Sanjeev Sanyal

Sanjeev Sanyal
Member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (EAC-PM)
Incumbent
Assumed office 22 February 2022
Principal Economic Advisor, Department of Economic Affairs, Ministry of Finance
In office 21 February 2017 - 20 February 2022
Personal details
Born	(1970-08-27) 27 August 1970 Kolkata, West Bengal, India
Nationality	Indian
Alma mater	Shri Ram College of Commerce St John's College, Oxford
Occupation	Economist Writer

Sanjeev Sanyal is an Indian economist and popular historian. He is a member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister of India. Sanyal has authored several books on Indian history to mixed reviews.

Early life and education

Sanjeev Sanyal was born in Kolkata and studied at St. Xavier's School and St. James' School. He received a Bachelor's degree in economics from Shri Ram College of Commerce followed by a Master's degree from St John's College (1992–1995), where he was a Rhodes Scholar.

Career

Sanyal worked for Deutsche Bank until 2008, leaving to research and write Land of the Seven Rivers, and returned in 2011. By 2015, when he resigned, he was a managing director and global strategist.

In 2017, he was appointed as the Principal Economic Adviser to the Indian Ministry of Finance and helped prepare the 2021–22 Economic Survey of India. In February 2022, he was appointed member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister.

Views

Sanyal has been a vocal critic of Nehruvian socialism, which he deems to have stemmed from an "inward-looking cultural attitude". Nehru and P. C. Mahalanobis are criticized for treating the economy as a "mechanical toy", leaving little scopes for the flourish of private enterprises, and ultimately throttling creativity. Sanyal praises the 1991 liberalisation reforms as the harbinger of Indian Renaissance, and argues for the application of Complex Adaptive Systems framework to economic issues.

Among his most-espoused views is that the historiography of India has been distorted with "Colonial, Nehruvian, and Marxist" biases — thus, requiring a "rewriting" of history by "properly revisiting" primary sources. In The Ocean of Churn, Sanyal argues that the primary sources used in painting a humane image of Ashoka can also be interpreted to reconstruct him as a genocidal tyrant. According to Sanyal, Ashoka did not convert to Buddhism out of laments at the Kalinga War but due to political pressure exerted by the Jains. A host of other sources are invoked to compare Ashoka with "modern day fundamentalists", whose Dhaṃma Mahāmātās were "religious police"; the famed edicts about religious tolerance are read as propaganda.

Sanyal blames the Nehruvian project for having established Ashoka as a "great king", and stresses on the urgent need of a post-socialist reading of history. In Sanyal's version of this reading, the central character is Chanakya, a "professor of Political Economy at Taxila university" who had helped Chandragupta Maurya establish a pan-Indian empire and who then wrote Arthashastra about a centralised Mauryan economy. Only when the Arthshastra is retrofitted to India's current political economy —by fixing the judicial system, investing in internal security, and simplifying taxation rules— among other things, Sanyal believes that we can return to the "golden age" of India that had birthed "yoga, algebra, the concept of zero, chess, plastic surgery, metallurgy, Hinduism, [and] Buddhism."

Reception

Meera Visvanathan, a historian of ancient India, finds Sanyal ignorant of methodologies in historical research. She notes that despite calls to rewrite history, Sanyal's citations remained restricted to mainstream histories and seldom invoked primary sources. In deconstructing the narrative of Ashoka, Sanyal failed to apply source-criticism—subjecting contemporary edicts, Buddhist hagiographies, and Sri Lankan legends to the same treatment—and imposed a host of anachronistic categories. Likewise, Sanyal remained oblivious of recent scholarship—documenting the fuzziness of Mauryan economy or Arthshastra to be the work of multiple post-Mauryan scholars—and misrecognized a shastra of political economy, as it developed in Ancient India, as a manual of Mauryan statecraft. Sanyal's analysis of Mahabharata was deemed to be an exercise in unsubstantiated speculation to fit preconceived notions of history without understanding the methods of interpreting Sanskrit itihasa. Overall, Vishvanathan finds Sanyal's works to be "riddled with holes" but yet, Sanyal's superior writing skills coupled with a logical simplicity that appealed to majoritarian prejudices had ensured popularity among masses.

Manu Pillai, a popular historian, commends The Ocean of Churn for being a "delightful introduction to the world of the Indian Ocean" despite the possibility of professional scholars challenging his narrative and conclusions. He welcomed Sanyal's command over a layered and complex past, his "accessible" yet "captivating narrative", and especially the reevaluation of Ashoka. Shiv Visvanathan, a social anthropologist specializing in science and technology studies, praised the same work for being a feisty, combative, and comprehensive history of Indian Ocean aimed at a general audience but cautioned that "a professional historian might crib". Like Pillai, he commends the "devastating" reconstruction of Ashoka and recovering figures from the margins of history.

Honors

Sanyal was awarded an Eisenhower Fellowship in 2007 for his work on urban issues. In 2010, he was named Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. He has been an Adjunct Fellow of the Institute of Policy Studies at the National University of Singapore, Fellow of and Senior Fellow of IDFC Institute (Mumbai). Sanyal has been a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, London, Visiting Scholar at Oxford University, adjunct fellow at the Institute of Policy Studies (Singapore), and a senior fellow of the World Wide Fund for Nature (formerly World Wildlife Fund).

Works

Books

• The Indian Renaissance: India's Rise After A Thousand Years of Decline, World Scientific, 2008, 264 p.
• Land of the Seven Rivers: A Brief History of India's Geography, Penguin, 2013, 192 p.
• The Incredible History of India's Geography, Penguin, 2015, 264 p.
• The Ocean of Churn: How the Indian Ocean Shaped Human History, Penguin, 2017, 324 p.
• Life over Two Beers and Other Stories, Penguin, 2018, 232 p.
• India in the Age of Ideas: Select Writings, 2006-2018, Westland, 2018, 318 p.

Columns

Sanyal is an occasional columnist for the Hindustan Times, Project Syndicate, The Economic Times, Live Mint, Business Standard, and several other publications.

External links

• Sanyal's Homepage
• Sanyal's Business Standard columns