Saurav Sinha

I write everything on this site.

I grew up in Bhagwatpur, a village in Bihar, and I live in New Delhi now. I trained as an engineer and stopped. I have been paid to write since I was nineteen, which meant several years of technical documentation and industrial copy before I wrote anything I wanted to sign my name to. That is not a complaint. It taught me that you cannot hide a thin argument behind a good sentence, and the same is true of history.

The books

My novella In Her Sixteen: Part One is published and available on Amazon. It is set in rural India in 2002 and follows Revati, a girl sold on her sixteenth birthday. Part Two is also available on Amazon and completes the story. There will not be a third. There will not be a third, because this is not a story I can keep writing indefinitely and it does not need to be longer than it is.

I have also finished an epic fantasy trilogy, Arsalan, set in an invented world called Indica. All three books are written and revised. The first is currently going out to agents and publishers. It is not published, and I will update this page on the day that changes rather than leaving the sentence vague.

The work

Professionally I write for screen and for publication. That is where the habit comes from of building a piece around one person rather than a sequence of dates, and it is probably why the articles here read more like stories than summaries.

Outside that I have been reading and writing about Indian mythology, Vedic philosophy and ancient history for years. That is where this site is eventually headed, and none of it is published here yet.

Why this site exists

I kept finding the same two failures in writing about the ancient world. Either it told me nothing I could not have guessed, or it treated every unanswered question as proof of a secret.

I wanted to see whether there was a third way to write it. Take the story seriously as a story. Take the evidence seriously as evidence. Then show the reader exactly where the two stop agreeing, and stop there rather than filling the gap with invention.

Every article on this site is an attempt at that. Some work better than others.

Corrections

If you think I have got something wrong, write to me. Corrections are the part of this I take most seriously, they are made rather than quietly absorbed, and they go on the record with the date and what changed.