Evolution of Mytho-Fiction and Multilayered Narrative Structures in the Select Works of Ashwin Sanghi

Abstract

Ashwin Sanghi occupies a distinctive position in contemporary Indian English writing as the author most credited with popularising the conspiracy-driven “mythological thriller,” a hybrid form that fuses itihasa (received history-cum-legend), archaeology, theology, and geopolitics with the pace of the airport thriller. This paper traces the evolution of mytho-fiction across Sanghi's Bharat Collection, from The Rozabal Line (2007) to The Ayodhya Alliance (2025), examining how his engagement with myth has deepened from a single speculative premise into a civilizational architecture spanning nine novels and seven millennia. The paper further analyses the multilayered narrative strategies Sanghi employs, dual and triple timelines, frame narratives, epistolary and documentary inserts, and the alternation of short cinematic chapters, arguing that these devices are not merely structural ornaments but the technical means by which Sanghi enacts euhemerism, the interpretive move of reading myth as displaced history. Situating Sanghi alongside contemporaries such as Amish Tripathi and Anand Neelakantan, and drawing on the critical vocabulary of ‘Bharati Fantasy’ developed in recent scholarship, the paper argues that Sanghi's oeuvre both reflects and shapes a post-millennial Indian readership eager to see its ancient past narrated as usable, evidentiary history.