ਅਮਨਦੀਪ ਸੰਧੂਅਮਨਦੀਪ ਸੰਧੂ

Amandeep Sandhu (born 1973) is an Indian novelist and journalist who writes in English, born in Rourkela, Odisha, into a Punjabi Sikh family and now based in Bengaluru. His semi-autobiographical novels Sepia Leaves (2008) and Roll of Honour (2012), and his non-fiction book Panjab: Journeys Through Fault Lines (2019), examine mental illness in a family, the divided loyalties of 1984, and the agrarian, ecological and social strains of modern Punjab, in writing that mixes memoir, history and reportage.

Early life in Rourkela

Sandhu was born in 1973 in Rourkela, the steel city in Odisha, where his father worked at the steel plant. His mother lived with schizophrenia, and he has said she was already unwell when he was born, so from boyhood he was both her son and, in practical ways, her caregiver. The home was unsettled: he was sent to a hostel at the age of six, brought back at seven, sent to live with relatives at nine, and then to boarding school, at a time when Punjab was entering its years of militancy. In a 2024 interview with Tint Journal he described growing up at the crossing of four languages, Punjabi at home, a carer's Sambalpuri Odia, Hindi in the streets and playgrounds of a town built for workers from across India, and English at school, and said he has no single first language.

The family moved across India through his growing years, through Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Punjab, Uttarakhand and Andhra Pradesh, before he eventually settled in Bengaluru, Karnataka. 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. Before books, he worked in varied jobs he has listed himself, from farm hand and shop assistant to teacher, journalist with The Economic Times, and technical writer with technology companies.

Work as a journalist and writer

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 reviews, political commentary and reportage on Punjab have appeared in The Caravan, The Hindustan Times, The Hindu, The Indian Express, Asian Age, Businessworld, Tehelka and Scroll.in. He has spoken at Sahitya Akademi conferences and at colleges, universities and literature festivals, and reviewers describe his method as a triangulation of memoir, history and reportage: the personal story is told plainly, then set against the record and the reporting around it.

During the farmers' protests of 2020 to 2021 he wrote widely to translate, articulate and disseminate the movement's language in the English language press, a role he told Tint Journal grew organically after magazines such as The Caravan asked him to cover the protests. He is also one of the few Indian writers to speak openly and repeatedly about mental health, writing frankly about his mother's schizophrenia, his years as her caregiver, and his own two clinical diagnoses of depression.

Major works

His first novel, Sepia Leaves (2008), published by Rupa, is semi-autobiographical. Set in 1970s Rourkela during the Emergency, it follows the young Appu growing up with a mother who has schizophrenia. Sandhu has said the first draft ran to 600 pages, that he found the book's structure on the night his father died, with the body still in the house, and that editing pruned it to about 185 pages. Akademie Schloss Solitude notes that the novel is now considered a cult classic among students of psychology, mental health partners and caregivers in India, that it has been mentioned at the WHO, and that it has been used as a reference text for the national mental health policy. The Indian Journal of Psychiatry reviewed it for its account of childhood lived 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, Operation Blue Star and its aftermath, including the bullying and violence inside the school. Sandhu told an interviewer it was the harder book to write, because it dealt with a school, a community and a nation at odds, over one of the bloodiest decades in Punjab. It was shortlisted 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 more than three years of travel across the state that began, he told The Hindu BusinessLine, not as a book at all but as an attempt to understand a region his family came from and he did not. Its 16 chapters each carry a Punjabi word as a title, from Satt, meaning wound, through Berukhi, apathy, Rosh, anger, Rog, illness, Paani, water, Zameen, land, Karza, loan, and Jaat, caste, to Janamdin, birthday, and together they work through agrarian distress, water and land, faith, caste, education, drugs and the border. The book opens with verses by the Sufi poet Baba Farid and with a photograph, taken after Operation Blue Star, of people on the Ramgarhia Bunga in Amritsar looking down at the damaged Akal Takht. It was longlisted for the NIF Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay Award 2020 and shortlisted for the Atta Galatta Bangalore Literature Festival Non-Fiction Prize 2020, has been republished by Penguin Random House, and its Punjabi translation appeared in 2022. A revised edition added a chapter on the 2020 to 2021 farmers' struggle. His e-book Bravado to Fear to Abandonment (2020) examines mental health during the COVID-19 lockdown.

Honours, fellowships and later work

In 2013 Sandhu joined Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany, for a fellowship that ran to 2015, working there on a planned novel about memorials and migrations. He was later awarded the Homi Bhabha Fellowship for 2022 to 2024, and in 2025 a New India Foundation Book Fellowship for 2025 to 2026 for his next book, Keeping the Faith: Sikhs Who Live Outside Panjab, In India, about Sikh communities in India outside Punjab, a subject that follows naturally from a childhood spent as a Sikh growing up in Odisha.

What is Amandeep Sandhu best known for?

Amandeep Sandhu is best known for Panjab: Journeys Through Fault Lines (2019), his three year journey through modern Punjab, and for Sepia Leaves (2008), one of the few Indian novels to write about schizophrenia from inside the family living with it. Together with Roll of Honour (2012), the books form a single arc: a son trying to understand his mother, a schoolboy trying to understand 1984, and a traveller trying to understand the Punjab his family left behind.

Legacy

Sandhu's place in Indian writing rests on candour as much as craft. He writes about subjects that are often kept private or partisan, mental illness in the family, the wounds of 1984, caste, water and farm debt in Punjab, and treats them first as lived experience and only then as argument. For Punjabi readers raised outside Punjab, in Rourkela, Bengaluru or abroad, his books offer a way back that does not pretend the homecoming is simple: in his own words to Tint Journal, home is in our stories, the stories in which we survive.