This book found me in London. When I finally reached for it, something shifted
- 23 hours ago
- 7 min read
Amit Sengupta’s A Sudden Golden Smile enters with the tempered force of early spring, carrying a sense of renewal that clears the air rather than announces itself. One year after its launch, the fifty-five essays gathered here stretch across decades of political upheaval, cultural tension, and private transition, yet the curation has the coherence of a single, breathing narrative.
By Narendra Pachkhédé in London/Toronto
This book found me in London.
It arrived during a crowded stretch of work, so I placed it aside and told myself I would return when I had earned the time. For days it sat in that private queue every writer keeps, the quiet stack reserved for hours when the world relents.
When I finally reached for it, something shifted.
The gesture felt less like duty and more like a retrieval of the self I had set aside. Opening its pages after such delay created an unexpected intimacy, as though the book had waited for the precise moment when I could receive it without the blur of distraction.
Amit Sengupta’s A Sudden Golden Smile enters with the tempered force of early spring, carrying a sense of renewal that clears the air rather than announces itself. The fifty-five essays gathered here stretch across decades of political upheaval, cultural tension, and private transition, yet the curation has the coherence of a single, breathing narrative.
One feels the sharpness of his selection. From a large archive he has chosen pieces that show a mind at full reach, alert to the tremors of injustice and equally to the redeeming details of ordinary life. The result is a collection marked by clarity, restraint, and a steadiness of moral vision.
Across these essays we witness the evolution of a writer who understands, as he recalls in “The Wager is a Hard Novel,” that “we make our stories until they make us.” (The Wager: A tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder -- book review in thecitizen.in )
This anthology shows how a lifetime of bearing witness shapes the writer as deeply as it documents the world he records. Sengupta rejects the sedative distance that now defines much of contemporary journalism and allows the stories he encounters to transform him. The book becomes not only a record of what he has seen but also a map of how those experiences have carved the contours of his imaginative and ethical life.
The range is extraordinary.
Gaza’s genocide stands beside the struggles of Gond communities in the central part of India and the persistence of Tharu homelands along the India-Nepal border. Reflections on parallel cinema appear near accounts of dictatorship, portraits of artists, and field reports from Manipur and Myanmar.
These pieces form a constellation rather than a linear sequence. Each burns with its own intensity, yet all are held together by a writer who refuses the safety of detachment.
Sengupta’s lyrical charge lifts reportage into literature.
His compassion avoids sentimentality. His criticism never becomes performance. His gaze is steady, his moral sense sharpened by long engagement.
At certain points the reportage glides toward memoir, where political attention and personal vulnerability meet in a single register. It becomes clear how deeply the world has engraved itself upon the self that writes it.
Sengupta describes the book as “my life and times in contemporary India and the world.” The phrase is plain, yet the intimacy it signals intensifies the essays and reveals the cost of sustained attention.
To understand the power of Sengupta’s method one must recall that reportage has always held an ambiguous place in the architecture of public knowledge. Kapuściński treated it as a literary art of proximity. Gellhorn regarded it as an ethical vocation. Teju Cole has argued that witnessing demands self-awareness about the power relations that shape the act of seeing.
Sengupta belongs within this lineage. He rejects neutrality and adopts a form of engaged witness, reminding us that journalism is not raw material from which history is later fashioned, but the crucible in which history first takes shape.
This commitment carries through the volume. He has spent a lifetime confronting political violence in India and across the world, and his prose holds a rare mixture of reach, feeling, and resolve. In a period when Indian journalism has grown timid through fear or allegiance, he remains among the few who continue to speak with precision.
The intensity of his student years at JNU, where he served as an independent union president, endures not as nostalgia but as a principle of solidarity with the marginalised and with those whose suffering is deliberately rendered invisible.
Half way into the volume, the essays like “Daughters of Dudhwa Forest Reclaim Land”, “Daughters Against Dictators” brings the focus back on to the challenge of the young and aspirational generation and their struggles. Sengupta writes of young women wrestlers fighting the systemic abuse and the fate of the Muslim scholars imprisoned for their participation in democratic protest.
Their utter helplessness is captured in the tone as a nation that incarcerates its most thoughtful citizens hollows out its own future. The essay reads as elegy and indictment, revealing both personal persecution and the moral corrosion that permits such acts to pass as routine governance.
In moments like this, journalism becomes conscience and testimony.
The book moves from political violence to global conflict with an ease that clarifies its underlying theme: the ethics of attention. Sengupta’s reflections on Myanmar’s civil war, and on the war-scarred landscapes of Gaza and Ukraine with soldiers bound to histories they inherit from opposing sides, show a writer who refuses to avert his gaze and despair as well.
His work finds resilience within ruin and a fierce dignity in those forced to endure the impossible. The writing seeks not transcendence, but an understanding of how people continue to live amid devastation.
A sharper throughline emerges as the essays on India’s indigenous communities come into view: attention is both method and ethic. In “So, did you dance all night too?”, Sengupta enters Birsa Nagar not as an observer gathering impressions but as a participant in a shared world.
The struggles for land rights, mining encroachment, and state intimidation appear, but the portraits resist pity. These communities are anchored in knowledge, memory, and intimacy with the land. Their resilience is a lived ethic.
He avoids the pastoral sentimentality that often mars writing on adivasi regions. He foregrounds political and legal structures rather than romantic scenery. In this sense his work echoes the urgency of Suchitra Vijayan’s Midnight’s Borders, which reveals the nation through its most fragile edges.
Cinema threads through the book as another register of collective memory. Sengupta writes about film not as an external critic but as a reader of social truth. His essay on Kanthara traces its lineage to rural realist cinema of the 1970s. His discussion of Yours Truly Shreedharan dismantles the falsifications of recent political cinema. His reflections on Killers of the Flower Moon illuminate the history of the Osage Nation and the deadly logic of extraction, drawing subtle parallels with the displacement of India’s tribal populations. Here his work resonates with Anuradha Bhasin’s Written in Blood, where violence is understood as structure rather than aberration.
Running beneath these political and cultural inquiries is a quieter current of personal reflection. Sengupta writes of ageing, illness, insomnia, and physical dislocation with unsentimental candour. These reflections form a second, submerged narrative that shapes the visible one.
Vulnerability does not weaken his political clarity. It intensifies it.
The tremors of a weakening body echo against the tremors of nations in conflict. The ruins of Gaza or the burning villages of Manipur acquire an added charge when set beside his reflections on aging.
In this fusion of public and private he stands within a longer trajectory of Indian nonfiction where the boundary between personal and political remains permeable. Bhasin and Vijayan write in similar fashion, letting private histories shape their witness to public life.
Sengupta recognises that truth is never wholly external. It is carried in the body and sometimes bruised by the act of seeing.
“A Death in the Time of Fascism” brings this fusion into sharpest focus. Sengupta juxtaposes the numbness that accompanied the Nazi killing machine with the moral indifference that shadows the present. He asks why distant deaths fail to disturb us and why empathy has withered in an age that claims connection.
The question is posed without rhetoric, creating a reflective space in which grief becomes difficult to refuse.
Throughout the collection one senses a commitment to truth that recalls George Orwell’s reflections on the motives of the writer. Sengupta embodies both impulses: the desire to record the world with honesty and the longing to shape it toward greater justice. His essays document the times with precision while gesturing toward a future in which dignity is not aspiration but right.
Seen through this lens, A Sudden Golden Smile becomes more than an anthology. It is a portrait of a writer who has refused resignation. It is a record of vigilance and a sustained argument for the value of remaining awake in a culture that rewards amnesia.
It chronicles injustice while affirming endurance. It shows that even in the deepest shadows small apertures of possibility persist.
The book’s only material shortcoming is the absence of an index and publication histories for the essays. Such information would have provided clarity about the chronology of Sengupta’s engagement and strengthened the sense of historical arc. In their absence the trajectory remains visible but less firmly anchored.
The title echoes a line from Camus, who wrote of carrying the smile of a stranger through an entire day. It reflects a belief in the fragile radiance of brief human encounters and the idea that fleeting gestures can pierce the monotony of suffering.
Sengupta transforms that insight into a method of reading the world. Through these essays one learns to recognise the small illuminations that give the book its name, the glints that persist even where they are least expected.
Book: A Sudden Golden Smile
Amit Sengupta
Publishers: Anamika | 300 pp.
(Available on Amazon.in)
Narendra Pachkhédé is a critic, essayist and writer who splits his time between Toronto, London and Geneva. His recent book is FORM AS HISTORY—When History No Longer Requires Us. Published by Daraja Press.
Also see the other reviews of A Sudden Golden Smile:
By Karen Gabriel, Professor, Head, Department of English, St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University.
By Pankaj Molekhi, senior editor in the mainstream English media, Editor, Lokmarg.com Delhi.
By Ajith Pillai, Seasoned journalist and author, Chennai.
By Ratna Raman, Professor, Department of English, Venkateswara College, University of Delhi.
By Naren Singh Rao, Lawyer and teacher, Delhi