In 1831, the India Gazette wrote about a group of radical young thinkers that it credited for an upheaval in social and religious politics in Calcutta. These were the Young Bengal, the proteges of Henry Derozio of Hindu College. These thinkers, according to Rosinka Chaudhuri, were India’s first radicals, trying to reshape Indian politics as it came under the sway of the East India Company and the British Empire.

Rosinka joins the show to talk about her book India’s First Radicals: Young Bengal and the British Empire (India Viking, 2025) and the British Empire, and where this group sits in the long history of Indian nationalist, anti-colonial and anti-imperial thought.

Rosinka Chaudhuri is director and professor of cultural studies at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. Her books include Gentlemen Poets in Colonial Bengal: Emergent Nationalism and the Orientalist Project (2002), Freedom and Beef Steaks: Colonial Calcutta Culture (2011) and The Literary Thing: History, Poetry and the Making of a Modern Cultural Sphere (2013). She has edited many books, among which are Derozio, Poet of India: The Definitive Edition (2008), A History of Indian Poetry in English (2016), and most recently, George Orwell’s Burmese Days for Oxford World’s Classics (2021). Many of her journal articles, reviews and book chapters have been published worldwide, while her translation of Rabindranath Tagore’s letters, titled Letters from a Young Poet (1887–1895), was published as a Penguin Modern Classic in 2014.

London-based business and culture journalist Prarthana Prakash joins me on the show today as a guest host.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of India’s First Radicals. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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