Bestselling author Amish Tripathi has said Indian history has long suffered from a "Delhi bias" that sidelines other powerful empires such as the Cholas, despite their extraordinary achievements. Speaking to NDTV about his latest book The Chola Tigers: Avengers of Somnath, Mr Tripathi called for telling these forgotten narratives.
"Our history textbooks... they have a latent Delhi bias. Like everything happened between Khyber and Agra, you know, and the rest of India didn't really matter," Mr Tripathi said. "I'm not denying the importance of Delhi... but it's not the only important thing. And when we excessively focus on Delhi, our understanding of India is incomplete."
He pointed out that this narrow framing reduces Indian history to invasions and defeats. "We think India was essentially about invaders coming in from the Khyber Pass, and everything would centre around the battles at Panipat and then we would lose. That was the story apparently of the last thousand years," Mr Tripathi said.
"But if you look beyond Delhi, you'll realise India was actually the greatest seafaring and trading nation of ancient times. India had the greatest GDP, particularly in the first millennium, by far because of our trading progress."
Mr Tripathi's latest novel turns the spotlight on Rajendra Chola, whose empire, he argues, rivalled, and in some ways surpassed, that of the Mughals. "Rajendra Chola's empire was bigger than the empire of Akbar," he said.
"Now, I'm not belittling the achievements of Akbar at all. But if you read our history books, you won't gather that. It won't give you the impression that Emperor Rajendra Chola had an empire as big as Emperor Akbar. That's unfair."
The Cholas were a powerful Tamil dynasty in southern India, renowned for their naval strength, trade, and cultural achievements. They built grand temples, expanded across South and Southeast Asia, and shaped medieval Indian history.
He stressed that non-Delhi empires across South, West, East, and Central India have been marginalized in mainstream narratives. "Various other non-Delhi empires have been ignored to be honest. It's not just South India-West India, East India, Central India, they've all been ignored. I'm attempting to balance that through my fiction writing."
Mr Tripathi also challenged the notion that Indian civilization passively endured centuries of defeat.
"The way history has been taught to us is that for a thousand years our ancestors just kept losing," he said. "But if we were losing every major battle for a thousand years, why the hell are we still alive? Every other ancient culture is dead... we are still standing 1,300 years later because our ancestors fought like hell. They lost battles, but they won battles as well and they never surrendered. The last thousand years, in my opinion, is the greatest resistance in human history."
For him, the Cholas' story is a crucial piece of Indian unity. "If you find the commonalities, the basis for our nationhood, it makes for a stronger nation. We don't have to lie to make it up, they are there. There is far, far more in common between north and south than we are actually taught."
