An Evening with the New Delhi Review of Books
(Organised by the New Delhi Review of Books (NDRB), published by the Nation First Policy Research & Change Foundation (NFPRC) Foundation, at Ambassador–IHCL Selections, New Delhi, on 23 October 2026)
Chief Guest
Mr Sanjeev Sanyal, Member, Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister of India
Editor-in-Chief
Mr Prem Ansh Sinha
Publisher
Mr Ananth Krishna
Felicitation and Launch
The team at Ramjas Political Review was invited to the launch of the inaugural issue of the New Delhi Review of Books (NDRB). The proceedings commenced with a welcome to the dignitaries and the gathering on the occasion. The chief guest for the evening, Mr Sanjeev Sanyal, was introduced to the house as a member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister of India, Chancellor of the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, a Rhodes Scholar and the author of several books on Indian history, besides being a licensed paragliding pilot and a collector of old maps.
Mr Prem Ansh Sinha, Editor-in-Chief, and Mr Ananth Krishna, Publisher of NDRB and Research Director at the Nation First Policy Research & Change Foundation (NFPRC), felicitated the chief guest. As a token of gratitude, Mr Sanyal was presented with a customised map tracing the history of India's naval routes. Post the felicitation, the dignitaries formally released the inaugural issue.
Editor-in-Chief's Note
Mr Sinha opened his address by remarking upon the aptness of the venue, observing that there was something remarkable in launching a review of books on a road named after a poet who was also a formidable journalist. Invoking Vengalil Krishnan (VK) Krishna Menon, he described the idea of NDRB as ‘more of an acquired taste’. He explained the editorial philosophy of the review, which says that it does not deal in summaries, promotions, or mere critiques. Each review essay, he explained, is the product of research on ideas that matter for India, and the form imposes its own discipline by obliging the writer to engage with existing arguments, references, and evidence.
Apropos the politics of the review, Mr Sinha saw it in the fact of his own youth, quoting, ‘I'm young and I can still feel that I can comment on politics.’ He spoke of institution-building and democratic participation, and of his hope of seeing India fulfil its destiny within his lifetime.
The speaker then introduced the contributions to the inaugural issue. Abhimanyu Singh, Deepesh Gulgulia, and Shubham Srivastav examine why money alone has not sustained legal scholarship; Sarvagya Pandey explores why recovered temple idols may remain unsafe at home; Apratim Tripathi critiques Janaki Bakhle’s portrayal of Savarkar; Gaurav Sen examines China’s intelligence apparatus in India’s neighbourhood; and Ambuj Sahu examines war and coercion as forces in state formation, contesting the disproportionate rhetorical weight placed upon peace and ahimsa in Indian foreign and security policy.
He extended an invitation to faculty members, think-tank professionals, doctoral scholars, students, and representatives of other publications to associate with the review through submissions, internships and collaborations. In his concluding remarks, he described NDRB as ‘‘the meeting point for those who may shape India’s institutions and civic life’’, and thanked the chief guest, the publisher, and the audience.
Publisher’s Note
Mr Krishna described the evening as the inauguration of an intellectual infrastructure which, he averred, would increasingly shape the intellectual discourse of the country. Describing the life of the mind as ‘a public good’, he termed NDRB a deliberate, long-term investment in it. He elaborated that the role of the NFPRC Foundation extends beyond conventional policy papers, legislative briefs, and governance reforms, since policy must be read through the ideas, histories, values, and debates that shape a society. He cautioned that India cannot afford an ‘intellectual monoculture’, and stated that the review seeks to nurture genuine intellectual pluralism in the country.
On editorial principles, Mr Krishna stated that the magazine would make space for ‘rigorous non-doctrinal thinking’ and would judge books on the strength of their arguments, without regard to the fashion of their politics. Its remit would span politics, history, economics, literature, and culture, with substantial critical essays examining evidence, intellectual traditions, and arguments. He maintained that books from across the ideological spectrum would be considered without any dilution of rigour, and that serious disagreement would be encouraged without delegitimising authors. He drew attention to the labour behind each issue, enumerating commissioning, editing, proofreading, typography, illustration, printing, logistics, and event planning, and termed the published issue ‘the visible tip of an enormous amount of invisible labour’. He appreciated Mr Sinha, the editorial team, and the members of the Foundation and NDRB for bringing the issue together.
Describing the Foundation's backing of NDRB as ‘an act of intellectual patience’, he observed that a sustainable publication would take years, if not decades, to build. Referring to the review essay ‘The Long March Through the Institutions’, he held that movements and magazines alike depend upon institutional capacity, competent management, rules and routines, talent pipelines, financial discipline, and a public purpose larger than any individual. Exhorting the audience to participate, he stated that ‘this magazine belongs to you’; the Foundation could support the infrastructure, but the success of the review would rest upon its contributors and readers, through their essays, disagreements, and subscriptions, and through their insistence that it represent the full range of serious Indian thought. He concluded, ‘For too long, the Indian intellectual space has been a room where only one conversation was allowed. Tonight, we are opening the windows.’
Chief Guest’s Address
Mr Sanyal congratulated the young team on the initiative, commending the quality of thought, the modern design, and the uncompromising quality control of the inaugural issue. Remarking that a high quality of production ‘shows a certain faith in your product’, he held presentation and production to be integral to the credibility of a publication.
The chief guest thereafter turned to what he described as an intellectual monoculture, arguing that Indian intellectual spaces have long been dominated by a narrow ideological outlook. He decried publications that, in his view, prioritise delegitimising individuals over engaging with their ideas, a practice he held to contribute little to debate and to entrench institutional and intellectual capture. While this dominance has been disrupted in several fields, including Bollywood and English-language writing, he rued the stagnation of the Hindi and Bengali literary ecosystems and the scant visibility of younger writers therein. Warning that monoculture ultimately alienates the next generation from reading, he called for an ecosystem of new thought, and illustrated the need for competing ideas with an ecological analogy: ‘No tiger can survive without the deer, and if you only have deer it'll eventually overgraze the forest.’
Mr Sanyal welcomed the review of S Vijay Kumar’s The Idol Thief, recalling his own long association with efforts to recover stolen Indian artefacts and idols, and noting that the India Pride Project was founded on his balcony in Singapore. He also appreciated the inclusion of books on China, particularly a review examining China from a foreign perspective.
He contended that an Indian review of books ought not to confine itself to Indian books, stating, ‘We need to engage with ideas. If those ideas come from outside, so be it.’ Urging the house to ‘reverse the gaze’, he pointed to the asymmetry wherein foreign academics routinely comment on Indian elections in leading Indian newspapers, while Indian academics are seldom afforded comparable space to comment on American elections in publications such as The New York Times. He extended the argument to public platforms, questioning why Indian officials share stages with foreign media representatives in the absence of reciprocal arrangements. For India to become a great power, he averred, it must first imbibe the idea of being one, which entails holding opinions on other countries and being unapologetic about them. He distinguished between defensive responses to foreign criticism and the independent formation of opinion about the world, and held that NDRB could help cultivate the latter.
On the question of longevity, Mr Sanyal cautioned the team against discouragement once the initial enthusiasm subsides, drawing on the counsel he had offered Swarajya in its early years: ‘It is in the fourth or fifth year that it will pay dividends.’ He cited an Indian sovereign-rating initiative covering approximately 55 countries as an instance of institution-building that accrues a track record and credibility over time before gaining acceptance in its field, and held that the same principle applies to NDRB. He recommended a quarterly schedule of five or six reviews per issue, with an unambiguous injunction on quality: ‘Don’t compromise on that.’
In Conversation with the Chief Guest
The address was followed by a conversation between the Editor-in-Chief and the chief guest. Mr Sanyal was asked what he read as an undergraduate at Shri Ram College of Commerce, and what that young man would make of his bookshelf today. Mr Sanyal described himself as an eclectic reader. His university years, he recalled, coincided with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the USSR, and India’s economic crisis and reforms of 1991, even as academic textbooks continued to extol the five-year plans and outmoded economic ideas. With alternative literature scarcely available in what he termed socialist India, he came upon thinkers such as Friedrich Hayek and BR Shenoy, whose works were largely absent from university curricula. His subsequent studies at Oxford exposed him to a wider range of ideas, though he opined that Oxford today has less intellectual diversity than it did in his student years, and that Indian universities, including the University of Delhi and Jawaharlal Nehru University, now offer greater intellectual diversity than many Western universities.
Referring to Mr Sanyal’s short story ‘The Intellectual’, which depicts the ageing intellectual circles of Kolkata, the Editor-in-Chief asked whether the audience ought to be nervous. Mr Sanyal explained that the story portrays intellectuals who project sophistication while remaining dependent on external validation, a dependence he held to persist in Indian academia, particularly in the social sciences and humanities, where advancement rests heavily upon publication in internationally recognised journal lists. He termed this reliance a form of intellectual colonisation. He further cautioned that sources accepted by platforms such as Wikipedia could shape AI-generated answers and reproduce existing ideological biases, and questioned the authority that international indices acquire through repeated citation and institutional association. Citing democracy rankings, he noted that governance indicators hosted by the World Bank are often mistaken for World Bank endorsements. He concluded that India must develop its own institutions and sources of intellectual authority.
Question & Answer Session
A member of the audience asked how a young editorial team should select approximately 24 books a year from the thousands published annually, and, by way of example, how it might choose one book on Savarkar from the hundreds available. Mr Sanyal remarked that book selection is more an art than a science. He suggested five or six books per quarterly issue, with at least two unrelated to India so as to engage with global debates. In the initial phase, he advised, the team could take its cue from books attracting attention in policy, literary, and other intellectual circles while developing its own editorial judgement, with the remaining selections spread across fiction, history, science and policy, since editorial variety sustains the interest of writers and readers alike.
Mr Sinha added that NDRB maintains a curated list of books organised by category, including China studies, development, politics, culture, and biography, which prospective contributors may consult before proposing a book by email, whereupon the editorial team considers proposals and commissions essays. Mr Sanyal further recommended a review on Theodore Roosevelt, whom he described as a central figure in the making of American power, the fight against oligarchs and the creation of national parks, and whose study he deemed necessary for a country that aspires to great-power status.
Mr Prashant Narang of the TrustBridge Rule of Law Foundation asked why Hayek, Shenoy, and other liberal thinkers remain marginal in Indian curricula, and what prevents the government from ensuring greater intellectual diversity in central universities. Mr Sanyal acknowledged that intellectual diversity in Indian academia remains limited, but observed that academia no longer commands intellectual life to the degree it once did, and that alternative platforms and publications can widen the debate. He spoke of his involvement in the rewriting of NCERT textbooks, particularly the economics component, and criticised the older textbooks for their outdated and stereotypical depictions of Indian industry, agriculture, and education, which he said required modernisation in imagery and content alike.
Responding to a follow-up on whether a monoculture had persisted in economic liberalism even as the political right grew more vocal on cultural conservatism, he stated that the revised curriculum would introduce Hayek, Shenoy, and Kautilya alongside other economists and intellectual traditions, besides complex-systems thinking associated with the Santa Fe Institute, which he held to be inadequately represented even in some advanced university curricula. The textbooks, he added, would teach India’s economic history more comprehensively, explaining the crisis that prompted the reforms of 1991 and the developments that followed through 2020.
Ends.
The author, Sarvagya Pandey, is an Assistant Editor at Ramjas Political Review.
Featured image credit: New Delhi Review of Books
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