Chennai: Mountain Girnar in Gujarat boasts of a vast Jain temple and Buddhist cave. When Shreyas Bhave, a writer-cum-railway electrification expert visited it, he was awestruck with the architectural marvel and was curious to know the mind behind it. When he enquired, pat came the answer. It was constructed by Chandragupta Maurya and Ashoka.
The incident left him pondering and made him embark on a journey to unravel discoveries of the great grandfather and grandson duo, thus was born Shreyas’ Asoka Trilogy. The concluding sequel, Nemesis of Kalinga was launched recently and it explores how King Ashoka ruled India from his capital Patliputra and answers the eternal question of who will be remembered as the greatest king of the land of Aryans.
“The visit to the mountain excited me and I was on a quest to delve deep,” Shreyas tells News Today when asked about what prompted him to write about trilogy.
The author states that his version was derived straight from the primary sources and attempted to establish the tale as close as possible to how it really could have happened. “Much of what we know of Mauryan times stems from the works of novelists of that age rather than from the writings of historians. The ensuing result being that we are no longer sure what we read is fact or fiction, or a strange amalgamation of both. As a result, a very little has been written about Mauryan history,” Shreyas adds.
The electrical engineer tapped various resources to gather first-hand information. Elucidating what went in the
making, he adds, “I went about reading the ancient Buddhist text Asokavadana to watching the popular Asoka movie. I also read historical accounts on Ashoka written by foreign authors like Charles Allen. I was open to explore the times of the Mauryas as a traveller and wanted to paint a picture of how exactly the events of those days must have taken place. My main focus was to create a political-thriller, based on those times.”
“A book that was of great help to shape up the land of Bharathvarsha from those times was Land of the Seven Rivers: A Brief History of India’s Geography by Sanjeev Sanyal. Finally, I let my imagination run its course and came up with fictitious characters such as Kanakdatta, Avarak, Hardeo and Dileepa in the story,” Shreyas shares.
Asked if his trilogy was same as he had planned, he quotes ‘Too much of anything is bad’, and adds, “A writer who plots first and then stick hard to the same is no better than a writer with no plot who lets his characters decide where the story goes. A good author manages both two, having a strong plot, yet letting his characters change it as the story progresses. Many things in the end product were not there in the plot. Many were changed in the course of the writing.”
Shreyas shares that plotting the trilogy was the greatest challenge. “Any book must have a great plot and climax, else, people will not love it. The chapters must end on anticipation; the plot must be a page-turner. A lot of thinking time goes into the plotting of the story but once the plot is perfectly prepared, everything else flows very smoothly,” the writer elaborates.
Whenever he gets hit by writer’s block, he derives inspiration from the characters about whom he writes. “I write about who makes me feel trivial – Alexander or Chanakya for instance. While Alexander conquered the world when he was 21, Chanakya was the mastermind behind the rich Mauryan dynasty,” he says.
Next up, the young author has embarked on a new trilogy based on one of the coolest and most efficient spies, Guptachar in Indian history.
Advising wannabe writers, he suggests writing everyday and learning designing tools like PhotoShop to help market the book.