India is much beyond the Mughals and well before the Mughals. – Prabir Ghosh | Interview

We’re here with Prabir Ghosh, a former corporate executive who’s turned his lifelong love of history and reading into a new passion—writing. After spending 35 years in a busy career and traveling all over the world, Prabir has written India – Glimpses of Her Journey 500000 BCE Till Today. His book dives into India’s history, but not just the parts we often hear about. It explores lesser-known events, regions, and cultures from ancient times to the present, giving a broader view of India’s rich heritage. We’ll hear about what led him to write this book, the challenges he faced, and what he hopes readers will take away from it.

1. What inspired you to transition from a corporate career to writing about history?

Prabir: Besides my busy professional life, my passion always was reading and also bit of writing. In between long flights, I used to write some kind of memoirs and pursued with my love for poem writing. My son Pratyay is an avid reader of history and he inspired me to seriously study history. While studying number of books on Indian History, I felt the need to record a chronological time line of vast Indian History. It was my wife, who hearing about the concept inspired me to develop the concept and write it for GEN Y, who has less time to read voluminous history books.

2. Can you share a memorable moment from your research process for this book?
Prabir: For me serious writing was an unknown phenomenon. When I decided to work on the project, I was unaware about the tedious process that I shall go through. I spent two months to conceptualize the book, another four months for my research and data collection, next two months for fact checks and cross verification, further three months for writing and editing. I used to sit six to eight hours daily at a stretch during last three months. The entire journey and my personal discovery of history in the process was truly memorable.

3. What motivated you to focus on the history of South and Eastern India?
Prabir: I always felt, while reading Indian History, that we romanticize and put importance a little too much on Mughal period and historical events that occurred north of Vindhya Range and west of Patna . How many of us are aware of the rich history of Cholas, Pandyas, Pallavas, Satvahanas, Rashtrakutas of the South India or Ahom, Kamrupa or Koch of North East or Mahameghvahana, Gajapati, Sailodbhava of Odisha? I felt an urge to bring these lesser known sides to the young readers. They must know that India is much beyond the Mughals and well before the Mughals.

4. How do you hope readers will engage with India’s history through your book?
Prabir: I am confident that the short and precise history of 12000 years of India and contemporary World, the precise historical facts and that too concise and in a snippet form in less than 200 pages shall inspire young history lovers to take a dig into the book. I thank book lovers like you and others, who are bringing the book to the knowledge of a wider family of netizens.
I am personally not very active in social media, so without your active interest the reach of the book would have been limited.

5. What challenges did you face while condensing 12,000 years of history into a single book?
Prabir: One must keep in mind that we don’t write history, we only gather and present the historical facts in a desired form and for a group of targeted readers. History is vast and not all historical information are always reliable. The major challenge was to select the important events, precise them, keeping the main essence, fact check and weeding out myths from histories and keeping unbiased stance and finally handling sensitive events without compromising facts.

6. How does your background in business influence your writing style and approach to history?
Prabir: In Top Corporate Position, we are expected to take an unbiased approach to the facts and figures that are available to us and to extract the main essence from the large data available therefrom. We also learn to be crisp, precise and to the point during our presentation. All these really helped in my approach while writing on history.

7. Can you share any surprising discoveries you made while writing this book?
Prabir: There are so many. I was amazed to know that Cholas were the major naval power between 9th and 13th centuries and controlled major part of South East Asia with their Naval Power. During Aurangzeb’s peak ruling period, India’s GDP was 25% of World GDP. There are so many such interesting facts that I have put in my book. The readers shall definitely enjoy these surprise elements for sure.

8. How do you balance political history with social and cultural aspects in your narrative?
Prabir: While political history is definitely important but human and social history is equally important. Most of the books on history ignore the social and geographical history. I am always keen to know how people behaved in early ages, what was their lifestyle, what they used to eat… so on and so forth. In this book I have tried to balance my approach and put importance on facts beyond politics.

9. What do you think is the most commonly overlooked aspect of Indian history?
Prabir: I would rephrase my reply taking cue from your question. Indian History over hypes Mughal History and Islamic rule before the Mughals came. I somewhat agree that Mughal period is important in Indian context but one must put focus on the likes of Rana Sanga, Himu, Ahom and Kalinga kings and South Indian Dynasties equally.

10. What role does travel play in your understanding and writing of history?
Prabir: It plays a lot. I am fortunate to travel around 40 countries across four continents and some of them have been more familiar than my own. These travels developed my personal interest on Global history. Just to give one incident. In Cologne Germany (my home away from home), I used to stay in a particular hotel. I was informed that at the basement of the hotel there is a preserved part of city wall that dates back to 7th century. I was amazed to see that they built the hotel on a historical site preserving the Archeological site as it is.

11. What’s next for you after this book? Any upcoming projects?
Prabir: Yes. That is still in early conceptual stage. Can’t disclose much now. But that too shall be on Indian History and should be interesting enough. Let’s see how the current work is taken by the readers.

12. How do you envision the future of history writing evolving in the digital age?
Prabir: GEN Y don’t have much time to read books and especially those of larger volume. Those who want to do serious study on history shall always go for detailed version. But there must be some kind of fun reading concept in history books for them. This genre of books shall deal with serious concepts but in precise, crisp and snippet form to develop their interest on history. After that if any of them want to do detailed study on any aspect of history, they have the choice of so many voluminous titles available to them. I want to act as catalyst in developing their interest in history.

Thank you so much, Prabir, for sharing your story and giving us a fresh look at Indian history. It’s been inspiring to hear how your background, travels, and interest in overlooked parts of our past have shaped India – Glimpses of Her Journey 500000 BCE Till Today. Your book opens up history in a way that’s both easy to understand and eye-opening, especially for younger readers who might be exploring these stories for the first time. We wish you all the best with the book and look forward to seeing what you’ll bring to us next. And for those who want to stay connected, be sure to follow Prabir on Twitter (@prabirghosh6) and Instagram (@prabirg59) to keep up with his latest updates. Thanks again, Prabir!