A Modern Ecstasy

Part travelogue, part reportage, part memoir—a lively recounting of the acclaimed writer’s firsthand experience of India and where he sees the nation heading

In this audacious and multi-faceted book, full of wisdom and compassion, Amitava Kumar shares with readers a personal history of his mother country, as well as the probing conversations he has had with Indian citizens from all walks of life, from Rajasthan to Delhi to Kashmir to the Andaman Islands. 

India is the world’s biggest democracy, with a population that has surpassed China's and an economy that has rocketed to be the fifth-largest globally. Yet India is also among the most unequal places on the planet: the number of people living in slums is greater than the entire population of Australia. And now India is at a tipping point. From a culture of increasing intolerance—which has seen the rise of populism, hypernationalism, religious extremism, and a Prime Minister surrounded by a cult of personality—to widespread ecological havoc to staggering corruption and unemployment, India’s problems today are likely to be the world’s problems tomorrow. 

Over the course of his extensive travels, which include a two-thousand-mile train journey from the Himalayan foothills to the country’s southernmost tip, Kumar talks to the people living through this moment of profound change: among others, a migrant worker, a renowned filmmaker, a farmer, a chauffeur, a jailed feminist activist, a student, a poet, a young bookseller, plus a climate change protestor. He assembles an astonishing array of first-person perspectives—including his own—on the state of the nation, a democracy under threat on a fast-heating planet, with a special focus on those fighting for justice.

Filled with insight, authenticity, and the provocative brilliance of the man on the ground, inflected by the recent student protests and national elections, A Modern Ecstasy delivers news of our shared future—at once a galvanizing cautionary tale and a dispatch of hope and resilience.