Most retellings of India’s history are continent-centric. In this narrative of India, the seat of power was initially Pataliputra, and later shifted to Delhi. The neighbourhood in which India is situated in this worldview is one that includes China and Central Asia. India, however, was also one of the world’s great maritime nations with its seat of power in the south, and its neighbourhood included Oman on one side and Indonesia on the other. At our Online Talk #ForgottenHistory, scholar and author Sanjeev Sanyal offers a different worldview of India’s history - a maritime one - which has genuine implications for the way we think about our world today.

About the speaker

Sanjeev Sanyal is a bestselling writer and historian, and also serves as the Principal Economic Adviser to the Government of India. He has written several books including 'Land of the Seven Rivers', 'The Ocean of Churn', 'The Indian Rennaissance' and 'India in the Age of Ideas'. Before joining the Government, he spent two decades in the financial sector; he was Managing Director & Global Strategist at Deutsche Bank till 2015. He has been awarded the Eisenhower Fellowship for his work of Urban Dynamics in 2007. He has also been a Visiting Scholar at Oxford University, Adjunct Fellow at the Institute of Policy Studies, Singapore, Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and an Honorary Professor of JNU. He has been a student of SRCC, Delhi, and Oxford University where he was a Rhodes Scholar (1992-95).