Of Law and Life: Upendra Baxi in Conversation with Arvind Narrain, Lawrence Liang, Sitharamam Kakarala, and Sruti Chaganti, Orient BlackSwan, 2024
RUDYARD Kipling famously writes, “If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.” This quote perfectly captures the book under review.
The book titled Of Law and Life: Upendra Baxi in Conversation with Arvind Narrain, Lawrence Liang, Sitharamam Kakarala, and Sruti Chaganti, as the title suggests, is a compilation of two-week conversations between one of the most acclaimed and admired legal scholars of India, Upendra Baxi and his former students, namely Arvind Narrain, Sitharamam Kakarala, Lawrence Liang and Shruti Chaganti.
On Baxi’s towering scholarship and contribution, another prominent contemporary Indian academic, Pratab Bhanu Mehta writes, “[He] has said all that can be potentially said about the Indian judiciary.” This book discusses the (lesser-known) method behind Baxi’s scholarship.
As the authors have stated in the introduction, “The book we present is the product of an affectionate conversation over shared concerns and themes, and thus falls somewhere between a biography— really a third person’s view of the subject’s life— and autobiography, based on the subject’s own view of his or her life.”
This book offers a unique flow to its readers, narrating law and history through stories from Baxi as a writer, teacher and activist.
