What is Adeva?

What is Adeva? | Everything you need to know about my Indian Grimdark Fantasy World

What is Adeva? Why this name? What kind of stories can you find in this grimdark world? As we come closer to the release of Abandoned by the Gods, I felt this is the perfect time for me to talk about my fantasy world.

Photo by Pixabay

In this post, I’m going to talk about my process on how I came about creating this fantasy world. What does Adeva represent? Why these themes and settings? And, much more. If you follow me on social media, you’ve seen my recent series where I added small tidbits about Adeva. If you’d like to check out my latest posts on Instagram.

Those social media posts deal with the in-world reality of Adeva. This blog post will talk about the behind-the-scenes and how I created the world of Adeva.

Adeva is the fictional setting of my upcoming trilogy. Inspired by my home country of India, its mythology and history, as well as contemporary socio-political and economic conditions, Adeva is a fantasy world. A continent, more than a single country or nation, Adeva is full of many kingdoms, and has a rich thousand-year history that I will shed light on in my upcoming books.

The most important part you need to remember about Adeva is that the Gods abandoned this land over a thousand years ago.

What does Adeva mean?

Deva – god
Pre-fix “A-” – lack of
So, Adeva literally translates to “a lack of God”

But, there is a deeper meaning to this name, which again takes me back to the themes I wish to explore in my books. Why it was named so, and by whom, will be explored in the books. Does the name have multiple meanings and connotations? We’ll cross that bridge when we get there.

Why Indian Grimdark?

Growing up, I saw a lot of mythology fiction in my favourite bookstores. Meanwhile, original Indian fantasy rarely made the cut. I didn’t mind the modern or alternative takes on our beloved epics. But most of the books I saw were lazy rehashes trying to capitalise on the popularity of Ramayana and Mahabharata. Since then, I wanted to create an original Indian Fantasy world.

I chose Grimdark because a lot of my personal beliefs and preferences align with what a Grimdark story would explore. In addition, current affairs, especially those starting from 2014, have also been foundational in shaping Adeva.

What themes will I be exploring in the coming shorts and novels?

Photo by Himanshu Kumawat

For the most part, I’ll be focusing on faith, religion, history, and power imbalances resulting from a manipulation of the three. I grew up in a religious household and spent two decades pretending to believe because my family would not have accepted my atheism. Pretending for all those years gave me a unique perspective on faith and religion. I’ve seen them both have detrimental effects on my family members. Faith and religion are the major cause of what India has been going through since 2014.

Therefore, a strong narrative exploring these concepts in all their raw brutality felt like the need of the hour.

Does Abandoned by the Gods also feature the same themes?

In bite sizes, yes. To better understand the short stories from Abandoned by the Gods, it is important to understand Indian society. And I mean this is an absolutely sceptical, emotionless, and blatant manner.

The stories from Abandoned by the Gods touch upon some of the worst aspects of Indian society. Blind faith, classism, casteism, sexism, all make up for major themes—and content warnings—for all of my shorts. I have chosen not to hold back because, at this point in my life, I couldn’t care less. If you really want to solve a problem, you have to admit that the problem exists. And so, here I am, telling raw, brutal stories with the worst of humanity at their core.

What are the Four Short Stories?

The four Short Stories (in order of appearance) are:

Servant of God

I was inspired to write this story after reading about the devdasi pratha for the first time. Another major inspiration was when a dear friend of mine mentioned how some women from their community tended to get possessed during major celebrations. However, my friend didn’t talk about it as a miracle, rather that they had noticed that the only people getting possessed were also those with the most mental exhaustion and domestic issues. Researching both of these topics led to quite interesting—and sometimes disturbing—reads.

I’ve had variations of this story play out in many different ways in my head. Finally, in 2022, I grounded this story in Adeva, which ended up being the perfect place to explore this idea. With a word count of 11,000+, this story technically becomes a novelette, but for the sake of simplicity, I’m going to refer to it as a short.

The Princess Who Loved Her Maid

I’m not too big on romance, but I wanted to challenge myself. So, this ended up being my attempt to write a love story.

I set this short 800 years before my main series because I wanted this to be the true story behind a romance etched in the annals of Adeva’s history. Without going into spoilers, I’ll say that I was able to explore inter-caste and inter-class love, whilst also establishing certain aspects of Adeva’s culture and history. I particularly love the ending, because it is a happy ending, but makes you wonder about the legacy it leaves.

Dacoit, Son of a Noble

I’ve always been fascinated with the concept of Vengeance. Old Boy, Pieta, Kill Bill, are some of my favourite revenge stories. However, I always wanted there to be a solid anti-vengeance theme if I ever wrote a story in that spirit.

I explored Dacoity, the Uniting Crusade, and other aspects of Adeva that are key to the main series. In fact, the conclusion of this short is a very key event that happens off-page in book 1.

Note: This short story was first published in Dark Horses Magazine Vol 22, November 2023.

Bittersweet Chutney

My personal favourite of the four stories, Bittersweet Chutney helped me examine several important themes and concepts. One was the idea of strong independent women. I’m not talking about a muscular sword-wielding warrior woman, but just an ordinary homemaker and mother of two with special skills limited to what was imposed on her by her gender roles. And yet, she perseveres.

Another, very dark theme of this story is religious fanaticism, what I see as the worst-case scenario if society were to subscribe to a religious extremist ideology. In fact, one of the most gut-wrenching scenes from this short is directly inspired by a real-life incident which loosely connects to this idea of religious fanaticism. I won’t name it here because I don’t want the wrong kind of attention.

Fun fact, this is the only story in the anthology which happens directly parallel to events in book 1. No need to worry about spoilers! That event is a commonly known fact at the beginning of book 1.

Conclusion

I hope this post sheds some light on the world I have created. I haven’t gone into too many details because I don’t want to spoil the stories I have yet to tell.

I’ll be closing the ARC requests for Abandoned by the Gods soon. If you’d like to read an eARC, click on the button below!

read the e-Arc

Hopefully, this post has piqued your interests, and you will dare to step into this grimdark world, starting with my Indian Grimdark Fantasy Anthology.

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