Shawn Haigins | Ashwin Sanghi: Tehelka: A gripping fictional narrative of Chanakya’s life and times

Sep 13, 2011

Tehelka: A gripping fictional narrative of Chanakya’s life and times

Pavan K Varma on Books: Ashwin Sanghi’s Chanakya’s Chant deals with the life and times of Chanakya in a credible yet gripping manner. It is hard to find well-researched fiction by Indian authors on Indian history. Sanghi dexterously interweaves a story of modern India with Chanakya’s life. This book is a refreshing change from our usual derivative creative writing.

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Chanakya's Chant

The year is 340 BC. A hunted, haunted Brahmin youth vows revenge for the gruesome murder of his beloved father. Cold, cunning, calculating, cruel and armed with a complete absence of accepted morals, he becomes the most powerful political strategist in Bharat and succeeds in uniting a ragged country against the invasion of the army of that demigod, Alexander the Great. Pitting the weak edges of both forces against each other, he pulls off a wicked and astonishing victory and succeeds in installing Chandragupta on the throne of the mighty Mauryan empire. History knows him as the brilliant strategist Chanakya. But history, which exults in repeating itself, revives Chanakya two and a half millennia later, in the avatar of Gangasagar Mishra, a Brahmin teacher in smalltown India who becomes puppeteer to a host of ambitious individuals—including a certain slumchild who grows up into a beautiful and powerful woman. Modern India happens to be just as riven as ancient Bharat by class hatred, corruption and divisive politics and this landscape is Gangasagar’s feasting ground. Can this wily pandit—who preys on greed, venality and sexual deviance—bring about another miracle of a united India?

The Rozabal Line

On a lazy day in London, a cardboard box is found on a shelf of the SOAS library where a copy of Mahabharata should have been. When the mystified librarian opens it, she screams before she falls unconscious to the floor. An elite group calling itself the Lashkar-e-Talatashar, the army of thirteen, has scattered around the globe. The fate of its members curiously resembles that of Christ and his Apostles in the first century AD. Their leader is not even a blip on the radar of intelligence agencies, yet their agenda is Armageddon. Somewhere in the labyrinthine recesses of the Vatican, a beautiful assassin swears she will eliminate all who do not believe in her twisted credo. She loves to kill-again and again. A Hindu Astrologer spots an approaching conjunction of the stars and nods to himself in grim agreement. It will happen on the very date he had seen as the end of the world. And it’s not far off. In Tibet, a group of Buddhist monk search for a reincarnation, much in the way their ancestors searched Judea for the son of God. In strife-torn Kashmir, a tomb called Rozabal holds the key to a riddle that arises in Jerusalem and gets answered at Vaishno Devi. An American priest, Father Vincent Sinclair, has disturbing visions of himself and of people familiar to him, except that they seem located in other worlds, other ages. Induced into past -life regression, he goes to India to piece together the violent images burnt onto his mind. Shadowing his every move is the Crux Decussata Permuta, a clandestine society which would rather wipe out creation than allow an ancient secret to be disclosed. In The Rozabal Line, a thriller swirling between continents and centuries, Ashwin Sanghi traces a pattern that curls backward to the violent birth of religion itself.