Reviews
Following A Prayer, Westland Books, 2023
Featured on 2023 Recommended Reads: Telegraph, Mint Lounge
"Gentle, intense, poignant, the haunting beauty of this story offers the reader—through the voices and silences of three young women—deep reflections on belief, words, language, prayer and life itself."
— Urvashi Butalia, author of The Other Side of Silence
"... it’s rare to find books about thought, ideas or philosophical reasoning. This is why it’s a pleasant surprise to find these elements in a work of fiction. Following a Prayer by Sundar Sarukkai is unusual and somewhat extraordinary."
— The New Indian Express
"This profound novel, which ends on a dramatic note, leaves the reader with an evocative feeling that lingers long after the last page has been turned."
— Hindustan Times
"Warmth, humour, playfulness, earthiness, and intelligence shine out of this absolutely charming book. A must read for adults and young adults."
— Asian Age
"Following a Prayer comes like a breath of fresh air at a time when we have all but forgotten the inherent beauty and power of words, of language, of communication and communion.'"
— Uma Mahadevan-Dasgupta, The Wire
"Sarukkai, a philosophy professor who founded the Barefoot Philosophers collective four years ago to take philosophy to the public, taps the innocence and curiosity of children to address the challenges of a knowledge-driven contemporary society."
— Financial Express
"Sundar Sarukkai’s Following a Prayer... a hauntingly intense philosophical reflection on language and the pursuit of meaning that keeps on extending itself in a sort of Derridean freeplay to end with a stunningly unforeseen climax."
-The Telegraph
"Where do words go? What does it mean to follow a sound? Is ‘God’ just another word or our collective shorthand for ‘illusion’? Or is language itself the root cause of lies? These questions sound like they belong at a philosophy seminar, but in Sundar Sarukkai’s brilliant and highly unusual novel Following a Prayer, such are the queries posed by children mounting a valiant attempt to make sense of a disorienting world."
— Aditya Mani Jha, India Today
The Social Life of Democracy, Seagull, 2022 (Distributed by University of Chicago Press)
"Sarukkai standing on the shoulders of these two [Ambedkar and Gandhi] outstanding thinkers, interrogates the Western understanding of democracy and liberates the idea of democracy from Eurocentric perceptions, shifts the responsibility of being democratic to the individual, transforms the individual from being democratically passive to active, and widens the scope of what it is to be a democratic self."
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- Ramanujam, Economic and Political Weekly 58, 2023
Experience, Caste and the Everyday Social (co-authored with Gopal Guru). Oxford University Press, 2019
"The book offers an approach to the social that is both more comprehensive and more cross-culturally inclusive than hitherto... is a work that must be considered an important methodological contribution to a revisioning of the social sciences, which is virtually ontological in depth and aimed at a rethinking of fundamental assumptions that may both lift the social sciences out of their Eurocentrism and expand the value of their pragmatic intervention...reviewer a new framework for social science is proffered in the holism that underlies and unites the various arguments."
- Bruce Kapferer, EPW 55, 2020
"[W]e consider ECES as one of the few recent efforts to bring a rigorous method to a subject that is bedevilled by “not-so-philosophically” resolute, essentialised and transhistorical defi nitions of caste and its attendant realities. In many ways, the work, and the collaboration that it connotes—
between a sensitive political theorist and a caring philosopher— is a heady one."
- Hegde and DeSouza, EPW 56, 2021
"This new book not only deepens the reckoning of experience by foregrounding the social and the heteronomous nature of the self and subject of experience but also supplements it with a critique of modern categories of thought that define the understanding of the social."
- Bargi, philoSOPHIA 11, 2021
Additional Reviews/Accolades:
Philosophy for Children: Reading, Writing and Thinking, Ektara Publications, 2021
Chosen for the Parag Honour List 2023
Reviews in Deccan Herald 2022, Vartha Bharathi 2022, The Book Review 46, 2022
JRD Tata and the Ethics of Philanthropy. Routledge, July 2020
Review in The Hindu 2021
The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory (co-authored with Gopal Guru). Oxford University Press, 2012
Reviews in The Book Review, 2013; Economic and Political Weekly 48, 2013; Contributions to Indian Sociology 48, 2014
Book Discussion - Five responses in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 33(3), 2013. The JMC Review 2020
What is Science? National Book Trust, 2012
Review in Leonardo Reviews May 2012
Indian Philosophy and Philosophy of Science. New Delhi: PHISPC/Motilal Banarsidass, 2005
Reviews in Economic and Political Weekly XLI, 2006; Current Science 91, 2006; Philosophy East and West 59, 2009; International Journal of Hindu Studies 13, 2009
Philosophy of Symmetry. Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 2004
Reviews in The Tribune, April 25, 2004; Current Science 88, 2005 and Sandhan IV, 2004
Translating the World: Science and Language. Lanham: University Press of America, 2002
Reviews in META 48, 2003; Technical Communication Online 12, 2003; Handbook of South Asian Languages and Linguistics 2003; The Translator 17, 2011