Love and Power are both drugs and Chanakya Returns tries to keep us addicted. Many have tried to resurrect the legendary maestro of political puppetry and failed. Timeri N. Murari, with his latest work of fiction, bucks that trend.
Chanakya’s overwhelming legend has intrigued many of us. Whether it is the picture woven by the Amar Chitra Katha, watching TV stories about him, or just reading his work and his life as adults, we wonder what it would be like to dig deep inside his head. To have him land up in our times, and express himself through his work certainly has our attention.
A modern day Chanakya rises through the ranks to help his ward Avanti negotiate the labyrinths of power and love. Characters and personalities pass by as the journey gathers speed and the bumps start increasing. And, like the Maurya scion in history, the dynast is handled with care; tough decisions being made on the way.
As a writer, this is stepping into a lesser known world where history collides with news, where emotion works with ambition, and imagination plays with reality. Comparisons with real life people and situations may exist — guessing who’s who, and drawing parallels with father-daughter relationships is tempting — but it takes away from the core story. The characters — what they are, and what they bring to the (reading) table — are strong, and the author knows them well. He has visualised them, explored their minds, hearts (and bodies) and opens them out for us — but only as much as Chanakya, the master craftsman, would have us know.
The paradox of power and love comes to the fore. The two try to coexist, cooperate, collide and cross over. And sometimes, the choice has to be made… The book makes its own choice. Power is its strength, and love is its weakness. Power and love are incompatible, Chanakya believes, and the book agrees. In Chanakya Returns , the corridors of power far outweigh and out-value the streets of love. The drama is in the power, and there lies the story. The thread of a route to power, about choices that one makes, and the beauty of their consequences inspires us enough to turn the page quickly — for Murari’s prose and dialogues and style are well suited to paint pictures of the pursuit of power.
In love, the clever use of words makes great reading and fodder for thought. However, the power of love is more than that — it has to be felt through the reading, it has to be as tangible as the love for power that is your constant companion through the book. And the power of love remains hidden in this book – you are desperate for it to come through, you want to weigh both on the same balance.
There are a few lines that would bring a smile to the readers’ lips — the plagiarising Machiavelli, for one. But those moments of brevity are the seasoning. The meat is in the intrigue, the gravitas, the skulduggery when doors are shut and most lights are off. The shadows. That’s where Chanakya works from, and that’s where the book goes to roost.
This is a book that you want to like. You want a fair battle between Power and Love — you want both to reveal themselves, bring on their armies, and spill blood on the pages. You want it to raise questions about the way today’s politics works and to question if the greater good is fair justification for the blood-spattered journey. And it does raise some philosophical and moral questions.
If you like politics, a touch of history, and wheel within wheels, read the book, for it will pique your interest. But even if you don’t like these themes, read the book anyway, for you will be supporting a writer who has pushed boundaries across time and words and power and love.
