Seattle, Sep 19 (IANS): Author and former UN official Lakshmi Puri says a multi-season web adaptation of her novel “Swallowing the Sun” is being developed, with screenplay work under way as she takes the book’s international edition on a tour of the United States.
In an exclusive interview with IANS at the Jaipur Literature Festival in Seattle, Puri discussed the adaptation, the family history that inspired her novel and her belief that storytelling can advance the cause of women’s empowerment.
The proposed series has made significant progress she said and expressed hope that it would eventually appear on a major streaming platform. She did not identify a platform or announce a release date.
“So they are writing the screenplay and it’s, it’s, and then, you know, the whole process is ongoing,” she said.
Puri said the adaptation was announced in September last year. Her account placed the project in development, with writing and other work continuing.
The novel’s journey, she said, began at the Jaipur Literature Festival in early 2024, which its international edition was launched this year. Returning to the festival’s international circuit in Seattle brought a sense of renewal as she introduced the book to another readership, she noted.
Puri described the novel as an instant bestseller that had also received critical acclaim. Marathi and Telugu translations were available, she said, while a Hindi edition was expected soon. She said the Marathi and Telugu editions had also become bestsellers.
The international edition was launched in Britain in February this year. Her US tour takes her from Seattle to Los Angeles, San Francisco and Houston, with a mix of festival sessions and separate engagements.
Two appearances are linked to JLF, in Seattle and Houston. She also plans to attend the South Asian Literature and Art festival and participate in other events.
One engagement coincides with Gandhi Jayanti. Puri said she would use that occasion to discuss how Mahatma Gandhi comes alive in “Swallowing the Sun”, which places its characters against the backdrop of India’s struggle for independence.
Asked what inspired the novel after a career that took her around the world, Puri traced its origins to a story much closer to home.
Her work at the United Nations had focused on gender equality and women’s empowerment. Fiction offered another way to pursue the same cause, through characters whose lives could bring those concerns directly to readers.
“So I realised that this cause is best promoted through storytelling,” she said.
Within her own family, she had a story she had wanted to explore for decades. Puri described her parents as feminists ahead of their time, whose lives combined a commitment to education with a deep engagement in literature and culture.
Her mother, she said, was among the early women in Maharashtra to pursue postgraduate education and study law. Her father was a lawyer who, she said, contributed to work on India’s Constitution in support of B.R. Ambedkar.
Both parents wrote poetry. Their interests, values and experiences helped shape the world she wanted to recreate.
Yet Puri was careful to distinguish inspiration from biography. The novel pays tribute to her parents and their generation, but its characters and narrative belong to fiction.
Poetry runs through the book, alongside its engagement with Marathi culture and literature. Puri said she wanted to bring that cultural inheritance to readers while telling a story that travelled beyond a single region.
The narrative moves across India, taking in places including Indore, Mumbai, Banaras, Shimla and Delhi. Its roots remain in Maharashtra, but its geographical and emotional reach is wider.
“So it’s a pan-India story, quintessentially Indian, but universal in appeal,” she said.
She described it as both an epic romance and a story of women’s empowerment. The questions it explores include how women a century ago found the confidence to act, pushed against restrictions and participated in the freedom struggle.
The title comes from a verse by the saint-poet Muktabai. Puri pointed to its imagery of extraordinary, seemingly impossible feats as the source of the novel’s underlying faith in human possibility.
“So, you know, emphasising that if you have faith, if you persist, if you dare, you can achieve the impossible,” she said.
That spirit, she explained, also speaks to people who feel insignificant or limited by their surroundings. Her characters’ experiences carry the idea that circumstances need not determine the limits of a person’s contribution.
Puri also placed the book’s international journey within the wider movement of Indian literature across borders. She praised the Jaipur Literature Festival’s organisers for taking Indian writing abroad while introducing international writers to audiences in India.
“And that osmosis has been a major contribution to spreading India’s soft power around the world,” she said.
She welcomed the festival’s expanding presence in countries including the United States, Britain and Spain. Its overseas editions, she said, had helped its reach grow with each passing year.
Responding to a question about the future of writing in the age of artificial intelligence, Puri expressed hope that the written word would survive in its original conception, returning the conversation to the human impulse behind her own book.
Puri’s career has spanned diplomacy, service at the United Nations and literary work. A former UN assistant secretary-general, she linked her turn to fiction with the gender equality cause she had championed internationally, drawing on family experiences to explore it through individual lives.
“Swallowing the Sun” brings together romance, poetry, women’s aspirations and India’s freedom struggle. Its central story draws on the generation that inspired Puri within her own home, while its translations and international edition carry that account to readers beyond its original English-language audience.
