Page 199 - EW October 2025

from Kalyan Pradeep from the narratives of sur- to scrutiny and catechized seeks to question. And it
(1929), a biography of vival penned by his white through the lens of indig- is precisely for this reason
a young Bengali doctor counterparts. enous knowledge, colonial that perhaps now more
Kalyan Mukherji by his The theme of move- encounter, and ecological than ever, an insistence on
grandmother Mokshoda ment, of people, objects, devastation. empathy, compassion, and
Devi, and Abhi Le Bagh- and ideas, acts as an Woven through all the a shared sense of human-
dad (1957), a memoir by anchor across the text. essays is a resolute call for ity becomes all the more
Sisir Sarbadhikari, Ghosh From the lascars who empathy. In his readings of urgent.
resurrects two incredible emerge as the first global Priya Satia’s Time’s Mon- Wild Fictions is, at its
narratives that have been Indians, to present-day ster (2020), Ghosh returns heart, a meditation on
long forgotten. migrants in Europe, to his to an oft-repeated ques- the making of a writer,
What supersedes his own peripatetic life, Ghosh tion: why do good people on the conversations
ability to reproduce the shows how the act of mov- do bad things? The ques- that shaped him, the
archive is that, unlike his- ing across waters, borders, tion is not as rhetorical as travels that surprised
torians, Ghosh inhabits the and languages is never it is ethical. In recounting him, and the realities
archive through the crutch without historical freight. the memoir Abhi Le Bagh- that disturbed him. For a
of fiction. This is a method In a delightful essay, ‘The dad, Ghosh points to how writer like Ghosh, it was
familiar to anyone who Well Travelled Banyan’, Sarbadhikari never lost the perhaps long overdue.
has read the Ibis Trilogy. he turns to the everyday perception of humanity With measured tone that
He is attentive not just Indian staple, the vest or during the war, even in his is never agitated, he charts
to what the archive says, banyan, as the protagonist enemies. Sarbadhikari’s the entanglements of
but to what it fails to say: of Indian identity amidst account is not isolated; empire, capitalism, history
the tremors of race, caste, global flow. many of the essays remind and ecology, allowing for
and class that shape lived Through such attentive the reader that in this quiet, anecdotal moments
experiences. A striking readings of the archive age of conflict and hate, to root concerns of the
example is his account of a Ghosh disrupts many of practicing compassion is mundane. These essays are
doctor stationed in Burma the foundational myths not simply possible but a not only insightful, but are
in 1942, whose arduous of the West. Ideas long necessity. Morality is never essential reading today to
journey back to India is tethered to the rhetoric of unmediated in a capital- understand our world in
marked with racial humili- liberalism, progress, and ist landscape; it is imbri- the shadows of peril.
ation, a very different tale sustainability are held up cated in the very system it ANIDRITA SAIKIA (The

OCTOBER 2025 EDUCATIONWORLD 199