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We should be asking who is the Manu or Chanakya of Indian academia.
Top Gen X intellectuals: Lawrence Liang, Shamnad Basheer, Sudhir Krishnaswamy,
Top Gen Y intellectuals: Tarunabh Khaitan, Gautam Bhatia, Anup Surendranath
Top Gen Z intellectuals: Hmmmm...Yet to come?
[...]
Established rockstars: Tarunabh Khaitan, Prabha Kotiswaran, Lawrence Liang, Vrinda Grover
Emerging rockstars: Saptarishi Bandopadhyay, Gautam Bhatia, Arghya Sengupta, Abhinav Chandrachud, Shubhankar Dam, Prabhash Ranjan, Anup Surendranath
Future rockstars: Arushi Garg, Raag Yadava, Sanya Samtani, Rohin Bhat, Anupriya Dhonchak
a) Public intellectuals write their best work in general publications for a general audience, while academics write their best work in academic journals for a narrow specialist audience.
b) By virtue of a), public intellectuals are more widely read and recognised
c) Public intellectuals have a greater impact on policy and practice
1. People who are very active on social media (e.g. Gautam Bhatia, Karuna Nundy, Sanjoy Ghose, Rohin Bhat)
2. People who write mainly for newspapers (e.g. Lawrence Liang, Arghya Sengupta)
3. People who have written a book which mainly summarises case law and does not advance original research in the true sense (e.g. books by Abhinav Chandrachud and Gautam Bhatia on the constitution)
I have nothing against such people and respect them for trying to discuss legal issues in simple language for the public. But I do not think they should be regarded as eminent jurists or scholars until they publish articles/books
that advance original and creative jurisprudential ideas. Furthermore, the journals should be top-quality peer reviewed journals (which is typically the case anyway, as no one will send articles with genius ideas to crap journals). So it's really RP Anand, Upendra Baxi and BS Chimni who are the gold standard among Indians to aspire to. Tarunabh Khaitan and Prabha Kotiswaran belong here too, but it's probably better to include them after 10-20 years.
The world has come a long way since analytical positivism of the HART/ Raz variety. Recent advances in legal theory take place in the critical legal theory realm- a Kimberley Crenshaw or an Ambedkar in the Indian context have said far more interesting things about the law than most of the folks named on this list.
But let's examine this more closely
So, depends on a number of factors.
If you're talking about intellectuals who deal primarily in first principled arguments and maybe jurisprudents in that regard, especially when it comes to the strength of their assertions, the first name that'd spring to mind is Chhatrapati Singh. I would contend that his work is much better than Hart's work will ever be. But then again he's no more so I guess that wouldn't qualify as "today's academia".
If you're talking about scholars who influence the law in the way the mentioned have, the answer would be none. Nobody has done that sort of work in India or maybe even abroad for that matter.
Or if you're talking about the mere popularity of their work, even then nobody has the status of that of Hart.
So, based on all these factors it would appear that our intuition is right. Nobody today has the status of Hart or Dworkin and appears like nobody will in the near future.
However, it must be stated that there is a lot of scholarship from India that is great in it's own regard. The mere fact that they're not like Heart or Dworkin doesn't take anything away from their work.
1. Tarunabh Khaitan: Has come up with a novel theory of discrimination law (awarded the Letten Prize for it)
2. Lawrence Liang: Founder of the Copyleft theory/movement (awarded the Infosys Prize for it)
3. Karuna Nundy: Has made a novel argument that rape can also be committed by a husband against wife, i.e. marital rape (named in the Time 100 list for that)
Here is a famous article from 1983 on marital rape: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/493988
Here is one from 1977, when Karuna Nandy would have been less than a year old: https://www.jstor.org/stable/581754