Patriots, Poets and Prisoners

Founded in 1907 by the visionary Bengali thinker and reformist, Ramananda Chatterjee, The Modern Review quickly emerged as a vital platform for debates on nationalism, patriotism, history and society. Alongside the leaders of the freedom movement – M.K. Gandhi, Subhas Chandra Bose, Jawaharlal Nehru, Rabindranath Tagore – thinkers like Romain Rolland and J.T. Sutherland contributed to its pages. While questions of self-rule, gender justice and caste inequality were hotly debated, the Review also ran fiction, poetry and personal essays, forging a character for itself that was uniquely literary, political as well as cosmopolitan. Marking Chatterjee’s 150th birth anniversary, this anthology, edited by members of his family and introduced by Ramachandra Guha, brings together a selection from the rich archives of the Review to convey its eclectic range and ambitions. Even after a century, the debates that played out in its pages resonate with the spirit of the turbulent times we live in, making it urgently relevant to the state of the nation and the body politic.