‘I Am on the Hit List’: A lament for Gauri Lankesh, and a country that lost its way

September 6, 2017. On Bangalore’s streets, wave upon wave of people, all of whom had turned up to grieve a journalist shot at her doorstep the night before.

Having moved to the city three months ago, I watched with incredulity. Who was Gauri Lankesh? How did her journalism end up touching the lives of so many people? Three years into the first term of the Narendra Modi government, when journalists were being regularly taunted as “presstitutes”, how had an editor’s death led to this outpouring?

Even while sending off hurried first drafts as a journalist with The Indian Express, I realised that many of these questions tugged at the skein of Bangalore’s progressive heart, led to its writers and filmmakers, its spent and current rebels – and their bruising encounter with the forces of Hindutva that was remaking their state.

American journalist Rollo Romig followed the story over several years to write I Am on the Hit List: Murder and Myth-Making in South India. A book on the execution of an outspoken woman journalist hated by Hindu fundamentalists could have been grim and dispiriting. But Romig’s writing repels boredom and banalities. It ripples with anecdotes and insights, and skirts the temptations of a linear story. “One story is a nest for...

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