Ashwin Sanghi: The Mythmaker

A FEW YEARS AGO, Ashwin Sanghi did an interview in which he was asked about his novel, the Vault of Vishnu, published in 2020, and the linkages it makes as its plot oscillates from Cambodia and China to India across time. Later in the day, while reminiscing about the discussion, a family member, who was from Uttar Pradesh, casually asked, “Have you seen the Ram Katha Park in Ayodhya?” Located on the banks of the Sarayu River, Sanghi was hearing about it for the first time. He came to know that an acre or two within the park was carved out as a separate area and on it was a big stone block brought from Korea, placed as a memorial for a queen known as Heo Hwang-ok. She was said to be an Indian princess from Ayodhya who married a Korean king 2,000 years ago. His curiosity piqued, Sanghi started digging into this legend and found many modern-day Koreans still came to Ayodhya to place flowers, lamps and incense at the memorial because they consider her their ancestor. The seed of his latest book The Ayodhya Alliance (HarperCollins; 564 pages; ₹599) was sown.

He also found other links, like thousands of words common between Tamil and Korean. “Cholas, Cheras, Pandyas, Pallavas, probably all of them had trade connections. But what explains this one-way movement? There was something more than what meets the eye. An ancient connection,” he says. The Ayodhya Alliance is about more than a queen. It spans millennia and continents, weaving a thriller that has at its centre a mysterious powerful material called dvaitalingam. “If alliances took place in the past, typically something else goes along with it. The city of Bombay was dowry given during the marriage of the Portuguese queen and the English king. But that royal alliance played a very important role in the shaping of what we now call Mumbai. Similarly, what was the effect of that royal alliance between the Ayodhya princess and the Korean king? I started looking at the steelmaking technologies of Korea as well as the ancient metallurgy skills in India, I realised again that there had been interactions. So, I said I need to figure out a way to bring this into the framework and that’s how The Ayodhya Alliance was born,” he says.

The novel is the latest in Sanghi’s popular Bharat series. Making these connections and turning them into a page-turning story has much to do with why he is one of India’s bestselling popular fiction writers. Writing however came by happenstance. Born in 1969, it had not been in the picture until his mid-30s. A cancelled flight was the cause of it.

Sanghi came from a Mumbai-based prominent business family with diversified interests that included automobile distribution, real estate, engineering and exports. Even as a student he used to go to his father’s workplace to learn the ropes . It was predetermined that business would be his calling. An MBA in finance from Yale University followed. “We were not expected to go into unserious professions,” he says.

The only connection to literature was a maternal granduncle who used to send him a book to read every week and in return Sanghi sent a letter about what he had got out of it. After he finished his MBA, he joined the family business. In 2002, he went to Kashmir for a function and the next day was to fly back to Mumbai but the flight got cancelled. The hotel was gloomy, so he hired a car and asked the driver to take him somewhere interesting. It turned out to be a tomb of a 13th-century Sufi saint in the older part of Srinagar. It looked ordinary. The burial was in the Islamic tradition with the head pointing towards Mecca. A local guide told Sanghi that if he looked at a certain angle he would be able to see an older burial under the top one. It did not have the head pointing towards Mecca, but along the east-west axis. Outside the sarcophagus was a metallic plate depicting two human feet with little cross marks on them. “It was reflective of the places where the nails for a crucifixion would have been hammered,” he says.

The legend was that the tomb belonged to Jesus Christ and dated back 2,000 years. “I was told there was a saint, the local Kashmiris called him Yuz Asaf, who came from a distant land in order to preach love and peace. He settled down in Srinagar in order to teach this. And the place where he is buried is known as The Tomb of the Prophet, which translates to Roza Bal. I came back to Mumbai the next day, but the story never left me. It became like a part-time hobby of mine to find out more,” he says.

He started collecting more material whenever he had time but it was without any objective, just an obsession. At some point he thought he would do a paper on it and wrote 40 to 50 pages. “I gave it to a few of my friends and my wife to read and tell me what they thought. The resounding answer was that it’s very boring. Because it was in the space of almost trying to be academic. My wife asked me—‘Do you just want to write something which will only be on library shelves, or do you want to write something where the story reaches people?’ That’s when I realised I will have to make it a story,” he says. It eventually became his first novel, The Rozabal Line.

The book would go on to sell lakhs of copies but when first written it was self-published because no agent or publisher was interested.

“I finished writing it by 2005 and looked around to get published. The common refrain was that there wasn’t a market for this sort of story, a theological thriller based on the notion that Jesus Christ might have survived the crucifixion and was buried at a place called Rozabal, and that India was possibly his spiritual home because he had actually learnt under Buddhist masters,” he says. By 2007, he was fed up and decided to self-publish. In the US, a couple of companies had come into existence offering services by which writers could upload their manuscript into a server and get a distribution package where the book would be listed on Amazon globally. “Every time a person ordered one copy, the supplier would print one copy and send it out. So there was no inventory. They say that the average self-published title sells 57 copies during its lifetime. I decided I’m going to market the book to my best ability even though this book was only available in the US. Amazon didn’t exist in India then and the book was not in the bookstores here. Doing all my jugaad I was able to sell about 800 copies in that first year,” he says.

Sanghi did not even put his own name and used a pseudonym Shawn Haigins, an anagram for Ashwin Sanghi, because he wanted to keep his writing and professional identity separate. He also thought such a name would resonate better with US readers. Encouraged by the books sold in the US, he started doing the rounds of bookstores in India. But they only stocked through distributors. He wrote to every distributor whose address he could find. Only one replied and suggested that it needed to be published in India to make economic sense. She connected him with a publisher and finally The Rozabal Line came out with his own name in India in 2008. It took time to gain traction. The first run of 5,000 published copies took six months to sell. It got good reviews in the media and gradually the numbers began to creep up. “Before we knew it, we’d already crossed that one lakh figure,” he says.

THERE ARE EIGHT Bharat series novels and they are all different. What connects them, says Sanghi, is being founded on the civilisational arc of India. “Otherwise, there is nothing remotely similar between the books. That is the reason why I could give freedom to my expression in that sense. With every book, I could pretty much experiment the way I wanted. The Magicians of Mazda (2022), which happened three years ago, was based on the arrival of the Parsi community in Sanjan. The Ayodhya Alliance explores the deeper connections with Korea. For me, all of that is fair game because it all relates back to that arc,” he says.

There are other reasons why his books have readership. They are fast paced with short chapters. They have an intriguing mix of history, mythology and characters spread across the ages and countries, all held together by a present-day thriller. Sanghi devotes a lot of time to creating the effect. Each novel takes around three years. The first six to nine months, nothing is written at all. He is only researching. He will then invest three months in developing the plot outline. It is done in an Excel sheet where every row is a chapter. In the columns he would put in primary characters, events, the social, economic, cultural, historical backdrops being referenced in that chapter.

“Most importantly, what I’ll have in the last column is how do I end this chapter. I want to make sure that the chapter is short but I also want to make sure a lingering aftertaste should prepare you into the next chapter. It has to end on a hook,” he says. Once done with the structure, he sits down to write, and that to him is the easiest part. It is a phase that lasts six months. Then there are another three months on numerous rewrites. It then goes to his editor, to whom the brief is to have complete freedom. “I tell them I’m a storyteller, I’m not a master of words. I tell them to be generous with their red marks,” he says.

Even though he is defined by his novels, Sanghi has broadened his work. In 2024, he came out with a thriller, Razor Sharp, where a cop, Prakash Kadam, tracks a serial killer. The second in that series is imminent. There are also non-fiction self-help books. A sixth in a series called 13 Steps to Bloody Good Sales is ready and about to be published.

Meanwhile, now that The Ayodhya Alliance is out, two or three ideas are bouncing in his head on what the next Bharat series novel should be. He will zero in on one eventually and then the cycle will start again, of research and crafting. He will zoom in on intriguing commonalities spread across the gathered raw material. Those will become the spine of the plot. In The Ayodhya Alliance, for instance, a motif of two fishes curved against each other keeps recurring across civilisations and time periods. It was a symbol in the tomb of Kim Suro, the king that the Indian princess married. “I had got high-resolution photos of Kim Suro’s tomb. I was wondering what the fish were doing there. Why fish? Why not tigers? Or elephants? ” he says.

And then the motif seemed to be in a lot of other places. Like government buildings in Uttar Pradesh. “You see it even on the badges of the police in Uttar Pradesh. It’s part of their emblem, the twin fish. It is also part of a medieval dynasty that ruled in Uttar Pradesh. The same twin fish was used by the ancient Pandyas on their flag. So you see a repeat of this symbology across multiple places,” he says.

To Sanghi, that is the fiction writer’s advantage—to take elements of legend, myth, history, science, philosophy and spirituality, and make them the columns and beams of his structure. In The Ayodhya Alliance, the twin fish symbol was one of them. Another was the physical place in Ayodhya where people were still coming to worship the legendary princess. There was also the tomb in Korea where this story was also narrated, and technological proof that steelmaking was advanced in Korea and in India at the same time. “Once I looked at all of these, those became the building blocks,” he says. Once these blocks are placed, there remain gaps and that, to Sanghi, is what the writer fills with his imagination. “That is where we lay our brick and plaster. The complete structure occurs because of that layering,” he says.

Ashwin SanghiBharat novelbookscivilisational arcIndian historyThe Ayodhya AllianceVault of Vishnu