The Hindu Business Line : Our own Potter!

For those who have not read them it is difficult to understand the hype and hoopla surrounding the Harry Potter series of books. The latest, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, hit bookstalls worldwide on July 21. Potter buffs were all but nervous wrecks over the fate of Harry and his Hogwarts pals after writer J. K. Rowling had hinted that they would be “killed”. Copies of the book were kept under lock and key so that there was no leak of the “end” that would have spoilt the readers’ thrill.

TV channels around the world were full of Harry Potter for days and the print media spewed out billions of bytes on the “story”. It was truly mind-boggling. Have we seen or experienced anything like this before? Yes, albeit on a much smaller scale. Students of English literature may have read about the kind of following Jane Austen enjoyed when her famous novels, including Pride and Prejudice, were serialised in magazines in 18th century England that was still two hundr ed years away from cinema, radio and TV.

It was so in India too. Did we have a Harry Potter or Jane Austen parallel, I asked my octogenarian uncle, who was reading a report on the Potter phenomenon headlined “Harrycane”. “Why not,” he replied, peering at me from over the newspaper. “Haven’t you read Kalki’s Ponniyin Selvan, he quizzed. I said I had read the five-volume set a few times.

My uncle said that when the novel was originally serialised in the Tamil weekly Kalki in the early 1950s, avid readers would crowd railway stations and bus stands, awaiting the arrival of copies of the magazine. They were anxious t o know what the key characters Vandiathevan and Aalwarkadian were up to. There was suspense, week after week, over who had killed Karikalan, the heir apparent of the 10th Century Chola Kingdom. Did he kill himself, after all, or was he murdered by the mysterious Nandini?

In a remarkable way, never seen before or since, ‘Kalki’ had gripped the readers’ interest in Ponniyin Selvan week after week for three and a half years as he wove a romance complete with palace intrigues, espionag e, conspiracy, treachery and, above all, the suspense over the ending.

(The author, a former Deputy Editor with PTI, is a New Delhi-based freelance journalist. Write to rajamanirc@gmail.com