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.