Interview with Ashwin Sanghi

A look at Ashwin Sanghi, aka Shawn Haingis (his anagrammatical pseudonym), a Mumbai-based businessman and author of best sellers (The Rozabal line and Chanakya’s Chant) and you are sure to label him as a pucca Marwari businessman who, day-in-and-day-out, thinks only of doubling his profits. I am sure that increasing his profits definitely occupies his mind space, but along with that he constantly also ponders on developing the story line of his mystery and thriller novels. Considering both his works are full of twists and turns, suspense and the unexpected – Sanghi surely has much more to him than what meets the eye. 

We chat up with this author, who wants to be called and remembered not as an author but a storyteller, about the research he does for his books, how he selects the subjects for his works of fiction and how he thinks the habit of reading can be inculcated in kids.

Every Marwari businessman has this uncanny sense of business and being one of them did you also sense that there was a market for political and -history thrillers? How would you say you choose your subjects—interest or business?

Good question. The reason that I started writing was to do something that was diametrically opposite to what I did in my business life. What I do in my entrepreneurial avatar is to feed my family; what I do in my author’s avatar is to feed my soul. I can only write about topics that deeply interest me given the fact that it usually takes me 12-18 months to complete a novel. So the answer is very clear: I choose my subjects based upon deep personal interest in the subject. Business does not play any role at all.

You went about self-publishing The Rozabal Line. Even after 100 publishing houses refused to publish your first book what made you self-publish it?

I was convinced that The Rozabal Line was a story that had to be told. There were over 40 previous non-fiction books on the topics covered in my novel i.e. the lost or missing years of Jesus, the scrolls in Hemis, the Jewish burial at Rozabal, or the bloodline of Jesus. But when I assembled all the previous theories, I realized that this was something that needed to be narrated through commercial fiction, not non-fiction. I viewed it as the only way that the story would reach the average reader.

I was determined that the book be published irrespective of whether it happened through a mainstream publisher or not. As it turns out, self-publishing the book became one of the smartest decisions I took because otherwise the story would never have been noticed by Westland, which eventually decided to publish it.

The 2300 years ago portion of Chanakya’s Chant is written beautifully. We know it has been researched but how much of it is masala and how much real? Meaning, is the Vishkanyas/Girika bit true? Seems like it has been picked up from the serial Chandrakanta.

First of all, let me clarify that I have never watched the serial Chandrakanta so I have no clue of what the story in that particular serial is.

As regards your primary question i.e. how much of the ancient story is true. Well, as you may know, Chanakya is not mentioned in the Arthashastra. This seminal work on statecraft mentions Kautilya as the author, and also refers to Vishnugupta in one single stanza at the end of the work. There are indeed some scholars who say that Kautilya and Vishnugupta were not the same person. The assumption that Kautilya, Vishnugupta and Chanakya were one person only happens through Vishnu Sarma's Panchatantra. What little information we do have about Chanakya, comes from the Puranas.

There is also a historical Sanskrit play called Mudrarakshasa, however, this was written almost 900 years after Chanakya’s death. Thus, even though we have two voluminous works—the Arthashastra and the Neetishastra—authored by Kautilya (who could possibly be the man we now call Chanakya), very little is actually known about the life of this man.

It is precisely because these gaps exist in the historical narrative that a fiction writer finds it easy to fill in the blanks with his imagination. So for example, Vishkanyas are indeed mentioned in the Arthashastra. They are also mentioned in the Kalki Purana. However, did Chanakya actually use a Vishkanya to kill Paurus? That is where my imagination takes over. Similarly there actually was an executioner called Girika, and he was indeed a cruel man who was the chief torturer in the Mauryan empire. But history records him as being a servant of Ashoka, the grandson of Chandragupta Maurya, and not a servant of Nanda.

You said the chant is what is a common thread between the two separate stories running parallel in your novel. What does the Shakti chant imply? And what role does it play in Chanakya and Mishra’s lives?

Well, the one fact that is bound to strike you if you read Chanakya’s treatises is that he was a male chauvinist—probably it was simply a reflection of societal attitudes in those days. What I wanted to depict in my book was that in the present day it would be possible to use Chanakya’s power but only to prop up a symbol of Shakti rather than a symbol of Shiva. Thus, Gangasagar Mishra has the opportunity to use Chanakya’s Chant but only to advance the cause of a woman! The Shakti chant is thus central to the theme of the book.

The present day section of Chanakya’s Chant has a mention of everything – sex, plotting, manipulation, revenge and politics. What inspired you to put that together so well?

Reading the major newspapers in the morning and listening to the major news channels at night was all the inspiration that I needed to plot the modern-day political saga. It is a well-known adage that fact is usually stranger than fiction. The strangest stories appear each day in the media but we discount their novelty and strangeness owing to the fact that the stories are “real”, not imagined. All I did was to provide adequate motives for those stories to play out in the fictional context.

A little about the PhD you are doing in Creative Writing. What is it you are working towards in your research?

I am trying to examine whether it is possible to create an entirely new sub-genre in the space of Indian commercial fiction. When Shashi Tharoor was releasing Chanakya’s Chant in Mumbai, he said that till very recently Indian authors wrote with a western voice i.e. even though the characters, props or places may have been Indian, their stories were such that they could very well have been written by western authors. It was his view that my generation has shrugged off the colonial legacy completely and that this new breed of authors are writing with a purely Indian voice almost entirely for an Indian readership. I wish to understand the “why” behind this phenomenon.

Kiran Desai says, “Novelists are loners”. They have to lock themselves up, be all by themselves, miss out on family get-togethers and write and rewrite their drafts. How do you make time for research, interviews, reading and writing along with running a business?

I start my day at office rather late by 11 am. It is possible for me to do that because I own the business that I run. I’m usually at work for 8 hours but I do not attend office on weekends. I usually write each night from around 10pm till around 1am—which explains why I have to start my day late. I am an introvert by nature and have a close circle of friends whom I meet every few weeks. Other than that, I have virtually no social life. My life revolves around work, writing and my family. And honestly speaking, I like it the way it is. I would rather not change anything about it!

Your maternal grandfather, a poet, asked you to read and review books every week and that is what interested you to read and write. Is there any other way of inculcating the healthy habit of reading in kids?

There are several things that must happen if we want to make reading truly universal. First of all we need to lower prices. Just see what a lower price band has done to the volumes sold of Chetan Bhagat’s books! I believe that another way in which prices will come down will be by moving to eBooks in which paper, printing and distribution costs can be made virtually zero. The second important change that needs to happen (and is already happening) is that Indian authors need to address the wants of their target market. Till very recently, Indian authors only wrote literary fiction. If they wrote commercial fiction, it would usually be family sagas or epics spanning generations.

We missed the boat on mysteries, suspense, thrillers, murder, conspiracy novels and the like after Satyajit Ray. I am happy to see that this trend has changed dramatically in the past few years. Finally, I think that we need more people like Uncle Anant Pai, who passed away recently, to create material that parents want their children to read—Indian epics, history, mythology etc.

Which genre of books do you enjoy reading the most? What are your other hobbies?

I’ll answer the second question first. I have no hobbies or interests other than work, family and writing. I get virtually no time outside of these three spheres of my life to do anything else. I used to read voraciously as a youngster but find nowadays that I’m mostly reading those books that I need to research my next novel. If I have to pick up a book to read simply for the pleasure of reading then I would much rather pick up a book written by storytellers rather than authors—Jeffrey Archer, Sidney Sheldon, Arthur Hailey, Irving Wallace, Robert Ludlum, Frederick Forsyth, Dan Brown, John Grisham, Ian Rankin… the list goes on. My own desire is that when people think of me in the future, they should think of me as a storyteller rather than as an author or writer.

You can read Ashwin Sanghi's blogs here