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How the termination of This Country Called Us is categorically different from Penguin's withdrawal of Joe Sacco's book — and what it reveals about the Indian publishing industry's deepest ethical crisis. First Person:  Saket Suman When Penguin India refused to distribute Joe Sacco's The Once and Future Riot — a 135-page graphic investigation of the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots that killed at least sixty people and displaced over sixty thousand, mostly Muslim — the Indian literary world reacted with appropriate alarm. Arundhati Roy called it "a terrible loss to Indian readers." The Wire reported it. The Print published Sacco's own account of what he was asked to remove. He refused. Penguin India walked away. Tharoor and Guha shouted condemnations.  Representational Image: Home Minister Amit Shah at a Rupa book launch.   The story was covered. The author was heard. The book is available through parallel channels — imported from the UK by independent South Delh...

Mani Sankar Mukherjee, the celebrated Bengali writer known by his pen name Sankar, passed away on February 20, 2026, at the age of 92 after being admitted to a Kolkata hospital for age-related ailments. He had been undergoing treatment for some time and died at the hospital. He is survived by his two daughters. Indian PM and WB CM have expressed their condolences. Image Via: ImageCraft26 Born on December 7, 1933, Sankar grew up in Debdoot Sheet Nagar in Howrah, West Bengal. The son of Avaya Mukherjee, he lost his father as a teenager and began working as a clerk to Noel Frederick Barwell, the last British barrister of the Calcutta High Court. While working, he enrolled at Surendranath College, then known as Ripon College, in Calcutta.  In 1962, on a rain-soaked day at the crossing of Central Avenue and Dalhousie in central Kolkata, Sankar conceived Chowringhee, a novel set in an opulent hotel he called Shahjahan. The book became a bestseller and was adapted into a film in 1968. His...

Indian authorities have launched an investigation into the alleged leak and unauthorised circulation of an unpublished memoir by former Indian Army chief General Manoj Mukund Naravane, after digital copies of the book were found circulating online. Image Source: Arvind Gunasekar The Special Cell of the Delhi Police has registered a case to probe the source and dissemination of the leaked material. The investigation is examining whether there was a breach involving the unauthorised publication, duplication or circulation of a pre-print copy of Four Stars of Destiny , which has not yet been released. Amid the inquiry, Penguin Random House India issued a formal statement asserting its exclusive publishing rights over the book and clarifying that the memoir has not gone into publication. The publisher stated that “no copies of the book — in print or digital form — have been published, distributed, sold, or otherwise made available to the public by Penguin Random House India.” The statement...

✍️ Written by Saket Suman A democracy begins to collapse quietly when memory is treated as contraband and testimony is made conditional on permission. The most telling sites of this erosion is the uneasy space occupied by books that are written, circulated and discussed but not allowed to formally exist. Home Minister Amit Shah visiting World Book Fair in New Delhi; Via HM Across political systems, unpublished or “under review” manuscripts are often framed as incomplete, unauthorised, or unsafe for public consumption. The argument is procedural on the surface because nothing exists until it is cleared, stamped and released. But this framing misses the deeper truth.  A manuscript does not become real because a seal is affixed to it. It becomes real because it is written, because someone who witnessed events chose to place memory into language. Clearance can regulate circulation but it cannot annul authorship. Excerpts from such works enter the p...

Mark Tully, renowned journalist, author, and one of the most perceptive chroniclers of India, died at a private hospital in New Delhi on Sunday, January 25, 2026. He was 90.  Tully had been unwell for some time.  Image Source: KBalakumar Born in Calcutta (now Kolkata) on October 24, 1935, to British parents, Tully spent the early years of his childhood in India before moving to the UK for his education. He studied theology at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and briefly trained for the priesthood before turning to journalism.  He joined the BBC in 1964 and became its India Correspondent in 1965, a role he held until 1994, including over two decades as the bureau chief in New Delhi. Over his 30-year career with the BBC, Tully reported on many of South Asia’s defining moments — from the Indo-Pakistan wars to the Emergency, Operation Blue Star, the Bhopal gas tragedy, and the assassinations of both Indira and Rajiv Gandhi.  He was barred from entering India during the Emergency...

✍️ Written by Saket Suman There is a revealing gap between what Our Living Constitution  by Shashi Tharoor promises and what it delivers. The promise is commentary but the delivery is amateur recital. Over and over again, the book approaches moments of genuine constitutional consequence only to retreat into reverent summary, as though the mere act of repeating what the Constitution says were itself an act of interpretation. Image Source: Tharoorian on X Let us begin by considering the author’s handling of the Preamble. We are told, and correctly so, that it is “ the soul of the Constitution ,” followed by the full ceremonial recitation of “ JUSTICE, social, economic and political; LIBERTY… EQUALITY… FRATERNITY .”  The words are allowed to do all the work but there is really no sustained inquiry into how fraternity was historically the most fragile of these promises, nor how Ambedkar himself warned that political equality without social e...

✍️ Written by Saket Suman Writing and journalism are always under pressure. Pressure is their natural habitat. The tragedy now is that comfort has begun to cunningly pass off as success. The cushioned chairs, the familiar faces and the reliable applause!  A profession that cannot tolerate discomfort will eventually lose the ability to describe reality. And reality, unlike these sponsored festivals, does not curate itself. Nuremberg Rallies weren’t just big speeches.  They were mass propaganda spectacles;Via: Amber Speaks Up What we are watching unfold before our eyes is both censorship and choreography. Writing has already learned its steps. Journalism now knows when to enter and when to exit. There is a colourful, orderly, well sponsored parade underway where everyone is encouraged to carry a banner that says dissent provided they do not wander off the designated route. The music swells at the right moments when the masters of the ring ...

There has been a visible impact of IndianRepublic.in ’s reporting . More than two days after this publication documented a serious marketplace misrepresentation, Amazon India has now removed the misattributed reviews and ratings from the Kindle listing of The Sage Who Reimagined Hinduism: The Life, Lessons, & Legacy of Sree Narayana Guru by Shashi Tharoor .  But the correction is incomplete and the silence surrounding it is louder than ever. ; Representational Meme Source: MJ__Speaks on X As of this writing, the Kindle product page for Tharoor’s book (ASIN: B0G6Z7858F) continues to display the biographical description of another author, Amitava Kumar , under product description. This is a misleading artefact that remains live despite the removal of the reviews. The result is a listing that no longer carries borrowed ratings but still presents incorrect author information to readers under product description . Tharoor’s Kindle edition now has zero ratings and zero reviews. But...

More than sixty hours after IndianRepublic.in exclusively documented a serious marketplace misrepresentation involving Shashi Tharoor’s latest book , The Sage Who Reimagined Hinduism: The Life, Lessons, & Legacy of Sree Narayana Guru , the listing remains live, uncorrected, and consequential. This is in brazen defiance of the law and utter disregard for transparency and fair play by entities concerned. Representational Meme Source: Edgar Again Poeha on X During this period, the Kindle edition of Tharoor’s book has continued to gain measurable traction despite having received no original ratings of its own . Instead, it has benefited from reviews and star ratings written for an entirely different book: Amitava Kumar’s The Social Life of Indian Trains . Those reviews, which reflect reader responses to Kumar’s earlier work, remain algorithmically attached to Tharoor’s Kindle listing. The misattribution has operated to Tharoor’s clear commercial and reputational advantage, even as ne...

✍️ Written by Saket Suman When Shashi Tharoor announced on social media that his new book, The Sage Who Reimagined Hinduism: The Life, Lessons, & Legacy of Sree Narayana Guru , had been released by the Vice President of India, C.P. Radhakrishnan, the message carried the full institutional gravitas of a nationally endorsed publication. Released on December 30, 2025 at Sivagiri Mutt in Varkala, in the presence of the Governor of Kerala and senior religious and political leaders, the book was framed by Tharoor as a serious intellectual engagement with Sree Narayana Guru’s legacy and the Kerala Renaissance. It is precisely because of this stature, visibility, and public legitimacy that a parallel development on Amazon India demands thorough scrutiny: a flawed and misleading product listing that algorithmically links Tharoor’s book to reviews, ratings, and metadata belonging to a different author altogether, and raises troubling questions about co...

✍️ Written by Saket Suman There is no neat way to say this: the Great Indian Dream is dying. And it’s not being killed in faraway conflict zones, or in newsrooms that peddle noise instead of truth. It is being murdered in back offices of publishing houses and literary circuits, where contracts are torn with a smile, where deadlines are missed with impunity, where one writer's labour of years is discarded over silence, and where reputations are butchered so that the powerful remain unbothered. The very spaces meant to champion creativity are the first to abandon those who try to speak freely, those who refuse to bend, those who dare to write with sincerity. Representational Image: The 1st stamp of independent India shows the Indian Flag, released on 21Nov1947. I have lived through this. I have worked on a book that came from lived experience, research, pain, and a rare kind of stubborn hope. And I have watched that book — like countless others...