What made your write The Queen of Jasmine Country? What was the inspiration behind it?I had loved Andal as a reader and a listener for a long time, and did not think she would become a character in my own writing, ever. She swept in, and filled me – filled my eyes with tears, my heart with love, and my pages with words – and here we are.I didn’t ask myself questions like, “Would a goddess weep as she fought with the mortal who raised her?” Instead I asked myself, for instance, “Take a teenager from a provincial town and put her in a big city like Madurai during a festival – how would she react?”Reading on and around Andal was very important for me, and I found that academic interlocutors were the most interesting sources of learning for me.Very little is known about the historical figure who wrote the two works credited to Andal, the Tiruppavai and the Nachiyar Tirumoli.

I made a note of this, wrote the prologue the following year without any sense of the plot to come, and did not imagine even as late as last year that this novel would manifest so quickly.Although we do not know what people’s quotidian lives were like, Tamil civilisation and literature were quite advanced by this time. However, all of that changed when the author had two dreams in 2014. When she realises the vow has failed,. Then in 2014, I had two dreams about her. So while I read widely on and around the goddess, historically speaking I was preoccupied only with the girl. I had loved Andal as a reader and a listener for a long time, and did not think she would become a character in my own writing, ever, says Sharanya Manivannan.In conversation with this correspondent, the author shares more about the riveting manuscript, the historical figure of Andal, and the mysteries and romance that surround her. What made situating her chronologically easier for me was that the hagiography of her father, Vishnuchittan or Periyalvar, involves the 9th century king Srimara Srivallabha, and there is astrological evidence of the positions of Jupiter and Venus as she describes them in her poems in the year 851 CE or so.An immersive read, Manivannan says that while she has always loved Andal as a listener and a reader, she never thought the historical figure would become a character in her won writing.

It was like a thunderstorm of a love affair that leaves no scar yet lingers forever in who you become because of it.In terms of hagiography, I relied on oral hagiography most of all, as well as academic papers on the same. Her given name, and the only name my protagonist knows herself by, was Kodhai.It’s so strange for me to ponder my inspiration for my book now that it is in the world and out of my hands, and the more that people ask me about this the stranger it becomes – my initial admiration as a reader, then my later surrender to her as muse. So on this foundation, I filled in the details.What was the kind of background research that you did for the character of Andal?Very little is known about the historical figure who wrote the two works credited to Andal, the Tiruppavai and the Nachiyar Tirumoli. Among the most vital ones was Dennis Hudson’s work called “Tantric Rites in Antal’s Poetry”, which solved an important mystery for me, as to why the voices in the Tiruppavai and the Nachiyar Tirumoli are so varied, even though they appear to be located close together in time.

Sharanya Manivannans debut novel The Queen of Jasmine Country is a classic, often mystic, occasionally brooding and introspective story of a 9th century girl, born under the boughs of Tulsi leaves who would go on to embody a sense of love few can ever imagine.I was very clear about the distinction between the two: girl and goddess. In the other dream, she said I should write a novel about her. It’s important to add that the name Andal is an epithet, meaning “she who rules”. In one of them, she discouraged me from praying to get married given that I had such unscintillating options around undercut anchors Suppliers me (praying to get married is a theme of the book, and the fact that my own such prayers spectacularly failed certainly gave me an insight into how my protagonist felt!).In my book, Kodhai undertakes the pavai nombu with her friends, praying to find a good husband