Sumeetha Manikandan - The Sword - Ponnis Beloved Volume 3: An English Translation Of Kalki Krishnamurthy’s Ponniyin Selvan

Ponnis Beloved

AN ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF

KALKI KRISHNAMURTHYS PONNIYIN SELVAN

by

Sumeetha Manikandan

Part 3 of 5 - The Sword

Version 2.0

Copyright Sumeetha Manikandan 2020

Published in 2020 by

V. Sumeetha

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this book. This is a work of fiction and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. The author owns the copyrights for all the images that are present in this book.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sumeetha Manikandan is a top bestselling romance author whose novellas Perfect Groom and These Lines of Mehendi (which was published as a paperback novel called Love Again) have been on the top of Amazon India charts ever since their publication. A bookaholic, thinker, feminist and a daydreamer, she reads across genres and is a crazy fan of history, romance and science fiction novels.

An avid reader of historical novels, she has been translating Kalki Krishnamurthys classic Tamil novel Ponniyin Selvan for the past ten years and hopes to translate more of his novels into English.

Sumeetha is married to filmmaker K.S. Manikandan and lives with her twelve-year-old daughter in Chennai.

Acknowledgement

I would like to acknowledge my father, S. Vijayaraghavan who used to tell me the story of Ponniyin Selvan every evening during dinner and fueled my interest to read the book.

My Aunt Ranganayaki who lent me her Ponniyin Selvan books all those years ago when I was in school. I still treasure them to this day.

Navin and Vidya Sigamany for publishing the first drafts of Ponnis Beloved on their website Zine 5.com almost ten years ago. I would like to thank Inderpreet Kaur Uppal for her stellar efforts in editing the initial draft copy.

Author Venkatesh Ramakrishnan who encouraged me to resume the translation again. Writer and Journalist, Dhivakar Venkataraman for providing valuable historical guidance for the cover page artwork.

Meenakshi Devaraj, an avid fan of Ponniyin Selvan series and rendered great help in translating Poonguzhalis song and Devaram poems in this volume.

Friends like Raja King, Fowzia Iqbal, Abirami Baskaran, Sastha Prakash, Ramanujam Jaganathan, Thirukambigai Devi and countless others, who followed the translation avidly and promoted it among numerous groups.

I would also like to dedicate this book to all those fans who have been asking me for years to publish my translation and to my husband who claims to be the first among them.

A special dedication is due to Abirami Baskaran whose encouraging words were invaluable. She was one of many who left us all too soon. May her soul rest in peace.

AUTHORS NOTE

Kalki Krishnamurthys Ponniyin Selvan was the first Tamil novel that I read. To tell you the truth, I learnt to read Tamil using elementary school books, just so that I could read this story.

They say that good books and great authors can transform lives. I have found it to be true in my case. I started translating this book ten years ago, as a hobby and realized that I could write. Today, I am a freelance writer who makes a living out of writing, and I owe my profession to this novel!

Many authors have written phenomenal books in Tamil literature after Kalki Krishnamurthy, but Ponniyin Selvan still remains the most popular book, widely read by many. Ponniyin Selvan has the right mixture of all things that makes an epic political intrigue, conspiracy, betrayal, huge dollops of romance, infidelity, seduction, passion, alluring women, unrequited love, sacrifice and pure love.
Ponni s Beloved is an English translation, and as many readers have pointed out, no translation can do justice to the original. I have tried to capture the essence and soul of Kalkis writing in my translation.

I recently visited all the places (in India) that are mentioned in this novel. We started on Aadi 18 (Aug 3, 2019) for this trail trip almost on the footsteps of Vandiya Devan and saw all the fascinating places that he mentions in the journey. I have included some of the photos in this volume.

Thank you,

Sumeetha Manikandan

PS. For those who wish to sign up for this tour trail, do contact Tour Bee (7299646588). The tour trail was well organized and at the curator had many interesting stories about each place that we visited.

FOREWORD

Kalki Krishnamurthys Ponniyin Selvan was serialized in the post-independence era and it ran for four long years. Talking about a golden era in Tamil history, it ensnared the imagination of huge swathe of the Tamil population with people queuing in railway stations long before dawn to lay their hands on that weeks edition of the Kalki magazine.

An entire generation dwelt upon the freshness of the novel and surprisingly it was not condemned to the recesses of the mind as a childhood fancy but continued to entice readers of subsequent generations as they were born and introduced to the Tamil language. The novel still has a colossal following but bounded by the hedges of a language that is not easy to learn, it strictly remained out of the mainstream and well within the realms of the Tamil speaking world.

Tamil people have been habitual migrants and the diaspora is spread over numerous countries. In todays generation, though many of them can speak fluent Tamil they lack the patience to read the Tamil script that is spread over 1000 pages of a novel. And thats when the need arises a need for a good translation.

When I read the novel late in my thirties, the social media was just picking up and I was introduced to the yahoo group of Ponniyin Selvan fans around the year 2001. For the first time, readers from different age groups, settled in different lands were congregating online.

It was there that I came across a translation of Ponniyin Selvan into English. (There had been one earlier in print but that left much to be desired for those who had read the original. In fact, at one point the earlier translator mentioned Maize for the Tamil word Cholam. But it was pointed out in the group that Maize entered India 500 years after the storyline period.)

The online translation was a bold bid by a youngster. As much as the substance within, the attempt bedazzled a lot of us because for 40 years or more it was almost sacrilege to deal with kalkis works. The one sequel in the market at that time had been mauled by the copyright owners!

Over the next decade many of the members of the Yahoo group became novelists, biographers, bloggers, heritage activists and a host of history and literature connected personalities. And I would like to list Sumeethas translation of Kalkis work as a starting point for all this.

A translated work should remind us of the original and it should have the authors imprint on the words. I think Sumeetha comes out in flying colours on both fronts. I am sure her work would open up the genius of Kalki to many who were deprived of it all these days.

Biography of Venkatesh Ramakrishnan:

Author Venkatesh Ramakrishnan is a Chennai based bilingual novelist from India. South Indian historical fiction is his forte. He has published 3 novels in Tamil, 2 of them are sequels to the famous Kalki Krishnamurthy novels Ponniyin Selvan and Sivagamiyin Sabatham respectively, with the titles Kaviri Mainthan and Kanji Tharagai. One of his other fictional work in Tamil is Thillayil Oru Kollaikaran. Gods, Kings & Slaves. The Siege of Madurai is his first novel in English.