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We may think of it simply as a resonant moment of ‘accord’. The accord between emotion and intellect, immediacy and timelessness, creature and creature, story and meaning, language and the world. An accord that may profoundly alter the inner landscape, deepen it, refine it
By Karen Gabriel
I knew Amit Sengupta through our days in JNU as a man with an incisive mind, a bold and unique voice, and a fundamentally lyrical soul. His most recent book, A Sudden Golden Smile, is full of a passion and lyricism that remains a rarity within the political narratives, that occasionally intersect, and those that simply veer away from each other.
While reading his earlier writings as well, I have often felt that he was as much a poet as he was a political thinker and journalist. It is this poetical, lyrical quality of his pieces that makes them unique and characterizes Amit as a writer. The title of the book and those of its many anthologized pieces – as much as the ways in which he deals with his matter – all speak of a multi-leveled, insistent and fundamentally poetic dealing with the world per se, and the idea of humanity itself.
Each of these pieces is highly expressive. The gritty passion in them comes from a combination of raw ground experience with a meticulous analyses of events, situations and alignments. The scrupulous bridging of phenomena, experience and abstract thought is formative and transformative.
Something palpable but fragile happens.
We may think of it simply as a resonant moment of ‘accord’. The accord between emotion and intellect, between immediacy and timelessness, between creature and creature, between story and meaning, between language and the world. An accord that may profoundly alter the inner landscape, deepen it, refine it.
This accord, which we sometimes call harmony, is fundamental to beauty. The musicality of his language is an insistent reminder of this accord, of the imperative of beauty to a world that is being brutally stripped of it.
It enquires about the place of beauty in the world, about what it means to live in a world without beauty, about what beauty does for and to us. It also acknowledges the fragility of beauty in the face of brutishness.
We find traces of this orienting vision in both the subtle iterations or direct evocations of Pablo Neruda, Derek Walcott, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Leonard Cohen, Joan Baez, Pablo Picasso, Andrei Tarkovsky, Rajendra Yadav, MF Hussain, BR Ambedkar, Jesus Christ the liberation theologist, Muktibodh and Werner Herzog.
The vision is equally present in the evocation of dark doubling mirrors in the film, Kanthara, motifs of dance – both joyful and macabre dance – that are used to notate the joys and the tragedies of the Adivasi people, the pain and anger of the Manipuri people. It is equally present in the direct commentaries on novels, cinema, political analyses and accounts of social tragedies.
Amit’s insistent and resonant record of atrocities and violence is powerful because it also insistently humanises the subject of this violence, dispossession and injustice. They are never statistics, never just numbers; they are Nevada and Sehwaniya, fiery women leader of the Tharu adivasis in the Doodhwa National Park, Gond woman leader of the All India Union of Forest Working People (AIUFWP,) Sokalo Gond, Mahsa Amini of Iran who was murdered by the moral police triggering a mass uprising of women, and Mitra Hejazipour, a symbol of resistance in Iran.
This is important because it is only when we see others as fully human—complex, emotional, and valuable—that we connect, change how we treat them, and how we interact with the world. That is the road away from discrimination, violence, reification and injustice.
So we need the names of people, their specific stories, the fullness of their histories, the integrated complexity of life itself.
The grand old trees and fragile flowers specific to that very place, the dry earth and soft breezes – the very geographies that are sought to be invisibilised, and then ravaged – gain a lasting life on the pages of this book, and remind us about the integrated complexity of life. Consequently, the tragedy comes home in unforgettable ways: you awake from the deadening drudgery of the humdrum, you smell the air – first, fresh, fragrant and living, and then, smoky, bloody and metallic.
Sadness and the reminder of possibilities — all at once.
The ability to convey a vision while documenting a world is crucial. It wakens one to the many possibilities that were and are present, and to the implications of a rotting set-up. This double vision is a route to optimism. One sees and still one hopes.
To be able to continue to believe in the possibility – no, the imperative – of beauty, and to present that beauty, and to communicate the need for it can only be the outcome of a stubbornly lyrical soul in a dry land, a wasteland.
Karen Gabriel is Professor and Head, Department of English, St.Stepehen’s College, Delhi University.
This review is adapted from the presentation in the book launch at the Press Club of India in Delhi on March 15, 2025. The presentation was done by Alka Ranjan, theatre actor and editor.