HARAPPA SERIES
ABOUT ME
An orthopaedic surgeon by profession, I have always been interested in history. When I realised that I could write after the success of "A Kangaroo Court", I decided to put down on paper what I had read and learnt about the Indian pre-history. I had heard of Harappa and Mohenjodaro being spoken in whispers and no one really knew much about the Indus Valley civilisation or its people for a long time. Indus Valley script defied experts across the world and only recently there have been some advances in trying to understand what they said. I had always wondered what kind of people lived in those cities before they turned into ruins. How did they lie, what did they eat, what kind of clothes they wore, what was their daily life was like. Last ten years or so has seen an explosion of discoveries on the Indian side of the IVC (Indus Valley Civilisation) culture and the myth of river Saraswathi has been solved with some certainty. Mainly thanks to experts such as jonathan Kenoyer and organisations such as Remote Sensing Laboratory of Jaisalmer, some of the riddles have been solved.
Vedic scriptures always fascinated me since childhood. I used to sit and listen to priests at home and wondered what they said during hindu ceremonies. Most of it went completely over my head!! The four Vedas - Rigveda, Samaveda, Atharvana Veda and Yajurveda are considered the oldest compositions in the world and probably the largest as well! Most importantly, no one knows who composed them. I was told that they were voices of God "heard" (Shruthi) and not written down. It amazed me that such a huge corpus of extremely complex literature was carried down from generation to generation and over thousands of years without changing. I felt that this was not humanly possible! Several experts felt that this massive scripture was the work of the Harappans (as the people of IVC are called) and it was composed during the third millennium BCE or even before. Reading of the whole veda is a daunting task. I managed to read english translation of Ralph Griffith with great difficulty and I must admit that I did not understand everything!! One thing that became quite clear from reading Rigveda was, that a ot of it was a historical document with events and people in it.
I decided to use the events and people in the Rigveda, placed them in the Harappan cities of IVC and reproduced the stories from the huge corpus in fictional form. That was the beginning of Harappa Series. First book was published in Delhi by Palimpsest India and released in November 2013. The second book is undergoing the final edit and slated for release during the spring/summer of 2014 by Alchemy Publishers. The third book, The Battle of Ten Kings, is likely to be my magnum opus and due for release in 2015.
