Book Review: Languages of Freedom – The Idea of India in Political Theory, Bombay Cinema and Progressive Urdu Poetry by Neera Chandhoke
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Team Kitaab reviews Neera Chandhoke’s Languages of Freedom (Speaking Tiger, 2026), observing how it captures the many tongues of an unfinished idea.
In Languages of Freedom, political theorist Neera Chandhoke returns to one of the most frequently invoked words in modern India—freedom— to recover the many voices that have struggled over its meaning. At a time when freedom is often reduced to political slogan or constitutional abstraction, Chandhoke reminds us that it has always been a contested, plural and profoundly imaginative idea, articulated as much in poetry and cinema as in political theory.
The book’s achievement lies in refusing the temptation of a single narrative. Instead, Chandhoke offers a series of interconnected essays that move across intellectual history, literature, film and philosophy, revealing freedom as a language spoken differently across historical moments and cultural forms. The result is an invitation to rethink how political ideas are created, circulated and lived.
The opening essays revisit the conceptual foundations of Indian freedom. Chandhoke traces the evolution of swaraj from nineteenth-century reformist and revivalist thought through Dadabhai Naoroji’s critique of colonial exploitation and Gandhi’s moral and political transformation of the idea. One of the book’s most compelling interventions is its examination of how Indian culture gradually came to be conflated with Hindu culture, a narrowing that obscured the country’s layered intellectual and cultural inheritances. Freedom, Chandhoke suggests, cannot flourish where plurality itself is diminished.
