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“sarithira kadhai” - translated literally, it is “historical novel”. Heard of “Ponniyin Selvan”, “Sivakamiyin Sapatham” or “Kadal Pura”? All these novels fall in the category of historical novels. What exactly is a historical novel and whats the purpose of this (and a few more to follow) post?

Basically, a historical novel is a story set in a totally different era, usually in the era of kings, hundreds and sometimes, thousands of years ago. Facts are retained (as much as possible) and a fictional story is woven through facts and incidents. Of course, there is no such rule as you should write a historical novel this way or that way, its entirely upto the author. But usually, extensive research is done before a good historical novel is written, and most authors take special care to make sure that they don’t distort the facts. They might add extra characters though, to make the story interesting.

One such example in English is “The Seventh Secret” by Irving Wallace (its set relatively in the recent past, as recent as the second world war period). This post is about some of the extraordinary historical novels, but in Tamil. I’ve read and thoroughly enjoyed a few of them.

I’m not sure if anyone is writing historical novels anymore, but they used to be a rage when I was in school. Even today, a huge number of people are interested in this form of fiction. I remember specifically two authors, in fact three - Kalki, Sandilyan and Akilan. I’ve read at least three of Kalki and one of Akilan (not sure if they wrote more than that) and Sandilyan’s, I’ve lost count. I’ll write about some of them in the following posts, if any of you reading this post have similar interests, please leave a comment.