Singing in the Dark Times

Amit Chaudhuri's On Being Indian raises questions on the nature of the contemporary intellectual and rationalism's role in religious discourse

- Amit Dixit

Novelist, poet, essayist and musician Amit Chaudhuri is a man of few words, but he chooses them with care. This slim volume—its main text runs to just 71 pages with generous use of white space—is a dense distillation of his thoughts, in this case on India’s current sociopolitical environment. And he doesn’t pull his punches.

On Being Indian had its origins in a Parisian apartment, where Chaudhuri lived for several months in 2018-19 while his daughter worked on her two final-year college theses. The subject of one of these was the ‘organic intellectual’. That’s how Chaudhuri first encountered the term coined by Antonio Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks, although the Marxist thinker did little to delineate it.