Summary:
With you, there’s language, there’s science, there’s music [Mukherjee is an accomplished singer of Indian classical music]. In Indian writing in English there’s an obsession with the national project of India, which sometimes results in books that are about Indian history or about exalting certain parts of the Indian experience but that aren’t able to contribute anything new to the understanding of human consciousness. But Indian identity wasn’t forced upon you by other people? Do you feel the Indian education system or the ideas at its peripheries had an impact on you as an intellectual? It was purely incidental — an incidental passport which I happened to have.Ironically, of course, I’m a third generation transplanted Bengali who knows how to write and read Bengali..