BR Ambedkar

BR Ambedkar has left behind a vast body of work. There are also many books on him and his oeuvre. Given this context, what inspired you to work on this book? Author Ashok Gopal (Courtesy the subject) As I have said in the preface, I found that there were gaps in what has already been written about Ambedkar. Particularly in writings in English, Ambedkar’s turn to Buddhism has been unsatisfactorily told. That he was a deeply religious person, albeit not in the way many understand “religion”, was completely…

This year, as usual, except for a Yiyun Li and a Patchett here and an RF Kuang there, I read mostly non fiction – memoirs, political biographies, studies of a filmmaker’s oeuvre, books on women in science, even a passionate treatise on an alternative food source that has led me to include crackling seaweed on my snack menu. Among the memoirs, I particularly enjoyed Sara Rai’s Raw Umber, which touches on growing up in Allahabad, her grandfather Premchand, the ordinariness of death, drawing from a pool of languages in her…

The first wave of Dalit writing that breached the conspicuous boundaries of caste in Indian literature came in the form of autobiographies – searing portraits of life and social experiences in the first few decades of independence that was unlike anything that had been written before. Yet, even in this veritable list, Yogesh Maitreya’s Water in a Broken Pot, stands out as unique, not only because it breaks the mould of millennial writing but also in its refusal to coddle the reader. Maitreya – who also runs a…

26 years after P Sainath wrote Everybody Loves a Good Drought, he’s back with The Last Heroes: Footsoldiers of Indian Freedom, one that Gopalkrishna Gandhi says “redefines biography writing”. The big names we are all familiar with make cameo and guest appearances. The heroes are relatively unknown. They come from across India and speak many languages. That diversity is mirrored in their individual struggles. With lathis, type-writers and tiffin-carriers, they took on the might of the Raj. Some made bombs, others stopped…