Shiva Rupaya Vishnave: Part 1- The Warhorse and the Dancer

"WHAT IF A GOD WAS ACCIDENTALLY CREATED ACROSS EIGHT CENTURIES BY PEOPLE WHO NEVER INTENDED TO CREATE ONE?"

Three years after the war, Emperor Sri Krishna Devaraya returns to a celebrating Vijayanagara. The war is finally over, and the kingdom is thriving. Yet sitting on his throne, he is unable to feel the victory. The cheers of the crowd reach him like echoes from a battlefield.

On his wedding night, the bride he has just conquered a kingdom to marry raises a stone above a sleeping figure in the dark — and discovers, too late, that the king was five steps ahead of her all along.

It is only the beginning of his unraveling.

When the doctors and the priests fail to bring him back to the world, and when every other remedy fails, a dancer from the village of Kuchipudi offers the king an unusual cure:

A story.

The tale journeys backward through eight centuries of history — following a forgotten sculptor who carves a goddess in a cave and dies beside a pond, a wandering tribe that finds its home in the forest, kings and warriors who fight wars they do not fully understand, and philosophers who ask questions the world is not ready to answer. Across generations, these people struggle to protect what they love, survive what they inherit, and make sense of a world divided by faith, power, and memory.

None of them intends to change history.
None of them intends to create a God.
Yet together, they do.

The Warhorse and the Dancer is the first book of the Shiva Rupaya Vishnave Trilogy—a reverse chronological literary epic spanning South India across centuries. Book One shows the consequence. Book Two will show the generation that produced it. Book Three will show the origin.

This novel contains an original Srungaram song written by S.S. Krishna Kiriti, composed by Mani Sharma, and sung by S.P. Balasubrahmanyam — one of his final recordings — accessible via QR code at the emotional heart of the story.

For readers of Amish Tripathi, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, and Arundhati Roy.