Gandhi's power, portable citizenship & Indian writing - China's missing film star

Gandhi's power, portable citizenship and Indian writing. Rana Mitter talks to Ramachandra Guha about his new biography of Gandhi, hears about "portable citizenship from Indrajit Roy and discusses Indian writing and literary tradition with Amit Chaudhuri and Sandeep Parmar. Rana also breaks off from the subcontinent briefly to explore the mysterious disappearance of China's biggest film star, Fan Bingbing with the historian, Julia Lovell.

Ramachandra Guha has written Gandhi: The Years that Changed the World, 1915-1948 Amit Chaudhuri's new collection of essays is called The Origins of Dislike: A Geneaology of Writerly Discontent New Generation Thinker Sandeep Parmar is a poet and Professor of English at the University of Liverpool whose books include Reading Mina Loy's Autobiographies: Myth of the Modern Woman. Dr Indrajit Roy lectures at the University of York and is the author of Politics of the Poor in Contemporary India Julia Lovell is the author of The Opium War and will publish a global history of Maoism next year. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra is the author of four books of poems, most recently The Transfiguring Places. His Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets (1992) and his An Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English (2003) have helped shaped ways of looking at Indian writing.

Producer: Zahid Warley