Series is a misnomer for my Bharat books: Ashwin Sanghi
Rishabh Suri You can read any book without having read the previous ones. But when I use the word ‘Bharat’, it essentially means that I’m not only referring to a geography; I’m not even just necessarily referring to certain people, but to ideas.
ASHWIN SANGHI AUTHOR
The many mythological thrillers he’s written till date have led to him being tagged as India’s Dan Brown. And why not? Fictional narratives, replete with mythological elements, and laced with a real-life connect, have made Ashwin Sanghi’s books — right from Chanakya’s Chant to The Krishna Key — a bestseller.
His work, The Vault of Vishnu, is the latest addition to his Bharat series. The Vault of Vishnu revolves around a Pallava prince, who travels to Cambodia, carrying with him secrets that will cause great wars, many centuries later.
On what inspired him to come up with the book, the 51-year-old says, “If you really look at my Bharat series, this is the sixth book. Series is a bit of a misnomer, because all books within it are stand-alone. You can read any book without having read the previous ones. But when I use the word Bharat, it essentially means that I’m not only referring to a geography; I’m not even just necessarily referring to certain people, but to ideas.”
To drive home the point, he cites his first book, The Rozabal Line. “Most of that book happened in the socalled Fertile Crescent in Mesopotamia and during the origins of Abraham, but it was still a part of the Bharat series because I believed that there were many linkages. Similarly with my latest book, the thought was to bring in forefront the parallel between two great civilisations – India and China. The funny thing is we don’t really talk about the terrific flow of goods, services, religions, ideas and technology between these two countries,” says Ashwin, who was in Delhi recently for the launch of the book.
“In India,” he adds, “if you ask someone ‘Do you know who Bodhidharma was?’, nine out of 10 will say they have no clue. But if you go to China and use that term, people there know that he was a brahmin king who came from India, spent nine years perfecting a routine at the Shaolin monastery, which later came to be known as Kung Fu! They revere him; there is a statue of Bodhidharma right in a Shaolin monastery’s courtyard. A lot of other countries haven’t forgotten our culture and the rich heritage, but we have. It’s like what happened with Buddhism. It went from India to China around 70 AD, and from there to the rest of the world. But we have forgotten it. So the idea was to bring back a lot of these concepts in the public discourse.”