Cop by day, writer of thrillers & researcher by night, who is Maharashtra IPS officer Brijesh Singh

Principal secretary in Directorate General of Information & PR, Singh has written 3 books with the latest, The Cloud Chariot, released about 3 months ago.

IPS officer Brijesh Singh | Photo: X/@Brijeshbsingh

Mumbai: For several years now, IPS officer Brijesh Singh has been in the habit of staying up half the night, making use of the only part of the day when there are no demands on his time. Not from his work or family.

That’s Singh’s “me time”, and it is in this hush of the night that he creates. In these three hours, he sheds the skin of a cop and an administrator, and briefly becomes an avid researcher and writer.

It is this “me time” that has helped Singh, a 1996-batch Indian Police Service officer, write three books, with the latest The Cloud Chariot—a thriller set in the 1st century BCE that takes the reader to a transformative time in Kalinga region’s history—having hit the shelves just over 3 months ago.

This is also the book that’s dearest to him, one that he has spent the longest working on, and the one that he started writing first, but ended up being the last to release.

Singh, who grew up in Nagpur, is among the officers known to be close to Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis.

He is currently posted as the principal secretary in the Directorate General of Information and Public Relations (DGIPR) in the Maharashtra government, the same charge he had held in the Mantralaya, the state secretariat, in Fadnavis’ first 5-year stint as CM ending 2019.

It was the first time that the post was given to an IPS officer. Simultaneously, Singh was also made the first inspector-general in charge of the newly created Maharashtra cyber cell.

When the government changed and the Uddhav Thackery-led Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) came to power in Maharashtra, Singh was transferred as Additional Director General of Police, home guard.

However, after the Eknath Shinde-led Mahayuti government came to power, Singh was back in the limelight with a key post, that of the principal secretary to the CM, an office that’s usually always held by Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officers.

Now in the DGIPR, Singh is attempting to change quite a few things in the way the department functions, but he likes to talk more about his other identity, that of a writer.

“I also wrote this (his latest book) because as Indians, I have this deep feeling, we have this cultural amnesia. What I call the great disconnect. Anybody who talks about our history and grandeur is derided and rejected. I said why not write a serious work, which is almost like a thesis, but is also entertaining,” Singh said, speaking to ThePrint, as he brewed some coffee in the small pour-over coffee-maker at his ground floor Mantralaya office.

How Brijesh Singh turned into a history buff

About 15 years ago, an acquaintance told Singh that his company was working on publishing a graphic novel for children. When Singh saw the concept, he pointed out how it was very unIndian.

“It was anglicised. For example, children were shown shrugging. Shrugging is not something that’s in the body language of Indians,” Singh said.

On his friend’s request, he took up the challenge of writing something that’s more Indian in context. This is what led to him write The Cloud Chariot, on which Singh started work in 2011, when he held the busy post of Additional Commissioner of Police, traffic, in the Mumbai Police.

This is also largely when he slipped into his habit of sitting in isolation when the whole world sleeps, and writing.

His hunt for interesting and lesser known stories set in India’s rich history took him to the dynasty of Mahameghavahana, inspiring the name of his book The Cloud Chariot, a direct translation of the dynasty’s name.

“I was looking for themes, and I saw that there is an inscription in the Khandagiri caves near the capital of Odisha. A king (Kharavela) has written his life in 14 lines, then I went into the history of the dynasty,” Singh told ThePrint.

The book is a historical thriller set in Kalinga, which emperor Ashoka had devastated, and King Kharavela of the Mahameghavahana dynasty had revitalised years later. The newfound glory of Kalinga is, however, under constant threat. The book delves into the ample challenges, palace conspiracies, internal betrayals and dangers from foreign invaders that the king has to tackle.

“I have tried to find out who all were really there. Very few characters are fictional,” Singh said.

Singh had finished the book in two years, but it was published only 11 years later by Penguin Random House India. Meanwhile, its form metamorphosed from a graphic novel to a full-fledged book as Singh wasn’t too happy with the graphics, which he says were quite “Greco Roman” in style.

To write the story in as much detail as possible, Singh said he virtually created the city of Toshali, the capital of Kalinga, at the time.

“Fortunately, I could find archaeological excavations of the actual Toshali. What I did was, from those blueprints, I built the actual city, lane by lane. I was finding it very difficult to visualise that if you stand in the street, how would you feel about the city,” the IPS officer said.

He studied the ancient city of Pingyao in China as a reference, and extrapolated the details, the wooden architecture of the times, to Toshali. Singh said that Toshali’s administration was based on Kautilya’s Arthashastra—a Sanskrit treatise on statecraft, politics, economic policy and military strategy—so he read the entire Arthashastra.

He calls The Cloud Chariot “a fictional twist to the Arthashastra”.

While writing the book, Singh said he went into micro details, researching treatises about warfare, the kind of weapons that were used during that period, the kind of armour used and so on.

“In India, if you see shows with periodisation, soldiers are shown wearing metal armour when metal armour was hardly used in India. Armour was not for soldiers, and if at all it was used, it was of chain mail and later of leather,” he said.

In a chapter of the book, an elephant is poisoned as part of the story. For this, Singh said, he looked up what kind of poisons were available at that time and what were their antidotes.

“I actually found a book on elephant medicine: Elephant Ayurveda,” he said.

Singh’s other two books are vastly different from his last one and are more in tune with his main profession, that of an IPS officer.

The book that was released first—Quantum Siege—was a thriller set in present-day Mumbai about the city facing a threat from a hacker. It was published in 2014 and was written rather speedily.

His second book, Dangerous Minds, was written with author S. Hussain Zaidi and is a collection of stories of the most dangerous men, arrested for some of India’s most serious crimes. It was published in 2017.

AI push in government

These days, Singh has been using his nightly writing hours for coding and research of various AI platforms. He has also been pushing his department, DGIPR, to use artificial intelligence as much as possible.

Officials working with him told ThePrint about how Singh has coded his own AI-based programme to draft government press releases in the format of a journalistic news story, complete with a headline and versions in English and Marathi.

While earlier, news from DGIPR would reach journalists in a folder only late in the evening around 7 pm or 8 pm, the department is now disseminating information almost throughout the day, as and how government events take place.

Under Singh, the DGIPR has also set up a recording studio and a social media analytics centre, and is currently working on formulating a digital media policy, which will streamline the state government’s interaction with digital media outlets in different aspects, from news dissemination to government advertising.

(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)