Opinion: Foreign assistance: It is a truism that the Western scholars vilified by Hindu nationalists today are completely different from the White Indophiles, patrons, thinkers and activists who helped globalise Hinduism |The Telegraph, March 19th, 2026|
Obituary: Sankar (1933–2026): The writer as a dear friend |Beyond the labels of ‘lightweight’ or ‘middlebrow’, the beloved author of Chowringhee and Jana Aranya occupied a unique place in the Bengali heart. |Frontline, February 25th, 2026|
Obituary: Mani Shankar Mukherjee (Sankar) 1933-2026 | The great chronicler of a world and people at work, in a universal language. The novelist Sankar, who passed away in Kolkata at the age of 92, became part of my lost childhood memory, not through books, but through family lore. |Indian Express, February 21st, 2026|
Books: Writing With Fire – Literature In A Post-Epstein World: Where do we look for universal moral values? Will the dangerous dalliance of art and intellect offer epiphanies, or will they only muddy our ethical clarities in a world gone mad? |Outlook, February 19th, 2026|
Literary Trends: The Nobel and the Booker remind us of the apocalyptic and absurd in Central European fiction: What is the peculiar fusion of apocalyptic pessimism and bizarre humour that defines it? László Krasznahorkai and David Szalay’s novels might have the answers. | Scroll, January 11, 2026|
Opinion: Blood Brothers: It is shocking to realise that the self-conception of the nation now accommodates, indeed, foregrounds, both the calm superiority of the vishwaguru and the bloodthirsty violence of Dhurandhar |The Telegraph, January 08, 2026|
Culture: The Year of Hungary: For me, the irony of the “major” and the “minor” became blatant in unexpected ways this year, which, in more ways than I had imagined, turned out to be the year of Hungary | The Wire, December 06, 2025|
Opinion: Who’s my neighbour: Inside a gated community, three creatures have sorted out the world between them. And no, the humans are not among them | The Indian Express, December 03, 2025|
Literary Tribute: Zoë Wicomb (1948–2025): The South African writer who rediscovered the ordinary |Scroll, November 15, 2025|
Opinion: Nowhere people: Mobility and situatedness are tied to privilege. Such is the difference between immigration and displacement, the expatriate and the refugee. It is as old as the modern nation-state itself |The Telegraph, September 30, 2025|
Opinion: Bharat Vs Bangla: What happens when the great muddling pushes an entire cultural identity beyond normative citizenry and throws a language into this half-literate fray? |The Telegraph, August 13, 2025|
Opinion: One Life, Many Loves-Just the way queer rights have pushed their way past the Victorian-Protestant laws inherited from colonialism, the voices of those practising consensual polyamory have been rising in India. |The Telegraph, July 16, 2025|
Opinion: Mind the Gulf : A strange mix of insularity and delusion, propped up by a media at once sycophantic and hallucinatory, has kept us in denial about the steep drop of the world’s perception of India |The Telegraph, June 12, 2025|
Opinion: The Impossible Friendship of Extreme Nationalisms: They may wish to come together, but their innate narcissism, let us hope, will in the end, keep them apart |The Wire, May 31, 2025|
Opinion: The dangerous rise of illiberal nationalism in Hungary |The Hindu, May 27, 2025|
Opinion: A morbid imagination is a lovely thing for an obituary writer | News organizations often stockpile tribute pieces in advance “for as many of the newsworthy undead as possible | The Hindu, March 13. 2025|
Life and labour: What is a good and meaningful existence?, The Telegraph, January 22, 2025
Opinion: America needs Indians on H-1B visas, Indian Express, December 31, 2024
Opinion: Bapsi Sidhwa, Shyam Benegal, Manmohan Singh and the Death of a Century, The Wire, December 28, 2024
Mind and Matter: The tension between the material and the cultural, The Telegraph, December 24, 2024
Theory’s sceptics: Expertise is under assault globally, The Telegraph, November 20, 2024
The spin doctors: Toxic narratives of female deviancy The Telegraph, October 17, 2024
Monsters, Masters: Artists And Their Personal Life Violations; How does one teach the works of writers and thinkers who have abused their power or committed heinous crimes?, Outlook, July 31, 2024
The death of a Principle, The Telegraph, July 31, 2024
The Cracks Deepen: The irrationality of ideologically opposed friendships haunts me. The Telegraph, July 1, 2024
The Fiction of Rational Miracles: On Amit Chaudhuri’s NYRB Classics Reissuesmiracles-on-amit-chaudhuris-nyrb-classics-reissues/, Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB), May 14, 2024
An Identity Crisis: Data on identity are often a necessity to address historic inequities, as the various caste censuses have revealed, The Telegraph, April 24, 2024
Inheritance of loss: We’re entering an epoch where political control is not limited to the management of elections, the abrogation of state rights, or unexpected kinships between discrete organs of the govt, The Telegraph, March 30, 2024
The burden of togetherness: Bullocks are yoked in labour. Not in love, Hindustan Times, February 19, 2024
The globalisation of war: Globalisation of war turns the beauty of migratory friendships painful. I write to Israeli & Palestinian friends worldwide, just the way some of them touched base with me during Covid, The Telegraph, December 30, 2023
Mellowing romance: Do stories about ragging in college hostels and debilitation and death from them, a pandemic in recent media, become literary or cinematic classics? The Telegraph, October 31, 2023
Whitewashing the grey: In the tradition of the great European absurdists and existentialists, postmodernists like Kundera and Calvino evoked lightness and laughter in the face of political crises The Telegraph, September 01, 2023
Can literary activism lead to a disavowal of free-market capitalism in the creation of good books? Scroll.in, August 27, 2023
Crown and colony The Telegraph, July 31, 2023
Essay: The Cape of Silent Hope. Hindustan Times, July 16, 2023
Through the cracked looking glass: review of Siddhartha Deb’s The Light at the End of the World; The Hindu, June 30, 2023
Twilight Tales The Telegraph, June 27, 2023
A letter from South Africa’s Stellenbosch — university town, wine paradise and the birthplace of apartheid The Hindu, June 01, 2023
A dark light: The corruption of freedom in global polities The Telegraph, April 09, 2023
Essay: The writer without readers Hindustan Times, January 12, 2023
The wandering mind: Nirad C. Chaudhuri reflects Apu’s autodidacticism; The Telegraph, December 21, 2022
International Translation Day: Classics vs #cancelculture The Hindu, September 23, 2022
Another Look at India’s Books: Rohit Manchanda’s “In the Light of the Black Sun” Los Angeles Review, September 14, 2022
Amit Chaudhuri’s Sojourn book review: Suspended in the present The Hindu, August 24, 2022
Hindu Nationalism’s Censorship of the Gods
Hindustan Times, August 3, 2022
Scars of a surgery on paper: review of Amit Majmudar’s ‘The Map and the Scissors’; The Hindu, July 29, 2022
The Novel and the Love Letter
Hindustan Times, July 21, 2022
Another Look at India’s Books: Reshma Aquil’s “The Unblending”
Los Angeles Review, July 17, 2022
Language for a New Landscape
Los Angeles Review, July 12, 2022
Another Look at India’s Books: Juliette Banerjee’s “The Gap-Toothed Banister: A Tale of Anglo-India”
Los Angeles Review, May 12, 2022
The Deception of Creative Writing
Hindustan Times, April 22, 2022
Real and unruly: Saikat Majumdar reviews “Of Dry Tongues and Brave Hearts”; The Hindu, April 02, 2022
Another Look at India’s Books: Sanjay Seth’s “Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India”
Los Angeles Review, March 17, 2022
The Treacherous Modern
Literary Activism: A Series of Presentations and Interventions | Symposium III: Reassessments
Stubborn greatness: The provincialism of great art can be hard to accept; The Telegraph, February 01, 2022
To stranger, with love: When requests to write romantic letters came my way; The Hindu, January 15, 2022
Another Look at India’s Books: Lopa Ghosh’s “The Revolt of the Fish Eaters”
Los Angeles Review, November 10, 2021
Death of a teacher
The Telegraph, November 1, 2021
Crumpled spaces
The Telegraph, October 3, 2021
The beauty of the banal
The Hindu, October 2, 2021
In Conversation: On the new ‘Writer in Context’ Book series
Hindustan Times, October 2, 2021
Another Look at India’s Books: Sarabjeet Garcha’s Lullaby of the Ever Returning
Los Angeles Review, September 14, 2021
The Unmade Self
Arcade, Stanford University | Dibur Literary Journal | Issue 9 (Peripheral Modernisms)
The final curtain
The Telegraph, August 30, 2021
Three generations of unruly imagination
Speak, August 23, 2021
Another Look at India’s Books: Sunetra Gupta’s “A Sin of Colour”
Los Angeles Review, July 6, 2021
First love, Last rites
The Telegraph, July 2, 2021
The failed success of the postcolonial reader
Los Angeles Review, June 17, 2021
Where Satyajit Ray brings alive the genius of three generations of the Ray family in one book
Scroll.in, June 12, 2021
Essay: Remains of the body
Hindustan Times, June 2, 2021
What Does Untouchable Mean During India’s Covid Crisis?
Lithub, May 21, 2021
What do allies write about when they write (poetry) about feminism?
Scroll.in, May 15, 2021
Another Look at India’s Books: Basant Rath’s “Own Me, Srinagar”
Los Angeles Review, May 11, 2021
Put your coat and tie on: Can the postcolonial reader read in English?
The Hindu, April 21, 2021
On the influence of Bhasha literature on Indian English writing
Hindustan Times, April 16, 2021
On Navigating a Polyglot’s life
Lithub, March 22, 2021
Another Look at India’s Books: Out! Stories from the new Queer India
Los Angeles Review, March 9, 2021
How to read in a restless world
Hindustan Times, January 1, 2021
Another Look at India’s Books: Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd’s “Why I Am Not a Hindu”
Los Angeles Review, November 25, 2020
How the pandemic has changed the idea of university literary communities dramatically
Scroll, October 14, 2020
Another Look at India’s Books: P. Lal’s “Calcutta: A Long Poem”
Los Angeles Review, October 7, 2020
Why the profusion of courses in India will not over-professionalise the practice of creative writing
Scroll, September 13, 2020
How to build a creative writing programme as part of academic courses at an Indian university
Scroll, September 6, 2020
Can creative writing be taught in universities? Is it not in conflict with academic rigour?
Scroll, August 30, 2020
Where does a writer go when the streets are stolen?
Hindustan Times, August 21, 2020
Another look at India’s Books: Manjul Bajaj’s “Another Man’s Wife”
Los Angeles Review, August 18, 2020
“Kolkata’s commercial theatre was built on literature, but was looked down on by the intelligentsia“
Scroll.in, June 20, 2020
“Post-377: LGBTQ Literary Culture in India“
Los Angeles Review, June 19, 2020
“The art and law of love”
Hindustan Times, June 15, 2020
“On the future of reading and writing under the shadow of the pandemic“
Hindustan Times, May 27, 2020
“Saikat Majumdar shares the books he is reading“
Indian Express, May 12, 2020
“Saikat Majumdar, author of ‘The Scent of God’, recommends these titles“
The Hindu, May 6, 2020
“Eavan Boland (1944-2020): A tribute to the poet who wrote ‘Quarantine’, from a former colleague“
Scroll, April 28, 2020
“Scent and Sensibility”
Punch, April 18, 2020
“The comfort of sickness”
Hindustan Times, April 4, 2020
“The Inheritance of Flaws: What the Indian Bildungsroman tells us about our nation,” The Hindu, Jan 17, 2020
“Playing for Love: The Amateur Critic Vs the Academic, Professional Critic,” The Hindu, Nov 30, 2019
“There may not be a word for lynching in most Indian languages. We need one.” The Indian Express, October 12, 2019
“Left in Polytheism,” Los Angeles Review, October 2, 2018. Reprinted in Scroll.in, November 2, 2018
“Can the emotional power of art (and religion) be the solution to the problems of the post-truth world?” Scroll.in, September 23, 2018
“Dreaming of the Hindu Left,” The Hindu, September 1, 2018
“The lost art of public reading,” The Hindu, June 9, 2018
“A world too close for comfort,” Scroll.in, June 2, 2018
“The Jewish testosterone: Philip Roth,” The Mumbai Mirror, May 24, 2018
“Unlearning to write: on loving and hating creative writing workshops.” The Hindu, April 29, 2018
“And thereby hangs a tale,” The Hindu, March 3, 2018.
“Why are writers and critics around the world worrying about cultural appropriation?” Interview with Scroll.in, July 1, 2017
“2016 and the liberal art of life”” The Hindu Business Line Blink, December 23, 2016.
“Philip Roth: The American Writer who shouldn’t need the Nobel to be read the world over,” Scroll.in, October 15, 2015
“It’s 25 years since A Strange and Sublime Address has opened the gate to Indian Writers in English: a conversation with Amit Chaudhuri,” Scroll.in, September 11, 2016.
“Memory and Place: A Conversation with Saikat Majumdar.” A discussion with Joseph Haske. Los Angeles Review, April 21, 2016. Reprinted in Scroll.in, May 6, 2016.
“The Primal Place: Kolkata’s micro-cities are so much more than mere physical spaces”, Hindu Business Online, April 16, 2016.
“Indian Writers under siege: A roundtable with Githa Hariharan, Arunava Sinha, and Anjum Hasan.” Public Books, March 1, 2016; Reprinted in Vantage, a Caravan Web Exclusive, April 3, 2016.
“A City Ignored by Calcutta and Kolkata,” Hindu Business Online, February 12, 2016
Introduction to Focus, Little India. “The Provincial Life of Cosmopolitanism.” American Book Review. September/October 2015.
“Kolkata’s decadent theatre.” Mint Lounge. Special issue on theatre. August 15, 2015.
“The Ashes of Pleasure: how the curtains came down on Calcutta’s professional theatre.” Caravan Magazine, September 2014