Anand Neelakantan, the author of the series “Baahubali”, loves to discover stories hidden in epics and wrote his new book “Vanara” to tell the story of honor, pride, jealousy, love and betrayal about Baali, the undefeated hero of the Ramayana; his wife Tara and his brother Sugreeva.
The book was first born as a short story. Neelakantan had written a 5,000-word story about Tara as a labor of love, but his publisher wanted to turn it into a book.
Though he was skeptical about making a novel, he promised to come back and started re-reading different versions of the Ramayana.
And to my fascination, I discovered that there is a remarkable epic hidden in the great epic. The characters of Baali, Sugreeva and Tara were never examined in detail. Baali is the undefeated hero of Ramayana, who had even defeated Ravana. His story deserved to be especially because he had a tragic end,” says Neelakantan.
And so “Vanara: The Legend of Baali, Sugreeva and Tara” was born.
Well-known, but hitherto unexplored, Vanara’ would provide a new perspective on familiar characters and make readers think, as my other books, such as Asura’ or Ajaya’ series, had done, the author says.
Neelakantan tries to keep his story interesting.
“I want my stories to be appreciated. I don’t want my readers to rush through the book and throw it to a corner or use it as a snack that would be forgotten once they read the end,” he told PTI.
Neelakantan, author of the Baahubali Trilogy, the prequel to SS Rajamouli’s film; Asura: Story of the Vanquished, who narrated the Ramayana from Ravana’s point of view; and the Ajaya series, says his retelling works are all based on characters.
I work on characters. I become the characters when I write with their voices. The character could be Ravana as in Asura’, Baali as in Vanara’, Duryodhana as in Ajaya’ or Sita or Hanuman as in the series I wrote – Siya Ke Ram’ or Mahabali Hanuman’. I’m moving away from conventional storytelling and bringing in a lot of folk elements to add depth of perspective, he says.
According to him, Vanara: The Legend of Baali, Sugreeva and Tara, published by Penguin Random House India, is arguably the world’s first love triangle.
Research is very important to Neelakantan’s stories.
“In books based on Indian Puranas, research is the most important part. The variations in the stories are mind-boggling. A wide repository of research material would capture my imagination and help me take the story the way I want. Since I work from From the perspective of unconventional heroes (villains), research becomes the driving factor in my novels,” he says.
Neelakantan is now working on the second part of the Baahubali series.
Baali and Sugreeva of the Vana Nara tribe were orphaned brothers who were born in abject poverty and raised as slaves, like most of their tribesmen. They were often mocked as the vanaras, the ape-men. Sandwiched between the never-ending war between the Deva tribes to the north and the Asura tribes to the south, the Vana Naras seemed to have lost all hope.
But Baali was determined not to die as a slave. Aided by his beloved brother, Sugreeva, Baali built a land for his people. The capital, Kishkindha, became a beacon of hope for emancipated slaves from all over the world.
It was a city of the people, by the people, for the people, where there was no discrimination based on caste, creed, language or skin color.
For a short period of time, it seemed that humanity had found its ideal hero in Baali. But then fate intervened through the beautiful Tara, the daughter of a tribal physician.
Loved by Baali and coveted by Sugreeva, Tara became the cause of a brotherly war that would change history forever.
