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 many other stories, whose relevance becomes clear through the telling,” he writes.

And so, I Am on the Hit List is many things – an account of the steadily growing stain of Hindu supremacism on Indian public conscience, a vivid, intimate portrait of the Lankesh family, as well as a fine study of Bangalore. Romig details the latter’s quirks with fondness. This is a city of bookshops and authors, where a lapsed mafia don runs a progressive, anti-Hindutva, anti-RSS tabloid. Where gangsters once frowned on the use of guns – unlike the “cold machines” of the Bombay mafia, they used switchblades and machetes. Where a barbershop offered styles and services named after the city’s most loved writers – “the Kuvempu mushroom cut, the Masti head massage, the Ananthamurthy beard trim.”

Most importantly, I Am on the Hit List is a complex, sympathetic and balanced portrait of Gauri Lankesh, which resists turning her into a totem – for the left to worship or the right to revile. It places Gauri’s life in the cultures of violence and politics that surrounded her. As an outsider who came to love (and found love) in South India, Romig’s reportage is driven by urgency and despair, as he tries to understand the forces that drive India’s descent into majoritarianism.

The origin story

“To many literary Bangaloreans, Gauri’s murder felt like the violent announcement of the end of an era – an era that had arguably sprung from the imagination of her father,” writes Romig.

Gauri’s father, P Lankesh, was a poet, playwright, writer of the Navya literary movement in Kannada. But it was as the editor of Lankesh Patrike that he shaped Kannada cultural and literary landscape in the 1980s. Romig delights in telling the story of this iconoclast, who wrote sensitive poetry under a woman’s pseudonym but mostly treated his wife, Indira, with typical Indian male indifference. Even more precious is the portrait of Indira, who stops waiting for Lankesh to fix the family’s finances and builds a successful sari business on her own.

Lankesh’s newspaper was made in his image – angry, brash, irascible, and driven by the belief in its right to offend everyone. In a climate of careful newspaper journalism, Lankesh Patrike was like an “eruption of punk rock”. It had, as a journalist tells Romig, “great politics, great literature, great gossip”.

His death in 2000 thrust Gauri into the editorship of a legendary newspaper. Till then, Romig writes, she had been a competent but unspectacular journalist in Bangalore’s English media. Almost everyone expected her to fail.

But, as Romig recounts, she pulled off an impossible transformation. She improved her Kannada, grew out of the default centrism of the English-speaking liberal, and learnt the language of anti-caste and linguistic politics. “Gauri’s switch [to Kannada] made her extremely localist: against techies, against historical amnesia, immersed in local politics, a partisan for Kannada,” Romig writes.

It was editing her father’s newspaper and eventually her own – Gauri Lankesh Patrike – that “radicalised her”. If she had no place for a literary sensibility, she retained the jeering outspokenness with which P Lankesh had treated those in power. It pitched her into the crucial battles in Karnataka, such as the Sangh Parivar’s attempts to turn a syncretic shrine in Chikmagalur to the “Ayodhya of the south” or the debate over whether the Lingayats, a community born out of a 12th century anti-caste revolt, were at all Hindus.

Romig immerses herself into the muddling, often frustrating journey of this Kannada liberal. As we see Gauri through the eyes of her friends, her sister, her comrades and her critics, we come away with an image of a flawed, courageous woman. A “tiny, frail woman” with a “frail and failing newspaper”, fighting to keep it running – incredibly, when she died, her salary was Rs 25,000 a month.

But Romig also gently questions the myth of her as pathbreaking journalist. He wrestles with her dismissal of “objectivity”, her recklessly polemical vein, her declaration that she could not see the “point in pretending to be impartial”. Her lawyer BT Venkatesh tells him that he asked her to be careful, “to at least do some fact-checking of her articles.” Her talent, he concludes, was not journalism but “a talent for outrage, for friendship”, and the ability to unite disparate interest groups.

While many have contrasted Lankesh to his daughter, Romig suggests that intellectual mettle was not the only thing that set them apart – Gauri lived in a world that had become extremely hostile to progressive ideas and politics. As filmmaker Chaitanya KM had told me after her death, “When Lankesh was writing, the USSR was still intact and it was fashionable to be a Leftist. Not so in Gauri’s time, when you are called a presstitute and sickular for holding liberal views.”

The killers

The book succeeds in capturing the complexity of Gauri’s choices, but it is less successful in offering a portrait of the killers, who remain in the shadows.

Romig draws extensively on the work of Indian journalists, especially The Indian Express’s Johnson TA, who has doggedly reported on the Karnataka police’s investigation into the murder. But the book does not surface new information on the larger conspiracy to kill Gauri Lankesh, and the wider networks that armed her assassins.

All the men accused in the crime had links to Sanatan Sanstha, a Hindutva group with beliefs that are as comically deranged as they are dangerous. Its founder wrote “nothing less than a manual for murder in the cause of spirituality”, writes Romig – and multiple copies of Kshatradharma Sadhana were found on the accused.

The man who allegedly fired three bullets into her had not heard of Gauri until he saw a video of her provocative speech on Hinduism, which his handlers played on a loop to inspire him. Like rationalists Narendra Dabholkar and Govind Pansare and the Lingayat scholar MM Kalburgi – the three other progressive voices executed by the same assassination group – Gauri had been chosen because her killers had decided she was a Hindu who had betrayed her religion.

Why did Bangalore’s residents grieve for Gauri? Perhaps, because the message of her death rippled out as a warning, an omen. If an unarmed woman could be killed at her door for speaking her mind, what other violations were possible? Eight years on, as Romig documents with a quiet, clear-sighted hopelessness, the outrage has been silenced, the violations more brazen. The air has thinned even more for India’s Muslims. The Sanatan Sanstha, which once held press conferences to distance itself from allegations of inciting murder, now uses its heckler’s veto to shut down stand-up comics and book launches. By October 2024, nine of the accused in Gauri’s murder had been granted bail – the alleged shooter was welcomed on his release with garlands.

As freedom and fraternity shrink and cower with each passing day, I Am on the Hit List reminds us powerfully of a country that has lost its way.

I Am on the Hit List: Murder and Myth-making in South India, Rollo Romig, Westland.