In the early hours of a day in October in a North Goa mansion, the lights are out throughout the property — except for an office at the far end with a long table, where a team of young designers and coders is burning the midnight oil to build a media franchise spanning board games, novels, video games, films… everything that can be constructed around a fictional world.
This is the nerve centre of Maya, a “narrative universe” being crafted by Anand Gandhi, the independent filmmaker behind the philosophical Ship of Theseus, which premiered at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival, and the 2018 horror fantasy Tumbbad. For this project, Gandhi, 45, has teamed up with his longtime collaborator Zain Memon, 35, who led the development of Shasn, a political strategy board game that has found both mainstream success and a dedicated following among board-game aficionados.
Inside the sci-fi universe of Maya
Maya is set on the planet of Neh, a universe with seven species in constant tension, ruled by a near-omniscient class of “divine” beings that draw their power from the control of a planetary network of trees that can read their minds, simulate futures, and give the ruling class a panoramic view of the world. For most beings on this planet, not tethering to the tree for extended periods is akin to borderline treason.
The setting is a playground for the philosophies Memon and Gandhi have toyed with in their other works: the nature of political power in Shasn, the whole and its parts in Ship of Theseus, and now everything from surveillance capitalism to AI in Maya. What is the best medium for fables on these burning questions? Maya’s answer, it seems, is all of the above.
Game designer Zain Memon
| Photo Credit:
Emmanual Yogini
Unique architecture
Franchises on the scale of Star Wars, Harry Potter or Marvel have eluded India so far. But that is not to say that the country does not have the talent for it. In fact, cities like Mumbai and Bengaluru have a large industry dedicated to post-production and visual effects. But that alone does not lead to a lasting cultural legacy, nor does it yield the substantial funding that actual ownership over a transmedia franchise can entail.
The work that Department of Lore, the holding firm for Maya, has done so far, far exceeds what might be expected of a franchise that hasn’t fully released its first entry. “We spent four years on the lore,” Memon says from his office, next to a table with prototypes of game pieces for Yuyutsu, the Maya universe’s first board game. From generations of in-universe history to a Sanskrit-inspired series of terms (included in the first book as a pages-long appendix), the world has been prepared well in advance.
A creative from the ‘Maya’ universe.
And the funding has followed. Gandhi and Memon initiated a slick crowdfunding campaign, promising early backers a numbered edition of the first book, and other rewards. Against a $10,000 target, Maya raised over $400,000. The marketing has been intentionally geared to a global audience from the get go, with an audiobook narrated by Australian actor Hugo Weaving (Agent Smith in The Matrix), and with much of the initial contributions coming from outside India.
“We even had to rethink the architecture,” Memon says, as the in-universe species (the svaankas) need their own aesthetic. The duo partnered with an architecture college, to have students design dwellings for each svaanka. One of those designs has already won a prize, earning the franchise its first accolade.
A creative from the ‘Maya’ universe.
Why so many formats at the same time? Why not start with one and then work on others if the demand calls for it? “We have to realise that monoculture is dead,” Memon says. Earlier, a family would gather around a TV, but now everyone at home is consuming their own media. Maya, he says, is poised to give everyone an “entry point” into this world.
A cultural monument
“The community has been so warm, so welcoming,” Gandhi says in a video call from New York, after spending weeks at various conventions promoting Maya. “We started with Worldcon in Seattle, L.A. Comic Con, and then we had New York Comic Con which really brought the Kickstarter campaign to an end.”
For him, Maya has been a chance to address heavy philosophical concepts, something that the first book, Maya: Seed Takes Root, which releases next February, is brimming with. “For us, it’s not only a commercial question,” he insists, but “a question of deploying the ideas, concepts, and insights that we have in the language of fable and metaphor, expressed in experiences that come in passive and interactive frameworks.”
The first novel, ‘Maya: Seed Takes Root’.
The idea is “not only to speculate and simulate” the future, he says, but to “prototype it and model it so that we can build it”. It is no accident, therefore, that Seed Takes Root uses its characters to explore parallels to everything, from race, caste, and immigration to issues like surveillance and AI. The creatures may be winged, serpentine and alien, but as with all fables, the message is designed for earthly consumption and reflection.
Gandhi hopes Maya will be a “vast cultural monument that will live and breathe in films and games and graphic novels and pretty much every expression we have invented”.
A creative from the ‘Maya’ universe.
In purely commercial terms, what Maya may be on the cusp of — a franchise built in India for the world — is novel enough. But, Gandhi says, this is just a means to an end. “The truth is that we are not a media franchise at all, in the way that media franchises are usually understood,” he says. “We are not a cash grab studio. We are trying to create a framework, a narrative framework that becomes an ideology sandbox,” he says. Memon adds that there are plans to open up the world of Maya to external writers through API, or an application programming interface, a term usually limited to programmers making different pieces of code work together.
Overall, Maya will, Gandhi hopes, swim against the tide of Western cultural domination in both popular culture and classical philosophy. “Our generation is the one that has the resources and the wherewithal to show up at the table,” he says.
aroon.deep@thehindu.co.in
