“People want to hear histories about people like them, even if they’re messier”
An Interview with Anirudh Kanisetti
Illustrated by Rohini Bhadarge
Our latest interview is a conversation with one of India’s most prolific and intriguing public historians. Anirudh Kanisetti is an award-winning writer, columnist and speaker specialising in ancient and early medieval India. He is the author of Lords of Earth and Sea: A History of the Chola Empire (2025) and Lords of the Deccan: Southern India from the Chalukyas to the Cholas (2022).
He is also the instructor of Siyahi’s Chapter Three retreat later this month. The retreat focuses on mastering historical writing, walking the line between research and imagination, and seeing factual evidence with empathy. Learn more about the retreat and register your interest here.
I wanted to begin by asking about your journey as a writer. I know you’re a historian and researcher, but I’d love to understand the transition from that to deciding to write books?
I think writing for me really began with podcasting. That really informed my writing style and journey. Back in 2017, I was working at a think tank in Bangalore, which had a tie-up with IVM Podcasts, who were pioneering the format at that time. After a bit of searching, I realised that there were almost no Indian history podcasts which were actually produced, edited, researched and devised by Indians. So my thought was why the hell not?
I grew up watching National Geographic documentaries or Discovery Channel programs. I always liked their format, which allowed you to simultaneously hear from experts, see reenactments, look at artifacts, and travel through time alongside a witty narrator. I thought that podcasts could be similar, but because there was no visual element to them, I’d have to put a lot more thought into the writing and the soundscape.
A lot of my podcast writing was sensorially driven, and I would think deeply about what would a scene have sounded like – say I’m describing a Buddhist stupa in second century India – would there have been a big crowd? What kind of bells or sounds would have been in that environment? This method and the practice of working on these podcasts made me realise how historically immersive the medium could be. It also awakened me to the possibilities of sensorially evocative writing as a means to immerse listeners and readers into historical worlds.
Quite soon after I started podcasting, publishers began to get in touch and I had a whole bunch of ideas about books I wanted to write – mostly new histories of ancient India. During these conversatons, I also realised that there are big gaping holes in the general public’s understanding of India’s history. One of those is the Deccan – a massive, Germany-sized plateau which somehow had such a little part in our historical imagination. I had visited so many bookstores and secondhand shops in Bangalore and struggled to find accessible non-fiction writing about Deccan history, though of course academics had studied and explored it along disciplinary lines. So that’s when I thought – we need a new history of the Deccan that engages with the academic work and research papers and that makes them accessible to the contemporary reader.
I felt there was so much scope there, to make a reader feel like they aren’t just listening to a history that is, as the saying goes, ‘just one damn thing after another’. To convey the sense that history is living and breathing and full of people like themselves. A lot of the skills I’d picked up in podcasting were very much applicable to long-form writing – the study of historical materials and archives, the commentary that can relate it to the contemporary, the big picture analysis paired with zooming into the details – all of that helped me in the process.
One thing that you said which I wanted to explore more is about the lack of historical writing to come from India, particularly from Indian writers, in a civilisation that is as old and rich as ours. Why do you think it evolved that way?
Well, colonialism is the obvious answer. The historical writings of the nineteenth and twentieth century cast a long shadow today, and many of us accept their framing of history without questioning the colonial contexts in which they were developed — I’m thinking particularly about religious and ethnic nationalism here. But colonialism also had deeper impacts, because it shaped the nature of publishing and the relationship between the state and the production of knowledge. So who gets to publish or write in India is deeply connected to caste and capital, as well as fundamentally to politics.
For instance – I’m Telugu, and Telugu intellectuals were some of the biggest firebrands of the twentieth century – these guys were questioning things that had been taken for granted in society for centuries, from child marriage to women’s education to the treatment of widows. Right up to the 1970s and 1980s, they were a significant intellectual force, and there were similar regional literary cultures in different parts of the country. They had some interaction with the Anglophone Delhi intelligentsia and publishers, but otherwise published entirely for regional readers.
But in the 1980s and 1990s there was a sea change in Indian politics. Various regional parties went after intellectuals and very deliberately targeted printing presses and universities. In many ways, they pioneered the methods of jailing or censorship that have become even more commonplace now – this definitely happened with the Telugu intellectuals, and in other parts of India too.
Essentially, that led to a drying up of regional literary cultures across huge swathes of India. Tamil Nadu was a partial exception, because of the Periyarite commitment to public libraries, but was definitely the case in Andhra, Telangana, Karnataka even. There was no freedom, funding or connections for regional publishers and libraries and so on, definitely not to the scale that English language publishers had. So as all these reading cultures have withered, English endured, mostly concentrated in Delhi — and now it is facing the challenges that crushed other Indian languages. On top of it, as a result of this withering, my view is that English publishers tend to be fairly limited in their exposure to regional trends and talent. And so a lot of publishing opportunities tend to be available only to writers who are based in Delhi or already have a degree of social capital that connects them to the publishing industry.
That’s a great point. Yet, there seems to be an appetite amongst readers for more layered or regional histories. Do you see initiatives like the Siyahi Retreat as a way to bridge the gap?
Certainly. In a lot of ways, my journey into writing was lucky. I was outside of the publishing world but I was around in the early days of Twitter, before it became what it is today. I had a conversation there with Manu Pillai about the etymology of the name Vijaynagara, and how various Indian cities have names that mean the same things. Manu mentioned me to Juggernaut, and because I studied in English-medium schools, minored in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, and was in the habit of writing for my podcast, it all happened to come together very fortunately for me.
I’m very aware of the fact that this is an exceptional case, particularly for young writers – they may not have the connections, or know how to write proposals, or have confidence in their ideas and so on. That’s one of the things we’re hoping to achieve with the retreat with Siyahi – to find and mentor the next wave of history writing talent . Because while it might be hard for publishers to find the right folks to write history, it’s not like the audience for it doesn’t exist. I’ve been fortunate to be able to write south Indian history and find a wide readership not just in south India but across the country. I think there is a curiosity and almost an intuitive public understanding that we need richer, more complex histories that showcase our regional trajectories, that speak to various social groups and not just kings and queens.
The talent is out there, it just needs to find its platforms. I do see this changing slowly, there is more and more such writing and it’s required because academic history isn’t accessible for a lot of people. Not just because of how it’s written but also because access to academic journals is quite expensive – purchasing museum catalogues or conference papers is not something most Indians can easily do. There are a lot of hurdles and I hope that this retreat can help young writers overcome at least a few of them.
A very worthy project. I also wanted to also ask you about the role of history in the current political moment – the changing of textbooks or the controversies about certain periods of Indian history, particularly the Mughal era, for instance, has become quite a political flashpoint. How do you think this relates to the role of historians or writers such as yourself?
Firstly, I think no period of Indian history has ever been safe from rewriting. The Mughals are probably the most noticeable because the good intellectuals of Delhi have a greater understanding of them, but this has been happening for a long time in many Indian states, especially in south India and especially with early medieval kings well before the Mughals.
The period that I write about is ripe for these kinds of identity-building projects. What we’re seeing with Hindutva is simply a magnification of what’s been happening to regional histories for a long time. Because it was primarily happening in regional languages, the Delhi intelligentsia and media weren’t particularly concerned with it earlier. The Cholas are a perfect example – so much of public perception of the Cholas is based on popular fiction, things that are just said or repeated endlessly with almost no archaelogical evidence.
I can think of only one Chola site that is being actively excavated at the moment, and there have been a few in the past on various parts of the coast. But by and large, our archaeological understanding of one of south India’s most important dynasties is practically non-existent. If you were to ask someone to explain on archaeological grounds what the layout of a Chola city was like, what their healthcare systems or what income inequality looked like in that era, we have very little actual verifiable information.
We know this very well for some other parts of the world, like Europe or parts of southeast Asia but we have no idea in India. If you were to ask someone what effects the bubonic plague had in India, we can point to particular plague Goddesses who still persist in some forms, but we don’t have skeletons we’ve studied, or evidence of its spread, the way there is in Europe. You’d think a world-altering epidemic event like this would be studied more, but in India it isn’t. This is because there has been a systematic project of starving academic departments of funding or insisting they fall into line with particular political narratives.
So we see a ceaseless glorification of early medieval dynasties, roughly between 800-1200 CE. That’s because they’ve long been transformed into totems of ethnic, religious, regional or linguistic identity. It’s happened with the Cholas in Tamil Nadu, it happened with Vijayanagara, in Karnataka, in Orissa with the Gajapatis and many other instances. Basically, political parties find it much easier to paint these kings as representing some ideal devout golden age, rather than fund objective or academic studies of these sites. That way, these dynasties serve as potent banks of political capital. This dynamic is what we’re seeing at a much bigger scale across the country, with the added dimension of religious strife.
To return to Hindutva – the rewriting of Mughal history has been happening for a long time, one or two decades now. The recent NCERT textbook changes are just the tip of the iceberg – public opinion had already shifted through Hindutva command over popular media. What’s happening simultaneously, as Muslim histories are pushed out of the public consciousness, is that existing “totemic” regional figures are now being pulled into an idealised and solely Hindu history. So each state’s ideal kings are rebranded as primarily Hindi and pressed into a fictional golden age.
For example, with the Cholas, the Union government is attempting to glorify their conquests in southeast Asia, for which no archeological evidence whatsoever exists. What we do have archaeological evidence of is the Tamil merchant diaspora being active in that region for nearly a thousand years, which is already such an interesting story, but they want to paint it as some story of royal protagonists and Hindu conquest. But the Dravida Munetra Kazhagam, Tamil Nadu’s ruling party, has already been glorifying the Cholas on similar lines for decades. Yet this lip service to the past has not ensured basic infrastructure for contemporary citizens in the erstwhile Chola capital region, as various journalists have pointed out.
This valorisation of conquest, this nationwide political appropriation of history, can be seen in the emergence of certain kinds of “historical fiction” – for instance, in one of Amish Tripathi’s books the Cholas conduct a surgical strike on Mahmoud of Ghazni to restore the lost honour of Hinduism. It’s completely absurd from a historical standpoint, but it obviously makes sense from a political standpoint to press them into the Hindutva narrative, into Hindutva insecurities and talking points. Very recently, the Madhya Pradesh government had a mela in Delhi in which the Chief Minister claimed that the legendary king Vikramaditya had conquered most of Central Asia all the way up to Turkey. Obviously, there’s no evidence of this: the claim originates from an internet meme that was being circulated a few years ago. The Assam government had something similar when they had an event to celebrate the anniversary of Lachit Borphukan, an Ahom general who had defeated the Mughals, completely ignoring the fact that the Ahoms also migrated to India in the 13th century at the same time as the Delhi Sultanate, and brutally subjugated the locals who originally lived in the Brahmaputra valley.
I could go on, but I think the bigger problem is to do with the systems that are shaping the public understanding of history. The political and media ecosystem has been teaching people that there’s nothing more to history than the shame of being defeated or the pride of victory, these anachronistic concepts of national or religious honour. Public discourse needs to go beyond ‘who defeated who’ and we need to show readers that the dynamism and complexity of these societies is much more interesting to study.
Do you think it’s inevitable that history is always used to push a particular narrative or suit an agenda, or are there ways to combat this?
I don’t think it’s possible for this to last indefinitely, or at least I hope not. These kind of narratives have spread rapidly because of the emotional contagion that social media encourages. But at the same time, facts also spread on social media – perhaps much more slowly, but it does happen. I’ve seen people whose minds have been changed – teenagers who used to troll my columns have messaged me to say that when they actually looked at the history and read the evidence they see where I am coming from.
I just think that you can’t fool all of the people, all the time, particularly in the age of constant connectivity. Technocrats want us to believe they are omniscient and omnipotent, but they aren’t. Inconvenient facts are always going to come out. For example, in my most recent book, Lords of Earth and Sea, I got flak for pointing out that there is very little archaelogical, artistic or literary evidence for a Chola Navy. You can imagine that neither Hindutva-wadis nor Tamil nationalists liked that, but after putting out many essays and columns, many people have also come around to agreeing with me. Training readers in historical methods and bringing evidence to their attention is going to be a slow process, and it’s not particularly incentivised by our political ecosystem. But it will lead to tremendous long-term change.
As more and more young people write regional histories or do their own research or look at primary sources, there will be ripple effects and I can see it slowly changing. Maybe it’s only in my social media bubble. But then again, maybe not. And that gives me hope.
That’s encouraging to hear. I wanted to move to a question I’m sure you get asked a lot – who were the writers or what books, historical or otherwise, inspired you on this journey to start writing or to dive deeper into history?
Back when I was in college, I was doing an internship in Kolkata, when Flipkart was kind of new. They had this policy where if you returned a book within 2 or 3 days of ordering it, you’d be refunded the entire amount. For a broke college student with far too much time, that was the perfect hack. So in that period I probably read a few dozen books in two or three months. I read William Dalrymple’s The Last Mughals and White Mughals, which really opened my eyes to what narrative or historical nonfiction can be, how the characters can feel human.
Another book that really shaped my interest in ancient India was Romila Thapar’s Ashoka and the Decline of the Mauryas. I was probably the only person in my college who read that book cover to cover. Hindutva is very clever with identifying and smearing its opponents, so many people now critique Professor Thapar’s work without ever having read her. But I thought that for its time, it was an amazing book and one that contrasts the simplified narratives I’d been exposed to about Ashoka planting mango trees or building roads.
In addition, a lot of art and architecture resources have been a huge inspiration as well. After my first book I worked with MAP Academy in Bangalore, and I worked on their Encyclopaedia of Indian Art. Already while researching my first book, I’d learned a lot about sculpture and architecture because I really believe narrative history needs to have a rounded, immersive idea of the past that doesn’t solely come from texts. So working on the Encyclopedia really opened my eyes to using art as a resource to understand a society’s footprint, because the Cholas have left behind a tremendous architectural and sculptural corpus across huge parts of the Indian peninsula. You can see so much of a society through that, and that really fed into my second book. I’m grateful to MAP Academy for that experience, and they also gave me a grant to work on Lords of Earth and Sea, which was hugely helpful.
Those are great recommendations. I wanted to ask more about your writing process as well. How does research and podcasting and so on tie in to your routine? Do you write daily or outline first? How does a typical day go when you’re working on a manuscript or a draft?
My process varies, but it always begins with getting inspired or identifying a character. So for instance, I was writing about this 9th century Deccan king called Amoghavarsha. He’s best known today by Kannada nationalists for commissioning the first grammar of courtly Kannada. But he was born in the year 800 and then came to power in the year 814 because his father died young. Then he lost his throne two or three years later, was in exile, got his uncle to help him reclaim his throne, which he took back and then ruled for over sixty years after that.
But those were the facts, the thing that got me thinking was – what would a fourteen year old be thinking at his coronation? We have enough medieval accounts of these coronations – the ceremony of it, there’s a sacrificial fire, pouring of holy water, all the king’s vassals and generals and tributaries who his father had bullied would be there plotting to take the throne, there’s a heavy golden crown placed on his head – just imagining this experience for a fourteen-year-old is what made me want to start writing the scene rather than just framing him as this great king. That’s the kind of human connection that will resonate with every reader.
When I’m doing research, I would like to begin with scholarly literature to look at larger social trends, and then I move to primary sources, where I search for character and personality. As I’m building out the framework, I also try to plot out where I should place my commentary. For instance – what’s the best place in the overall plot to talk about temple architecture or medieval battles? I can’t have scenes for all of these things in every chapter: that’ll quickly get monotonous. So I plan carefully where they would fit best alongside characters who can absorb a reader.
Of course, that’s the ideal scenario — in practice my process can be much more ad hoc, with lots of revisions, reorientations, and scrapped trains of thought. But fundamental to everything is the initial moment of empathising with a historical person. I look for human stories or moments that intrigue me – I find it difficult to think of histories as a disengaged or disembodied processes, even if it’s important to zoom out and look at the big picture now and then; I think histories must be about people and that’s what makes them resonate for me and for readers.
This search for personality is also taking root in medieval scholarship on Europe, and I find it quite exciting. In Amy Livingstone’s study of the de Beaugency family, a minor French noble house, she points out quite simply that if a count made a donation for masses in his mother’s name – perhaps we should assume that he loved his mother instead of assuming that this was purely done out of devotion or convention. Once we apply this to Indian medieval primary sources, you can figure out quite a lot about interpersonal dynamics.
For instance, if a Chola queen built a temple in her son’s name, and everyone in his retinue, from his personal masseuse to his sheepherder, made gifts to it, could we at least suggest that he was a popular figure? If, after the prince died in battle, his general renounced his position and became a wandering ascetic, can we conclude that the two were dear friends? Looking for the human characters within these sources fascinates me. I think people are tired of histories that wag their fingers at them and try to make them feel angry or sad or proud about the past. I think at a fundamental level people want to hear histories about people like them, even if they’re messier and more troubling.
Once I’ve made the connections in my mind, figured out my characters and my commentary, it’s a fairly straightforward process. I try to be disciplined with my writing, but it always comes in phases – there are days when I sit all day and can generate two or three thousand words, and then days of misery where things just aren’t coming together. I used to stress out about this quite a lot (and my wife is a saint for putting up with it), but I’ve come to learn that the quality of a first draft doesn’t matter as much as having a first draft.
I came across a quote from Jordan Peele, of all people, or at least what someone on the internet thinks Jordan Peele said. He said that the first draft is not a sand castle but just you putting all the sand in the pit. I found that such a relief, and that helps me take the pressure out of the process. As long as I make sure the research is thorough and there’s some sort of narrative, you can keep chiseling out the story and the characters as you edit further and build on it. The term world-building is often used for fantasy but I think it’s equally important in writing history as well. To understand history we need to know the rules of the world in which history operated, to make sure there is immersion.
And I really enjoy this process. With the Cholas, we all think about conquerors or the massive temples, but how do you appreciate the scale of those temples if you don’t know how small they were before that? How do you understand a king’s compulsion to conquer if you don’t understand his family’s humiliating defeats before him? How do you appreciate raiding up the coast towards Bengal if you don’t understand the challenges of logistics in medieval times? These rules and contexts are so important, and slowly seeding them helps me bring the reader into that lost world.
So much of that is very helpful and relatable even to a writer of fiction or essays. Getting the first draft done is great advice. The last thing I wanted to ask was in terms of your future plans. Are you working on a new book? Are there other periods of history you want to explore more or anything else in the pipeline?
Well, I’m certainly very excited about the retreat - I know how daunting the first steps into writing can feel, and I’m excited to mentor writers who are just starting their research journeys. After that, I do want to branch out – I don’t want to be boxed in as somebody who only writes about medieval south India. Indian history offers such a vast canvas that generations of Indian historians could spend their lifetimes writing about different periods and we still won’t have enough voices. I do want to write about different regions, to change my chronological focus a bit, possibly to ancient India because I think that’s a period that is quite fundamentally misunderstood. I also want to shift away from writing about dynasties. For better or worse, that’s what readers are most familiar with, but it’s also one where opinions are strongly shaped by popular media and political interference. I’d like to experiment with other kinds of history – stories of travelers or adventures or objects or landscapes.
I’m constantly amazed by the perspectives that come out in global historical nonfiction.
I’ve been reading this book called Between Two Rivers by Dr. Moudhy al-Rashid, which is about the excavation of a room in Ur, in southern Iraq, dated to around 600 BCE. Because Ur was such an ancient city, that room contained artifacts that someone in 600 BCE found while rebuilding a temple that dated back to thousands of years earlier, so that room has actually been called the world’s first museum. So the book explores how these artifacts came to be there and what they tell us about ancient Mesopotamia, and it’s honestly so impressive. Next on my list is a history of Fulvia, who was Mark Anthony’s wife and a political player in her own right in ancient Rome. There’s always so many interesting approaches to learn about that it’s exciting.
I have a lot of writing ideas but I also want to spend some time exploring art, architecture, and potentially even trying to kickstart archaeological excavations on lost Indian cities. There’s lots of new technologies like LiDar scans that they’re using for Amazonian excavations, and that could offer us a way to rediscover Indian sites that cannot be excavated for budgetary reasons or because they’re under existing settlement areas. There’s more than enough reasons to be despondent about the state of Indian history but I’d like to focus on what’s still possible, what still remains to be discovered and learned. I believe there are enough people who believe in this kind of work, and I firmly believe that it’s the objective, nuanced, fact-based and humane histories that will eventually stand the test of time.
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Anirudh Kanisetti is an author and historian. He writes the popular Thinking Medieval column for The Print and hosts three podcasts: Echoes of India: A History Podcast, YUDDHA: The Indian Military History Podcast, and The Altar of Time: A History of India's Christian Art. He is currently Honorary Fellow at the Deccan Heritage Foundation.
Abhay Puri is a writer and founding editor of Hammock Magazine.
This interview has been edited for clarity and readability.