Pakistan embraces military rule without martial law

New laws have created jurisdiction for the military to operate at both federal and provincial levels of government, with serious implications for Pakistan’s already precarious federation.
Strains between Malé and the atolls in the Maldives

Forced migration, “development” pressures, political neglect and the climate crisis have assailed the Maldives’ less-populous atolls, eroding the country’s identity and driving thousands to the capital

Manipur’s conflict has harsh lessons for all of India’s Northeast

Rampant ethnic chauvinism of the kind that has shattered Manipur’s civil society is ingrained in communities across the Northeast
How Southasia and Oman intertwined

In ‘Sovereigns of the Sea’, the histories of Omani sultans in the age of empire speak to the interconnectedness of Southasia, West Asia and East Africa
G20 summit in Delhi, new allegations on the Easter Sunday bombings, the return of Nawaz Sharif and more

September 2023 - Updates and analysis from around the region

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Sexual violence in Manipur, protests and repression in Bangladesh, Modi’s Paris visit and more

Crackdown on online publishers, debt restructuring in Pakistan and Sri Lanka, Nepal’s registration of same-sex marriages and more

Modi’s US visit, Pakistani migrant deaths in the Mediterranean, Myanmar’s flower strike and more

Banished and excluded: the Girmit of Fiji

The story of how the Empire’s forgotten slaves overcame the political legacy of colonialism.

From Himal Archives EXPLORE

Violence, voices and visibility

What are the ethical implications surrounding graphic depictions of sexual violence in the media?

| Jul 11, 2014

A politics subsumed

The life and times of Jogendranath Mandal.

| Apr 01, 2010

The pursuit of the Southasian past

Moving beyond the colonial-era understanding of the history of the Subcontinent gives us a whole new way of looking at the Subcontinent´s past. This now includes not just the usual explorations of politics and economy, …

| Jul 30, 2008

India’s indigenous drones

The Maobaadi prime minister

Damn Good Story

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Crisis in India’s bread basket

How agriculture, capital and corporate investment have reshaped Indian Punjab, and brought about its current precarity

Images of the two Punjabs, partitioned yet forever alike

A photographer’s journey through the Punjab in India and Pakistan shows a land and a people still tied together, despite Partition and the militarised border in between

‘Jawan’ treads with caution in an India on edge

Shah Rukh Khan and the director Atlee’s tedious blockbuster has a veneer of being political even as it bends to prevailing winds – and its gender bias does not help

Purse-seiners, trawlers, and the epic fight over fishing in Tamil Nadu

A ban on purse-seine fishing in Tamil Nadu has threatened thousands of fishers’ livelihoods – and they are refusing to give up without a fight

The Kashmir Walla and media freedom, Bhutan-China boundary talks, Aditya-L1 and more

September 2023 - Updates and analysis from around the region

Notes on Southasian photography beyond borders

Rahaab Allana’s 'Unframed' explores how lens-based practices confront the divided realities of Southasia, yet also point to the region’s overlaps and entanglements.

Balochistan’s deadly confluence of separatist insurgency and Islamist militancy

Baloch separatists and the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan are growing closer in Balochistan, threatening the Pakistan state and military as well as Chinese interests

The historic struggle for housing by Bengali migrants in London

Shabna Begum’s ‘From Sylhet to Spitalfields’ offers a searing history of Bengali squatters in 1970s East London, and a chilling reminder of how migrants continue to be treated by a hostile British state