Before he is anything else — parliamentarian, public intellectual, lightning rod — Shashi Tharoor is, and remains, a writer. Not merely one who publishes books, but one who thinks in paragraphs, speaks in footnotes, and listens with the patience of someone trained by literature rather than by soundbites. In Calcutta, that identity feels amplified. The city does not receive him as a politician on tour, but as a returning author whose life has been shaped — and at times unsettled — by its rhythms.
“I’ve been here at different phases,” Tharoor tells me later, in between signing books and fielding interruptions. “I’ve seen the bad and the good.”
His relationship with Calcutta is not sentimental; it is layered, complex, occasionally bruised. He remembers the city of the late 1960s and early ’70s vividly — a time of street violence, institutional breakdown, and academic uncertainty. “I was here at the turn of the ’60s, early ’70s when there was violence in the streets,” he says. “When the Jadavpur University vice-chancellor was stabbed and murdered on his own campus, when examinations were disrupted by hooligans and thugs.”
It was that chaos, he recalls, that pushed him away. “That’s what drove me to St Stephen’s in Delhi,” he says. “Because everyone said you can’t study in Calcutta when you don’t know when the exams will take place, whether they will take place, whether the results will come, whether they’ll really be your results. It was such chaos.”
And yet, the word chaos — repeated often that evening — does not sound pejorative when he speaks of the city now. There is affection in it, even acceptance. “I’ve also seen the good years,” he adds. “The prosperity. The cool, as it were. I’ve seen the deep culture. I’ve seen the Calcutta of Badal Sircar and all of that.”
Today, he says, the city feels renewed. “There is a newly thriving Calcutta again — with energy, with prosperity, with the entire new city that’s come up on the way to the airport that didn’t exist in my student days.”
And above all, what keeps drawing him back is not nostalgia but continuity. “The culture, the food, the music,” he lists, almost rhythmically. “Everything from Rabindra Sangeet to the bookshops of College Street. These are unchanging aspects of Calcutta life.”
Last week, Calcutta once again made space for him — loudly, impatiently, and with unmistakable devotion — as he attended the 17th Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival and the Calcutta launch of The Sage Who Reimagined Hinduism: The Life, Lessons & Legacy of Sree Narayana Guru, in conversation with author and curator Alka Pande.
A Hall That Filled Before the Hour
The Galaxy at the Park Hotel is not unfamiliar with crowds, but this was a particular kind of anticipation — literary, restless, and faintly ungovernable.
Nearly an hour before the Oxford Bookstore Book Cover Prize 2026 shortlist announcement was scheduled to begin, the hall had already filled. Chairs were added continuously — first at the back, then along the sides, then squeezed into unlikely gaps. A murmur travelled through the room like static. Those seated furthest away craned their necks, stretching their arms upward, angling their phone cameras towards the ceiling rather than the stage — desperate to catch even a partial glimpse of Tharoor without disturbing the rows ahead of them.
The audience was diverse in age and temperament — students clutching notebooks, elderly readers with carefully wrapped hardbacks, festival regulars who knew exactly where to sit and when to stand. Everyone waited.
When Tharoor arrived, he did so quietly, without ceremony. He attended the shortlist announcement briefly, listened attentively, then moved on to the discussion that had drawn the crowd in the first place. By then, the room was no longer merely full; it was saturated.
Why Sree Narayana Guru Matters Now
When Tharoor finally settled into his chair opposite Alka Pande, the restless energy in the room seemed to recalibrate into something quieter, more attentive. What followed was not a performance but a patient, densely layered conversation — rooted in history, alert to contradiction — circling the life and legacy of Sree Narayana Guru, the 19th-century philosopher and social reformer whose ideas continue to reverberate across Kerala and far beyond it.
Tharoor spoke at length about how Guru’s interventions are often softened by hindsight, stripped of the radicalism they carried in their own time. We tend, he suggested, to underestimate just how disruptive his actions really were. When Guru consecrated temples himself, Tharoor noted, it was never simply a theological gesture. It was, in his words, “a political act in the deepest sense of the term” — one that made an unambiguous declaration: that divinity does not recognise caste, that holiness cannot be monopolised by birth, and that spiritual authority flows from ethical conviction rather than inherited privilege. One such act, he added, did more to undermine entrenched hierarchies than “a thousand pamphlets or protests” ever could.
For Tharoor, Guru’s relevance today lies precisely in this refusal to be rendered harmless by reverence. He is not, he insisted, a saintly icon meant to be admired from a respectful distance, but an uncomfortable presence — one who continues to ask difficult, unsettling questions. Have we truly moved beyond the hierarchies he challenged, or have we merely repackaged them in more sophisticated language? Are we genuinely committed to the idea of human oneness, or do we invoke it selectively, when it suits our social or political convenience?
It was here that Tharoor paused to recount one of the most quietly audacious episodes from Guru’s life — the consecration at Aruvippuram. When Guru installed a Shiva-like symbol there, the orthodox establishment reacted swiftly, objecting that he had no authority to consecrate a “proper” Shiva Lingam. Guru’s response, Tharoor recalled with evident admiration, was neither defensive nor doctrinal. He did not cite scripture or argue precedent. He simply said: this is our Shiva. In that brief assertion lay a complete dismantling of inherited religious authority. It was not defiance for spectacle, but a calm reclaiming of divinity from exclusivity — a reminder that, in Guru’s vision, faith belonged not to lineage or ritual sanction, but to lived belief. What might have escalated into controversy instead became a philosophical statement, reframing worship as an inclusive right rather than a guarded privilege.
At the heart of the discussion, inevitably, was Guru’s most radical assertion: one caste, one religion, one God. It is an idea that still feels arresting in its moral clarity — and almost impossibly aspirational in the present moment. “Sounds almost utopian today,” I told him later, as Tharoor signed books and the crowd began to thicken once again. He did not disagree. A small nod, a simple acknowledgement — that’s right.
Had India, I asked, moved any closer to that vision? Or had it merely learnt new ways to resist it? Tharoor’s answer was careful, almost calibrated. He said, “In Kerala, I think the message has resonated rather impressively. You can see the tangible impact of Sree Narayana Guru’s ideas in social reform, in education, in the growth of self-respect and self-assertion among communities that were historically marginalised. His legacy there is not abstract; it is lived.”
“But nationally,” he continued, “I am far less optimistic. Sadly, what we are seeing today is that people have become more conscious of their religion and their caste, and this has not happened in a vacuum. Politics has actively encouraged mobilisation on grounds of identity, and in doing so, it has reinforced precisely the categories that reformers like Guru were trying to dissolve.”
“At one point in our history,” Tharoor said, “caste was understood quite clearly as a structure of oppression. The moral impulse of social reform was to challenge it, weaken it, and eventually make it irrelevant. What has happened instead is deeply paradoxical. Politics has transformed caste into a structure of empowerment — so that in the name of caste, you can claim jobs, benefits, political representation, votes, and a sense of collective bargaining power.”
“I do not think the reformers of Sree Narayana Guru’s generation anticipated this outcome,” he added. “They believed they were dismantling systems that de-humanised people. They could not have foreseen a future in which those same systems would survive by adapting themselves, appearing in a different guise, carrying a different impact, but remaining stubbornly present.”
“And that,” Tharoor concluded, “is precisely why it is so important that we return to figures like Sree Narayana Guru now. The ideas, the achievements, the stories — they must remain available to later generations. What people choose to make of them will depend on their own circumstances and choices, of course. But the availability of these ideas, these insights, still matters. I hope — perhaps naively, but sincerely — that they can continue to influence, to unsettle, and to transform some minds.”
The Swarm: After the Talk
If the conversation on stage was measured and reflective, what followed was anything but. The moment the session ended, Tharoor was engulfed. Somewhere in that chaos, I slipped in. We had met a year earlier at the Tollygunge Club. I reminded him of that. He smiled, trying to place me. “Do you mind if I keep talking to you while you sign?” I asked.
“In this chaos,” he said dryly, “what kind of organised conversation do you want to have? You can try to get the answers out of me, I guess,” he replied. At one point, he laughed and said, “You can describe this scene — that’s your story.”
And so I did.
Literature Against the Algorithm
“You’ve often said language is both a weapon and a refuge,” I told him. In an age of shortened attention spans and algorithm-driven speech, what does literature still protect us from? Tharoor did not hesitate. “Literature can still protect us from that dumbing down that happens when people outsource their own thinking to an algorithm,” he said.
For him, reading is not escapism but immersion — an encounter with another human mind. “When you enter into the authentic voice of a literateur, you are understanding human experience not filtered through digital pixels, but through the sensibility, the mind, the soul of a human being who has thought and reflected about life and tried to express it.”
Literature, he believes, will endure. “It survived television. It survived cinema. It will survive social media,” he said.
But the real concern, he added quietly, is scale. “The question is — for how many?” If readership continues to shrink, literature risks becoming “the preoccupation of a very small elite”. And that, he said simply, “would be a pity”.
Hinduism, Hindutva, and the Right to Debate
Tharoor’s engagement with Hinduism is neither defensive nor performative. It is intellectual, rooted in text and tradition.
“I think I can take some immodest credit for having been perhaps amongst the first voices after the Babri Masjid to situate the debate not between Hinduism versus secularism, but between Hinduism and Hindutva,” he said.
His book Why I Am a Hindu, he explained, emerged from that distinction. “It juxtaposed the inclusive, all-encompassing and therefore liberal view of Hinduism against a more narrow-minded and intolerant view of the faith,” he said. “Which I felt was less true to the authentic teachings of Hinduism.”
The debate, he insists, must continue. “But we can’t have a situation where one side drowns out the voices of the other.”
On Writing in English and Not Performing Identity
“You write in English and continue to defend India’s literary and linguistic plurality. Do you ever feel pressure to perform Indian-ness in a global literary space?” I asked.
He looked genuinely surprised. “My focus is so overwhelmingly India now that the question actually surprised me,” he said. He explained that he spends far less time in international literary spaces than he once did. “I’m not performing much, if anything, on the international space anymore.”
What remains essential, he said, is mutual understanding. “You speak about India to the global audience and about the global culture to India. Both are necessary.”
He recalled moments abroad that stayed with him — particularly around Inglorious Empire and Era of Darkness. “I once had someone come up to me with tears in his eyes and shove a note into my hand,” he said. “It said, ‘I am British, please forgive me’.”
Those moments, he said, felt like having accomplished something. “If you’ve been able to touch people’s sensitivities that way, then you’ve done something worthwhile.”
Intellectual Honesty in an Age of Outrage
My final question came late, when patience was wearing thin all around. “How does one retain intellectual honesty,” I asked, “while operating in spaces that reward simplification and outrage?”
Tharoor was candid. “I don’t know if I’ve succeeded,” he said. “I’m constantly distorted, misrepresented, attacked, trolled.”
What sustains him, he said, is accountability to himself. “My intellectual honesty is a reflection of my integrity. What other people make of what I say and do is their problem,” he said. He paused, then added, “As long as I’ve been true to myself and to what I believe and stand for, the rest will have to take care of itself.”
Judge the Work, Not the Artist
As the evening drew to a close, I reminded him of something he had said the previous year — that art and the artist should not be equated. He clarified carefully. “The artist’s art is one thing. The artist’s personal life, political beliefs, or the way he treats other human beings — those are not relevant in judging the work of art,” he said. Unless, he added, there is a flagrant contradiction. “If someone is preaching virtue and behaving in ways that undermine it, then yes, that contradiction matters. Otherwise, judge the work.”
After the Noise
When it was finally over — the signing, the photographs, the interruptions — Tharoor looked at me and said, almost apologetically, “You better describe the circumstances in which we had this interview, because honestly I don’t know if we came across coherently or not.”
Perhaps coherence was never the point. What emerged instead was something truer: a writer surrounded by readers, a thinker interrupted by affection, a city refusing to let him pass through quietly.
Calcutta does not offer silence. It offers engagement. And Shashi Tharoor, for all his years and all his roles, still meets it where it stands — book in hand, pen poised, willing to answer, even in the middle of the noise.