Lending voice to Kalki’s characters, making them heard far & wide

Anyone who reads Kalki Krishnamoorthy’s ‘Ponniyin Selvan’, the perennial bestseller in Tamil fiction, would be possessed by a passion to be transported back in time, to see and live with the book’s characters, or at least hear their voices. While several efforts to make a film out of the book failed at different stages in the past, almost six decades after the book was published, the efforts of a Ponniyin Selvan fan resulted in the five-volume novel being adapted into an audiobook.
Stage director and telefilm-maker Bombay Kannan, who produced the audiobook in 2012, has so far made audiobooks of three novels of Kalki - Sivakamiyin Sabatham, Ponniyin Selvan, Parthiban Kanavu and Sandilyan’s ‘Kadal Pura’. An ardent Kalki fan, he is currently working on the audiobook versions of the author’s ‘Solaimalai Ilavarasi’ and ‘Mohini Theevu’. His latest audio book, Ra Ki Rangarajan’s Naan Krishnadevarayan was released on April 11 in Chennai.
With 200 hours of audio books to his credit thus far, Kannan believes the form is a development that cannot be overlooked. At a time when we are witnessing an increase in the costs of printing and publishing books, audiobooks will form the future, he says.
When it comes to rendition, Kannan’s audiobooks stand out when compared with others in the market. "Audio books usually have a single person reading out the entire text. But I wanted to bring out the emotions in the dialogues of the characters," he says. For Ponniyin Selvan, he used 65 voice artistes to produce the 78-hour long audiobook in which he plays the narrator. The book’s uniqueness is that it treads the line between an audiobook and a radio play.
Kannan, a former bank employee, after a brief stint as an amateur stage artist in 1969, started making telefilms. In 1998 a popular Tamil television channel approached him to direct a telefilm based on Kalki’s novel ‘Sivakamiyin Sabatham’. But due to various reasons, the project was stalled. Kannan made an audiobook of the novel in 2010. Impressed with the quality of the work, C K Venkatraman, a Kalki fan approached Kannan to make an audiobook of Ponniyin Selvan, by offering to produce the work.
Kannan says satisfying the readers’ expectation on the way the characters sounded was one of the many hurdles he faced while recording the audiobook. "Many fans of Kalki, after listening to a chapter or two, would tell me that the voice of the characters did not match their expectations. But as they listened more, they warmed up to the voices." The most gratifying moment for Kannan was when a group of visually challenged people told him that through his work, they could at last ‘see’ the books’ characters.
Currently working on making a six-hour telefilm based on the book, Kannan says the film will have the most vital parts of the book, and the dialogues, though shortened, will the just the way Kalki wrote them. With plans of shooting partly in areas around Kumbakonam, Kannan says he aims to complete the crowd-funded project by January 2018.