Outline of a Prolific Academic Endeavour

The Talking series of the Oxford University Press is a unique window. It offers a quick view of a wide spectrum of scholarly work by some of the most reputed social scientists in India. The Talking series is an excellent starting point to get introduced to some of the central themes that these scholars have investigated, or to familiarise oneself with some of their key ideas. You get to hear it from the horse’s mouth as these scholars revisit, introspect, and reaffirm some of their major claims in a lucid conversational mode.

In the book under review, the series editor and Gandhian scholar Ramin Jahanbegloo talks to Dipankar Gupta— an eminent sociologist, a public intellectual, an articulate liberal voice, and one of the most well-published scholars of his generation. For those who are unfamiliar with Gupta’s body of work, this book provides a grand yet nuanced over- view of some of his major argumentative preoccupations. And, for those who have followed his works closely, this is a reassuring bouquet that wonderfully collects all the major threads of his academic works. It brings together an array of interconnected thoughts on “modernity,” “democracy,” “rationality,” “universalism,” “intersubjectivity,” “ethics,” and most importantly “citizenship”—while simultaneously mapping Gupta’s intellectual trajectory. His upbringing and his experience in Delhi School of Economics and Jawaharlal Nehru University also get the space it deserves.