‘Ajita was lying flat on his stomach on the ground along the wall of the kitchen. The seven-year-old had spent all morning in the garden following the trail of the red ants who had now found a way through the tiny hole in the wall straight into the kitchen…. “I wish I could hear them and understand what they are saying to each other.”’
Ajita begins at a scale deceptively atomic and unfolds into an unusually inventive fictional foray into the life of Indian philosopher Ajita Keshakambalin, a leading figure in the school of materialist philosophy called the Carvakas, whom we meet as a curious mind shaped—in true materialist fashion—via engagement with the world around him, ground up. Ajita’s context includes illustrious contemporaries such as Makkhali Ghoshala, the Ajivikas, Mahavira, and not least, the Buddha, all brought alive as heterodox thinkers negotiating as much the dynamics of state power under Bimbisara and Ajatashatru, as epistemological and existential questions.