The five-volume book version was bought by every circulating library, then photocopied and bound by borrowers. The epic has since been re-serialised three more times. How popular? When Kalki first wrote the story in serialised form in the early 1950s, the illustrated tale singlehandedly boosted the readership of his eponymous weekly magazine. Yet even in translation, the story by prolific Tamil writer ‘Kalki’ Krishnamurthy is as engrossing and popular as it was when first published more than 60 years ago. A sprawling historical romance set in the Chola period, full of tongue-twisting names, quotations from classical Tamil poems, and asides on religion and history, Ponniyin Selvan is not your standard summer bestseller. The incident says a little about my cousin - resourceful or shameless? - and a lot about the hook of that book. She pulled off this trick once more before her outraged mother intervened. Desperate to know what happens next but also broke, she returned to the store pretending there was a mix-up: she had really intended to buy the second volume. She took it home, started reading, and didn’t put it down until she had finished. One summer, when my cousin was in college in Chennai, she wandered into a bookstore and found an English translation of The First Flood, the first book in the five-volume Tamil novel Ponniyin Selvan (Darling of Ponni).
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