History, Bias & Narrative: Who Controls the Truth? ft. Ashwin Sanghi

ELI5/TLDR

Ashwin Sanghi — Mumbai businessman turned bestselling thriller writer (Rosabal Line, Chanakya’s Chant, the Bharat series) — sits with IIMUN’s Rishabh Shah for a long, meandering interview. Half is autobiography: South Bombay boyhood, a maternal grand-uncle who shipped him a book a week, an MBA at Yale, two decades of writing in the cracks of a family business, the long agony of getting Rosabal Line published. The other half is Sanghi’s pet theme: that history is a story told by someone with a viewpoint, that myth often hides a truth, and that India should now read its past with five lenses instead of one. The argument is reasonable on its face. The application — Dwarka, the Ram Janmabhoomi site, the line “for 70 years from 1947 to 2014 you fed me one narrative” — leans clearly toward the Hindutva reading of Indian history, even when dressed in the language of pluralism.

The Full Story

The boy in South Bombay who got a book a week

Sanghi’s setup is unusual but not rare for the class he comes from. Marwari Banya family, Cathedral school, summer “vacations” replaced by apprenticeships in his father’s office and factories — at twelve he is being taught to underline ledger account heads by an old munim in a black coat. The counterweight is his Majle Nana-ji in Kanpur, his mother’s uncle, who runs a textile business and reads in Persian, Urdu and Latin. Every week or two, a book arrives in Bombay with a note: read this, write me a letter telling me why you liked or disliked it, then I’ll send the next. Autobiography of a Yogi at fifteen. Rajagopalachari’s Mahabharata. Freedom at Midnight. War and Peace (which he gives up on). Lolita before he turns eighteen.

His mother contributes the other shelf: Jeffrey Archer, Frederick Forsyth, Ken Follett, later John Grisham and Dan Brown. Sanghi credits this twin diet — high seriousness from Nana-ji, mass-market entertainment from his mother — for the kind of writer he became. Conspiracy thrillers stitched onto Indian myth and history. Page-turners with a 20-page bibliography at the back.

His grandfather’s other gift is a one-line frame Sanghi keeps returning to: Lakshmi follows Saraswati. Wisdom first, money as the byproduct. He uses it to resolve the early conflict between his father (focus on bookkeeping, not book reading) and his own pull toward writing. The deeper claim — that he was being “rewired” without realising it, like the frog in slowly heating water — is probably true. He was an average student at Cathedral. The real education was happening at home.

Yale, gas plants, dotcoms, and the slush pile

He cracks the GMAT at 750, flies to the US for in-person interviews because no American MBA programme wants a 21-year-old fresh out of a 10+2+3 system, and ends up at Yale. In retrospect, he says, none of this was as life-or-death as it felt. He could have done other things. The credential was a comfort blanket.

Then the long failure tour. An old industrial gas plant inherited from Europe whose unit power economics are broken — he bangs his head against it for two years before realising it was never going to work. A late-90s bet on multi-brand online auto retail, killed by the dotcom crash. And the great failure that turned into the great success: writing the Rosabal Line between 2002 and 2005, then having forty-seven literary agents and publishers say no over the next three years.

He self-publishes through Lulu in 2007 — print-on-demand was new, the Kindle was a clunky brick that had only just shipped. He hawks copies in Indian bookshops, gets passed around distributors, and finally Hemu Ramaiah at Landmark forwards the manuscript to Gautam Padmanabhan at the just-launched Westland. Senior Padmanabhan, the doyen of Indian publishing and Gautam’s father, reads it and tells his son: don’t bother polling the other nine readers, publish this. First royalty cheque, 2008: twenty-five thousand rupees.

The book does not move on its own. Sanghi does a “book yatra” — Bombay, Delhi, Kolkata, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune — visiting ten or fifteen stores per city, talking to whoever is on the floor, asking them to put the book up front. The print runs go 3,000, 5,000, 8,000, then he loses count. The lesson he wants young writers to take away is double-edged: don’t write while hungry, keep your day job, let writing be the morning or the late evening. And expect that the book itself does not sell the book. The author selling the book sells the book.

His advice to first-time writers compresses into a few rules. Get an agent if you can — you skip the slush pile. Don’t bother with vanity publishing. Self-publishing gives you discoverability, but understand the long tail: at the time he checked, the average self-published title sold 57 copies in its lifetime, most of them to the author and family. Self-publishing is Indian Idol — the platform where you might be found. Most contestants are not.

The five-point checklist under the tree at Rambagh

Post-Covid, on a winter morning at the Rambagh in Jaipur, Sanghi sits on a bench with no laptop and writes down what actually matters. The list, in no order:

Money — enough to not have to think about it. Not a target, a floor. Hospital bills, holidays, sleep at night.
Health — yours and the people around you. One serious diagnosis can swallow five years.
Purpose — something you wake up for. He gets up at 5 a.m. to write the next chapter because he wants to.
Relationships — small circle is enough. Five people who are happy when you’re happy.
Belief — not religion. The recognition that the road and weather are not in your hands. You may be the best driver in the best car, but the universe lays the road.

The car-and-road metaphor is the heart of his stoicism. He locates agency in the driving, surrenders the rest to whatever you want to call it. It’s a soft frame, well worn, and works for him.

The marriage, in three meetings

Married late by Marwari standards — 30 or 31, in 1998. The arranged route after he tells his parents he’s ready. Three meetings with Anushika across two weeks, then a proposal. The thing that tipped it, he says, was that she came to the third meeting with questions, not answers. Where do you see our lives going? How will you provide? He took it as a sign of someone grounded enough to ask the right things.

He folds in a riff on what he calls the “sixth sense” — really just the brain doing fast pattern-matching below the threshold of awareness. He used the same idea in 13 Steps to Bloody Good Luck. Twenty-seven years married. He gives Anushika credit for not flinching when he started writing seriously. The first laptop he wrote on, she put in front of him.

The history argument — and where it tilts

The second half of the conversation is where Sanghi makes his case about narrative, and where his Hindutva colouring becomes hard to miss even though he disclaims it.

His core moves are unobjectionable in form:

C.S. Lewis on myth: “a myth is a lie that reveals a truth.” Don’t treat the surface details as the point.
Santayana on history: “a pack of lies about events that never happened written by people who were never there.” It is impossible to remove the narrator’s bias. Anyone claiming impartial recounting is wrong.
The 3D-glasses metaphor: one beam of light gives you a flat image. Multiple beams aggregated give you depth. Read five narratives of the same event, not one. He cites 1857: “first war of Indian independence” in Indian textbooks, “Sepoy Mutiny” in the few British curricula that mention it at all, the same event from two angles.
Purva Paksha: he invokes the Sanskrit debate tradition of stating your opponent’s view fairly before refuting it, and Shashi Tharoor’s distinction between tolerance and acceptance — the Sanatana Dharma claim that there are multiple valid truths, not one truth being graciously tolerated.

This is all defensible. Pluralism, source criticism, exposure to multiple narratives — yes.

The tilt shows up in the examples he reaches for. Dwarka — was it real, the rigour wasn’t applied. Ram Janmabhoomi — “a clash of narratives.” The Taj Mahal as Tejo Mahalaya, where he name-drops P.N. Oak (a fringe revisionist whose claims have no archaeological standing) and frames it as just another viewpoint deserving entertainment. A loaded line drops in mid-conversation: “for 70 years from 1947 up to 2014 you fed me one narrative in the school textbooks.” That date — 2014, when the BJP came to national power — is not accidental. It is the standard Hindutva framing of post-independence Indian historiography as a single Nehruvian-Marxist conspiracy that the present government has corrected.

He does soften it. He pleads for equilibrium, says don’t swing the pendulum to the other extreme, says “are you trying to tell me that Savarkar didn’t do five great things or that Nehru was only incompetence” — i.e. read both. He’s allergic to bans of any kind, which is a real position consistent with his pluralism argument, and to his credit. But the pattern of which narratives he treats as suppressed and need rescuing, versus which he treats as already over-amplified, lines up neatly with the Hindu-right reading list. Multiple narratives in principle. One particular set of narratives in practice.

Bharat as a melting pot

The closing riff is genuinely lovely. Asked what comes to mind for “India,” he says Bharat — but as a network of ideas, not a geography. Bodhidharma, the Tamil prince who carried Indian breathing techniques to Shaolin and helped seed Chinese martial arts. The Pallava prince whose journey through Cambodia routed kalaripayattu and silambam into Asian combat traditions. Angkor Wat as the largest Vishnu temple in the world. The Mitanni-Hittite peace treaty in present-day Syria invoking Indra, Varuna and Mitra. Darius calling himself Kshatra in Kshatri — Shahanshah, king of kings, from Kshatriya. Iran from Aryanam. Hormuz from Ahura Mazda from Varuna. Yama-Yamuna becoming Gemini. Gandhari as the woman from Gandhara, modern Kandahar.

This is Sanghi at his most generous and most interesting — Indian civilisation as something that radiated outward and absorbed inward, not as a fortress. He even acknowledges the obvious objection: “people will say Ashwin Sanghi has lived up to his name, Sanghi.” His defence is that pointing to what was meaningful in this civilisation does not require disregarding others. Fair, but again — the test is whether the practice matches the principle.

Anger, jealousy, pride, lust — the small wisdom literature interlude

Toward the end he runs through four emotions with examples from Indian texts. Anger as Chanakya untying his shikha, channelled into bringing down the Nanda dynasty — the energy is fine if you build irrigation canals for it, useless as a glacier with nowhere to flow. Jealousy via Indraprastha and the Pandavas. Pride via Bharata refusing the throne and ruling in Rama’s name. Lust via Ravana, who composed the Shiva Tandava Stotra, kept Shani at the foot of his throne, was multifaceted and learned, and still couldn’t control the one emotion that destroyed him. The point — every text shows you composite humans. We are sums of failed experiments slightly outweighed by the successful ones.

G = infinity minus K

The interview’s most charming digression. Sanghi tells a story about getting drunk with Dan Brown at the Oberoi until 2:30 a.m. after interviewing him at NCPA. Brown asks, what is God? Sanghi writes on a napkin: G = ∞ – K. God equals the entire Brahmand minus human knowledge. The Egyptians saw the sun and called it Ra; once Galileo and Copernicus and Aryabhata explained it, Ra lost divine status. Divinity is what we cannot yet explain. Brown agrees but calls it “god of the gaps.” Sanghi adds his proviso: any equation with infinity on one side is mathematically indeterminate. So is God. He likes it that way.

He extends the same frame to the Hindu pantheon. Lakshmi-Saraswati-Kali as a downward triangle, Brahma-Vishnu-Mahesh as upward, overlapped they make a Star of David. Multiplicity not as polytheism but as multi-dimensional approaches to a single whole — different facets of one thing.

Key Takeaways

Read in pairs and triplets, not singles. The single-narrative diet — whether from a textbook or a WhatsApp forward — flattens history into a flat 2D image. Five narratives give you depth, even if none of them is fully right.
Myth is signal, not noise. A story retold 300 different ways across generations almost certainly grew from something. The masala accumulates over centuries; the kernel was once real.
History is also fiction in places. The reverse of the above. Treating history as a clean factual record while treating myth as fantasy is naive in both directions.
Don’t write hungry. Keep the day job. Write at 5 a.m. or 10 p.m. Most published authors who quit early to write full-time end up resentful.
Self-publishing is Indian Idol. A platform for discovery, not a business model. The lifetime tail of an average self-published book is around 57 copies.
The author has to sell the book. A good review does not move stock. Walking into stores and talking to the floor staff does.
Sixth sense is just fast pattern-matching. Treat it as data your brain has already processed below the conscious threshold. Don’t ignore it.
Wisdom is knowing you don’t know. Sanghi keeps returning to this — the most genuine through-line in the conversation.

Claude’s Take

Two interviews are happening at once and the better one is the small one. Sanghi the storyteller — Cathedral boy, Yale MBA, the long apprenticeship of Rosabal Line, the print-on-demand workaround through Lulu, the Hemu-Ramaiah-to-Padmanabhan handoff, the book-yatra across Indian bookstores — is genuinely worth listening to. The publishing-industry detail is concrete and useful. The G = ∞ – K riff with Dan Brown is the kind of late-night napkin moment that justifies the whole format. The Bharat-as-network closing — Bodhidharma at Shaolin, Hormuz from Ahura Mazda, Gandhari from Kandahar — is the most interesting five minutes in the interview.

The bigger interview is the history-and-narrative one, and here Sanghi is doing something subtler than it looks. The argument structure is impeccable: history has bias, expose yourself to multiple narratives, treat myth as encoded truth. No reasonable reader disagrees. The selection of examples, however, does almost all the ideological work. Dwarka, Ram Janmabhoomi, Tejo Mahalaya (P.N. Oak’s Taj-as-Hindu-temple thesis, which has zero standing in serious archaeology and gets a respectful nod here as just another viewpoint), the dating of Indian textbook bias to “1947 up to 2014” — these are the standard talking points of the Hindutva intellectual project. Each is presented as an open question requiring more rigour and more pluralism. In practice, “more pluralism” almost always means rehabilitating Hindu-nationalist claims that mainstream historiography has rejected on evidence, while leaving claims that align with that worldview unscrutinised.

The intellectual move worth flagging: Sanghi says it is impossible to remove the narrator’s bias, and quotes Santayana on history being “a pack of lies.” This is a partial truth that, pushed too far, becomes a license to treat all narratives as equivalent. They are not. The Sepoy Mutiny / First War of Independence example is genuinely a case of two reasonable framings of the same evidence. The Babri Masjid site dispute and the Taj Mahal are not — there is actual evidence, and “let’s entertain both views” smuggles the weaker view back into legitimacy by procedural fairness alone. The 3D-glasses metaphor only works if all the beams of light are real. If one of them is just a torch you brought yourself, what you get isn’t depth — it’s distortion that looks like depth.

To be fair to him: he is consistent on free expression (against bans of any kind, including books), genuinely well-read, generous about Nehru and Savarkar both having multiple sides, and the closing on Bharat as a civilizational network rather than a fortress is the opposite of the small-tent Hindutva. Sanghi the man is more interesting than Sanghi the political signal. But the political signal is there, audible in the dates he chooses, the names he name-checks, and the disputes he frames as “still open.” Worth reading him as a thriller writer. Worth reading him on writing and publishing. Worth being awake about which narratives he treats as needing rescue and which he treats as already winning.

Score: 6/10. A long, well-spoken interview with real value in the autobiographical and craft sections, undercut for serious history by ideological framing dressed as pluralism. A 9 if you came for the writing-life advice. A 4 if you came for an honest reckoning with Indian historiography.