Tag: Rupa Publications

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Review

Colonisation in the Global Frame

Book Review by Bhaskar Parichha

Title: Colonization Crusade and Freedom of India: A Saga of Monstrous British Barbarianism around the Globe

Author: Rakesh Dwivedi

Publisher: Rupa Publications

Rakesh Dwivedi’s Colonization Crusade and Freedom of India is an unflinching indictment of British imperialism and a forceful challenge to the long-standing narrative of colonialism as a “civilizing mission”. Written with the precision of a seasoned constitutional lawyer and the moral urgency of a historian disturbed by selective memory, the book seeks to dismantle the myths surrounding the British Empire while situating India’s freedom struggle within a wider global context of colonial violence.

At its core, the book argues that British rule in India was not an aberration of excesses but a carefully structured system of exploitation sustained by economic plunder, engineered famines, racial hierarchies, and institutionalised violence. Dwivedi rejects euphemisms such as “benevolent administration” or “rule of law,” insisting instead on naming colonialism for what it was: a barbaric enterprise masked by moral rhetoric. In doing so, he aligns himself with a growing body of postcolonial scholarship that seeks to recover suppressed histories of suffering and resistance.

One of the book’s notable strengths is its global frame. Dwivedi does not treat India in isolation but links the subcontinent’s experience to British imperial conduct in America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. By drawing parallels between policies of extraction, demographic manipulation, and divide-and-rule strategies across continents, he underscores the systemic nature of empire. This comparative approach lends weight to his claim that colonial brutality was not incidental but intrinsic to imperial governance.

The chapters dealing with famines, wartime exploitation, and economic drain are particularly compelling. Using archival material, parliamentary debates, and secret British records, Dwivedi exposes how starvation and deprivation were often outcomes of deliberate policy choices rather than natural calamities. His discussion of India’s role during the World Wars—both as a resource base and as expendable manpower—adds a crucial geopolitical dimension to the freedom struggle, reminding readers that independence was shaped as much by global power shifts as by internal resistance.

Dwivedi’s legal background is evident in his methodical narrative. He builds his case like a prosecution brief—marshalling evidence, anticipating counter-arguments, and dismantling colonial apologetics with forensic rigor. This gives the book a distinctive voice, though at times the prosecutorial tone may feel relentless. Readers looking for narrative subtlety or emotional restraint may find the language uncompromising, even polemical. Yet this stylistic choice appears deliberate: the book is less concerned with balance than with moral clarity.

The treatment of Partition is another significant aspect. Dwivedi views it not merely as a tragic inevitability but as a consequence of imperial betrayal and strategic manipulation. His critique of British exit policies challenges sanitized accounts of decolonisation and raises uncomfortable questions about responsibility, culpability, and historical accountability.

That said, the book’s sweeping scope occasionally works against it. The ambition to cover centuries of imperial history across multiple regions can lead to dense passages that demand close attention. Some readers may also wish for greater engagement with alternative historiographical perspectives. However, these limitations do not diminish the book’s central achievement: forcing a re-examination of colonial history stripped of nostalgia and imperial self-congratulation.

Colonization Crusade and Freedom of India is not a neutral history—it is a corrective one. It speaks directly to contemporary debates about historical memory, reparations, and the politics of remembrance. In an age when empire is often romanticised in popular culture and public discourse, Dwivedi’s work serves as a necessary provocation.

This book will resonate most with readers interested in colonial studies, Indian history, geopolitics, and the ethics of empire. Whether one agrees with all of Dwivedi’s conclusions or not, his argument compels engagement. It stands as a powerful reminder that freedom was not gifted to India—it was wrested from an empire whose legacy must be confronted, not softened.

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Bhaskar Parichha is a journalist and author of Cyclones in Odisha: Landfall, Wreckage and Resilience, Unbiased, No Strings Attached: Writings on Odisha and Biju Patnaik – A Political Biography. He lives in Bhubaneswar and writes bilingually. Besides writing for newspapers, he also reviews books on various media platforms.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

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Review

Geetika Mehendiratta Comes of Age!

Book Review by Meenakshi Malhotra

Title: The Higher Education of Geetika Mehendiratta

Author: Anuradha Marwah

Publisher: Rupa Publications

Anuradha Marwah’s debut novel, The Higher Education of Geetika Mehendiratta, republished by more than thirty years after its original publication, is a delightful read. It is a trailblazer and a pioneer in more ways than one-an Indian campus novel before the campus novel became identified as a genre; and a frank exploration of female sexuality without the usual  humbug  and euphemisms associated with the treatment of sex in many 20th century novels.

It scores in other respects as well-its recreation of small-town ennui before the internet took over our lives, in the middle of a hot summer is a feeling  we recognise well. Time moved slowly, people still read books and families still conversed with each other, albeit in the most cliched terms. However, the novel’s tone is not nostalgic, and does not “invite readers into a sepia-tinted past.” (Authors Note)

When the novel opens, we see Geetika whose outlook and  family context is quite at variance with the majority of people around her. We cannot imagine her settling into middle-class bourgeois domesticity with her ‘boyfriend’  or otherwise. The slow pace of life and limited options available in Desertwadi make it a claustrophobic trap for someone like Geetika, who is ready to embark on her adventures, both intellectual and sexual. Her experiments in both directions is a sort of liminal phase before she embarks upon the next stage of her life.

The author has hit the right mixture of irony, tongue-in-cheek humour and social satire. Her social satire pierces particularly deep, albeit at the risk of occasionally falling back on stereotypes. This is strongest in the case of the typical small-town aunty, Andy’s mother. Andy, her son, who is attempting to court Geetika, can barely get anything said (or done!) without  his mother butting into the conversation or walking into his room. Dalpat Singh is another such character, a corrupt small town sports official who has considerable clout and fully exploits his position in whatever way possible. Geetika realises that “Dalpatji was a reality I could not accept. He did not care if the Indian team won or lost; he only cared about the requisite number of scotch bottles that had to be presented to a journalist in order to get good coverage in the papers.”

Drawing on an undertow of real events like the mega sports hosted by India, ASIAD in 1982, the novel stays moored to recognisable places and times. Sometimes, it almost seems like a ‘roman a clef,’ a novel where real events and people appear with fictitious and invented names. The author has explored the nooks and crannies of the two cities, Delhi (Lutyenabad) and Ajmer (Desertwadi) in intimate detail, the claustrophobia of small town existence and the fraught ‘freedoms’ of the big city which breeds its own threats and insecurities. Double standards of morality and the double binds of gender are both in evidence in the novel. Geeti’s friend, Vinita, gets married to a NRI who while being sexually experienced himself, wants  a ‘pure’ Indian wife. Vinita is comfortable with her new husband’s sexual exploits before marriage: she did not mind as it was “all before marriage and men will be men-if girls were game, one couldn’t expect them to be saints.” The double bind of gender is evident in Geetika’s careworn mother. A working woman who is also engaged in social work, Geetika also observes how she has to do the heavy lifting when the domestic help is on leave.  

Many aspects this coming of age story seems particularly prescient for a novel that  was first published in 1993. Its primary concerns —  the stifling and limited choices of life particularly for girls in small-town India, its frank and unabashed exploration of sexuality, narrated in a sassy and unapologetic way make it seem like a fitting story of twenty-first century India.   The book accurately captures the inner conflicts of a young woman caught between a society where even progressive parents are limited by the paucity of available options and the narrowness of societal expectations.   Geetika inhabits a society that veers between conservatism and a kind  of  progressive  hypocrisy. On a quest to expand the contours of her world, she learns that there are no easy choices and the seemingly viable options of settling into bourgeois domesticity, albeit self-chosen, would clip her wings and disable her from self-realisation. This realisation hits her when she is already into the relationship. Some of the fault lines in the relationship between Geetika and her boyfriend, Ratish, are evident from the beginning. From his conservative perspective, feminism is a problematic term. On being asked about his mother, he declares that she is not a hysterical feminist. For him, a woman’s primary duty is to make herself available and agreeable and  be a good mother and wife, and any other aspiration is dismissed as a feminist excess.  

 Geetika realises that her curiosity and quest for freedom have led her up a slippery slope and this book is about the incremental costs of chasing one’s dreams.  The book ends on a somewhat sombre notes with Geetika giving up on dreams of middle class marriage  which would severely limit  her choices. The unconventional and difficult choices she makes also demonstrate the influence of feminist staff rooms where many  women– colleagues and associates — have made difficult and  unconventional choices.  In their company, Geetika realises that she has let herself drift into a relationship which would negate any exercise of agency on her part. It is in part, her recovery of her intellectual freedom to think and write authentically that constitutes her higher education.

The novel also offers us a social satire of ‘higher education’ in the premier institutions of Lutyenabad, replete with references to Capital University and Jana University. This is an insider joke with barely veiled references to actual universities in Delhi. Further, the academic pretensions of many academics who unleash fancy theories, which they have barely grasp themselves, on their hapless research students,  are called out. Literary references pepper the text where Roland Barthes’s   essay “Striptease”, a masterpiece of structuralist criticism, actually refers to a stripping of Geetika’s professor of her pretensions of having been at Sorbonne .   

The Higher Education of Geetika Mehendiratta is a sharp, accurate, searing and witty coming of age story, a bildungsroman, which is unabashed in its honesty about an ambitious  young woman’s journey to self-realisation. To quote from the Author’s Note, “Geetika, my outspoken protagonist, questioned and challenged, and the issues she grappled with are by no means resolved till date.” She continues, “Young people continue to face similar dilemmas: career or family, feminism or femininity, love or rebellion.” Geetika’s story is still relevant and contemporaneous,  ”adding the heft of history to present-day conversations on marriage and partnership.” It’s a coming of age story that resonates far and wide into the twenty-first century.  

Click here to read an excerpt of the novel.

Meenakshi Malhotra is Professor of English Literature at Hansraj College, University of Delhi, and has been involved in teaching and curriculum development in several universities. She has edited two books on Women and Lifewriting, Representing the Self and Claiming the I, in addition  to numerous published articles on gender, literature and feminist theory.  Her most recent publication is The Gendered Body: Negotiation, Resistance, Struggle.

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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

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Excerpt

The Higher Education of Geetika Mehendiratta

Title: The Higher Education of Geetika Mehendiratta

Author: Anuradha Marwah

Publisher: Rupa Publications

Boyfriend

There is communication because there is no communication, thundered the supervisor in a sudden spurt of lucidity.

Three dark heads bent obediently over the notebook to glean these pearls of wisdom.

‘When I say cat, you may think of a black cat, a white cat, a fat cat, a thin cat…’

I wondered where to put this in. I was going to write a dissertation on A House for Mr Biswas by V.S. Naipaul, I had decided last night. At what point should I bring in the feline? This brand new structuralist approach… For the past twenty minutes, this impressive lady from Sorbonne had only spoken about the difficulty in identifying cats. I had even drawn one in my notebook. Structuralism had spread far and wide, she had told us; it had reached Cornell, where a professor had simplified it at once for the simple non-European brain. Only Americans are capable of such simplifications, she had added laughingly.

Cornell, America… Vinita.

Vinita had changed so much. She now had a baby girl. She did all the household chores herself, she had told me. She had become plump. Her breasts had lost their upright quality; she had even started applying a lot of make-up—bright lipstick, mascara and eyeshadow.

She wouldn’t know about American universities though—that wasn’t the America she had gone to. She had gone to drudgery and loneliness… No servants to chat with all day long.

In Ratish’s house, there were servants… Lakshmi said Ratish was far too predictable. She said I was predictable too. That I would get married in a hotel, watched by a whole lot of people I didn’t know; that I would have two easy deliveries and be pleasantly miserable all my life. She even predicted I would get fat.

When I told her I wasn’t predictable and would make her sit up one day, she began singing ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’.

Every discourse has a mediatory role as an instrument of change.

Who would mediate between my estranged parents and me?

Which discourse—the discourse of commitment or the discourse of tradition? Lakshmi or Ratish?

Ratish had come to Desertvadi to say that he loved me. Mummy had said it was absolutely dreadful the way I could never make up my mind about boys. She had cried. Andy had cried too; Papa was the only one who hadn’t. And then, suddenly, there had been a letter from the university saying I had cleared the written exams for the MPhil programme, would I appear for an interview?

I was where I wanted to be, for the first time in life, although the umbilical cord of parental expectations was yet to be cut… Ratish said he valued family and respected my parents, and that I should be gentle with them… Cruel to be kind, kind to the potential children in my womb. What if there weren’t any? What if I couldn’t have any? So much of our planning would go haywire, Ratish. I would have been cruel for nothing.

There would be nothing to do except cry or make a phone call to your office… No patter of little feet. What would I do with you then?

Tonight, we are going for a party, I will ask you then.

Words are either arbitrary or associational.

Is that a word, ‘associational’, or was it coined in Sorbonne this very summer? Lakshmi says it would be better to check the professor’s antecedents; perhaps she is not from Sorbonne at all.

Lakshmi looks down on our department anyway.

Economics people have this strange nose-in-the-air attitude towards languages. Our department was housed in the School of Languages, so everybody thought it was a Linguistics department… But we were doing literature, three of us. One was from Utkal University, Orissa; another from Ramakrishna Mission, Pondicherry; and I, from Rajasthan University.

I was disappointed that there was nobody from Lutyenabad in our course. All Lutyenabad students went to the Capital University because all the jobs were there. I had heard that there was a danger of never landing a job in Lutyenabad after doing an MPhil from Jana University.

So Andy, your curse may yet materialize—if I don’t have children and I don’t get a job. You had said as much, hadn’t you?

‘You will never be happy, Geetika, never… Don’t think you can find happiness by wrecking mine.’

But what could I do, Andy?

‘Geeti, my mother wants us to marry,’ you had said.

‘But Andy, my parents do not want me to marry yet.’

‘Look, the situation is getting very difficult for me. My parents are rather worried about the fact that your parents have not made any overtures to them.’

‘Why don’t you explain to them—’

‘I have done enough explaining. Your brother got married without even calling his parents for the wedding…’

‘What does Bhaiya have to do with this?’

‘Geeti, I can understand my parents… They didn’t question my decision to marry you. Surely, they are entitled to some sort of say in my affairs.’

‘I am not saying they are not…but Andy, what am I to do?’

You could never answer that one, could you, Andy? It just went on and on—your duty towards your parents, the obduracy of mine. I was tempted, sorely tempted, to just tell my parents that I was marrying you that very day but Ratish’s card saved me.

It came by the evening post the day you left Desertvadi after extracting a promise from me that I would speak to my parents. It was a lovely card; it said: ‘I can’t forget you, little one’.

It became easier to write that letter to you, dear Andy… It became easier to tell you, when you came running after receiving that letter, that it won’t work… But it wasn’t easy dealing with the lava of your frustrated anger as it burnt down my unsuspecting ears whenever I picked up the phone for months after that.

‘You bitch, you found somebody else at the Sportsaid, didn’t you? Don’t think you can ever be happy with him…’

Discourse becomes necessary because of the ambiguity inherent in the nature of language.

But I understood even what you didn’t say… I knew that I had wronged you, Andy. I did not cry as much as you did; I would have to make up for it. I had always appeased the gods by crying… This time, I slipped up…

About the Book: Desertvadi, Rajasthan, is a retirees’ paradise, but for a young girl like Geetika it is a claustrophobic trap. Academically gifted and sexually curious, she feels suffocated by small-town mediocrity and dreams of faraway lands and liberated lives – the kind that fill the pages of her beloved novels.

So, when an opportunity to study in the big, bustling Lutyenabad presents itself, Geetika leaps at it, eager to get away from her parents and the miasma of chronic boredom that envelops Desertvadi. Soon cosmopolitan life begins to feel like a snug fit especially when her new boyfriend, a famously fine catch, offers her the many luxuries of a conventional marriage.

But life in a metro impacts her in ways she never expected. Her aspirations inflate, her tastes evolve, and her ambitions solidify.  As her boundaries expand uncontrollably and the daydreams she was escaping to inevitably shatter, Geetika is compelled to face some tough questions.

Published in 1993, The Higher Education of Geetika Mehendiratta was one of India’s earliest campus novels. Republished for a new generation, this is a bold and intimate coming-of-age tale – unafraid of its hunger and unashamed of its heat.

About the Author: Anuradha Marwah is a professor, playwright, and novelist. Her wide-ranging publications also include poems, essays, articles and reviews. Aunties of Vasant Kunj, her fourth novel was published in 2024 to immense acclaim. Anuradha lives in Vasant Kunj, surrounded by a community of trees and cats.

Click here to read the review of the novel

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Review

Last Song Before Home

Book Review by Bhaskar Parichha

Title: Last Song before Home

Author: Indira Das

Translator: Bina Biswas

Publisher: Rupa Publications

Last Song Before Home, the English translation of Indira Das’s Bengali memoir Shuru Theke Phera – Mayer Smritikatha[1], emerges as a luminous elegy to the fragility of memory and familial bonds. Translated by Bina Biswas, the book chronicles the author’s mother, Gayatri Das, navigating vascular dementia post-stroke. Through an epistolary structure of imagined letters, Das captures the slow erosion of self, where recollections surface like half-remembered melodies amid Bengal’s partitioned landscapes. The thematic depth and stylistic finesse position it as a vital contribution to South Asian memoir literature.

Central themes orbit memory as both lifeline and tormentor. Dementia strips Gayatri of chronology, yet fragments—rain-soaked courtyards, Partition’s unspoken wounds—resurface as anchors of identity. Das reframes loss as resistance, transforming maternal decline into a testament to resilience. Sisterhood underscores this; bonds with siblings weave a tapestry of shared silences, countering isolation’s void.

Partition looms subtly, not as a historical spectacle but an intimate scar—displaced homes echo in Gayatri’s fading queries: “Where is home?” This mirrors postcolonial Bengal’s flux, where personal trauma intersects collective upheaval. Dignity persists through ritual: songs hummed off-key, hands folding faded saris. Das elevates the mundane, critiquing modernity’s erasure of oral legacies. Resilience triumphs, not via triumph, but quiet defiance—memory’s “last song” before oblivion. The memoir critiques gendered aging in India, where women’s stories dissolve unspoken, urging reclamation.

A practicing gynaecologist, Das’s prose, via Biswas’s fluid translation, mimics dementia’s rhythm: elliptical sentences drift, loop, and fracture like synapses firing erratically. “The courtyard bloomed once, or was it twice? Rain came, carrying voices from across the river.” This stream-of-consciousness narrative eschews linear plot for associative flow, evoking Woolfian interiority fused with Bengali lyricism—sensory motifs—jasmine perfume, monsoon mud—ground abstraction, rendering emotion tactile.

In the translator’s note, Biswas, who is a poet and academician, says: “This book is not simply a narrative-it is a mosaic of survival, and the search for belonging. As John Berger once wrote, ‘Never again will a single story be told as though it is the only one.’ The protagonist’s journey is part of a greater collective-a shared history of migration, exile, and emotional displacement. Her voice rises in a chorus of the grieving, each thread woven with shared loss and a fierce resolve to cling to identity.

“She is a figure many will recognize: a woman who, though exiled by circumstance, carries the remnants of home in every gesture and memory. Her story becomes a vessel for inherited struggle, for resilience passed from one generation to the next. As Milan Kundera so memorably stated, ‘The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.’”

Epistolary form innovates: letters to an absent self-blur authorial voice, fostering intimacy without sentimentality. Repetition (“Remember? No, forget.”) mirrors cognitive loops, building hypnotic cadence. Das avoids melodrama; understatement amplifies pathos— a single, misplaced utensil evokes existential ache. Cultural bilingualism enriches: Bengali idioms, untranslated, preserve authenticity, challenging monolingual readers. Pacing accelerates in crescendo passages, where songs bridge eras, culminating in cathartic release.

Last Song Before Home transcends memoir, becoming a philosophical meditation on impermanence. Its strengths—haunting style, layered themes—outweigh minor translation hiccups, like occasional stiffness. Essential for readers of Partition literature or aging narratives, it earns four stars for profound humanity. Das not only mourns but hymns endurance, leaving echoes that linger.

[1] Translates to: Returning from the Beginning: Memories of Mother

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Bhaskar Parichha is a journalist and author of Cyclones in Odisha: Landfall, Wreckage and Resilience, Unbiased, No Strings Attached: Writings on Odisha and Biju Patnaik – A Political Biography. He lives in Bhubaneswar and writes bilingually. Besides writing for newspapers, he also reviews books on various media platforms.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

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‘A Story of Moral Contradictions and Human Cost’

Book Review by Bhaskar Parichha

Title: India in the Second World War: An Emotional History

Author: Diya Gupta

Publisher: Rupa Publications

When we think of the Second World War, the images that most often come to mind are those of Europe’s ruin — the Blitz in London, the camps in Poland, the victory parades in Paris. India, though one of the largest contributors of men and material to the Allied cause, usually slips to the margins of that global story.

Diya Gupta’s India in the Second World War: An Emotional History sets out to correct that imbalance — and does so not by recounting battles or strategies, but by uncovering the feelings, memories, and private sufferings that shaped India’s wartime experience.

In this groundbreaking work, Gupta turns away from generals and governments to listen instead to soldiers, families, poets, and activists. Through letters, diaries, photographs, memoirs, and literary texts in both English and Bengali, she reconstructs the emotional life of a country caught in the contradictions of fighting for freedom while serving an empire. Her book is as much about the inner weather of a people at war as it is about history itself.

The story begins with the strange binary of India’s position in the 1940s. The British declared India a participant in the war without consulting its leaders. While nationalist politics in the country were reaching their boiling point, over two million Indian men were dispatched to fight on foreign fronts — from North Africa to Burma — under the Union Jack. They fought for a cause that was not their own, for a government that denied them liberty.

Gupta’s focus on emotion allows her to expose this moral paradox with nuance. The letters of sepoys from the Middle East reveal homesickness, confusion, and occasional pride; families back home are haunted by anxiety, caught between imperial propaganda and the whisper of rebellion. The result is a portrait of divided loyalties — of men and women who inhabited both the empire’s war and the nationalist struggle at once.

But it was the Bengal Famine of 1943 that made the war’s cost most brutally visible. Triggered by colonial economic mismanagement and wartime policies, it claimed nearly three million lives. Gupta’s chapter, ‘Every Day I Witness Nightmares’, captures this catastrophe through eyewitness accounts and literature that tried to make sense of it. Hunger, she suggests, became not only a physical condition but an emotional state — an emblem of the moral starvation of empire.

In poems and essays by writers such as Sukanta Bhattacharya and Mulk Raj Anand, the famine appears as a mirror held up to civilisation’s collapse. Tagore’s haunting late work, ‘Crisis in Civilisation’, forms a central thread in Gupta’s narrative — the poet’s disillusionment with humanity, his grief at the world’s descent into barbarism, and his call for renewal through compassion.

One of Gupta’s greatest achievements lies in her ability to braid together the intimate and the historical. The war years, she shows, were also years of reflection and redefinition. In the chapter named ‘The Thing That Was Lost’, she explores how the idea of “home” was transformed by displacement — whether through the departure of men to distant fronts or through the forced migrations caused by famine and air raids. Home, once a site of safety, became a space of longing and loss.

Another chapter, ‘Close to Me as My Very Own Brother”, turns the spotlight on male friendships in Indian war writing. Here, Gupta uncovers the tenderness that often underpinned comradeship — relationships that blurred the lines between duty and affection, and that offered emotional sustenance amid violence and uncertainty. In these pages, she challenges the stereotypes of stoic masculinity, showing that vulnerability and empathy were also part of the soldier’s story.

While the battlefield has long been the focus of war history, Gupta gives equal weight to those who remained behind. The women who waited, worked, and wrote — often in silence — emerge as witnesses in their own right.

Activists such as Tara Ali Baig, nurses and doctors on the Burma front, and countless unnamed mothers and wives populate the emotional landscape she paints. Through their letters and memoirs, we see how war invaded domestic spaces, transforming everyday life into a theatre of endurance.

Gupta writes of “anguished hearts” not as metaphor but as historical evidence. The fear of air raids, the sight of hungry children, the absence of loved ones — these, too, were the realities of India’s war. By restoring emotion to the historical record, she argues that feelings are not soft data but vital clues to understanding how societies survive crisis.

What makes the book so compelling is its insistence on looking at the global war from the Indian perspective. For Britain, the war was a fight for democracy and civilisation; for India, it was also a confrontation with the hypocrisy of those ideals. As Gupta notes, the same empire that called for liberty in Europe jailed Gandhi and suppressed the Quit India movement at home.

Seen from Calcutta rather than London, the war ceases to be a heroic narrative of Allied victory and becomes instead a story of moral contradictions and human cost. Gupta’s intervention is both historiographical and ethical: she reminds us that global history must include the emotions of those who bore its burdens without sharing in its glory.

A historian with literary sensibility, Gupta writes with precision, empathy, and grace. Her prose balances academic rigour with narrative warmth, allowing the reader to move effortlessly between archival fragments and the larger questions they evoke. Each chapter unfolds like a story, yet the cumulative effect is that of a symphony — voices rising and blending, carrying echoes of pain, pride, and endurance.

Gupta’s work has been widely celebrated for its originality and emotional depth. Shortlisted for the 2024 Gladstone Book Prize, it has drawn praise from scholars and critics alike for its fresh approach to war history. What distinguishes her study is not only its range of sources but its refusal to treat emotion as peripheral. For Gupta, feelings are the connective tissue of history — the invisible threads binding individuals to events, memory to nationhood.

The book is  more than the  war. It is about the human capacity to feel in times of fracture — to love, mourn, and imagine even amid devastation. It shows that the emotional life of a people can illuminate their political choices, their artistic expressions, and their vision of freedom.

By reassembling scattered memories and forgotten emotions, Diya Gupta offers a new way of reading both India and the world in the 1940s. Her India is not a passive colony swept along by imperial tides, but a living, feeling community navigating grief and hope in equal measure. The war, as she reminds us, did not just redraw maps; it reshaped minds and hearts.

In giving voice to those who seldom found one in history books — the sepoy writing from the desert, the poet confronting famine, the mother waiting for news — Gupta transforms statistics into stories, and stories into testimony. Her book stands as a reminder that history is not only written in treaties or timelines but in tears, silences, and the fragile language of feeling.

It ensures that those emotional histories, too long buried under the dust of archives, are heard again — quietly, insistently, and with the full weight of their truth.

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Bhaskar Parichha is a journalist and author of Cyclones in Odisha: Landfall, Wreckage and Resilience, Unbiased, No Strings Attached: Writings on Odisha and Biju Patnaik – A Political Biography. He lives in Bhubaneswar and writes bilingually. Besides writing for newspapers, he also reviews books on various media platforms.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

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Review

Thorns in My Quilt

Book Review by Rakhi Dalal

Title: Thorns in My Quilt: Letters from a Daughter to her Father

Author: Mohua Chinappa

Publisher: Rupa Publications

Mohua Chinappa’s Thorns in My Quilt: Letters from a Daughter to Her Father is a quiet and visceral exploration of memory, grief, and the often-fraught space between love and silence. Drafted in the form of a collection of letters to her late father, the book is less about resolution than about reckoning – more an attempt to articulate what remained unsaid while he was alive. Chinappa, through this profoundly personal lens, not only offers a portrait of a relationship but also a reflection on absence, yearning, and the emotional inheritance that we all carry forward sometimes.

Mohua Chinappa is an author, a columnist, a renowned podcaster in India, a TEDx speaker, a former journalist and a corporate communications specialist. Her other initiative—NARI: The Homemakers Community—provides a platform for homemakers to voice their everyday challenges.

The letters in this book, seamlessly weave together fragments of childhood and adulthood, moving fluidly between time and place. One moment, Manu the daughter, beckons the warmth of her early years in Shillong — vanilla flavoured butter cookies and the hush of rain-soaked afternoons, then the shelter of a harsingar[1] tree in their government house in Delhi, while in the next, she confronts the frailty of her marriage, the weight of her Baba’s illness, or the sting of words that sometimes remained unsaid. The form of writing echoes the workings of memory. Not linear, but recursive, continually turning back to moments that remain unresolved. Each letter seems like an appliqué sewn into the fabric of remembrance, creating a quilt with seams held together by both tenderness and pain.

At the centre of the book is the paradoxical figure of her Baba, portrayed with candour as a man who is loving yet aloof, erudite yet impractical and admired yet sometimes resented. Manu longs for his approval but also grapples with the ways his criticism and aloofness diminishes her. The letters vacillate from affection to accusation and from gratitude to grievance. In the acceptance of these contradictions, there seems a resistance to recall the memory of a father in an idealised tone. Instead, Chinappa manages to present a figure whose complexity remains inseparable from her own. The portrait revealed, thus, appears all the more moving.

The narrative also reverberates with a strong theme of displacement. The family’s history of migration, the shifts between Shillong, Delhi, and Bengaluru, create a sense of being both rooted and uprooted at once. Places do not act merely as backdrops but are living repositories of memory, holding within them the sweetness of belonging and the ache of estrangement. This sense of dislocation extends inward in the narrative. Chinappa captures not only her alienation from her father but also the broader struggle of carving an identity in a world shaped by expectation and silence.

The language of the narrative is lucid, and doesn’t tip into ornamentation. Everyday details—trees, rain, food, household objects—become charged with metaphorical weight, carrying emotional resonance far beyond their surface. The letters are suffused with sensory detail, grounding the reader in the textures of lived experience while also opening space for reflection. The writing exercises restraint. Even at its most poignant, it doesn’t spill into melodrama.

The emotional honesty of the book is equally striking. Manu does not shy away from confessing anger or disappointment; nor does she smooth over her father’s failings in the name of filial devotion. She admits to her vulnerabilities—the yearning for acceptance, the bitterness of abandonment, the pain of reinvention when life’s foundations collapse. These allow the readers to relate with the story. Though the particulars may differ, but the longing for parental approval, the hurt of unspoken words, and the struggle to reconcile love with resentment are universal.

However, some constraints in the narrative cannot be overlooked. The epistolary form, while effective in evoking intimacy, also narrows the perspective. Baba appears only through Manu’s voice, his presence mediated entirely by her memories and emotions. At some places, the narrative shifts abruptly, from addressing second person (father) to third which makes the reading a bit disconcerting. At times, the absence of other perspectives leaves the figure of father more shadow than substance, defined by what he was to her rather than who he was in himself. The letters also occasionally return to the same emotional terrain, circling around familiar grievances and sorrows. While this mirrors the looping nature of grief, the repetition creates a sense of exhaustion.

These reservations, however, do not diminish the book’s overall appeal. Its power lies not in neatness but in its willingness to dwell in ambiguity. It does not offer easy closure, nor does it attempt to tidy grief into a narrative of redemption. Instead, it embraces complexity, acknowledging that love is rarely unblemished, that absence can wound as much as presence, and that the act of writing itself can become a form of survival.

Thorns in My Quilt resonates because it is both deeply particular and quietly universal. While grounded in Chinappa’s personal history, it speaks to the wider human experience of fractured relationships, cultural displacement, and the longing to be heard. In cataloguing both the thorns and the blossoms of her bond with her Baba, Chinappa creates a testament that is as much about resilience as it is about grief.

[1] harsingar: Night Jasmine

Rakhi Dalal is an educator by profession. When not working, she can usually be found reading books or writing about reading them. She writes at https://rakhidalal.blogspot.com/ .

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Categories
Poetry

Found in Translation: Ashwini Mishra’s poems

Five poems by Ashwini Mishra have been translated from Odia by Snehaprava Das

Ashwini Mishra 
RIDING THE EARTH: THE LAST DAY

Farewell! 
A final goodbye!
The prologue to an epic of an endless rest
Has to be something
Extra special.

Gathering up all the strength
Of his senses 
He strove to know the people
Around him.
He spoke fondly to them
‘Let you all be there in my heart
Forever,
May my world keep shimmering
With the glow of this endearing bond.’
He rode each passing day
That galloped on -- 
Like a well-fed, robust horse,
He rode on, 
His feet securely stuck in the stirrups 
His hands gripping the rein hard.
 In an instant he could
 Gallop around the earth
 Cradling time under his arm. 
The river, the ponds 
And the rainclouds brought water
For his parched throat,

Towards the end of the journey 
He called one by one his folks 
Whom he held dear to his heart.
 Some of them sounded assuring,
 Some promised to come.
 A few fulfilled their promises too
 And came --
Still, there was a disturbing emptiness
Somewhere within.

Where has disappeared
The knot of love that had held  
So strong in the days of past?
It was as though that knot 
Had loosened and shredded.   
Worn out like a weary page 
In the mindscape,
Like someone that had once 
Played a major role,   
And had moved away from the centerstage,   
To stand by the stage-wings
Distanced and dispassionate!

SWORD  

 I had never wanted
To wield a sword, a dagger or a goad.
I had always wanted to tuck plumes
into the hair,
To draw a lotus on the palm,
To play the notes of spring breeze
For the ears of the 
Blazing summer noon.
I had wanted to be a dreamer,
To let my eyes close 
At the touch of the delicate petals 
Of exotic blooms!
But you did not let that happen.
My loved ones,
My folk I held close to my heart,
Fell at the merciless blows
Of harsh and hostile words
Your canons shot.
Your anger, your cruelty,
Weighed heavy on me
And a thunderstorm brew inside me.
Unnoticed by others. 
In the end,
My compelled hands
Reached out to the scabbard
Lying abandoned under 
The smuts of time
To draw the sword out.
 
THE CLAY LAMP

A clay lamp can always guess
How long the ghee and 
The wick in it will last.
It is a living thing 
How brief might its lifespan be.
It can, like all living beings,
Battle the wind and the darkness
In its struggle to survive
In an unenclosed space
That is vulnerable to 
The assault of hooves of animals
Or the misty spray of the dew.
 It knows that 
 The moment the curtain rises,
 Revealing the stage
All set for the entry of light,  
The first act of the play will end  
And Its role will be over    
Even before the makeup is 
Rubbed off the face or the artificial tint
On the hair fades.
The hand that had lit it 
May turn impassive, too!
  
  A woman, her heart and hands 
  Focused on the act,
  Keeps lighting up the clay lamps,
  Not knowing for sure 
  How long their light would last
  Or when the flames would die.
 The idol of the goddess    
  That glittered in the light of 
  The lamps she lights 
   Never steps down to help her 
   When the flames char her body.
   There is not a soul in sight
   When her flame dies,
   Except a few burnt insects.
  
 GAZA
You neither have a chest 
Nor arms now 
To embrace those who once saw
You as their own
Like you did before.
The natives and the foreigners, 
Who trod your soil, 
Now take a turn either to your left
Or to your right and move on.
No longer the chirrups of birds
Come sprinkling down 
Either from your sky, or your trees.
There are vultures everywhere
Scavenging on the tender human flesh
Getting fat and heavy.
The sun, the moon and the stars 
In your sky are 
Blown away into thousand pieces now.
You may dig up some of them  
Graved under your ground.
The Death in your sea breeze
And in your explosive garb
Haunts living humans 
To turn them to corpses.
Like a farmland ladened with crops,
Skeletons are heaped in your streets.
Houses and buildings where life dwelt 
Are mounds of shattered concrete.
Wreckage of kitchenware, 
 And of home appliances
 Lie on the desolate roads 
 In pathetic scatters.
A book satchel slings from the 
Severed hand of a dead child.
The thirst for war is not quelled yet,
New strategies are deliberated upon
To pursue newer missions of death.
New weapons must be hoarded 
In the arsenal 
To launch an attack on the netherworld 
After this world is razed to ruins.  

WHIP 

The whip that once basked proud in
The love of the kings and the feudal lords  
And danced in elation on 
The defenseless back of the oppressed, 
Now lies worn and weary 
In a niche in the royal palace or 
Behind the glass doors in the shelf 
Of a museum, 
Coated in dust and dirt.
The obsequious tanners,
Who were far below the 
Aristocracy,  
Polished this tool of tyranny  
 Bright with oil, 
 And it jumped crazy 
On their haggard backs, 
Drawing crooked lines 
Of livid blue and red.

How wide is the chasm between 
Sage Dadhichi who gave his bones 
For forging a thunderbolt 
To kill demon Brutrasura*,
And the stingray that gave its tail to 
Shape a whip 
That performs its brutal dance
On the back of innocent humans? 
Even today,
The barges of history and legends
Voyage across the pages 
Of text books taught in the classroom,
Their sails fluttering 
On their proud masts. 

*Brutrasura was killed by Indra with a weapon made with Sage Dadhichi’s bones as per mythology.

Aswini Kumar Mishra has 13 poetry collections to his credit. He has been translated widely into English, Hindi, Bengali, Tamil and other Indian languages. He has authored a fiction in English, Feet in the Valley (Rupa Publications, 2016),  His poems and essays have appeared in several literary journals including Indian Literature, Kavya Bharati, Wasafiri, M.P.T, The Little Magazine, Samakaleen, Konark, Rock Pebbles and Vahi etc. A recipient of several awards, he currently lives in Bhubaneswar and can be reached at cell phone +919438615742, +918456953936. His email id is:  mishra.aswini53@gmail.com

Dr.Snehaprava Das, is a noted writer and a translator from Bhubaneswar, Odisha. She has five books of poems, three of stories and thirteen collections of translated texts (from Odia to English), to her credit. 

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Categories
Review

The Kite of Farewells

Book Review by Madhuri Kankipati

Title: The Kite of Farewells: Stories from Nagaland

Author: O’Jungio

Publisher: Rupa Publications

O. Jungio’s The Kite of Farewells: Stories from Nagaland is a collection of short stories of longing and grief set in contemporary Nagaland. The author is a tribal studies scholar, and cultural historian whose research and essays focus on oral traditions, folklore, and socio-cultural changes among Naga communities. In the book’s preface, he writes, “The objects—mute spectators to human sorrow—become the vessels of collective grief, the repositories of the most intimate of the farewells”. And every story in this collection does explore of longings of different kinds followed by farewells.

The first story, ‘Fire’, begins with a man driving in a downpour. He forgot to carry the food packed by his Ayo’s(mother’s). Like many others she believes hotels are “vectors for every ungodly disease in the world masquerading as something palatable.” What follows is at night he ends up in a strange village for food and shelter; where it seems like the lines between the living and the dead are blurred. The narrator chances upon a man who serves him raw food. He notes, “perhaps by way of some idiosyncratic tradition, this village served raw food on this particular day of the great harvest” and starts a fire to cook himself only to be spooked out by the man. Despite his longing for food, he has to make an escape. 

In ‘The Encyclopaedia of a Salesman’, a young man selling encyclopaedias meets a retired government official. Initially, the narrator is cautious about why a man so steeped in command would be interested in something as democratic as encyclopedias. He reflects: “With a career of bossing around subordinates, were more inclined to be loud in their admission of suspicion and disinterest in things that challenged and subverted their sphere of command. What annoyed such men more was the vague possibility that for once in their life they would be hoodwinked by a lesser man like me. It would amount to an abominable upset of social order.” This single observation is enough to collapse multiple distances of age, profession, class. The salesman’s mind, seasoned by years of observation, becomes its own encyclopedia. Just when the disparity gets real, Jungio reminds us of a harder truth: that conversations end.

Jungio tries play on the longing for nostalgic memories in ‘Scoreboard’, highlighting an exchange about keeping a manual scoreboard for FIFA world cup 2017; the son arguing “you can get match summaries and stats from google” for the father to brush it off with “it has been a tradition for me”. The whole act of hanging a whiteboard with teams playing and the predictions along with their scores stands out as a cherished activity for the season. When tragedy strikes, that brief exchange transitions itself into a way of longing, in the practices we all hold on to after the passing of loved ones.

It is not just about the personal objects of longing, but also the social objects, or feeling like a forgotten object that has stood still in time. In the story ‘Showroom’, we meet a middle-aged man, who has always “shopped cheap and done so unapologetically,” visits a new mall in town after much contemplation, only to find himself embarrassed when he misunderstands the mall purchase policy. The story is tinged with humour.

In ‘Sacred Crow’ the concept of ‘Echu Li’ is introduced to the reader and the protagonist at the same time as “a world not different from ours. It is a transient stop for the dead before they move on to the Great Home, where they all would become noble spirits, formless like the wind” — which presents itself as an acceptance of loss. The protagonist awaits the black crow, building curiosity only to close on a note that better fits the tales passed around orally in rural Nagaland.

The final story, ‘The Newspaper Kite’, features four rowdy boys who “create” trouble for their neighbours with their games, their little understanding of familial financial struggles and a bond they both form with a man in his sixties. They lovingly call ‘Amotsu’ when he kindly returns them their newspaper kite in a new frame the boys “dropped” in his garden. The boys find joy in a paper boat because “Lofty ideas are, to an extent, a luxury when the means to materialise it are limited or absent. When you are poor, you train your mind to dream on a budget, and some days, you surprise yourself by getting so much out of so little.” When the boys find about the sudden demise of the Amotsu, they remember his words, “There is always a next day,” with the awareness that the coming days would be without Amotsu. It is in the memory of “that thread trick Amotsu used to do” while flying kites, the boys stay connected to the person who left this world.

O. Jungio does a balancing act between inherited lore and the present. He subtly hints at that it is the lore that differs from landscape but not the emotions or beliefs. Regardless of the objects that offer solace, people connect with the commonality of emotions.

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Madhuri Kankipati is a reader, writer, and translator with too many hobbies and refuses to pick just one. She was raised to follow instructions, but the real world doesn’t work that way, she just stares at her problems. You can find her on instagram @withlovemadhuu

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Categories
Excerpt

Letters from a Daughter to Her Father

Title: Thorns in My Quilt: Letters from a Daughter to Her Father

Author: Mohua Chinappa

Publisher: Rupa Publications India

LOSS

4 August 2022

Living Room, Bengaluru

Dear Baba, Today is your shraddho, the puja for your departed soul. Referring to you as a soul seems so distant. Calling you anything but ‘Baba’ seems like two strangers speaking to one another. The purohit is here to do the rituals. The atmosphere is sedate. The room is lit and the flowers in the vases are in full bloom. I am glad we have cousins in the city; otherwise, it would be very lonely for Ma and me. We know very few people who would make the effort to attend a staid function like a shraddho. How does one end a tie so deep with a mere ritual? One can’t. It does feel surreal to watch your photograph with a jasmine garland around the lifeless frame. The sandalwood phonta or tika on your forehead makes you look different. The living room has been cleared. The large antique box has been covered with a white cloth, and your photograph is placed on it in such a way that you are facing the direction that will lead you to the other world. The shraddho among Bengali Hindus is a ceremony that is performed to ensure a passage for the recently deceased to the other world. The rite is both social and religious and is meant to be conducted by the son. But you have no male heir. So I defy tradition and lead the puja.  I follow the rites dutifully and chant the mantras, which don’t mean much to me. You are gone. There is no mantra that can soothe my heart. On the floor is a bed, laid out with a pillow and an umbrella for your onward journey to God-knows-where. I follow the purohit. Neel joins me in the ceremony. I feel so anchored, having him next to me. What a loving child he is. He makes life so much simpler for me. After the puja, we put out a plate of your favourite food so that a crow can come and eat it. Leaving the food in the corner of a lane seems ridiculous, but I have decided not to question any of the rituals, for I don’t want Ma to feel that I didn’t do my best. I leave the plate on the ground. There are bottles strewn around, and the ground is not very clean. I don’t turn back for another look. Your photo has now been removed and stands on my marble corner table. I put out the burning incense sticks and remove the flower garlands. It is still sinking in that I won’t be able to hear your voice ever again, calling out to me, asking me for something or the other. As we sit down to eat, Neel reminds me how you discussed Left politics and he argued with you on capitalism, just to rile you up in jest. You had such a wonderful bond with my child. I smile as I hear Neel mimic you and your quintessential Bengali ways of reacting to situations. Those debates between you both. I loved the way you both called each other Dadu. Baba would say, ‘Dadu, you must read about the world and its magnificent history. The great idea of how civilizations emerged, and how revolutions took place in protest against tyranny and oppression. As you read, you will learn that the world is a beautiful study of humanity and historical events.’ And Neel would say, ‘Na, Dadu, I will only read books that emphasize the profit and loss of capitalist businesses. Whoever cares about art and philosophy?’ Neel knew how you would go red in the face. And you would say, ‘No businessman ever built a nation; it is the thinkers and the dreamers who created a world of equal opportunities.’ This camaraderie you both shared remains the most beautifully preserved and poignantly pure memory of you with your grandson. I remember those days when you constantly waited to hear from Neel, and how the Sundays were marked aside to have your long-awaited conversations with him. You truly were a wonderful grandfather to my son. I feel empty as the furniture in the living room is rearranged to how it was before. Like nothing has happened, and no one is now gone forever. It looks as if you will come back in a minute, ask for a cup of tea and brood with your arms crossed over your chest. I think just being there to watch me do everyday things made you feel calmer. I don’t know. But I hope someday, I will understand the silence between us. Comfortable spells of silence, and some very terrifying ones. Like your death.

Love

Manu

*

5 August 2022

Bengaluru

Dear Baba, The vermilion has been removed now. The parting is stark white the hair oiled tied into a braid of acceptance. The grey mixed with the leftover black strands falling carelessly on her shoulder. I had seen her one lonely noon take a pair of scissors cut off her locks Like Samson and Delilah. She was at war A war with her own existence Her identity has been shaken Her oar is cracking open along with her broken sail. She sets to the seas but the land is far away on the horizon shining like the crystals found on a crown lost in a war lying forlorn for the head of the right king but now Samson is dead the Philistines have left too the palace has been torn down but parts are intact. Her locks sheared from guilt for being alive. Will she find her shore with her broken boat and tattered sail hoping the seas take her in or the fire of her breath is gutted before it becomes wild like a forest fire burning the little birds coloured kites stuck between branches and her capsizing boat too lost in the new world!

Love,

Manu

About the book:

Thorns in My Quilt: Letters from a Daughter to Her Father is a series of letters written by a daughter to her father after he passed away. Unspoken thoughts, unshared memories and unsaid words combine in this searing and poignant account of a relationship filled with joy, but with equal moments of sorrow.

Mohua Chinappa (Manu) loved her Baba, who was as kind as he was cruel, as well-read as he was unworldly, as loved as he was unloved. His dearest Manu recollects her childhood in Shillong, infused with the aroma of vanilla essence that went into the butter cookies he baked. She reminisces about her father holding her little hand while helping her through the undulating, rain-drenched roads. Mohua returns to Delhi, where she spent a part of her growing-up years, and revels in the memory of a government house with a harsingar tree. She writes to him about her broken marriage, recalls how her parents left her side, and how she reinvented herself. The letters are often selfish yet strangely cathartic.

Her father’s kidney failure prompted a daughter to confront the demons within—the loss, the doubts, the emptiness, the guilt of saying things, and the angst of not saying things.

About the author:

Mohua Chinappa is an author, a columnist, a renowned podcaster in India, a TEDx speaker, a former journalist and a corporate communications specialist.

The Mohua Show, a podcast she started in 2020, has close to 2 million downloads. She contributes regularly to various national dailies and magazines, including The Telegraph, Deccan Herald and Outlook. She is regularly invited as a speaker on TEDx and Josh Talks.

Mohua’s other initiative—NARI: The Homemakers Community—provides a platform for homemakers to voice their everyday challenges.

Her book—Nautanki Saala and Other Stories—was awarded the PVLF Best Debut Non-Fiction (in English) Award 2023. She also has two poetry collections to her credit—If Only It Were Spring Every day and Dragonflies of My Dreams.

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Categories
Review

Proclamation for the Future

Book Review by Bhaskar Parichha

Title: Raisina Chronicles: India’s Global Public Square 

Author: S. Jaishankar & Samir Saran

Publisher: Rupa Publications

Raisina Chronicles: India’s Global Public Square by  S. Jaishankar and Samir Saran commemorates a decade of the Raisina Dialogue, India’s flagship geopolitical and geo-economics conference. The book reflects on the journey of the Raisina Dialogue and its impact on global discourse. It brings together contributions from leaders, thinkers, and diplomats, scholars, and policymakers worldwide, offering insights into addressing global challenges through collaboration and dialogue.

S. Jaishankar has been India’s External Affairs Minister since May 2019 and represents Gujarat in the Rajya Sabha. He was the Foreign Secretary from 2015 to 2018 and has held ambassadorial roles in the U.S., China, and the Czech Republic, as well as High Commissioner to Singapore. He authored notable books like The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World and Why Bharat Matters. Samir Saran is the President of the Observer Research Foundation (ORF), a leading Indian policy think tank. He has enhanced ORF’s influence in the U.S. and the Middle East and provides strategic guidance at the board level. Saran curates the Raisina Dialogue, co-chairs the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Geopolitics, and serves on the Board of Governors of The East West Centre in the US. He has written five books, edited key monographs and journals, and contributed to numerous academic papers and essays, appearing in both Indian and international media.

The book brings together voices from across the world—of leaders and thinkers reflecting on the Raisina Dialogue’s impact on how we may navigate global challenges and create solutions that work. Putting India at the forefront of leading the change, the effect of these Dialogues is felt across policies and projections.

The editors emphasise that diversity, dissent, discord, and divergence of opinion make for the necessary ingredients for a sustainable future, shaped and owned by all. Ten years since its inception, the Raisina Dialogue has become the paramount platform for bringing together cultures, peoples and opinions. It is now India’s flagship geopolitical and geo-economics conference and has truly become a global public square—located in New Delhi, incubated by the world.

It emphasises the importance of diversity in thought, approaches, beliefs, and politics. It highlights how pluralism and heterogeneity contribute to resilience and societal evolution. Raisina Dialogue serves as a platform for inclusive participation, welcoming voices from underrepresented geographies and institutions.

While it showcases India’s emergence as a global leader in addressing development challenges and fostering international cooperation, it reflects the philosophy of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (the world is one family) and its efforts to harmonise local solutions with global needs.

Through initiatives like the G20 Presidency, India has shared transformative models such as digital public infrastructure (e.g., India Stack), offering templates for financial inclusion and tech-enabled development globally.

Alongside the carefully organised discussions, Raisina Chronicles examines the evolution of the Dialogue and presents its audience with a comprehensive volume that offers deep insights and an unwavering optimism for achieving shared solutions to worldwide issues.

As the globe approaches significant structural and historical transformations, the core aspiration of this work is to ensure that the voices of the populace are prioritised in global politics and policymaking, echoing through influential circles and reaching the broader community. For leaders to effect change, it is essential for society to unite and take a decisive step forward in the right direction.

Raisina Dialogue is also portrayed as a crucial venue for bridging divides in a fractured world. It fosters open discussions among diverse stakeholders—diplomats, scholars, business leaders, civil society members—to discover shared futures and solutions. The book underscores the importance of dialogue over polemics and inclusivity over exclusivity in shaping global policies.

Contributions from high profile global leaders such as Kyriakos Mitsotakis (Prime Minister of Greece), Mette Frederiksen (Prime Minister of Denmark), Penny Wong (Australian Foreign Minister) and others enrich the book with perspectives on international cooperation, climate goals, defence partnerships, and multilateralism.

The book serves as both a retrospective of the Raisina Dialogue’s achievements over ten years and a forward-looking guide for navigating global challenges. It positions India at the heart of global conversations, highlighting its role in fostering equitable dialogue and creating solutions that resonate across borders.

This volume is not just a collection of essays but also an intellectual testament to the transformative power of dialogue in shaping a sustainable future for humanity.

Bhaskar Parichha is a journalist and author of Cyclones in Odisha: Landfall, Wreckage and Resilience, Unbiased, No Strings Attached: Writings on Odisha and Biju Patnaik – A Political Biography. He lives in Bhubaneswar and writes bilingually. Besides writing for newspapers, he also reviews books on various media platforms.

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