Amandeep Sandhuਅਮਨਦੀਪ ਸੰਧੂ

Early life

Amandeep Sandhu was born in 1973 in Rourkela, Odisha, into a Sikh family — far from Punjab, in the steel city where his childhood took shape. That childhood, he has said, was built on ruins. His mother lived with schizophrenia — she was already schizophrenic, he later wrote, when he was born — and from boyhood Sandhu was both her son and her caregiver, learning early how illness bends a family's shape around it.

The family moved across India through his growing years — Orissa, Chhattisgarh, Punjab, Uttarakhand, Andhra Pradesh — before he eventually settled in Bengaluru, Karnataka, where he lives today. He took a master's degree in English Literature from the University of Hyderabad and then trained as a journalist, earning a Diploma in Journalism from the Asian School of Journalism.

Career

Sandhu worked first as a journalist and then as a technical writer, but it is as a writer of fiction and reportage that he found his register. His journalism — reviews, political commentary and reportage on Punjab — has appeared in The Caravan, The Hindustan Times, The Hindu, The Indian Express, Asian Age, Businessworld, Tehelka and Scroll.in. In 2013 he joined Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany, for a two-year fellowship, and in 2021 he was awarded the Homi Bhabha Fellowship for 2022–24. In 2025 he received a New India Foundation Book Fellowship for 2025–26 for his upcoming book, Keeping the Faith: Sikhs Who Live Outside Panjab, In India.

During the farmers' protests he wrote widely to translate, articulate and disseminate the movement's language in the press. He is also a rare open voice on mental health in Indian letters, writing frankly about his own two clinical diagnoses of depression and his years as his mother's caregiver.

Major works

His first novel, Sepia Leaves (2008), is semi-autobiographical: set in 1970s Rourkela during the Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi, it follows the young Appu growing up with a mother who has schizophrenia. Sandhu calls it a true story shaped as fiction — the events and emotional content honestly true — and it has been described as a cult classic in India, even reviewed in the Indian Journal of Psychiatry for its unflinching account of childhood under the shadow of mental illness.

Roll of Honour (2012), his second novel and also semi-autobiographical, sends Appu to a military boarding school in the fictional town of Jassabad in Punjab in 1984, tracing a Sikh boy's divided loyalties during the Khalistan movement and Operation Blue Star. It was nominated for The Hindu Prize for Best Fiction in 2013 and was translated into Punjabi by Daljit Ami as Gwah De Fanah Hon Ton Pahilan.

In 2019 came his first work of non-fiction, Panjab: Journeys Through Fault Lines, the product of three years of travel across the state, combining reportage, memoir and history against the backdrop of the Green Revolution, the Emergency, the Punjab insurgency and the present. It was longlisted for the NIF-Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay Award 2020 and shortlisted for the Atta Galatta–Bangalore Literature Festival Non-Fiction Prize 2020, and has since been republished by Penguin Random House; its Punjabi translation appeared in 2022. His e-book Bravado to Fear to Abandonment (2020) examines mental health during the COVID-19 lockdown.

Legacy

Sandhu writes with what critics call a triangulation of memoir, history and reportage. Sepia Leaves remains one of the few Indian novels to treat schizophrenia from inside a family that lives with it, and Panjab is among the most-read recent English accounts of the state's disquiet. His insistence on speaking plainly about mental illness — his own and his mother's — has made him one of Indian literature's most visible mental-health advocates.