The Air India plane that I boarded in Calcutta had arrived from Tokyo littered with trash, its crew tired and abrupt with the passengers. It felt more like a village bus than an aircraft flying a glamorous international route, a feeling magnified by the Bangladeshi men in numbered orange jumpsuits who had come on board with me in Calcutta. When we disembarked in Bombay, I saw them one last time, plaintively answering their foreman’s roll call before they shuffled off in search of their connection. I spent the night pacing the terminal, waiting for my flight to New York.

Apart from a brief, reckless foray across the border into Burma, I had never been abroad. Now, in the summer of 1998, armed with a passport, a $100 bill given to me by a Muslim friend with a corporate job, and a six-year doctoral fellowship, I was on my way to Columbia University.

I’d never imagined a life outside India, or even away from the north-eastern periphery of the country, where I grew up in a refugee family caught up in waves of ethnic conflicts, displaced three times by the time I was 18. My dream was to be a reporter for The Assam Tribune or The Statesman in Calcutta, regional papers where I could write about the north-east.

That dream took me to Presidency College in Calcutta, a colonial-era institution where a literature faculty bloated with its Oxbridge credentials handed out nuggets of wisdom while the city broke out in frequent strikes and the streets flooded every monsoon with green, garbage-seasoned water. There was no reason for someone like me to be at Presidency College, with its wearying list of Nobel laureate alumni, but it was a public institution and I had passed its admissions tests. I came from the barbaric frontier. My father was a paraplegic, my mother unschooled and bitter that I had left home to study literature. But even I could manage the tuition fees – the grand sum of ₹15 a month.

I finished college in 1991, the same year the USSR collapsed. A year earlier, a mildly progressive prime minister had sparked off nationwide protests among the upper castes in his attempts to implement affirmative-action policies for oppressed castes in higher education and state jobs. The collapse of the global left unleashed the desire for more hierarchy, not less. The economy began to be reoriented, American-style, towards the market in a process that was called “liberalisation”. At the end of 1992, the Babri Mosque was demolished by stormtroopers of the Hindu right.

By this time, I was doing my master’s at Calcutta University, a more chaotic but also more egalitarian institution, while carrying out odd jobs to sustain myself and my family. The elite among my Presidency classmates had decamped for graduate school in Britain or the US, as their parents had done before them. Others, adjusting to the collapse of state employment and the steady expansion of private companies, found jobs in marketing or IT.

I worked, very briefly, in advertising. The money was good, the work meaningless. When I found my way into journalism, I took the pay cut without a second thought, eventually moving to Delhi.

Journalism suited me. It offered me middle-class stability without being staid. I had licence to roam, to go high and go low. I found myself talking to small traders and failed footballers, tramping around the country to religious festivals where Hindu rap played loudly into the hot summer nights, and down coal pits where shirtless miners swung their picks at carbon-veined rock.

My bosses, the ones armed with degrees from US universities, introduced me to contemporary American writers. I discovered Paul Auster, Don DeLillo and Toni Morrison, buying their books from a second-hand shop where Western backpackers jettisoned their reading weight. From a recycling store in Connaught Place, I bought The New Yorker and Harper’s by the kilo, the copies still bearing the address labels of US embassy staffers.

But like India, journalism was changing. The nonfiction I wanted to write, inspired by the writers I was now reading, had little meaning in this new landscape. There were more media jobs than ever, but their coverage was relentlessly urban and shallow, confined to applauding a steady stripping of state assets, the rise of the consumer market, and the massed weight of the political formations of the Hindu right.

In the last media job I held in India, at a Delhi newspaper, my salary was higher than it had ever been. Unlike in my previous positions, I was on a contract that prevented me from joining the existing employees’ union. The promise made when hiring me – that I would be sent out to far-flung areas to write longform stories – never materialised. I found myself turning inward, to writing fiction, wondering if I was better off returning to the university.

At work, I was stuck on the news desk, surrounded by young, Westernised Indians who griped about the government’s supposed policy of appeasing Muslims and Dalits – almost none of whom were present in the newsroom. My Washington Post-trained boss, who had introduced me to Auster and DeLillo, was surprisingly unsympathetic to the older editorial workers when they went on strike, joined by the men who worked the printing presses in the basement. His boss, who boasted of close ties to the national security agencies, was memorable for only three characteristics: he hated Arundhati Roy, loved Madeleine Albright, and said he had never seen anything more beautiful than the parking lot outside an American Walmart.

The idea of escape out of the country slowly took shape, even if I thought of it as a temporary respite. I had noticed how journalists with Western degrees were propelled into the higher ranks of senior editors. They provided intellectual sheen, writing about Samuel Huntington and Francis Fukuyama as India marketised and militarised further. I could do a leftwing version of that, I thought, combining it with actual reporting. I would just need a Western degree and the confidence that came with it.

Along with the foreign brands suddenly present in India, a steady stream of Western intellectuals was passing through Indian cities. Almost all, regardless of birth, were connected to an American university. I was reading Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism when Said visited Delhi in 1997, setting off a flurry of excitement among the editorial grandees at my workplace. I noted that he taught at Columbia University. Said had been preceded, earlier that year, by Jacques Derrida, whose translator was the Calcutta-educated Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, a colleague of Said’s in the English and Comparative Literature department at Columbia University.

The name Columbia began to take on weight, dislodging buried memories. B.R. Ambedkar, the Dalit writer of India’s constitution and a critic of its oppressive caste structure, had studied at Columbia in the early twentieth century. The leftwing Assamese singer Bhupen Hazarika had been an anthropology student there in the 1940s, where he was inspired by Paul Robeson and his dreams of musical and world revolution. Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, which I had recently devoured, was set in Morningside Heights, around the university, where Auster had also been a student. I began to formulate an escape plan. I would scam my way into a fully funded PhD programme, write a novel on the side, get my doctorate and return to India to continue a more meaningful kind of journalism. 

These things seemed, as they always do, deeply personal discoveries. But they were part of an ongoing shift in an entire generation of young people from the Third World, privileged enough to have an education, frustrated by stalled decolonisation and the new market forces sweeping through their nations, and yet dazzled by a globalisation that made the West suddenly appear that much closer.

But the material dazzle of globalisation, by itself, would simply have pulled me into the orbit of ‘making it’ financially, and moving into the elite status conferred by the green card and the US dollar. A part of me, undoubtedly, wanted that. But the examples of Said and Spivak, of Ambedkar and Hazarika, offered something more complex, something more desirable to people like me. This was the promise of prestige and security without selling out – the idea that one could move to the West and not abandon one’s soul.

I was hoping, like all migrant aspirants, to game the difference between West and East. A book deal, perhaps in US dollars, a fully funded degree on a campus with well-stocked libraries, and encounters with the other America that was represented, for me, by figures like Robeson. It was an incoherent assemblage, but it was what I had come up with.

It took me a year to cobble together enough money for the GRE and TOEFL tests, and even then I needed a last-minute intervention from my boss at the newspaper to get me a temporary passport that would allow me to sit the exams. Another year went by before I had enough money saved for the application fees to three universities – Columbia, NYU and SUNY Buffalo. I thought all three were in New York City. 

One night, after a long night shift on the news desk, I was interviewed on the phone by Spivak. She had read my application to Columbia and wanted to know who I would work with if I were accepted. Everything I had learned in India told me to say that I wanted her as my supervisor. But I decided to be honest. I said I wanted to study with Said. She asked me why. Again, well aware of the tortuous density of her post-structuralist prose, I said that much as I found Said’s ideas interesting, it was his prose style that I really loved. Spivak laughed and said she would recommend me for a fellowship.

My own desperation to leave surprised me. I didn’t have money for a plane ticket, but a kind editor in Delhi – Renuka Chatterjee – let me hold on to a book advance of ₹25,000. It was for a nonfiction book on India’s north-eastern borders, a project I abandoned when Columbia came through, but she would wait until I could pay her back from my university stipend. That still wasn’t enough for a ticket, and I contemplated selling a kidney on the black market for another ₹20,000. It had taken another kind person, an auntie working on the Air India counter in Calcutta, to see the desperation on my face and work out a complex itinerary that would get me a one-way ticket to New York for 25k. 

So it was that on a sweltering August morning, the day after the Air India flight dumped me at JFK, I found myself standing inside the campus of Columbia or, as it styled itself in all official communication, “Columbia University in the City of New York”. A replica of Rodin’s The Thinker squatted on a patch of lawn in front of Philosophy Hall, where the English department was located. I spent three years there, left to be a freelance writer in 2001, and returned again in 2005 to finish my degree when I was on the verge of becoming a father.

I remember a sunny day in 2006 when my toddler son was playing on that strip of grass under the Rodin replica, while I sat there with his mother. I had met her at the university. I had published two novels and was writing magazine pieces about the onslaught of neoliberalism and the Hindu right in India while trying to complete my PhD. Things were challenging, and yet, in that moment, it was possible to believe that all my dreams had come true, that my escape plan had succeeded better than I could have ever imagined. 

There was a kind of repressed grandeur about Columbia in the late 1990s – a compression of the colonial past, the rebellious counterculture of the 60s, and American modernity. I found no statue of Paul Robeson on campus, contrary to my expectations, but Butler, the main library, was as imposing as the National Library in Calcutta, and that had been the former palace of the governor-general of the East India Company.

I found it incomprehensible that there was no limit to the number of books I could check out. The same casual sense of infinite resources was visible in the clothes and manners of the faculty, then all tenured or tenure-track. I saw Said on the sidewalk one day, wearing an army field jacket over his suit. I took careful mental note of his sartorial style. Spivak treated me to lunch, unperturbed by my refusal to take her hugely popular Derrida and Marx classes.

Articulate and thoughtful in the classroom, the faculty were often generous outside. Graduate students like me were invited to lavish university apartments for end-of-semester drinks and dinners, the iron doors to the lobby always heavy, the uniformed doorman always imposing. I became friends with Bruce Robbins, a friendship that has outlasted my marriage. Franco Moretti, the Italian scholar with whom I did my master’s thesis, gave me his old desktop Mac when he discovered that I wrote all my papers in the computer lab. The department administrators, Joy Hayton and Sean Walsh, aware that I had no resources beyond the university stipend, from which I also sent my mother money every semester, threw as many odd jobs my way as they could.

Though my admiration for Said had steered me toward Columbia, I didn’t end up as one of his students. By then he was a beleaguered figure, worn down by leukaemia and repeated attacks for his writing and speaking about Palestinians. A graduate student I had become friends with in my first weeks, a soft-spoken Democrat from Oregon whose mother had warned him never to walk under New York scaffolding, saw me reading Said at the Hungarian Pastry Shop, a cheap hangout for Columbia students and neighbourhood eccentrics. “That guy makes my skin crawl,” he said.

One morning, I saw that the thick glass windowpane of the department office was disfigured by a spiderweb of cracks. A student from Yale had come looking for Said with a baseball bat. There was an FBI file on Said, and the rightwing Zionist magazine Commentary had dubbed him the “Professor of Terror”. I took the last graduate seminar he offered, which he co-taught with the philosopher Akeel Bilgrami. The room was packed, and among the students were a number of hijab-wearing women who were otherwise completely invisible on campus. He gave me an A- for my final paper. He liked what I had to write about colonialism. He was less enthused when I focused on class relations.

The faculty and department staff exemplified what I had imagined about the collegiality, resources and commitment to ideas at an American university. When I worked for Edward Mendelson as a teaching assistant in his Victorian literature course, he insisted on sharing grading duties with all us TAs. I took a course on a comparative study of empires with Mark Mazower, exactly the kind of class I fantasised about in India. Mazower, who found out that I was a writer, tracked down one of my novels and told me how much he liked it. Together, the faculty at Columbia gave me a confidence I hadn’t possessed in India. I began to feel special, a favoured child, and it is a feeling that still comes to me when I run into my former professors.

But figures like Said and Spivak, in their grandeur, unknowingly presented a false model of what was still possible in the American university. From them, I had assumed that one could think deeply about books and the world, talk back to the empire, and do so while still living comfortably. I hadn’t really considered that what was possible for academic celebrities in the 1990s wouldn’t be available in the future.

Among my American fellow students, there was an undercurrent of anxiety – about jobs, about healthcare, about housing – that I didn’t quite understand. Without the dense friendships that often sustained Global South students, they stood exposed, largely alone, to the inequities of the most expensive city in the world and a job market where the permanence of tenure and the significance of the humanities was fading fast. Born in America, they had an American measure of things, unlike me, dazzled by the fact that my stipend was more than twice what I had been paid at my best-remunerated newspaper job.

It was the Americans who initially helped me see the other Columbia. My girlfriend, a middle-class Jewish woman paying for her master’s degree in literature, had enormous student debt and was held back by that in a way that I wasn’t. Her credit cards were maxed out. She had no access to student housing, couldn’t afford a room on her own near campus and made an enormously long commute to Columbia from the edge of Queens. This was not the America projected to us overseas, and neither was this the American university we saw in India when stars like Spivak and Said visited.

I was struggling to live on the stipend of $900 a month. Around $600 went to Columbia for my furnished room. Admittedly, it was the nicest room I had ever had, with a window looking out onto 112th Street, and the luxuries of a desk, a chair and a phone. My flatmate, a business-school student who had graduated from West Point, mocked my studiousness. He was attending networking parties and getting laid. It was all he needed to do to get to Wall Street, he said, where he would make way more money than I ever would.

Legally restricted to on-campus jobs, and too cowardly to scramble for under-the-table cash gigs, I worked for the university at the minimum wage of $5.25 an hour. But I could never get more than 40 hours of legal work a week; Columbia didn’t want to pay me overtime. My first summer, without a stipend check and with only the minimum-wage job, I fell behind on my rent and duly received a letter from Columbia’s real estate office warning me of eviction.

The names of Greek and Roman philosophers might be carved on the neoclassical façade of Butler Library, named after the Columbia president who was a great admirer of the Nazis and Mussolini. In one of the cavernous reading rooms, there was a motto inscribed: “A Man is But What He Knoweth.” But that was a lie, that last word almost an anagram. The truth was simpler, had always been. “A Man is But What He Owneth.”

I did not realise how much of the world I aspired to join was dead or dying by the time I arrived at Columbia. Primarily, the idea that apprenticeship at the university might lead to a position of intellectual and economic freedom. In the cleverly marketed vision of the last decades of the twentieth century, the American university offered a life of esoteric conferences, sleeping around and personal lifestyle, the kind of thing made glamorous by campus satire novels like David Lodge’s Small World (1984) and magazines devoted to academic celebrities like Lingua Franca (1990-2001). How on earth did I know, while working minimum wage at Columbia, that the Milton scholar Stanley Fish drove a Jaguar to work at the University of Illinois at Chicago? Who is to say that deep down I wasn’t craving that, along with the freedom to write and think?

I left student housing after a year. Because Columbia was still in the early stages of its relentless expansion, there were pockets of escape uptown, amid the gargantuan blocks of low-income NYCHA housing and the overhead tracks of the 1 train. My girlfriend and I moved into an apartment with sloping floors and a pit bull chained up in the yard, across from a building with a polite drug crew known as the Blacktops gang.

This was Harlem, with liquor stores, storefront churches and a kind black landlord who was willing to overlook the fact that I had no credit history and that my girlfriend had terrible credit. That was when I truly began to understand that the romantic student life described by Auster – I remember devouring his Moon Palace from my room on 112th street, enthralled by the fact that the protagonist also lived on 112th street – was dead by the time I arrived, like the neighbourhood Chinese restaurant Auster’s novel was named after.

In hindsight, it is easy to see that what I thought of as a deeply personal choice, the desire to leave the reactionary confines of Indian journalism for the supposed freedom of the American university, was the result of what Marxists might call a conjuncture – a period of peak prestige for the American university when the end of the Soviet Union coincided with growing university endowments and the fashion for French theory, what Said himself described, in class, as “French wool gathering”.

Theory, in the classroom and outside it, was abstract, abstruse and jargon-ridden, split in infinite directions. It allowed people to cultivate a moral distance from capital and empire, with a great focus on performativity, but it had none of the capacity or energy of mass movements. Once interred in the tomb of the university, Marxism and post-colonialism were no match for capital and fascism, as Columbia has since demonstrated more than almost any other prestigious institution.

The image of academic life that drew me to Columbia was a distraction from what was actually under way: the complete subservience of the American university to wealth, power and empire. If the university was going to be run like a business, it needed badly paid workers, and in retrospect it is obvious that this was why people like me were given F1 visas, minuscule stipends, booklets on American culture and invitations on fancy letterheads.

Our brown and black faces, from postcolonial countries shattered by the Washington consensus, our cheap labour, and our work ethic, fed the adjunct labour pool that the universities wanted, even as tuition fees climbed higher, and the ambitious Americans who might have once become professors increasingly moved into well-paid administrative jobs. This was why so many students from the Global South were enticed to come to Columbia, until their presence became a problem and it was time to turn on them – and, after 7 October, to start turning them in.

The significance of my position became clear when I taught composition to first-year Columbia undergraduates. My own university degrees, subsidised by the Indian government, had never cost more than ₹300 a year, and here I was teaching students who were paying Columbia upwards of $50,000 annually, and who, for all their freshness, kneweth what they owneth.

Around the time that Columbia’s graduate students began their 15-year battle to form a union, I left the university to freelance and eke out a living as an independent writer. I returned to campus when my wife, exhausted by her soulless job and the demands of motherhood, wanted a break. We needed the measly health insurance provided by the university, a plan that excluded eye and dental care. My graduate stipend was barely enough for the apartment we rented in Washington Heights. I wrote book reviews to supplement the stipend, one a week, and it still wasn’t enough. When I got a position teaching creative writing at the undergraduate college of the New School, a supposedly progressive university in downtown Manhattan, I left Columbia again. This time it was for good.

The New School had been founded in the early twentieth century by pacifist Columbia faculty protesting its deep involvement with the American war machine. The names of John Dewey, Thorstein Veblen and Hannah Arendt were part of its appeal. In its lack of money, the rundown state of its classrooms and the chaotic employment models of its many competing divisions, the New School offered a contrast of sorts to the clinical environment of Columbia. But, as I quickly discovered, its grit was largely confined to the perpetually jammed photocopiers and moribund classroom technology. When I joined, its president was a former US Senator who had admitted to his involvement in killing unarmed civilians in Vietnam – and who has since turned up in the Epstein files, soliciting donations from the disgraced financier after his first stint in prison.

The New School was also intellectually stifling, and more claustrophobic than Columbia, because it had never internationalised beyond a devotion to German scholars, and never touched the idea of postcolonialism or the reality of a world beyond the West. Its intellectual flagship, the New School for Social Research, was ghastly in its whiteness. The same was true of the undergraduate college where I taught, its focus largely on virtue signalling and maximising tuition revenue. A British colleague who was evidently unimpressed with my work emailed me once testily to say that it was “a teaching college, not a writing college”, while another announced to me, apropos of nothing, that he didn’t “get” what all my public writing was about.

Still, I stayed. I was long divorced, but I stayed for love, as I had done before. I wanted to be back in India, which, for all the venality of Modi and the Hindu right, had pockets of intellectual freedom – spaces outside universities or newsrooms where ideas still mattered. I could go back to the north-east, to the mountains, where Hindu majoritarianism couldn’t assert itself as violently. Among writer and journalist colleagues, banished from the Indian mainstream but valiantly battling on, even after some of our comrades had been jailed, I could still have freewheeling conversations. I wondered if I should have left at all.

But I didn’t want to be separated by oceans and borders from my son. I could barely stand being more than a few blocks from his school and his mother’s apartment, and I moved back into Harlem, east of the Columbia campus. I went to India on extended research trips. There was no interest in my work at the New School, but for the most part I was left on my own to track India’s evolution into a violent, authoritarian oligarchy. I noticed the silence in the corporate university, whether Columbia or the New School, about what was happening in India and indeed in the rest of the world. But while the realities of India and the American university were unpleasant in different ways, there was a gap in between, a zone where I could do the writing and thinking about India that I hadn’t been able to do in India.

That gap vanished after 7 October. The rise of India’s oligarchic capitalism and its authoritarian right had become familiar to me over the decades that I had written about it. Now I began to find its echoes in America. The revised textbooks and syllabi trumpeting a make-believe past, the universities placed under a programme of top-down fiats and bottom-up police brutality, the media outlets circulating falsehoods, and a supine liberal class alternating between support for these processes and a self-preserving silence.

I had been disinvited from a family wedding so that I wouldn’t spoil it with my opinion of Modi. I had received my share of vilification and threats on social media. It shouldn’t have been surprising to me, then, that after 7 October, a colleague would suggest I was defending Hamas in response to one of my posts supporting student protesters, or that people attending my talks would lodge hate speech complaints and accuse me of erasing the Jews because I supported a boycott of Israeli institutions.

And yet I was surprised, perhaps for no greater reason than my need to maintain the illusion of a vestigial belief in free speech, facts and ideas. I had become a better writer and thinker by being here; in some sense, I had become a better person. It was hard to think that this was simply a question of the passage of time, and the individuals I had met, that it had nothing at all to do with the institutions where I had honed myself and my craft.

But soon Columbia would put up barricades, invite in ICE, and watch as its protesting, manacled students were sent to prison and deportation. In a perfect, symmetrical reversal, it would turn its back on the very programmes that had given it international prestige in the 1990s and embrace the Trump administration’s proposal to put the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies under supervision. The arc of post-colonialism bends, inevitably, towards the horizon of the big man with the gun watching over the natives.

I dream, often, of leaving. I sustained the dream of going back to India through marriage, divorce, parenthood. For nearly a quarter of a century, I refused to get an American passport, clinging, out of a stubborn Third Worldism, to my Indian passport and its myriad indignities. I caved in, during the first Trump regime, when he began cancelling green cards. It was the height of the pandemic, and my son was only 14. I couldn’t bear the thought that I might have to see him through a screen for the rest of my life, as many of us around the world were doing at that moment.

I dream, now even more than ever, of leaving. At work, I see the names of writers and scholars painted on the walls of an expensive café at the university – Edward Said, Marc Lamont Hill, Rupi Kaur, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Judith Butler. I doubt any of them would be allowed onto campus to speak about Palestine, and they would surely be accused of hate speech if they did. In silence, public and private universities around the country have caved in to the demands of Trump and Israel. Like the Hindu right, which used a twisted post-colonialism to push forward its violent, authoritarian agenda, the language of minority rights and diversity and inclusion has been weaponised in the US to protect Israel’s genocide from its critics.

The promise of the American university for people like me always rested on its contrast with the ruined state of our life-worlds, its resources and laconic freedom offering an alternative of sorts to the limited opportunities and increasing threats back home. That difference no longer exists in any meaningful form. You watch what you wear, think twice about what you say, here as anywhere. This is how empires collapse.

When I shared my disillusion with an American academic recently, she compared people like me to the Jewish subjects of the Habsburg empire – first-generation writers and scholars scrambling for purchase after the world that had produced them collapsed; multilingual, adept at moving between cultures, and yet without a home.

Some of the people I know in New York mock me for what they see as my fantasies of departure. Why would someone give up tenure, New York, the dream life? They still cling to the illusion that the empire that let us in for its own purposes will outlast the fate of all empires, that it will evade climate collapse, internal political violence and the grinding, painful end to the so-called rules-based order of the world. They believe that what we have seen of late is an aberration, that nowhere else is better.

Still, they may be right about me. In Calcutta, after I left college, when my refugee father died at 66 and the Babri Mosque was demolished to the sound of ringing temple bells, I dreamt often enough of returning to the north-east, of going back home. Of course, I didn’t. Instead, I went to Delhi. Instead, I came to Columbia. Instead, I kept moving.