Prof Sudeep Chakravarti of Stepwell Centre for Asian Futures Receives Ramnath Goenka Sahitya Samman 2025

Fallen City: A Double Murder, Political Insanity and Delhi’s Descent from Grace (Aleph, 2024) Sudeep Chakravarti has won the Ramnath Goenka Sahitya Samman 2025 for Best Nonfiction, instituted by The New Indian Express Group. The book was also longlisted for the Crossword Book Awards 2025 (Nonfiction).

In Fallen City, Professor Chakravarti examines the abduction and murder of teenage siblings Sanjay and Geeta Chopra in August 1978, an event that shocked Delhi and the nation, and places it within a wider social and political canvas. He traces what he describes as the city's "dark arc" between 1975 and 1984, a period marked by political turbulence, institutional breakdown, and communal unease, and explores how a city absorbs trauma, how power responds to public outrage, and how memory is shaped by fear, silence, and spectacle.

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Built on meticulous research, the book draws on archival material, on-ground mapping across Delhi, Mumbai, and Agra, and interviews with witnesses connected to the crime and its investigative and judicial aftermath, including the executions of Billa and Ranga. This forensic depth gives Fallen City its authority and moral weight, compelling readers to confront not only the violence itself but the social conditions that allowed it to unfold and recede from collective reckoning.

Professor Chakravarti, Executive Director of the Stepwell Centre for Asian Futures at Ahmedabad University, Professor of Practice at the School of Arts and Sciences, Ahmedabad University, and Chair of the University's Communication Programme, is the author of several acclaimed works of nonfiction, including Red Sun, The Bengalis, Plassey, Highway 39, and The Eastern Gate. With Fallen City, he delivers one of his most urgent and unsettling works to date.

The Ramnath Goenka Sahitya Samman recognises the literary strength of Fallen City and its continuing relevance as a work that interrogates power, violence, and the uneasy relationship between cities and their histories. Ahmedabad University congratulates Sudeep Chakravarti on this prestigious recognition.

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