Review: Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story

Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story by Jim Holt
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In 1935, Martin Heidegger delivered a series of lectures at the University of Freiburg. In return for proclaiming his allegiance to Hitler’s national socialism, Heidegger, arguably the most influential of 20th century philosophers, was given the job and title of rector at the University of Freiburg. As he commenced his lectures, Heidegger declared “Why is there being rather than nothing at all” to be the deepest, the most far-reaching and most fundamental of all questions. Indeed, ever since Leibniz first posed the question of ‘why is there something rather than nothing’ in the early 18th century, philosophers, theologians and physicists have expended much intellectual energy in thinking about the question and possible solutions to it. In ‘Why Does the World Exist’, Jim Holt sets out on a personal philosophical quest to explore the various scientific and philosophical theories that have been advanced in recent years in an attempt to penetrate the enigma of existence. Holt’s quest makes for a tremendously exciting and rewarding read: profound yet humorous, erudite and yet accessible, Holt’s work is a veritable tour de force of philosophical and scientific writing.

The book is structured around interviews and conversations with the following eight thinkers: David Deutsch, Adolf Grünbaum, John Leslie, Derek Parfit, Roger Penrose, Richard Swinburne, Steven Weinberg and John Updike. Holt’s interviews with these thinkers and reflections more generally on contemporary debates in cosmology and philosophy makes clear that there remains profound intellectual disagreement regarding the question of the universe’s origin and the purpose of its existence. The philosopher Robert Nozick suggested that anybody who proposed a non-strange answer to the question of ‘why something exists rather than nothing’ shows that he or she doesn’t understand the question. Nozick had a point and it is worth reflecting on some of the theories that Holt’s interlocutors have proposed by way of an explanation of the origins of the universe. Before we do, it is worth reflecting, if only very briefly, on why it is that Leibniz’s question, as he initially formulated it, provokes such existential angst among thinkers.

Leibniz’s question of ‘why is there something rather than nothing’ derives its force from a seemingly obvious fact about the world and the objects that populate it. The world and the objects in it strike us as being contingent. That is to say, it is entirely coherent that the world or any object within it might not have existed. Mahatma Gandhi existed; but it is entirely possible that he might not have existed. Indeed, if his parents had not engaged in sexual congress, India would not have had a Gandhi to shepherd the country through its movement for independence. Reflect on the world around you and you will notice the frighteningly fragile grip that things have on existence; things come into existence and go out of existence and therefore, Leibniz argues, it makes sense to ask why it is that the world exists, especially because its non-existence seems simpler. This last point is not with controversy. The suggestion that non-existence is simpler derives from what Robert Nozick called ‘the presumption in favour of nothingness’. The argument is that worlds that contain things pose explanatory questions that are not posed by ‘empty’ worlds (that is, words containing nothing). Given the presumption of nothingness, the existence of the actual world cries out for explanation. Leibniz’s Principle of Sufficient Reason holds that there must be an explanation for every fact, an answer for every question. What then can be explanation for the world? Importantly, Leibniz argues that the existence of contingent entities (and the world is such an entity) can be explained only by appeal to a necessary being. A necessary being is an entity whose existence is not contingent. Leibniz argues that God is such an entity because he contains within himself the reason for his own existence. Leibniz’s response to the question of ‘why is there something rather than nothing’ is therefore clear and decisive: the world exists because of God; only God can furnish the ultimate resolution to the mystery and enigma of existence.

This Leibnizian resolution to the mystery of existence has been subject to philosophical attack from all quarters. Most have sought to challenge the ontological coherence of ‘necessary beings’. One thinker who also reasons from the apparent contingency of the world to God but who adopts a somewhat different approach to that of Leibniz in getting there is Richard Swinburne. Swinburne also views God as the terminus of the explanatory chain and considers that one cannot go beyond God in the quest to resolve the mystery of existence. However, Swinburne does not believe in the Principle of Sufficient Reason; he considers that there does not need to be an explanation for everything (this allows him to avoid the question of why God exists). Swinburne, in contrast to many contemporary philosophical theists, does not believe that God’s existence is logically necessary. The important point for Swinburne is that God’s simplicity renders him the most likely and probable cause of the world. For Swinburne, God’s existence is just a ‘brute fact’ and there is no point in asking why it is that God exists.

Holt’s fifth chapter deals with what he describes as the ‘hotly contested’ issue of the world’s temporal nature: is the world finite or infinite? In the thirteenth century,up the Catholic Church declared it to be an article of faith that the world had a beginning in time. This of course was many centuries before scientists discovered evidence of the so-called Big Bang and so it is worth asking why the Catholic Church committed itself to such a position even though Aquinas, ever the loyal Aristotelian, insisted that the point could never be proved philosophically. Of course, the account of Genesis has been read by many Christians as suggesting that the world was created at a point in time and therefore is not eternal. Additionally, some theologians, including Aquinas’ contemporary St. Bonaventure, argued that the universe could not have an infinite past. Bonaventure considered that the eternality of the universe was logically impossible. This argument has been developed by the contemporary Christian philosopher of religion, William Lane Craig. Craig argues that the universe must have had a beginning and that this conclusion is supported on both philosophical and scientific grounds. Let’s consider his argument from philosophy. Craig argues that the notion of an actual infinity does not make any logical sense and that there could be no such thing in the real world. Following al-Ghazali, Craig argues that if past time were infinite then Saturn and Jupiter would have completed the same number of revolutions. But, Saturn and Jupiter obviously wouldn’t complete the same number of revolutions in any given period of time for Jupiter completes a revolution in twelve years whereas it takes Saturn thirty years to complete a revolution. On this basis, past time cannot be infinite.

Holt suggests that there is nothing absurd about an infinite past and points to the examples of Galileo, Newton and Einstein, all of whom had no problem conceiving of the universe as being infinite in time. Even the Big Bang, Holt argues, may not necessarily be evidence of the finite nature of the past. Holt argues that the current theory that best explains the Big Bang is called the ‘new inflationary cosmology’. The theory predicts that the universe-engendering explosions like the Big Bang should be a fairly routine occurrence and that our universe is likely to have emerged from the space-time of a pre-existing universe. Our universe then is just an infinitesimal part of an ever-reproducing multiverse. Although each of the bubble universes within this multiverse had a definite beginning in time, the entire self-replicating ensemble may be infinitely old.

One of the most interesting chapters of the book includes Holt’s interview with the speculative cosmologist, John Leslie. Leslie’s solution to the mystery of existence is distinctly Platonic in nature and holds that reality is ruled by abstract value. Following Plato, Leslie believes that the ethical requirement that a good universe exist was itself enough to create the universe. In Plato’s Republic, the Form of the Good is said to ‘bestow existence upon things’. Leslie’s view requires belief in goodness as an objective value (i.e. that there are facts about what is good and evil and that these facts are timelessly and necessarily true, independent of human concerns). More controversially, Leslie’s account requires that we believe that the ethical needs that arise from such facts about goodness can be creatively effective – that they can bring things into existence. It is this claim that most would reject as too implausible. How, Holt writes, could objective truths about goodness summon up a world out of sheer nothingness?




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Review: Nation as Mother: And Other Visions of Nationhood

Nation as Mother: And Other Visions of Nationhood by Sugata Bose
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There is much of value in Sugata Bose’s latest book, ‘The Nation as Mother’. The book comprises an assortment of essays, all of which focus, some more tangentially than others, on the theme of nationalism and the formation of the nation-state. The book’s title comes from the defining chapter of the volume in which Bose interrogates ‘the sacred biography of the Mother’ - the provenance and history of the maternal metaphor in India’s national consciousness. The metaphor of ‘nation as mother’ was formed in the intellectually fertile terrain of Bengal and inspired creativity in provincial and nation-wide expressions of nationalisms through a litany of art forms including literature, poetry, music and painting. Bose’s incisive narrative brings to light the historical and enduring unease that Indian Muslims have had with the maternal symbol and its overtly religious symbolism and use. Bose’s fascinating study of Aurobindo sheds light on the latter’s political and religious philosophy and represents a much-needed corrective against recent attempts by secularist historians to paint Aurobindo in communal and sectarian colors. Throughout his volume, Bose cautions against the seemingly dominant tendency of viewing Indian nationalist thought through the prism of European discourse. Treating the former as derivative of the latter has resulted, Bose argues, in a vacuum of native subjectivity. In seeking to rescue Indian intellectual history from its impoverished state, Bose invites readers to consider the extent to which modern Indian nationalism drew significantly on rich legacies of precolonial regional patriotisms, kept alive through a ‘constant process of creative innovation’. In many respects, Bose would have done well here to engage more robustly with the recent work of Ananya Vajpeyi who does more than Bose to demonstrate how the creative engagement with precolonial patriotisms shaped and informed colonial and post-colonial Indian nationalisms. That said, Bose’s analysis reminds us that Indian history provides for a rich diversity of nationalisms and that there is nothing particularly indigenous or inevitable about the oppressive, parochial and exclusionary-based nationalism that informs India’s contemporary political discourse. Bose argues, correctly in my view, that our national project today should be about recovering a more generously formed vision of national belonging and patriotism that does, among other things, justice to the spirit of cosmopolitanism that permeates the writings of thinkers that Tagore and Aurobindo.

Several of the essays in the volume deal with Partition. Bose attributes significant responsibility to the Congress Party and its commitment to a “monolithic concept of sovereignty borrowed for modern Europe” for the eventual dismemberment of India. Bose argues that the Congress Party’s lust for power denied the multiple identities and several-layered sovereignties that had characterized India’s pre-colonial past. Bose’s criticism of the Congress Party’s (and the Hindu Mahasabha’s) role in bringing about Partition must be seen in light of his Bose’s treatment of Jinnah’s culpability and role regarding the same. Bose’s account of Jinnah (and of the Congress Party) is consistent with Professor Ayesha Jalal’s thesis (Sugata Bose is married to Ayesha Jalal) which holds that Jinnah’s demand for Pakistan was merely a bargaining chip to be used against the Congress with the aim of securing a more federated post-colonial India. While scholarship in this area remains (to some degree) in a state of flux, recent scholarship does more than enough to undermine Jalal’s central claims. For example, in reviewing Venkat Dhulipala’s 2015 book, ‘Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam and the Quest for Pakistan in Colonial North India’, Pratap Bhanu Mehta wrote that the book ‘decisively demolishes Ayesha Jalal’s idea that Pakistan arose in a fit of ideological absentmindedness, a stratagem in a bargaining game gone awry.’ Dhulipala’s book convincingly argues that the idea of Pakistan, an Islamic state that is both a homeland for Muslims and the vehicle for regeneration in Islam, had deep roots in political, theological and literary debates (in other words, giving lie to the oft-quoted assertion that Pakistan’s problem was that it was ‘insufficiently imagined’). The final section of the book contains a transcribed selection of Bose’s Lok Sabha speeches. Commenting on the controversy over Jaswant Singh’s eulogistic portrayal of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Bose writes that ‘majoritanism, whether in secular or saffron garb, continues to be a potential threat to Indian democracy. Regional rights were once thought to be a counterpoise to the anti-democratic tendencies of an over-centralized state. Regional parties run by petty and insecure dictators are proving to be as ruthless as the all-India parties in the suppression of internal dissent’. I wonder who Bose had in mind when he wrote these words; isn’t it ironic how this would strike most readers as a particularly apt description of his own party, the Trinamool Congress and his party leader, Mamata Bannerjee.


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Notes on Divine Foreknowledge and Freedom

What is omniscience?

Most classical conceptions of God view God as omniscient. Most religious believers would struggle to accept a God that was ignorant of some states of affairs or certain important facts about the world or our selves. That God be omniscient therefore seems right; however, the notion of omniscience is more problematic than it first appears. Take an initial question: what does God being omniscient actually mean? In other words, what does God have to know to be omniscient?  

One of the biggest challenges to the coherence of omniscience concerns the compatibility between omniscience and human freedom or free will. Suppose that tomorrow you decide to eat pizza for lunch. It follows that there is now a true proposition to the effect that you will eat pizza for lunch tomorrow. Propositions of this kind are known as future contingents. If God is omniscient, and if omniscience requires knowledge of all true propositions (as many would argue it does) then God now knows that tomorrow you will eat pizza for lunch. But if God now knows that you are going to eat pizza for lunch then you cannot do so freely for if this decision were free then you could refrain from making it. But, if you were able to refrain from making such a decision then you would be able to make it the case that God has a false belief. However, you are not able to make it the case that God has a false belief for that would be inconsistent with the fact that God is omniscient, and essentially so. The dilemma then is this: either God isn’t omniscient or genuinely free action is not possible. Most religions require the possibility of free agency and so this problem of foreknowledge and freedom threatens to require theists to reject God’s omniscience.

Here are two of the most common attempts to resolve the problem. The first response takes issue with the assumption that there are propositions about future contingents. According to this line of thought, first popularised it seems by Aristotle in his sea-battle argument and adopted now by the contemporary philosopher of religion Richard Swinburne, if the future is genuinely open, in other words to revert to our earlier example, if it is now possible for you to eat pizza for lunch and also possible for you to refrain from such a decision (i.e. by choosing to have soup for lunch instead) then it is not the case that there is now a true proposition to the effect that tomorrow you will eat pizza for lunch. And so it follows that if there is no such proposition then there is nothing for an omniscient being to know (or for that matter, fail to know). It is only when you actually consume pizza for lunch that the relevant proposition comes into existence.

From a theological perspective, does this argument make sense? One of the problems with this argument is that if future contingents fall outside the scope of God’s knowledge, then creation was a huge gamble, for God didn’t know what human beings would do with their capacity for free agency. But if Einstein is right that God doesn’t play dice with the universe, this argument seems unsatisfactory from a theological perspective.

The second response to the problem seeks to contest the notion of foreknowledge itself. The problem of foreknowledge and freedom presupposes that God is temporally bound or located in time just as we are. This view of course requires that some events take place in God’s present, others take place in God’s past and still others take place in God’s future. Many theists have argued that this view is mistaken and that God’s relationship to time is utterly unlike our own. Boethius, famously argued, for example, that God’s eternity consists in the ‘complete possession of an endless life enjoyed as one simultaneous whole’.

The argument here is that God is not like humans who exist wholly at each finite moment in time and endure through time. A human possess his or her life only in a small finite window which we call “now” – the past life is no longer possessed but gone, the future is not yet realised. Since our human life is lived in a finite “now”, it is never full and complete but is fragmented. God, however, is perfect and God’s life is not fragmented like the life of a temporally enduring human. He lives in the eternal “now”. His “now” streteches over our past, present and future. Our finite present is representative of God’s eternal present, but our finite present is only a faint and imperfect model.

This view of God as existing outside of time holds that God’s properties are not indexed to particular times in the way in which our properties are. We have properties at particular times – for example, you have the property of being asleep at some times but not at others- the atemporalist argues that God does not have properties at particular times. God no more has a history or a future than abstract entities such as numbers do. Just as it is incoherent to ask how long the number eight has been in existence or to wonder how long it will continue to exist, so too the atemporalist thinks that such questions are incoherent when asked of God. Let’s reflect for a second on how this atemporalist account of God could solve the problem of foreknowledge and freedom. To revert to our earlier example, suppose that you do indeed have pizza for lunch tomorrow. This event occurs in the future relative to your current temporal perspective, but it is not and never was, future relative to God’s perspective, for God has no such perspective. God is only ever aware of the temporal relations between events in absolute terms. Now to be clear, God is aware of the order in which various events occur, for example, God knows that you eat pizza for lunch a day after you read this blog post, but on the atemporalist account, God does not cognize this event as occurring in the past or the future.

Are there any problems with this account? Some have argued that the atemporal conception threatens God’s omniscience for there appear to be certain things that only a temporally located creature can know. Could an atemporal God know what time it is now? Many have argued not, on the grounds that one can grasp temporally indexed claims (such as ‘it is now 9 a.m.’) only if one is in time, and by hypothesis an atemporal God is not in time. I am not sure this objection is decisive. Any facts that can be represented indexically can also be represented non-indexically. Suppose, for example, that you ask yourself: ‘what time is it now?’ on 1 January 2019. Arguably, this fact is captured by the non-indexical proposition, ‘On 1 January 2019 you asked yourself, ‘what time is it now’?’ and even an atemporal God could know that proposition. In other words, the atemporalist might grant that although certain ways of representing temporal facts are unavailable to God, there are no temporal facts that are beyond God’s ken.

There is, however, a more serious theological objection to the atemporal account. The atemporal account seems difficult to reconcile with the claim that God is personal. Grace Jantzen, for example, argues: ‘a timeless and immutable God could not be personal because he could not create or respond, perceive or act, think, remember, or do any of other things which persons do which require time’.

Review: The Elegance of the Hedgehog

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

An absolute delight. Muriel Barbery’s ‘The Elegance of a Hedgehog’ is a wonderfully innovative and highly erudite work of literary fiction that speaks to the power of fiction and its ability to find meaning in the seemingly banal monotony of human experience. “The Elegance of the Hedgehog,” written in French and translated into English by Alison Anderson, revolves around three characters, Renée, Paloma, and Ozu (the latter of whom features less prominently but whose appearance remains central to the novel’s plot and significance). More than half of the book centers on the confessions of Renée, a middle-aged, widowed, and rather unattractive (Renée describes herself as “short, ugly and plump”) concierge in a Parisian block of luxury apartments. What makes Renée special is that beneath her stereotypical working-class persona lies an autodidact of incredible sophistication and highly refined taste. When free of the tasks that otherwise occupy her in her concierge day job, Renée reads Tolstoy, listens to Bach and reflects on the beauty of Japanese aesthetic sensibility. Paloma is much younger than Renée; she is a precocious 12 year old whose family also live in the luxury block of apartments in which Renée serves as concierge. Paloma is unlike other 12-year-olds. She is highly intelligent for her age and spends a lot of her time populating her notebook with ‘profound thoughts’. Unfortunately, Paloma believes that the world is meaningless and so has decided to commit suicide when she turns 13. Our last main character is Mr. Kakuro Ozu, a tremendously rich Japanese gentlemen who decides to purchase one of the vacant apartments in the luxury block in which Renée and Paloma live. The first part of the novel depicts daily life in the apartment building as it is observed through the vision of Renée and Paloma. Their meditations on daily life are inspired by the great works of philosophy and art and carry tremendous depth of meaning. The second half of the book brings all three characters together and their interactions and the experiences that result drive the plot until the end of the novel.

It would be somewhat of an understatement to describe the book’s critical reception as ‘mixed’. Apparently, readers either love the book or detest it. One recurring criticism takes issue with the apparently ‘pretentious’ spirit of the book. The philosophical ruminations that permeate the book are critiqued for their redundancy and are alleged to undermine the believability of the characters themselves. I think these criticisms are seriously off the mark. The philosophizing that takes place throughout the novel is absolutely central to the book’s structure and literary effect and so the charge of redundancy does not stick. Also, if all philosophically-laden books are to be deemed ‘pretentious’ what are we to do with Dostoevsky’s ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ or other similarly-structured literary works. Barbery succeeds admirably in ensuring that her erudition doesn’t detract from the literariness of this philosophy-laden work of fiction. Her reflection, via the characters, on philosophy as it applies to daily life is rich with insight and carried out with a lightness of touch that helps to preserve the readability of the novel. In fact, Barbery has a wonderful sense of humour and as one reviewer puts it, it is this sly wit, ‘which bestows lightness on the most ponderous cogitations, [that] keeps her tale aloft’.


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Review: Ashoka in Ancient India

Ashoka in Ancient India by Nayanjot Lahiri
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There is a voluminous body of scholarship that readers and students can turn to, to learn more about India’s experience under colonialism or its more recent history since the achievement of Independence. Unfortunately, if you have any interest in pre-modern or ancient Indian history, the primary source of such information are highly technical and specialist journals that are not aimed at wider, non-specialist audiences. While things are changing, it remains the fact that there are very few readable and accessible histories of ancient India that readers can turn to today. Seen in this light, N. Lahiri’s ‘Ashoka in Ancient India’ is a highly welcome addition to the scholarship on Ashoka and the Mauryan empire more generally. Lahiri’s study is highly readable and her scholarship is original and persuasive. Lahiri’s excellent account of Ashoka’s edicts and her attempt to understand the man ‘underneath the edicts’ distinguishes her biography from the few existing accounts of Ashoka that are available. There is a particularly insightful section of the book where Lahiri brings attention to what appears to be an increasingly authoritarian streak that emerges in Ashoka’s inscriptional presence. Her finely textured and intricate study of the edicts and the literary accounts of his life helps to bring Ashoka to life and gives readers a tangible sense of what king and kingdom must have been like.

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Review: Why I am a Hindu

Why I am a Hindu by Shashi Tharoor
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Tharoor’s latest book is an eminently readable and highly persuasive critique of Hindutva, the ideology underpinning contemporary Hindu nationalism. Why I Am A Hindu does not purport to constitute a scholarly treatise on Hinduism. Indeed it isn’t one. The first section of the book in which Tharoor introduces his conception of Hinduism to readers is well-written and highly readable but lacking in scholarly rigor. Tharoor repeats platitudes often found elsewhere regarding Hinduism’s tremendous capaciousness and tolerance of diversity and plurality. While Tharoor is surely right that Hinduism respects and embraces plurality in ways that rival traditions have historically not, the book could have benefited from a more thorough and searching analysis of the basis of this tolerance and open-mindedness. There is of course a prior question that Tharoor’s book hints at but does not adequately resolve and that is what does Hinduism actually mean? There is a serious danger that fuzzy and non-scholarly attempts at presenting Hinduism have the unintended effect of rendering the category vacuous and hopelessly incoherent. By way of example, let’s think of Hinduism’s supposed respect for plurality a bit more deeply. Tharoor claims that Hinduism holds that all religions are equally true and equally valid paths to God/Salvation/Liberation. Is this right? The overwhelming majority of Hindu religious and theological traditions that fall within the umbrella of Hinduism would surely not accept this claim. After all, the great Vedantic theologians such as Sankara, Ramanuja and Madhva expended great energy and intellectual effort in arguing with one another about the correct interpretation of scripture: they would not possibly endorse the view that all religions were equally true or equally valid. While it is surely true that the whole is often greater than the sum of its parts, more work needs to be done to explore this tension between the apparent inclusiveness of Hinduism and the emphasis on correct doctrine in the respective theological traditions that make up Hinduism. My view on the issue is that one can, without contradiction, uphold the primacy of one’s own theological view while conceding the soteriological value present in other religious traditions: this approach allows us to respect other traditions and encourages us to consider the various ways in which we can learn from them in deepening of our own commitment to truth and piety. It doesn’t however require that we commit ourselves to the incoherent view that all religions are equally true or valid.

The best and most rewarding part of Tharoor’s book is his account of the political philosophy that underpins Hindutva and Hindu nationalism more generally. Tharoor argues persuasively that Hindu nationalism impoverishes Hinduism in its homogenized and diversity-denying presentation of the religion. Tharoor’s critique is both well-informed and balanced: his presentation reflects the nuances that distinguish the main ideologues of the Hindutva tradition (V.D. Savarkar, Golwalker, and Deen Dayal Upadhyaya) and he is prepared to concede where his ideological interlocutors have good arguments (i.e. Upadhyaya’s commitment to humanism and poverty alleviation). All in all, this is an important and timely book and is worth reading for anyone interested in Hinduism, Indian political philosophy and contemporary India.

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Review: When The Moon Shines By Day

When The Moon Shines By Day by Nayantara Sahgal
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Aside from her literary achievements, Nayantara Sahgal is well known in India for her forceful and unrelenting critique of Hindu Nationalism. In 2016, Sahgal returned her Sahitya Akademi Award to protest what she described as increasing intolerance in India and the Akademi’s indifference to attacks against rationalist thinkers. She thinks of the BJP and Modi in particular as ‘fascist’ in orientation and has displayed courage throughout her career in combating the right-wing nationalisms of the Sangh Parivar. This is the political womb, so to speak, from which her latest novel emerges. The novel has been described as a political satire and this seems to me an apt description. The novel’s setting is a dystopian India (which Sahgal believes has already arrived) in which racial segregation, book-burning fiestas, and state-sanctioned torture all feature. As regards its literary merit, the books disappoints for many reasons. The plot is disjointed and not easy to follow; the characters that populate her novel lack depth and the novel, more generally, seems to have been hastily produced solely to inflict as much reputational damage as possible to the current political dispensation. Be that as it may, Sahgal’s short novel serves as a chilling commentary on disquieting developments in contemporary India that are increasingly unleashing illiberal instincts in multiple Indian constituencies. It takes just 30 minutes of watching Indian news channels to see how bitter and coarse India’s political discourse has become. As the space of liberal expression seems to be shrinking and as minorities continue to be reminded of their precarious position in Indian society, literary activism of Sahgal’s sort is required to remind us of the true dystopia that awaits us should we allow the present illiberalism to gather steam and percolate throughout the country.

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