Fantasy rooted in Indian culture

“Sharikrida is an old Sanskrit word that means a game of chess. The actual spelling is Sarikrida, but I’ve stylised it – as I have done to a lot of other Sanskrit words in my book – to make them sound more interesting,” begins 23-year-old Krishna, who is the nephew of veteran filmmaker Mani Ratnam, as he speaks about his first book Sharikrida that was released at Starmark recently. The narrative, with an empowered female protagonist, is set in a futuristic India where modern civilisation has collapsed and what’s left of the subcontinent are six kingdoms — kingdoms playing a desperate, brutal game of chess. “The ‘pieces’ used for these games are actual living men. While the work takes inspiration from and is an Indian homage of sorts to Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, Hunger Games and other classic fantasies, the most direct inspiration for it was actually the Mahabharata , where the fates of entire kingdoms and people are decided by the outcome of a single game,” adds Krishna, a commerce graduate from Loyola College, who left his job as a business reporter to promote the book. 

Sharikrida is the first novel published by Chennai-based publishers Zuna. Getting his work published as a young writer wasn’t easy. “While I had a lot of selfdoubts and fears initially, nothing was as difficult as the publishing process. No one takes you very seriously even when you say you’re serious about something. Secondly, I was also writing in a genre (non-mythological fantasy) that most publishers weren’t convinced about. Some publishers just asked me to drop the idea, while a few others asked for so many changes that it would no longer have been the same book if I’d agreed to them. There were a lot of hiccups. But nothing is worse than being denied an opportunity. How will you know if someone’s good or bad without giving them a chance?” asks Krishna who plans to do a Masters in screenplay writing and write for films like his aunt Suhasini Maniratnam, who released his book.