The Immortals of Meluha by Amish Tripathi

The last decade has witnessed the birth of a new quasi-literary creature, the IIM bred manager turned scribe. The author of The Immortals of Meluha is the newest member of this posse but that’s not what interested me in this book. Amish sits in a glass fronted cabin at a shouting distance from my own humbler, cluttered workstation. So, it was only natural that I would be curious (like many of my colleagues, one of whose benevolence allowed me to avoid buying it) about the book despite it being perceptibly out of my fairly wide reading range.  

The Immortals is the amalgamation of bits of Indian mythology and history with a dash of what appears to be Hindutva ideology with heaps of imagination. Shiva (as in our dear lord of phallic fame) heads the Gunas who eke out a marginal existence troubled by marauders on the shores of Lake Mansarovar in Tibet. They are invited by a delegation from Meluha to settle in their prosperous land to the south. The Meluhans (who our history text books referred to as Harappans or Indus Valley people) run an overregulated socialist type utopia set up by an ancient king named Rama. They manufacture an elixir that bestows on them good health and makes them extraordinarily long lived. When Shiva partakes of this elixir, his throat turns blue. The Meluhans uphold this as a sign of the realisation of an ancient prophecy about a blue throated saviour. They expect this saviour to bring peace to their land which is troubled by attacks from the Nagas, a shadowy race who are in the employ of the Chandravanshis, the Meluhans’ rivals who hold sway over the Gangetic plain. Much of the book is concerned with how Shiva builds his credibility by touring the Meluhan cities, changing their laws, smoking pot, participating in skirmishes and wooing Sati, the daughter of the king. The plot cruises predictably along towards the inevitable Thermopylae like battle scene where the Meluhans route a far larger Suryanvanshi army. When the victorious Shiva enters the enemy capital at Ayodhya, he finds that what he’s been fed about the foe is not wholly factual. Thus ends the first instalment in yet another trilogy, albeit one set in ancient India.  

Amish’s take on ancient Indian history would have the late K.S. Lal doing a little ‘out of India has history come’ dance on that allegedly ignorant leftist wench, Romila Thapar. I am not so fussed about historical revisionism in fantasy fiction but at times the detailing is quite crude. Take for example the names of cities in the Indus Valley. We have no idea what the denizens of this civilisation called their lands save the single reference ‘Meluha’ in some obscure Sumerian texts. In The Immortals, Amish uses rehashed versions of modern place names, Mohenjodaro, which he justifies as ‘house of mohan,’ is in fact a descriptor meaning mound of the dead in Sindhi, a language that won’t come into existence for another 2000 years or Karachapa from Karachi. He alludes to the legend of the ancient submerged land off the coast of Southern India as the place where all Indians come from and he calls this land Sangamtamil. Historically, Sangamtamil refers to the classical age of Tamil civilisation as well as the form of the language spoken during this era and certainly not a submerged land. Like all good Tamil boys, I know the story of Kumarikandam which is the actual name of the legendary ancestral land of the Tamils which was allegedly lost to the sea. It may seem pedantic to point out what may seem trivial to most readers but the beauty of a novel, even a fantasy, is in its details. Of the many anachronisms and revisionisms, I found the validation for the ‘beneficial origins’ of the caste system particularly odious.  

The contemporariness of the language spoken by the characters is jarring and requires the reader to ascend to a whole new level of suspension of disbelief. The writing is for the most part unoriginal and makes easy use of stock phrases. The initial chapters are particularly amateurish. I read about 50 pages before putting it away. It took a lot of effort to go back and finish it. Fortunately, things got a little better towards the middle with the more frequently appearing action sequences carrying the plot and writing along more fluidly.  

One blogger called ‘The Immortals of Meluha’ a sleeper hit and I noticed this morning whilst ordering some books on Odyssey that it appears to be on their bestseller list. There is definitely a market for this kind of fiction but that market ain’t me.