Roza Bal, Kashmir: Comparisons with Da Vinci Code are inevitable: Sanghi

The Rozabal Line is not a story about Jesus Christ surviving the crucifixion and travelling to Kashmir; it is a story about how human beliefs and ideas have been freely absorbed and assimilated down the ages, and how such interfaith borrowing has shaped our ideas and beliefs in the present day.

Ahmadiyya Times | News Watch | Int'l Desk
Source/Credit: IBN Live | Authors
By IBN | October 19, 2010

A cardboard box is found on a shelf in a London library. When the mystified librarian opens it, she screams before she falls unconscious to the floor. Thus begins The Rozabal Line, originally published in 2007 under Ashwin Sanghi’s pseudonym, Shawn Haigins. It has now been published under his real name. IBNLive.com spoke to Sanghi about his book, his writing, and himself.

IBNLive: How many people have tried to draw similarities between The Rozabal Line and The Da Vinci Code? What has been your response to them?

Ashwin Sanghi: Such comparisons are inevitable whenever one writes fiction that has Jesus Christ or Mary Magdalene as a backdrop. In reality, however, nothing could be further from the truth. I had spent almost two years reading every book that I could find regarding the Jesus in Kashmir theory. I knew that there was a story that needed to be told but I did not wish to follow the rules of a formulaic thriller.

There is a rather precise Dan Brown formula: provide a hook to the early chapter that becomes the central thriller plot, with its one character facing challenges that increase in severity while stakes are raised for two-thirds of the story or more, followed by a few plot twists, the main character winning (or at least partially winning), his opponents losing (or partially losing) and a satisfying resolution for the readers a la Dan Brown.


My aim was to not merely provide a story but also to explore the ancient connectivity between world faiths. If that meant that I had to compromise the formula, so be it. Thus you find frequent jumps in time and geography because the aim of the novel is to explore connections between apparently unrelated events, beliefs, rituals, people and places.

IBNLive: What’s the back-story to the writing of The Rozabal Line?

Ashwin Sanghi: My parents used to regularly take us for holidays to Kashmir during the 70s. During these visits, we would do all the touristy stuff — including visiting Rozabal. As a child, however, I did not fully understand the significance of the tomb.

It was only in 1999 that the very notion that Jesus may have left behind a bloodline came to my attention when I read Holy Blood Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. A couple of years later, I read Holger Kersten's Jesus Lived in India and was fascinated with the idea that Jesus could have been inspired by Buddhism and that he may have drawn much of his spiritual learning from India. I began to wonder whether I could marry the two theories i.e. that he survived the crucifixion and travelled to India and that he left behind a bloodline.

I spent the next two years reading each and every book that I could acquire on topics that I wanted to explore viz the possibility of Jesus having spent his missing years as a youth studying in India, the theory that Jesus did not die on the cross and that he was whisked away to safety, and the notion that Jesus travelled to India to reunite with the lost tribes of Israel who had settled in Kashmir. In all, I read around forty books during this time besides scouring the Internet for any information that I could possibly find. I started writing The Rozabal Line in 2005 and finished it eighteen months later.

IBNLive: Is there some personal belief behind the novel? Is religion a personal interest or merely the backdrop to the book?

Ashwin Sanghi: Surprisingly enough, I am not a religious person. I am spiritual, in that I believe in the essence of “do no harm” as well as the theory of karmic debt, but that does not translate into being someone who prostrates himself daily inside a temple. I am equally comfortable inside a church or dargah as I am inside a temple. In fact, it is this openness that allows me to explore the question “Where did this idea emerge from?”

The Rozabal Line is not a story about Jesus Christ surviving the crucifixion and travelling to Kashmir; it is a story about how human beliefs and ideas have been freely absorbed and assimilated down the ages, and how such interfaith borrowing has shaped our ideas and beliefs in the present day.

IBNLive: Why did you originally publish this novel under a pseudonym? And that too one that made it sound as though the book were not written by an Indian? And why under your own name now?

Aswhin Sanghi: I am not a writer by profession. I was born and brought up in a business environment. I started working when I was 16 and completed my MBA when I was 22. By the time that I completed writing The Rozabal Line in 2006 I had already been in business for over 20 years. The decision to use a pen name was nothing more than a desire to compartmentalise my life so that my entrepreneurial dimension would remain distinct and separate from my literary one. However, I had not thought about an appropriate pseudonym to use until I actually completed the novel. As you know, there’s an abundance of anagrams in my novel and the idea struck me: why not use an anagram of my real name as a pseudonym? I had always been a fan of Jack Higgins, the master of thrillers who began his career with The Eagle Has Landed. I tried shaping my pseudonym in his likeness. What I did not realise at that time was that I had not written just any other book but a book that was trying to coalesce different religions by connecting the dots.

A close friend sent my self-published book to a reputed journalist in Kashmir who loved the book but she commented that “writers and authors ought to use their real names and not take refuge behind some sort of a camouflage. For, then, where's the connectivity, where's the bonding?” By then Tata-Westland had already decided to publish The Rozabal Line as an Indian edition and their management team had concerns about the difficulties in promoting the book under a pen name. Hence, the Indian edition was directly published under my real name rather than my pseudonym.

IBNLive: How long was this book in the making? Where were you when you wrote it? How did you do all the research?

Ashwin Sanghi: The Rozabal Line saga is a never-ending one. I began to think about writing the novel from 1999 onwards but never got around to it. I started seriously reading up on the subject from 2002 onwards but it was 2005 by the time that I actually started writing it. I completed it eighteen months later and then spent a year trying to find a publisher. I was unsuccessful in my quest and out of sheer frustration decided to self-publish the novel so that it would become available on international book retail sites such as Amazon, WH Smith and Barnes & Noble. My problem, however, was that the book was unavailable to Indian audiences. I began sending out my book to Indian distributors hoping that they would agree to supply my stock to Indian bookstores but I soon realised that they were not interested in promoting anything other than books by established authors. Luckily for me, my book got noticed by Westland and they decided to publish an Indian edition on the condition that I was willing to spend another nine months editing it. I agreed. The book was introduced to the market in 2008 and went on to remain a bestseller for several months. We have now released a reprint in 2010. As we speak the book is also being converted into a screenplay. The novel is also being translated into Hindi, Turkish and Spanish. I genuinely believe that we are not at the end of this saga but at the beginning.

IBNLive: Which authors do you admire and / or have read everything of?

Ashwin Sanghi: I was brought up on a diet of commercial fiction and thrillers for most of my growing years: Jeffrey Archer, Sidney Sheldon, Robert Ludlum, Frederick Forsyth, Irving Wallace, Jack Higgins et al. I was most impressed by the voluminous research that Arthur Hailey would do for his novels and that strongly influenced my style which is research-oriented. Amongst Indian works, I loved Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra, Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts and The Guide by R. K. Narayan, but given that I was never drawn to literary fiction, most Indian authors—who mostly wrote literary fiction—were outside my subset of preferences.

IBNLive: What’s next from you?

Ashwin Sanghi: History and mythology fascinate me, but I do not see myself as someone who can simply write historical fiction. Unless there is some relevance of history to the present day, I do not find the subject interesting enough for further exploration. As we speak, my second novel is under editing and should be released by January 2011. The Rozabal Line was a modern-day thriller that used a backdrop of religion and history. My next novel, on the other hand, is also a modern-day thriller, the primary difference being that it uses a backdrop of politics and history.

(The Rozabal Line is published by Westland, pp 362, Rs 225)



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