Unravelling the present through prism of the past

Devi Yesodharan has a nose for research: sifting through academic papers and history books became nearly as thrilling than the intrigue of the plot. It was the Sangam poetry that truly captured her heart and this is obvious in Empire, her debut novel. Nominated for the JCB Prize 2018, Empire tells the story of Aremis, the Greek captive and a gifted warrior, who served in guard of Rajendra Chola. Set within the realms of an ancient empire, Devi Yesodharan tells Darshana Ramdev how history is a safe space from which she unmasks modern society

“When does it end?’ I ask. ‘When does what end?’ ‘This feeling. Of belonging nowhere and to no one. Waking up with my loneliness a stray dog beside me.” The scruffy eleven-year-old girl glares up at Anantha through her tear-stained cheeks, fingers itching for the dagger in her belt, in the first pages of Empire. Her total oddness is enough to compel you to turn the pages. 

Much like her creator, Devi Yesodharan, Aremis is a rebel. Held captive in a foreign land that awes and terrifies her in equal measure, Aremis  isn’t the sort of protagonist one would necessarily warm to, either: tall, blonde, thin, intensely aware of her oddness amongst the bevy of bronzed, curvy women who filled the court of Rajendra Chola. Her diffidence is easily mistaken for arrogance, her bristling nervousness can be irksome. “She’s angry,” agrees Devi Yesodharan, the author of Empire. “Readers don’t necessarily like female narrators to be angry, they expect them to be calm and diplomatic. That was something I definitely did not want.”  

Aremis’ narrative runs alongside that of Anantha, the privileged, revered general and right-hand man of Rajendra Chola. Along the way, we meet imposters and traitors, encounter friendship, love and betrayal, all in the glorious setting of the Chola empire at its peak. Empire, with its brooding protagonist, the bad-boy general Anantha and the the glory of the Cholas, has been nominated for the prestigious JCB Prize for Literature, catapulting her into the ranks of writers like Perumal Murugan,  Jeet Thayil and Nayantara Sahgal.

As the story unravels, Aremis’ apparent indignance to wear itself down: Now she is out of place, alone and although she would be loathe to admit it, afraid. Even so, she is filled with a thirst to prove herself, as the reader peels back her personality, layer by layer, to see what lies at the heart of it all. 

And while you work through this, Devi draws you in with her mellifluous prose, which resonates with the melody and rhythm of Sangam poetry and a masterful enticement of the senses: If the scents of pepper-crusted lamb on a spit and the pungent olfactory assault of sardines in tamarind curry won’t draw you in, what will? “I made a mistake with the peanuts though,” she says, almost at the outset. “They came to India later. But it’s in the first 10 pages of the book!” The new edition has corrected this error.

Devi Yesodharan, who looks rather tired, having arrived at an artsy little Indiranagar Cafe straight from work, is strikingly similar. “I work at a startup in the finance sector,” she smiles. Devi has always found solace in her little world of make-believe and her first story was published when she was a child: “I wrote a story comparing my hair to the bathroom mat, I was all about comedy then,” she chuckles. Hers has been a world of convention, growing up in a house where studying English Literature was out of the question. 

Devi and her calling weren’t easily parted after all, her first job was as a journalist at a leading daily. From there, she joined the office of Infosys Founder Narayan Murthy, working long hours and against impossible deadlines to turn around a speech. “That’s where I learned to write with discipline,” she remarks. “It helped me put out a great volume of words in a short time.” She went on to work on Nandan Nilekani’s Imagining India, an experience she describes as “similarly traumatic.” “I’m the worst kind of procrastinator,” she laughs. Now the founder of her own startup, Devi admits she thrives off the uncertainty, the constant risk that comes with being one’s own boss. “I actually write better when I have a day job. Maybe it’s that I have to make time to do it and the inherent feeling that I’m being denied something.”

Like Aremis, Devi’s choices seem to be born of rebellion, which lurks, beneath a calm demeanour. 

That the Cholas didn’t merit more than a couple of lines in her CBSE textbook was enough to set her off. She was enthralled, not just by the magnificence of Raja Raja Chola but by his son. Heir to a great empire, there was little he needed to do. “But he wanted to prove himself, to make his own mark,” she says. “That’s why he extended the empire.” 

The Chola armies ultimately made their way across the subcontinent and then beyond, as Devi made her way through reams of academic papers, history books and fiction. “In the end, I found a collection of essays, very rare, which I ordered on Amazon and had a friend bring to me. That was a real catch!” “ She was captivated by the  king’s Greek female bodyguards, the first to die if an attack should take place, although they appeared purely ornamental otherwise.  Despite the obvious dangers of a white protagonist in  political climate infested with polemic, Devi took the leap regardless. It is within ranks of the king’s guard that Aremis finds herself, much to her displeasure: Little is made of her superior talents with the sword. She’s not the sort to blindly fall in line with diktats of a patriarchal system: Aremis is made of sterner stuff. 

 “Have you lived away from home and felt like an outsider?” Devi responds with a question. The three years she spent living with her maternal grandfather, when her mother moved to Dubai for work, she recalls as some of the warmest in her life. “When I moved, I was permanently homesick.” When she overheard her mother describe the plight of a neighbour who had returned to Kerala for treatment, Devi developed a cough, one apparently immune to treatment. Defeated, her mother sent her home to Kerala, where she stayed for nine months. “I only told her about this when I was an adult!”

 To Aremis too, everything stems from rebellion, whether it is sneaking out at night to meet her lover, Natesan, her stately ambitions or falling in love with the savvy maiden Kamakshi. “Women were a bit stuck in that society,” Devi admits. “Their status depended on the kindness of their husbands.” Anantha’s wife is a rigid, somewhat bitter woman - her husband is in love with another woman. Even his mistress, the lovely, full-of-life Mandakini, is full of grit and determination. “She has worked her way up and also, before she came along, nothing had ever really gone wrong for Anantha. He is a high-caste man who had all the privileges of his position, Mandakini turned that around.”

 The women bear their struggles with fortitude while Anantha is crippled with grief by the death of his mistress. The story builds up towards a war, one in which Aremis is prophesied to play a pivotal part. Still, as you weave in and out of their lives, their grief, ambition, failure, loss and love, you almost forget the great danger that waits around the corner. There is suspense and intrigue at every turn along the way although Devi is kinder to her reader than she is to her protagonists, for we fit in instantly. 

In a world torn apart by war, where action is driven by outcome and constant migration plays havoc with the human need for rootedness, Empire is just right for those who yearn for belonging and a chance to prove themselves, but who have, somewhere along the road, lost their way.