The Day the Earth Bloomed is set in the Sangam era (3rd century BCE), and traces the journey of a family of paanars or bards whose hunger and poverty compels them to seek the patronage of kings who are known for their love of music and dance. The family is in search of their son Mayilan who disappeared years ago to escape poverty and is later discovered in the court of one of the famous kings of the time where he joins the maravars, a group of bandits who wage wars on the king’s behalf. The novel is divided into three sections that are focalized through three principal characters: Kolumban, his daughter Chithira, and his son Mayilan.
Unlike the Sangam corpus that is divided into akam (about the ‘inner’ feminine world of love and domesticity) and puram (about the ‘outer’ masculine world of war and politics), these categories are one among a series of binaries that are ironized and unresolved in the novel—mobility/rootedness, inner/outer, self/other, love/war, masculine/feminine, life/death, and so on. Reading the novel is like walking through a circular hallway lined with objects and mirrors that reflect their inverted images. The novel’s story is framed by a mythic narrative of loss and resurrection that links the beginning to the end. Let me return to this point later.