There is one question underneath everything I write, whether in fiction or in argument: what does a society actually owe its people, and what happens when it refuses to pay?
I arrived at this question not as an academic but as a writer formed by Kolkata — a city that has lived inside the tension between revolutionary promise and democratic failure long enough to have stopped being surprised by either. That formation is not incidental to the work. It is the root.
The Ananya-Rudra Sequence is an eight-book Bengali thriller built around two protagonists — a mother and her neurodivergent teenage hacker son. What holds them together across every book, every place they inhabit, every structure they find themselves inside, is not a cause but a condition: they are people who cannot look away. Ananya and Rudra end up inside wherever power grinds ordinary lives into numbness — whatever the geography, whatever the machinery — not by choice but by temperament. The question the sequence asks, and refuses to answer cheaply, is this: how do ordinary people survive structures designed to erase them, and what does that cost them at the level of the nervous system? It is not allegory. It is not polemic. It is an attempt to render in fictional form what political philosophy can only describe from the outside: the moral texture of power, loyalty, betrayal, and resistance as they are actually lived. Book 1 was published in 2023. Book 2 is complete. The sequence runs to 2040 — eight books, one argument, proportional to the question being asked. An English reimagination of Book 1 is in progress.
Justice as Moral Economy is the parallel doctrinal work of Gunjon Dasgupta. It triangulates three thinkers across a century: B.R. Ambedkar, who understood that justice without a prior legitimacy test is performance; John Dewey, who understood that democracy without moral architecture is a shell; and Daron Acemoglu, who has demonstrated with empirical precision what extraction does to institutions across generations. The argument being built from this triangle begins with a challenge to Amartya Sen’s capability approach — which asks what people are able to do and be, but does not first ask whether the structure enabling that question has any legitimate claim to pose it. That prior question is the engine of the doctrine. Justice, the argument proposes, is not a legal condition or a distributive problem — it is a moral economy, with its own circuits of debt, obligation, default, and repair. The Manifesto is in progress. Essays orbit it.
Fiction and scholarship are not separate endeavours sharing a name. They are two instruments trained on the same object. What the essays argue, the novels inhabit. What the novels cannot resolve, the essays pursue.
The Project is one thing, expressed in two forms, across a working life.