Humanity is certainly woven into all his work. Dasgupta’s first novel, Tokyo Cancelled (2005), is a modern-day take on Canterbury Tales, told through the stories of 13 passengers stuck overnight at an airport. Solo (2009) is a saga of the 20th and 21st centuries, told from the perspective of a day-dreaming 100-year-old Bulgarian man. That one won him the Tagore Literary Prize and Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.

The Windham-Campbell award, administered by Yale University, recognises Capital, a non-fiction work containing intimate accounts of their own lives, told to Dasgupta by people across cultures and socio-economic classes, in the rapidly globalising Delhi of the early Aughts. He was living in Delhi then; he now lives in France.

How does he feel about his human endeavours after the win? What is his next book, After Nations, about? Excerpts from an interview.

* Well, congratulations. The prize came as quite a surprise?

I actually had no words at the very beginning. I was completely unprepared. I haven’t published a book in 11 years. I’ve spent most of the last decade writing another book, which has been very difficult and has taken me completely away from the public eye.

In this long period of time, I had moments of despair. “Can I finish this? Did I start something that’s just mad?”

When you get a call like this in the middle of that process, and my book’s still several months from coming out, it’s very reassuring. I think more than any kind of intense joy or pleasure, it’s a much quieter, deeper sort of reassurance, that you’re doing the right thing.

* Did your need for that reassurance have anything to do with AI, which you mention often in your tweets?

I think AI will affect us writers to a very, very great extent. We now realise that it’s possible to use large-scale computer intelligence to produce quite extraordinary creative works. We certainly realise AI is capable of reporting on reality in astounding ways.

Writers are experiencing a new kind of terror, which is: What about this is human anymore?

In that respect, I think this is quite a fascinating moment. We might be the last generation that wins these sorts of prizes. We are now engaging with a new set of questions, which come from the fundamental idea of: What am I doing that could never be replicated by machines? Which, of course, is a question no one had to ask until very recently.

* You were born in Canterbury, studied at Oxford, lived in New York. What took you to Delhi?

I was working in public relations in New York, which I was quite good at because it’s basically about telling stories. But I take stories very seriously, and I did not like the ones I was telling in the world of PR.

So I started writing the book that became Tokyo Cancelled, on the weekends. And there came a point when I thought: I really can’t do this job anymore. I was in love with someone who lived in Delhi. I thought, let me go there and see if I can write a whole book of these stories.

I thought I would just go for three months, because I wanted to return to my beloved New York. But I stayed for seventeen years.

* Why a non-fiction book about Delhi, though, after two novels?

It was obvious from the beginning that the reality of Delhi was extraordinary. I thought, there’s no point in me fictionalising this because people will think I made it up. I wanted readers to feel the impact of this reality.

In the years I capture in Capital, which included the Commonwealth Games of 2010, there was really this sense of shock in Delhi. The whole city was ripped down and enormous slums were cleared violently. One would see crazy things in the streets. I once photographed a dead horse that had been tossed into a trash bin, its four legs sticking out, right there next to construction waste.

And then there was also that terrible rape and murder (the 2012 Nirbhaya case) that just took people’s imaginations to the worst places that one could imagine.

It was all so raw. I wanted readers to sit with that reality.

The international press loved talking about the new generations of urban Indians with their iPhones and cappuccinos, and I wanted to tell people that it’s much crazier than that. When you transition in a short amount of time from one system to another, it’s much more turbulent.

* By systems you mean the shift to hyper-capitalism, which is also what the book became about? What can you tell us about your next book, After Nations, which builds on that critique?

Capital came out in 2014, which was, of course, the year that Narendra Modi was elected prime minister in India. In 2016, Donald Trump was elected in the US. And Britain exited the European Union.

Because I was moving a lot between the different places where these things were happening — I was still living in India, but teaching at Brown University, and my parents were in the UK — I started wondering, what kind of global transitions are influencing all these places in similar ways? Then Boris Johnson became prime minister in the UK, in 2019.

And people said, oh they’re clowns, this person is ridiculous. And yet, behind the scenes, these clowns were changing political systems in all kinds of ways.

After Nations came out of this. It came out of the question I was faced with at that time, which was: What are the connections between all these rather similar events happening in different countries? Is it possible we’re going through a transition, not in the history of the US or UK or India, but in the system of nation-states as a whole?

After Nations essentially argues that the nation-system has, in fact, reached a sort of crisis, and that all our hopes that our national governments can save us and continue to protect us in the ways we thought they might… well, they might not be able to do that anymore. And we might need to think very differently about politics.

* That sounds provocative…

I suppose so. I think India is, to some extent, a big counter-example, in the sense that a lot of the nation-states do not currently have anything like the economic growth that India has. India has its crises, and still finds it very difficult to produce jobs for all its young people. But it is an effective nation-state. China is even more exceptional than India.

But outside Asia, certainly, nation-states are finding it difficult to generate the economic growth they require. And there’s a widespread sense that national governments are simply not in charge anymore, in the way they used to be.

And people have all kinds of dramatic emotional reactions to that. Some turn to religion. Some turn to some fantasy of the past – they want all the foreigners out, all the jobs to “come back”, etc. Overall, there is a sense of turmoil.

* And then there are the tech giants. You’ve likened Big Tech to the East India Company…

America and Britain have always tied their destiny to big companies.

The East India Company contributed to British income, and the state was itself a shareholder. Yet the Company was also a big threat to the state. Its financial crisis of the 1770s, which had everything to do with its violent destruction of the Bengal economy, hurt the state too.

Today, I think we have a parallel situation in the US. The state has become extremely dependent on Silicon Valley, at a time when the US is terrified of losing technological leadership to China.

It’s no coincidence that Donald Trump’s administration would have a key figure from the tech world making decisions about the future of America, the American state, its democracy.

But Silicon Valley is increasingly not playing ball with the state. There are quite anti-democratic ideas emerging from parts of Silicon Valley, and from people like Elon Musk. What does this do to the people’s need to protect their own rights and freedoms?

I just returned home from the US, and it feels absolutely chaotic there right now. It looks like Trump is siding with a very small group of elites, driving people onto the streets, and we don’t know where all this can lead. But it’s definitely a huge crisis for the nation-state.