[4] He worked as chief economist for South and Southeast Asia at Deutsche Bank until 2008, leaving to research and write Land of the Seven Rivers, and returned in 2011.

[17] Nehru and P. C. Mahalanobis are criticized for treating the economy as a "mechanical toy", leaving little scope for the flourish of private enterprises, and ultimately throttling creativity.

[17] 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.

[3] 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.

[17] 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.

[17][18] 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.

[17] In deconstructing the narrative of Ashoka, Sanyal failed to apply source-criticism[b] and imposed a host of anachronistic categories on the past; likewise, Sanyal remained oblivious of recent scholarship on Mauryan India[c] and misrecognised a shastra of political economy, as it developed in Ancient India, as a manual of Mauryan statecraft.

[17] Rohan D'Souza, a historian of South Asia at Kyoto University, approved of Visvanathan's critique as a "reality-check" to Sanyal's amateur efforts at rewriting history.

[20] R. Mahalakshmi, a historian of ancient India at Jawaharlal Nehru University, held Sanyal's reinterpretation of Ashoka to be entirely lacking in "contextual understanding" of the King and a politically motivated endeavor on the overall.