'Maya' and the monoculture
I recently reviewed a novel titled Maya: Seed Takes Root, by Anand Gandhi and Zain Memon, for The Hindu. Excerpt:
As with novels, the first symptom is the writing, which is conspicuously aphoristic. Lines like “If dreams inspire hope, nightmares inform vigilance” are peppered throughout the text. Of Maya’s three protagonists, Yachay is the anomaly, Kshar is predictability and control manifest, and Ayn represents the alternative path. Gandhi and Memon explore Maya’s concepts of choice through this trio, but it’s not at all messy. It’s fine for Yachay, Kshar, and Ayn to arrive at different ideas because of who they are, yet all three also seem conveniently able to utter polished philosophical propositions. At one point, it’s possible to sense the authors writing.
When it doesn’t falter, Maya is quite enjoyable, with a breezy flow and a mythos that could prove generative for Indian readers looking for sophisticated fiction that’s also culturally familiar (albeit to one specific slice of the demographic). However, the cracks remind readers that Maya is part of a ‘trans-media’ franchise where a board game and a film — whose screenplay and the novel were written together — are in the works. Maya doesn’t make full use of the privileges of being a novel (the thirteenth chapter is the exception that makes the rule) and refuses to transcend the franchise’s needs, including the covert preference for writing plots that can work on a page as well as on a screen.
The Hindu’s Aroon Deep had previously interviewed Gandhi, a filmmaker, and Memon, a game developer. Excerpt:
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.
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.
I sincerely disagree with the idea that “monoculture is dead” and that whereas “a family would gather around a TV, … now everyone at home is consuming their own media”. Platforms are proliferating and there’s indeed more individual choice — but that doesn’t mean shared mass culture is disappearing and therefore a reasonable creative response is to develop IP simultaneously across many media.
A 2025 study in Telematics and Informatics reported that audiences were increasingly dispersed across media even as viewing patterns were becoming less polarised, as people were consuming a range of materials instead of retreating into mutually exclusive enclaves. So someone might watch a YouTube channel, Netflix, cricket, Instagram reels, and a Tamil film all in the same week. This digital cornucopia has also failed to eliminate blockbusters. In a 2008 article, Dutch economist Anita Elberse found that blockbusters were capturing more of the music and home-video markets rather than disappearing as consumers dispersed through what was becoming an effectively infinite catalogue. For instance, KPop Demon Hunters had more than 600 million views within a year — including 482 million in the second half of 2025 alone — and appeared on Netflix's top 10 charts in all 93 countries for which that data is available. The five seasons of Stranger Things attracted 275 million views in the same period. All this is to say a large catalogue and personalised distribution can coexist with attention being concentrated to a great degree around singular hits.
Also, no longer do 30 million people have to sit down at 8.30 pm on Thursday to watch a show because, instead, they encounter it over several weeks as songs on Spotify, clips on YouTube and Instagram, jokes about it on social media, conversations about it at work, and so on.
Second, a novel affords those who compose it unique and rich ways to develop multiple voices, interiority, pacing, etc. Films, on the other hand, can exploit performance, montage, sound, and spectacle. Similarly, where a board game needs interesting systems and opportunities to develop new degrees of freedom, a videogame needs mechanics and a generative relationship between what a player does and what the game’s fiction means. In 2016, the content head of Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed had discussed expanding the game into novels because while films are constrained by duration, videogames surrender considerable control to the player. And the company was exploring novels as a way to narrate a kind of story that existing media couldn’t rather than as just more vessels in which to hash out the same lore. (Maya is apparently trying to build a world, so a board game needn't reproduce the novel. But there’s a difference between needn’t and isn’t: i.e. I’m not yet clear if this is what Maya is planning.) More recently, the years Disney spent expanding Disney+ also increased Marvel content volume across film and television. But by 2024, both then Disney CEO Bob Iger and executives at Marvel admitted they’d produced too much and diluted their focus and that they needed fewer films and series with more attention to quality. This doesn’t mean Maya will also suffer the same fate but it’s a pertinent warning: more manifestations of some IP are not automatically more valuable manifestations of the same IP. More plainly, it remains that every product has to justify itself on the particular medium's own terms.
Many giant franchises also became transmedia after proving that their IP was proportionately compelling. Maya however is building the franchise architecture before audiences have had a chance to decide whether they like the central conceit. Again, this doesn’t mean Maya is doomed to fail but there’s also a reason few others have done that.
I concede the franchise doesn't need somebody who likes novels to have to like Maya the novel to be able to consume everything. If the novel wins 500,000 readers, the board game 100,000 (largely other) players, and the film 20 million viewers, the shared IP will still have allowed the franchise to reach multiple constituencies without requiring any of them to migrate. But my concern is the quality, since I’m told the novel and the Maya film’s screenplay were composed together, and the fight scenes in the novel are suspiciously similar to how one might visualise an ‘epic’ contest on the silver screen.
The media environment has also fragmented considerably — although not to the extent that the statement “monoculture is dead” is true. The UK communications regulator Ofcom has found that fewer than half of British 16-24-year-olds were watching broadcast TV weekly by 2023 and that YouTube use on household televisions has been surging. In the US as well, Nielsen reported streaming overtook broadcast and cable combined in TV viewing for the first time in May 2025. This fragmentation strengthens the case to meet audiences on different platforms instead of assuming one distribution channel will reach everyone but that’s also kind of my point. Developing one product to be consumed by everyone, by availing it on multiple media, only endangers the product at a time when, in the same infinite catalogue and the ability to switch platforms and pause/play at will, quality matters all the more.
And if Maya the novel was any indication, I’m not looking forward.
