India, Dec. 19 -- The most interesting book that I read this year was Rosinka Chaudhuri's India's First Radicals: Young Bengal and the British Empire. Chaudhuri is one of India's leading scholars of literature and a literary historian, and her latest book returns to subjects she has explored in earlier ones such as Freedom and Beef Steaks: Colonial Calcutta Culture, 2012, and Derozio, Poet of India: The Definitive Edition, 2008, on the remarkable figure of Henry Louis Vivian Derozio. On a personal note, I have been trying to write a novel about Derozio and his circle for several years, but with little success. One reason for this is the lack of research on Derozio's circle, which came to be known as Young Bengal. Having read - and reviewe...