An incisive, lyrical, and deeply reported account of India’s descent into authoritarianism.
Traveling across India, interviewing Hindu zealots, armed insurgents, jailed dissidents, and politicians and thinkers from across the political spectrum, Siddhartha Deb reveals a country in which forces old and new have aligned to endanger democracy. The result is an absorbing—and disturbing—portrait. India has become a religious fundamentalist dystopia, one depicted here with a novelist’s precise language and eye for detail.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his party—a formation explicitly drawing on European fascism—has deftly exploited modern technologies, the media, and market forces to launch a relentless campaign on minorities, women, dissenters, and the poor. Deb profiles these people, as well as those fighting back, including writers, scholars, and journalists. Twilight Prisoners sounds the alarm now that the world’s largest democracy is under threat in ways that echo the fissures in the United States, United Kingdom, and so-called democracies the world over.
Born in Shillong, north-eastern India, Siddhartha Deb lives in Harlem, New York. His fiction and nonfiction have been longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, and been awarded the Pen Open prize. His journalism and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Republic, Dissent, The Baffler, N+1, and Caravan.
Publication date: April 2, 2024
Introduction: The India Racket
Chapter 2. What is India? Why India’s Boom Years Have Been a Bust
Chapter 3. The Violence, Insecurity, and Rage of Narendra Modi
Chapter 4. Arundhati Roy: The Renegade
Chapter 5. The Killing of Gauri Lankesh
Chapter 6. The Worst Industrial Disaster in the History of the World
Chapter 7. Nowhere Land: Along India’s Border, a Forgotten Burmese Rebellion
Chapter 8. Those Mythological Men and Their Sacred Supersonic Flying Temples
Chapter 9. The Detention Centers of Assam
Chapter 10. India’s Political Prisoners
Chapter 11. The Temple and The Mosque
Conclusion
“Deb’s writing demonstrates deep familiarity with Indian politics and the ability to write for a non-Indian audience. For Americans reading this collection, there will inevitably be a comparison with the emergence of the Christian Right and the MAGA movement in recent years…. Overall, this book is an eminently engaging and politically astute collection of essays that critique the growth of Hindu nationalism, the absurd and ahistorical mythology that undergirds it, and the violence experienced by minorities in India.” —Socialism and Democracy
Praise for Siddhartha Deb
“One of the most distinctive writers to have emerged from South Asia in the last two decades.” —Pankaj Mishra
Praise for The Light at the End of the World
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
“Extraordinary . . . I was in awe of Deb’s imagination and razor-sharp prose. The hallucinatory quality of his narrative reminded me of William Burroughs’s ‘Naked Lunch,’ while its apocalyptic trajectory had echoes of Cormac McCarthy’s ‘Blood Meridian’ . . . That the novel invokes a glorious past, hints at a utopian future and contradicts reality could be the author’s way to protest an authoritarian government skilled in just that . . . Whatever the author’s intent, I felt privileged to have been on an odyssey quite unlike any other.” —Abraham Verghese, The New York Times Book Review
“The Light at the End of the World is full of intriguing puzzles and opacities, but what brings it to life is less its inventiveness than its galvanizing anger, its outraged awareness of exploitation and cruelty. It travels, unbounded, into the past and the future, yet it always meets the reader in the middle of these destinations, the broken world of the present.” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
“Deb explores a range of alternative explanations for and ramifications of historical events . . . Working in a speculative mode, Deb imagines a kind of agency for his characters barred to them by historical, and present, realities.” —The New Republic
