“Each tradition in our plural society is fluid. It is this fluidity that has created a shared space; it is this fluidity that constructed our shared inheritance; our sanjhi virasat, that shaped a soft, gentle, tolerant culture.” Neera Chandhoke (Author, Languages of Freedom)
9 min read
Team Kitaab is in conversation with author Neera Chandhoke to discuss her latest book, Languages of Freedom (Speaking Tiger, 2026).
Neera Chandhoke is currently Visiting Professor, Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi. She was formerly Professor of Political Science and the Director of the Developing Countries Research Centre at the University of Delhi. Some of her recent books include We, the People, and Our Constitution (2024), Violence in Our Bones (2021), Rethinking Pluralism, Secularism, Tolerance (2019), Democracy and Revolutionary Politics (2015) and Contested Secessions (2012).
Team Kitaab is in conversation with her to discuss her latest book, Languages of Freedom: The Idea of India in Political Theory, Bombay Cinema and Progressive Urdu Poetry (Speaking Tiger, 2026).
About the Book
An urgent and panoramic work on how democracy has been imag¬ined by the great political and cultural figures of India—written by one of the most distinguished political scientists in the country.
Languages of Freedom asks a simple but urgent question: what does it mean to be free—and why does freedom so often slip through our hands?
In these wide-ranging and incisive essays, political scientist Neera Chandhoke moves between political theory, mid-20th-century Hindi cinema and Urdu poetry of the Progressive Writers’ Movement to trace how freedom has been imagined, claimed and constrained in modern India.
Beginning with early conceptions of freedom—from 19th-century revivalists to the idea of Swaraj as articulated by Dadabhai Naoroji and transformed by Gandhi—she examines how ‘Indian’ culture came to be narrowly identified with ‘Hindu’ culture. Revisiting landmark debates on swaraj, particularly those initiated by philosopher K.C. Bhattacharya, she shows how attempts to free the Indian mind from Western domination often overlooked the richness of our shared inheritance.
The book then turns to the 1930s, when, inspired by socialist currents worldwide, Urdu poets like Faiz, Majaz, Sahir and Majrooh reimagined freedom beyond independence and gave moral depth to the movement against colonialism. Cinema carried this argument forward. Examining V. Shantaram’s reformist films such as Sant Tukaram, and the searing critiques of Guru Dutt and Bimal Roy, Chandhoke shows how filmmakers exposed the limits of political freedom in a society still marked by poverty and inequality.
The final essay confronts a difficult question: can India think politically in its own voice after colonialism? What would it mean to write an Indian political theory grounded in our histories, yet alive to the present?
Across these essays runs a single insight: freedom is never a uniform, settled idea. It is argued over in philosophy, fought for in politics, and imagined in literature and popular culture—and it always runs the risk of being narrowed or lost. In recovering these different languages of freedom, Chandhoke invites us to see both what has been achieved and what remains at stake.
Team Kitaab: Your book asks what it means to be free. Why does freedom, in your view, remain such an unresolved idea in India?
Neera Chandhoke: The core of our struggle for independence was constituted by the vocabulary of freedom. During the national movement interpretations of freedom ranged from independence from British rule, to the Gandhian concept of swaraj as self-governance, to liberation from patriarchy, economic want and social discrimination that was articulated forcefully by the Progressive Writers Association. In the Constitution political and civil liberties formed part of the Fundamental Rights Chapter. But social and economic freedom was relegated to the Directive Principles of State Policy as arguably policy advisories. The outcome has not been too positive. Millions of Indians continue to suffer from poverty and ill-being till today. And no person can be free if she is shackled by these ills. We still have to give meaning to social and economic freedom.
Team Kitaab: You move between political theory, Urdu poetry, and Hindi cinema. What does cultural material reveal about freedom that political theory alone cannot?
Neera Chandhoke: Political theory has still not discovered its true mission in India today. And I speak as a political theorist. We still have to focus on the overriding importance of dignity, freedom from exploitation, and freedom from want and humiliation. These were the very values that were foregrounded by Urdu poets in the 1930s and 40s powerfully. And in the aftermath of independence, a number of films focused on the chains of poverty and ill-being.
For example, four years after independence in 1951, Roop K Shorey directed a film called Dholak. On a fun-filled evening of a farewell party in a college, students dance to the music of a band and sing a joyful tune Halla-Gulla Laila. And then the song takes an unexpected turn:
Aish karlon doston college ki diwaron main/Kal se likhe jayoge sab ke sab bekaron mein/ choti-moti naukri dhoondoge akhbaron mein/ Aaj nahi to kal milegi kisko yeh samjhaoge.
Neera Chandhoke: Four years after independence, unemployment stared young people in the face. The message was serious even if it was communicated through peppy music. Satirical lyrics became the medium of a sharp critique of a state that had failed to live up to expectations. The most famous of these songs was ‘Yeh Hai Bombay Meri Jaan’. Films and poetry communicate, they touch hearts, they impress upon the soul in a way dense tomes of political theory may not.
Team Kitaab: You show how Indian culture was often narrowed into Hindu culture. How has that narrowing shaped our understanding of freedom itself?
Neera Chandhoke: Each tradition in our plural society is fluid. It is this fluidity that has created a shared space; it is this fluidity that constructed our shared inheritance; our sanjhi virasat, that shaped a soft, gentle, tolerant culture. It is this fluidity that we can recover by once again interpreting our history not as wholly conflictual, but also marked by co-existence and the creation of commonalities. How can we think freely and creatively unless we do so in the context of shared legacies that offer us an efflorescence of thought, ideas and ideals we can draw upon?
This culture is ours; it forms the context of our lives and our consciousness. And this gives us the option to draw from many traditions that overlap, that are shared, yet distinct in their own right. Freedom in its basic sense presumes options. These options are only available in the many cultures of our society, not in one culture that strives to be hegemonic and exclusionary.
Team Kitaab: In revisiting Gandhi, Naoroji, and K.C. Bhattacharya, what do you see as the most overlooked tension in early Indian ideas of swaraj?
Neera Chandhoke: Consider the problems that stalk politics when the religious/spiritual idiom is employed in a multireligious society. It is ironic that Gandhi, a man who would have laid down his life to save the life of a Muslim deployed a language and an imaginary that excluded the mass of non-Hindus. Consider once again whether the use of Hindu concepts such as moksha do not seem odd in a multi-religious public sphere created by the freedom struggle. The public sphere denotes a metaphorical space where people who belong to different religions, castes, regions, and who speak different languages come together in and through associational life. Historians have pointed out that the use of a spiritual vocabulary sent shivers of misgivings along the spine of other communities. Naoroji was exempt from these tensions, for him swaraj meant self-determination in keeping with his liberal propensities.
Team Kitaab: The Progressive Urdu poets expand freedom beyond independence into questions of hunger and dignity. What did they add to the political imagination of their time?
Neera Chandhoke: The formation of the Progressive Writers Association that led to the flowering of radical prose and poetry, mainly in Urdu and Hindustani, not only transformed aesthetics, it expanded political imaginations, theories of resistance politics, and the idea of freedom. Writers and poets reflected society and its many ills and many unfreedoms, and pointed the way to substantive freedom. Towards this end they radicalized the nationalist discourse of freedom. They interrogated social reform movements. These challenged many customs, but ultimately preserved the status quo. They were not radical enough. Progressives valued the cultural inheritance of India, but they rejected all that inhibited human freedom and creativity, for example orthodoxy and obscurantism.
Team Kitaab: Films by Guru Dutt and Bimal Roy expose freedom under conditions of poverty. Do you think cinema functioned as a critique of the nation the state could not articulate?
Neera Chandhoke: In the 1950s and early 1960s films shook up Indian society because they narrated how society is imprisoned in visible or invisible shackles that fetter freedom. They told us how the shrugging off of chains that bind us is itself an act of liberation. Recollect the way Vijay, played by Guru Dutt in Pyaasa, liberates himself from the manacles of fame by walking out of society. Whereas some films highlighted Nehruvian ideals of modernity: liberty, equality and justice enshrined in the Constitution, pace-setters in cinema sketched for us the supremely uncomfortable encounter with modernity amidst the continuation of reprehensible traditional and discriminatory practices re religion, gender and caste. These films challenged social and political power; they chronicled the death of dreams and of hopes of an egalitarian post-independence India, in a rather short period of time.
Team Kitaab: You argue that independence did not complete the project of freedom. Where do you think that gap is most visible today?
Neera Chandhoke: Apart from poverty and social discrimination that persist, the greatest casualty of our times is the rift in inter-community relations. The imposition of a simple minded but dangerous historical imagination at the expense of a nuanced understanding of history carries heavy costs. We need to recollect Jawaharlal Nehru in this context who perceptively remarked on the occasion of the inauguration of the Indian Council of Cultural Relations on 9 April 1950:
“There is, I suppose, no so-called culture in the world which is absolutely pristine and pure and unaffected by any other culture. It simply cannot happen, just as no person can say that he belongs one hundred percent to a particular racial type, because in the course of hundreds and thousands of years, changes and mixtures have occurred more or less.”
This understanding is our legacy; this is exactly what the concept of sanjhi virasat indicates. The dismantling of shared legacies has resulted in a society where we fear our own fellow citizens instead of recognizing that all of us inhabit a community of fate.
Team Kitaab: Is it still possible to write an Indian political theory that is rooted in history without being trapped by it?
Neera Chandhoke: We have to take our constitution as a document that provides the foundation of our public life seriously. Therefore, institutionalized hierarchies based on factors that are outside our control, such as birth into a specific caste group has no place in a democratic society. Democratic politics, which sets the frame for social, economic and cultural transactions can hardly uphold the notion of an upper-caste Vedanta as fundamental to our collective life. To reinforce its status as a public philosophy in a democratic India, will amount to buying into the Hinduization of a public sphere that ought to be secular, in the sense of according respect to all religious groups. Above all, we have to devote ourselves to the pursuit of freedom.
Till the point our fellow citizens are relatively free, we will continue to be bound in chains. The historical background of a political theory of renewal is our shared culture, the multiplicity of traditions within each culture, and the way cultures have come together historically to create rich intellectual resources for our project. This is the only route to an inclusive political theory.
Team Kitaab: Across your essays, freedom seems constantly at risk of being narrowed. What are the main forces that narrow the idea of freedom today?
Neera Chandhoke: The decline of India’s position on all global indexes of democracy should serve as a warning. The rise of authoritarian populism demands curtailment of civil liberties, limits on the media, and restrictions on student activism in universities. The irony is that the first document on the importance of civil liberties emerged in the public sphere in 1895.
No one knew who had written it though Anne Besant suggested that the author was Balgangadhar Tilak. The commitment to civil liberties was reiterated in every constitutional document drafted by the Congress in the years that led to independence. In the Constitution the right to freedom is the cornerstone of fundamental rights and of democracy. Without freedom, democracy withers.
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