In conversation with Priyamvada Gopal. The scholar, Paul Gilroy, talks in terms ‘post-colonial melancholia’ and that is certainly there, but, also, I think, a toxic cocktail of rage, entitlement, false victimhood, exceptionalism, and vanity.

By Amit Sengupta. The sudden, radical rupture inflames the rain-soaked afternoon. The fire spreads in the eyes, and inside clenched fists. A mother holds her little child close to her heart, eyes blazing. A thin, wiry young woman in a red sari, becomes a fiery symbol of shakti – women’s power. A grandmother is so intense, that her entire history of angst and anger explodes.