Story Outline

Dharma Kusuma: Defender of Langkasuka
TURMOIL IN THE SOUTH EAST

Book 1 of the Dharma Kusuma Trilogy

'Tis a tale of a brave people
How they had to take up arms
And resort to blade and battle
To liberate their beloved motherland
In a time far past, in a long gone world

Story Outline

The time is the 11th century. The place is the South East. The region which encompasses Suvarna Bhumi, the Golden Continent, and Suvarna Dvipa, the Golden Islands. An area riven by great turmoil, resulting from old tribal enmities mixed with new religious rivalries, contest for territory, prestige and power, and competition for influence and advantage amid increasingly lucrative land and sea trade routes.

In this conflict torn region lies the land named Amdan Negara. One of several kingdoms of an ancient federation named Langkasuka Adhi Negara, sometimes also called Langkasuka Maha Mandala, that had collapsed, their once sovereign raja demoted to vassal narapati, in the wake of the combined Srivijayan-Sailendran invasion and conquest of the northern parts of the Golden Peninsula, circa 775 AD.

In the midst of all this confusion, chaos and anarchy, three people between them, somehow, ends up shaping the destiny of the Langkasukan federation.

Shakranta, the last scion of the now near extinct Dharma Kusuma Dynasty, fighting to regain his family’s lost throne and to restore a fallen kingdom.

Isabelle, a young girl of Saxon-Norman parentage from Angli Land, a country ravaged by war in the Isles of Britannia, lost and stranded in a foreign land, struggling for her very sanity and survival.

Ozalan, child of an Oghuz Turk mercenary and a Bolgar woman, orphaned at six years old, staring at the bleakest of futures ahead of him.

 

Their paths meet in the many-splendoured city of Constantinople, in the glorious land of Byzantium. Strangers brought together by different strands of fate, the trio sail eastward to Shakranta’s homeland in the Golden Peninsula. Retracing the routes once travelled by Shakranta’s distant ancestors centuries earlier.

Shakranta’s grandfather, Adhi Vira, lights the first flames of rebellion to overthrow a band of foreigners who had seized the governorship of Amdan Negara, the collapsed kingdom of their ancient ancestors. Subsequently, his mother Kembang Seri Wangi ably continues the family heritage as the next narapati. But their lost dynastic throne is still beyond their grasp, their former ancestral land still vassal to a powerful foreign empire, while yet another one is rapidly emerging, now looming over the horizon. It is now left to Shakranta to help her fight for Amdan Negara's complete restoration.

 

Is there hope for Shakranta, the Dharma Kusuma Dynasty and the broken kingdom of Amdan Negara?