Sucheta Dasgupta

New Delhi

Assistant Editor at The Asian Age

Desk drone, writer, thinker, author.

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Articles

Book Review | Story of Indian Independence’s ‘Real’ First War

4 weeks ago | deccanchronicle.com | Sucheta Dasgupta

The Sanyasi Rebellion. The three-year famine of 1769-71. The war cry of “Jai Bhawani”. All themes from the classic Anandamath, written by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, published in 1882. A novel, no doubt, but what no one knows is that it did refer to India’s first war of Independence. Not the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, but one waged almost a hundred years earlier. The name of its hero missing in that story is Fateh Bahadur Sahi.
Book Review: 11 Caucasians Who Crafted the Allure of Calcutta

1 month ago | deccanchronicle.com | Sucheta Dasgupta

This finely researched book explores the shared legacy of every person growing up in Kolkata. It chronicles the lives of at least 11 forgotten newsmakers. Chief among them is Harry Hobbs, one of Kolkata’s first urban historians. Hobbs arrived in Kolkata in 1883.
Book Review l Life of the mind, Ajita and Ajivikas

Mar 22, 2025 | deccanchronicle.com | Sucheta Dasgupta

Quotidian language. Laboured dialogue. Wooden characters. A personal preface from the author on the Oulipo movement and the ouroborus that serves to confuse rather than illumine. Yet this fiction on Ajita, the forerunner of the Charvaka school of thought, forges forth with an inexorable, passionate force, drawing the reader inwards to the centrifuge of its arguments and counter-arguments, and then climaxes in a tremendous emotional payoff.
Sucheta Dasgupta | India’s unsung green heroes

Mar 8, 2025 | deccanchronicle.com | Sucheta Dasgupta

The philosophy of environmentalism is no more than one century and a quarter old, and marked by intellectual scepticism regarding poor countries' contribution; as economists Lester Thurow and Eric Hobsbawm, curiously, respectively, maintain, “they want[ed] more ‘development’” and “they simply aren’t interested”. Never mind if the 1973 Chipko movement in the Himalaya gives the lie to these assertions.
India a Begumpura of reason & compassion: Githa Hariharan

Dec 13, 2024 | deccanchronicle.com | Sucheta Dasgupta

Writer and editor Githa Hariharan, who successfully challenged the Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act in 1995 to uphold the rights of the mother, has an idea of India that she explores in her new book, This Too Is India: Conversations on Diversity and Dissent (Westland, 2024). In this conversation, she shares a bit of it with Sucheta Dasgupta: Why would you want to centre dissent in your idea of India? All of us agree that diversity is the ground India stands on.
Book Review | Orbital odyssey dull and underwhelming!

Nov 15, 2024 | deccanchronicle.com | Sucheta Dasgupta

In the last quarter of the latest Booker-winner, Orbital, one of its six protagonists, American Shaun, is posed by a journalist this perplexing question: With this new era of space travel, how are we writing the future of humanity? Initially, Shaun is at a loss because, the writer says, in space your thoughts are usually about the next few moments; you learn not to think beyond the next half-hour.
Book Review | India’s Schindler and his rescue list

Nov 8, 2024 | deccanchronicle.com | Sucheta Dasgupta

According to legend, an officer in Austria’s royal Habsburg army was the first to add sugar and milk to Turkish coffee. Thus, coffee shops were ubiquitous in Vienna in 1938 as were eateries. These sold traditional cuisine like wiener schnitzel (fried veal), tafelspitz (boiled beef), beuschel (veal ragout) and selchfleisch (smoked meat). Enter Kundanlal from Ludhiana, a machine tools manufacturer, there for haemorrhoids surgery.
Theyyam, Indian shamanic shuffle that can unravel anthropological mysteries

Nov 2, 2024 | deccanchronicle.com | Sucheta Dasgupta

Mime. Theatre. Worship. Trance. Dance. Art. Music. Story. Now imagine a spectacle comprising all these further augmented by esoteric chanting and extravagantly colourful makeup and attire. In which the performer takes on the attributes of the powerful deity, indeed, for the duration of the performance, becoming god.
Interview | Invest in museums, Nalanda: William Dalyrmple

Oct 17, 2024 | deccanchronicle.com | Sucheta Dasgupta

Rather than chest-thumping, Indians should invest more in the study of history. This is the advice of Scottish historian William Dalrymple whose latest book, The Golden Road, is all about the influence wielded over the world by India. In conversation with Sucheta Dasgupta, he explains how it came to do so and why it is important that we both explore and share this knowledge. In the first century CE did India have a greater per capita income level than Rome? Very difficult to say.
Book Review | How multinational was port of Kochi!

Oct 4, 2024 | deccanchronicle.com | Sucheta Dasgupta

Journalist M.K. Das has authored this unique volume of essays tracking the evolution of Kerala's financial capital which is also an emerging mega-city. Now renowned internationally albeit since 2012 for its biennale, Kochi, formerly named Cochin, is a young city. Young, eventhough Kerala Mahathmyam, the ancient book of legends, traces the lineage of the Cochin royalty to the Ayodhya Suryavamshis, stating that Parashurama crowned the grandson of Lava from Ramayana as king of Balapuri.