronicling Andal’s life?
It was very important to me to write a feminist book, but which honoured a cherished story. So every subversion had been meaningful, not just for its own sake. The poet was radical in her own time. But to paint her as being radical in ours would only be one more erasure, one more way of saying that the woman in the poems is not enough for us as she is.
But I love the woman in the poems. So this meant making certain creative choices. My best example would be how I did not make the Vaaranam aayiram scene (the dream of a thousand elephants) an inclusive feminist wedding. What I did instead was to situate the dream at a point in the plot in which Kodhai and her father have stopped seeing eye to eye. Having rebelled, she wakes from that dream’s grandeur into frustration and tension. And later, when she visits her cowherd friends, she feels a sense of rue. She remembers her wedding dream and how they did not appear in it, and this becomes a moment when she confronts her caste privilege.