“Anything we study about society, we have to be the prime suspect in.”: Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari
Amritesh Mukherjee from Team P3 was in conversation with Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari at the Jaipur Literature Festival, 2025. If you’ve ever been to the Jaipur Literature Festival, you’d know the ceaseless hustle and bustle that is at the core of the festival. If you’re a journalist, that hustling becomes even more incessant. Amidst that epicentre […]
“I’m not a judge. I’m not a jury. And I’m certainly not an executioner. I’m a historian.”: Janaki Bakhle
Amritesh Mukherjee from Team P3 was in conversation with Janaki Bakhle at the Jaipur Literature Festival, 2025. We live in a world of binaries, a world of good and bad, that side and this side. Nuance dies a thousand times in our world of social media discourse and political propaganda. Nothing is untouched by this, […]
“If you see injustice as a monolith, it’s impossible to act. You have to break it into its component parts.”: Aruna Roy
Amritesh Mukherjee from Team P3 was in conversation with Aruna Roy at the Jaipur Literature Festival, 2025. The personal is political. It’s a statement we’ve oft heard, you and I, but what does it truly mean? Does it simply mean posting about a sociopolitical injustice from the comfort of our homes, air-conditioned air blasting away […]
“Reverence should not mean treating the Constitution like a religious text. Respect comes from reading, questioning, and interpreting it freely.”: Arghya Sengupta
Amritesh Mukherjee from Team P3 was in conversation with Arghya Sengupta at the Jaipur Literature Festival, 2025. Are we citizens or are we subjects? Did we break the shackles of our Colonial past or just inherited that dark legacy? Arghya Sengupta, through his book The Colonial Constitution: An Origin Story, questions that foundational text of […]
100 (+1) Must-Read Books from the Rich Literature of India
Indian literature, while vast, often remains limited in the mainstream. Outside the handful of classics and Booker-winning titles, the vast reservoir of stories and voices frequently are deprived of the spotlight. Here’s an attempt at change. Our list of books from the literature of India travels across languages, periods, voices and styles to bring a […]
Khilega To Dekhenge/ Once It Flowers by Vinod Kumar Shukla: A Summary of Our Third Book Club Meeting
The Purple Pencil Project started its first book club in July, aimed at reading through the books of one Indian author chronologically. This aim is intentional, as we seek to understand an author better while reading them through months and, hopefully, chart the evolution in their storytelling style. We started with Vinod Kumar Shukla, and […]
नौकर की कमीज (The Servant’s Shirt) by विनोद कुमार शुक्ल: The Art of Observing in a World of Distractions
Amritesh Mukherjee reviews नौकर की कमीज (The Servant’s Shirt) by विनोद कुमार शुक्ल (published by Rajkamal Prakashan, 2006). Before entering this baffling, mesmerising, stagnant, volatile and stream-of-consciousness wonder of a novel, I knew few things about Vinod Kumar Shukla’s writing despite having heard him in numerous interviews and articles outside of vague terms like “masterpiece,” […]
7 Revolutionary Student Movements in India That Changed the Course of History
History is complex. Quite complex. And yet, all too often, our perception of our past is shaped more by the contemporary fashions of the day instead of some “objective truth.” Moreover, the world, for better or for worse, exists beyond the silos created by the internet and social media. For instance, there have been many […]
19 Must-Read Books on Adivasi Movements in India
The world we see is often not the only world there is. By extension, the India we see is often not the only India there is. The same country known for its Gandhian principles of non-violence has many strata whose populations can’t go on hunger strikes because that would mean they otherwise aren’t hungry. For […]
A Summary of Our Second Book Club Meeting: Mahavidyalaya/ Blue is Like Blue by Vinod Kumar Shukla
From July onwards, the Purple Pencil Project started a new wing in its community initiatives: a book club. More specifically, for the time being, a club dedicated to reading Vinod Kumar Shukla’s fiction chronologically from July to January. So far, we’ve read his first novel, Naukar Ki Kameez, and gathered to discuss his first collection […]
