Christopher Doyle launches into conversation about his latest book The Mahabharata Quest with the story of two phases of his life. “To talk about my current book, I’d have to go back to my first book, The Mahabharata Secret . That was a story for my daughter who was seven then. She quickly outgrew the book and was looking for something more intellectual on the lines of history and mythology. That’s when I started doing research for this book (around 2006) and I came upon the Legend of the Nine Unknown Men during Ashoka's time. It’s a historical fact that at that time science was widely suppressed — that was a trigger for me to write my book, which is based on science and not fantasy,” he emphasises.
Christopher says that in the late 90s he read a few books that inspired him to write a book based on science and technology. “One of the earliest works by Akshoy Majumdar, The Hindu History , compares all the Hindu scriptures and narrates the history of kings present 5,000 years ago. In fact, he was one of the first to suggest that Hindu gods were humans. Graham Hancock’s Fingerprints of the Gods and Robert Lomas and Christopher Knight’s Uriel’s Machine really cemented my belief in prehistoric science.”
The Mahabharata Quest , the first book in a series, talks about the historical probability and science behind the epic, or the “ithihasa”, as Christopher calls it, and argues that when people have interpreted Western myths, it’s about time that we did the same for indigenous ones. But what is it with Indians and the great epics? We seem to be a nation obsessed with telling and retelling them. Christopher finds The Mahabharata to be the most underrated piece of literature he’s read. “I've read many versions — Rajagopalachari's, Ramesh Menon's, Kisari Mohan Ganguli’s... and Kisari’s is the one I depended on. It made me realise that every character in The Mahabharata displays a stunning range of emotions, that everyone is a mix of grey shades.”
He does admit that this fixation might be a generational thing, where people are open to different interpretations of the same story. “Whether it’s Amish about Shiva or Anand Neelakantan about Ravana having a good side to him, there are so many ways to look at it; and even gods have problems,” he exclaims.
So far, he says, his book has received positive feedback and, funnily enough, the only negative comments are from people who mistake him to be a Westerner, thanks to his English-sounding name.
With a full-time day job that lets him schedule his writing around it, Christopher says that it took him about eight years to complete research for The Mahabharata Quest and two years to put it together. To answer a question about why more and more management-based authors are emerging, Christopher says that he can only speculate about it. “People have told me that I have an advantage in marketing, so maybe that,” he laughs. Christopher also plays in a classic rock band called Mid Life Crisis that he says is “on the backburner for now,” and is focusing his attention on the rest of the series.
