The Past is a Thriller

 THE LAST 1,000 years of Indian history are of immense interest to the best-selling Indian writer Amish Tripathi. It is a period that, he believes, casts a large shadow across our national psyche today, one that we have not confronted, let alone made peace with. “Will Durant, the great American historian, has called the Turkic invasion of India probably the bloodiest in human history,” Amish says. “And we Indians have responded to this [period] with two extreme reactions. One is a complete denial, to play down what happened. And then there is the other extreme, which is unfocused hatred, even hate towards people today for what happened 500 or more years ago.”

We are seated in a small conference room in the Mumbai office of a biotechnology firm that Amish’s family members run. It is days before Deepavali and, along with the lanterns and festoons slowly taking over the office floor, there is a pal­pable festive cheer. In the conference room, a strip that serves as a whiteboard runs through its walls, and there are words and figures here from past meetings, half erased and written over. Amish sits on a chair, with some scribbled message behind him. He puts his hands on the table, fingers clasped, considering the question over what drove him to write his lat­est book The Chola Tigers: Avengers of Somnath (Harper Fiction, 455 pages, ₹499), a fictional story set in the aftermath of the destruction of the Somnath temple in the 11th century. The impulse, Amish says, came from a desire to explore this period in a work of fiction that neither whitewashes the brutality nor gives in to unreasoned hate. He draws his chair close to the table, as he brings up the extremity of our reactions. “It’s like that adult who has been through a major childhood trauma,” Amish says. “Psychologists will tell you how many adults respond to trauma in such extremes too—either complete denial or unfocused hatred.”

This is not Amish’s first exploration of this period. The Chola Tigers is a part of his ‘Indic Chronicles’, a series of books that looks at this period through fictional stories of real and imagined characters from the Indian subcontinent. The first book in this series, Legend of Suheldev, told a fictionalised story of a historical figure, the eponymous Suheldev who is best known for defeating and killing the Ghaznavid General Ghazi Salar Masud in the 11th century. The books in this series may be dubbed historical fiction, but Amish takes the bare-bones of historical events and, sometimes, historical figures to weave his imagination. In The Chola Tigers, a real historical event, the destruction of the Somnath Temple by Mahmud of Ghazni becomes a story about a group of assassins assembled by the Chola emperor Rajendra Chola to avenge the destruction by having Mahmud of Ghazni assassinated and his sultanate thrown into turmoil by instigating a civil war.

There was another reason for wanting to explore this period through such a series. He was tired, Amish says, of the historical portrayal of this time, as one of repeated defeats. “Our historians, I think, made mistakes. If the British colonial rule is not called the Christian invasion, why is the Turkic colonial rule called the Islamic invasion? We confused the fact that they were all foreigners,” he says. “And the second thing is that the history of the last thousand years is told to us as a history of repeated defeats. And my interpretation of it is the exact oppo­site. Because if we were losing every battle for 1,000 years, how the hell are we still alive? The same invaders who came here for 1,000 years, the Turks, Persians, Arabs, Portuguese, Dutch, French, British, went to every other corner of the world. They wiped out every single, practically every single, ancient culture. None of them are alive anywhere. India is still here. So to me, the story of the last thousand years is the story of the greatest resistance in human history. No bunch of indigenous people has fought so long and so hard to keep their culture alive. Not the Coptic Christians, the Pharaonic Egyptians, the Hellenic Greeks, the Central Americans. They all died out. Not us,” he goes on. “So, to me, this is the greatest resistance in human his­tory by an indigenous group of people against foreign invaders. This is the story I want to tell through the Indic Chronicles. Not about the invaders, but our ancestors who fought those invaders.”

The Chola Tigers is a pure Amish creation. It is fast-paced and action-packed, and written not necessarily to pay fidelity to that period of time, but rather to appeal to a modern audience. There are riffs on Dire Straits’ ‘Sultans of Swing’ or clues linking to other books and characters that are like little winks to Amish’s devout readers.

There are also characters here, belonging to kingdoms and dynasties that we know historically fought against one another, who band together to fight against Mahmud of Ghazni, and who refer to this whole region as ‘India’, something mainstream historians will probably balk at. When asked about this, Amish distinguishes the cultural construct from a political one. “If your concept of a nation is a political state, then okay, the present state [of India] emerged in the British times… But the present state of the UK is also not an ancient concept then. Because the concept of a nation-state emerged only with the Treaties of Westphalia, which happened only in the 17th century. So there was no nation-state anywhere in the world before that, not just India. Prior to that, political units were monarchies. Nations were just cultural concepts,” he says. “So the question that arises is not political, but cultural. Was the cultural concept of India alive? Hell yes,” he says, as he points out references to this concept in the Vishnu Puran and also references made by foreigners travelling in this region.

Amish turned to this time and the format of historical fiction after the conclusion of his blockbuster Shiva trilogy and his near completion of the Ram Chandra series, the fourth and final book of which is still due. They are said to be the top two fastest-selling book series ever in India. They didn’t just sell millions of copies and revitalise the Indian mythology fiction genre but also catapulted an unknown name, who was then working in a financial services firm, into the most recognisable face in mass market Indian publishing, earning him epithets like ‘India’s Tolkien’.

AMISH HAD UNTIL then been leading a convention­al life of middle-class success in India. Born in Mumbai, he pursued Maths in college, got an MBA degree from IIM Calcutta, and entered the financial services sector where he rose to a senior position (the national head of marketing, product development and service quality at IDBI Federal Life Insurance). Until then, Amish never had a creative impulse in his life, never having written any piece of fiction, not even a forgotten short story in a drawer, or a song, when in fact he used to be the lead singer of a music band when he was in Kolkata. “I could perform, I could sing, but I never wrote. The way I look at it, creativity is actually a blessing. And I didn’t have it then. I had no idea how to write,” he says.

What Amish did have was a religious upbringing. One of his grandfathers, a big influence on him growing up, was an ac­complished priest in Varanasi who used to teach at the Banaras Hindu University. His parents were also devout Hindus, and Amish and his siblings grew up in a house that he describes as rooted and traditional.

It was during this time—what he describes as the boring life of someone in the financial sector—that he was seized by the idea of what eventually became The Immortals of Meluha. “The idea that struck me then was a purely philosophical one. I discussed it with my family, and it was they who suggested I write it down,” he says. “That book I was actually writing just for myself, because I had no clue where it would go.”

Since he had no experience with writing creatively before, he tried to initially teach himself the craft. He read books that dole out writing tips like Stephen King’s popular On Writing, created character sketches and summaries of chapters, and made daily word count targets. “When I tried working that way, I actually hit a point where the writing just stopped,” he says. “The character of Lord Ganesh I had written in my character sketch was how we tend to see him, as this jovial and happy character. But in my book, he was emerging as a very tormented soul, and I was struggling with him when I worked according to my character sketch. And it got to the point where I just stopped writing. It only changed when I gave up all these algorithms on writing, and said to hell with it. If a character is supposed to be a certain way, then I’m not going to control it,” he says. “I’m not a creator, I told myself. I’m only a witness.”

The book took around five years to finish. It might have been turned down by a number of publishers, but after it became a massive hit once it was self-published, publishers vied with one another to bring out the book and the rest of the series. The publishing industry might have changed its opinion on the marketability of Amish’s books, but the author himself wasn’t sure of it, and he held on to his job, and only quit once the royalty cheque of the second book became larger than his salary. “Look man, I’m very middle class,” he says. “I grew up pre-1991 India. We are very boring, very pragmatic, very risk averse.”

SINCE HIS BOOKS FIRST hit the shelves about 15 years ago, there has been one notable change in the way he writes his books, at least those that are part of the Indic Chronicles series. The Chola Tigers marks the second time he has used a team, which is called the Immortals Writers’ Centre, to co-write the book. Legend of Suheldev was the first. Here, he presents a summary of the story of anywhere between 5,000 to 6,000 words to the team, also pointing them towards the neces­sary research, so that they can come up with the first draft of the book. Amish then reworks the draft into a finished manuscript.

He had to come up with this method just to keep up with how prolific he tends to be. Amish famously does not think in terms of books, but in terms of series. “I’ve gotten some 12 books out in 15 years. But in my mind, I have ideas for around 35 to 40 book series,” he says. “I know I’m going to carry many of them to my funeral pyre… So I keep trying to find ways to get more stories out.”

There are drafts of two more books from the centre that have been completed, which Amish has set aside for now. And he is still buzzing with ideas for many more titles about little-known or forgotten figures from Indian history for the Indic Chronicles, from an Ahom general (Lachit Borphukan) in present-day Assam who fought against the Mughals, to a warrior queen from what is now Karnataka who defeated the Portuguese, to a ruler from today’s Kerala who defeated the Dutch, and many more.

Amish is today also a brand by himself, and he is at the cusp of an inflection point where he is beginning to explore other avenues for his ideas. Apart from his books, he has become a podcaster and made documentaries under the banner of Kaal­jayi Media that he and his wife run. There is a film coming out on Lord Krishna next year, where he has served as creative director. He is also working towards producing one of the two Indic Chronicles books into a movie and is currently involved in the making of an ambitious role-playing video game, The Age of Bhaarat, along with Paris-based games industry veteran Nouredine Abboud and film legend Amitabh Bachchan (who has voiced the game’s trailer and will be involved in the game’s creative aspects) that has got many excited. He’s also exploring the option of putting many of his ideas for book se­ries straight into development for movies and shows. “Instead of writing and publishing these books, which take time, I’m exploring the option of just putting them straight into series with OTT platforms, and then later converting it into books,” he says. “Because I really need to get all these stories out before I die.”

If there’s a hint of moral obligation in that statement, there’s a good reason behind it. The source of creativity is a subject that many writers across generations and backgrounds have won­dered about, and Amish, who believes he didn’t possess it before, believes it is divinely ordained. “If you think about it logically, no artist can explain where the hell does it [creativity] come from. Now, if you’re an atheist, you can perhaps say it’s in the universe. But if you’re a believer, you’ll say it’s from my God,” he says.

So does his too come from God?

“I know it sounds strange. And I know some people might laugh at it. But I don’t care. I don’t think it comes from me. I think it’s a blessing from Lord Shiva,” he says. “Whenever he chooses to stop that blessing, it’ll stop. But right now it’s still coming. So I write.”