Hello reader,
I’m so happy to see the return of many well-known and well-loved Southasian literary figures this season. Kiran Desai, after a hiatus of nearly two decades, is back with a love story that spans decades and continents; and Arundhati Roy’s long-awaited memoir has us all hooked at the moment (watch this space for a forthcoming review). The reception, however, has been complicated: readers have criticised Roy for publishing with Penguin and promoting the book in the New York Times, a platform that sits uneasily with her long-standing opposition to Israel’s occupation and genocidal assault on Palestine.
In case you missed it, a review in Himal’s pages recently contributed to the alleged war criminal Wasantha Karannagoda’s memoir being withdrawn from sale and Penguin India terminating his publishing contract. That’s the power of Himal’s independent criticism! Read more about this in my last newsletter here. And to keep this work going, please become a paying Himal Patron today.
I’d also love to hear about what you’re currently reading and your thoughts on Arundhati Roy’s new book. As always, you can reach me at shwethas@himalmag.com.
In 1971, during the nine-month war that gave Bangladesh its independence from West Pakistan, the Pakistan Army carried out a brutal crackdown against Bengalis in which hundreds of thousands of women were detained and repeatedly brutalised.
Set against the final weeks of the Liberation War in Bangladesh, Saima Begum’s debut novel The First Jasmines (Hajar Press, July 2025) follows two sisters, Lucky and Jamila, who are captured and imprisoned by the Pakistan military.
Through their story, Begum writes the birangona women back into a history from which they had been largely erased. The novel brings to light the experiences of the women who endured unimaginable violence and injustices in 1971 and its invisible aftermath – women whose voices have largely been excluded from national memory and popular narratives.
Tune in to our conversation on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Youtube.
Why did Penguin India publish Wasantha Karannagoda, alleged war criminal?
The sanctioned former Sri Lankan navy chief’s memoir contains potential admissions relevant to alleged crimes committed during the country’s civil war, and raises serious questions of publisher accountability
By Frances Harrison
Prison diaries
Between June 2018 and October 2020, 16 people were arrested, accused of inciting violence during a riot and of being part of a conspiracy to assassinate India’s prime minister Narendra Modi. The arrests occurred despite the lack of credible evidence. The 16 individuals, who came to be called the BK-16, had all been working towards social justice causes, specifically on issues affecting Adivasis, Dalits and Muslims across India.
The public intellectual, scholar and activist Anand Teltumbde entered the Taloja Central Prison in Mumbai as accused number 10 in the Bhima Koregaon case and spent over 30 months in prison in pre-trial detention before being released on bail. In The Cell and the Soul: A Prison Memoir (Bloomsbury Publishing, September 2025) Teltumbde exposes a state that criminalises dissent through imprisonment and the cost of speaking truth to power, laying bare the realities and injustices within India’s carceral system.
🎙️ State of Southasia podcast: A conversation with the social anthropologist Alpa Shah on the Bhima Koregaon case and India’s democratic decline.
In February 2010, the journalist-activist Seema Azad and her partner Vishwa Vijai were forcibly arrested under the draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, charged with sedition and “waging war against the State”. Across two and a half years of incarceration, Azad kept a jail diary, documenting the grim realities of life behind bars, documenting life behind bars, the deeply entrenched caste and gender hierarchies, and the relentless indignities of a system rife with bribery and exploitation. In Unsilenced: The Jail Diary of an Activist, translated from the Hindi by Shailza Sharma (Speaking Tiger, August 2025), Azad documents the struggles of the women prisoners she meets – mostly Dalit, Adivasi and Muslim – and the children who have never seen the outside world, alongside her own legal battles, courtroom absurdities and media vilification, culminating in a life sentence and an unexpected release.
📜 From the Himal Archives: A special series unpacking carceral systems in Southasia.
The Finest Hotel in Kabul
The Intercontinental Hotel, Afghanistan’s first luxury hotel, opened in 1969. Its former glamour may have faded, but the Intercontinental has remained a potent symbol: those who rule Kabul rule Afghanistan, and those who rule Kabul rule the Intercontinental. Today, the hotel is under Taliban control, following their return to Kabul in August 2021.
The BBC’s chief international correspondent Lyse Doucet first checked into the Intercontinental in Kabul in 1988. Over fifty years on, the hotel is still standing and has witnessed a Soviet occupation, multiple coups, a brutal civil war, the US invasion and the Taliban’s rise, fall and return. In her new book, The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People’s History of Afghanistan (Penguin, September 2025), Doucet collects the stories of the Afghans who have kept the hotel running to craft a people’s history of their country.
📜 From the Himal archives: In Taran N Khan’s essay on the many obstacles of videography in an Afghan wedding hall, there’s a brief glimpse into how Kabul’s elite favoured the Intercontinental Hotel for weddings in the 1970s.
Queer histories
Before the British colonised the Subcontinent, India was largely protofeminist and queer. Forbidden Desire: How the British Stole India’s Queer Pasts and Queer Futures by Sindhu Rajasekaran (Simon & Schuster India, September 2025) shows how people across its society explored gender and sexuality in countless ways. To Victorian eyes, this was scandalous. The Empire relentlessly curtailed women’s sexual freedom and suppressed sexual minorities, branding any desire outside the heteronormative as deviant.
Colonial laws and new social codes targeted sexually agentive women and queer communities alike. Nautch dancers, courtesans, trans and queer persons – even ascetics – were classified as “sexual deviants”. Old prejudices were fused with Victorian moralism, reshaping India’s attitudes toward sex for generations. Forbidden Desire works to reclaim this past, showing how colonial laws and social codes buried centuries of India’s queer histories.
📜 From the Himal archives: Jessica Hinchy unpacks the long history of criminalising Hijras.
Writing Indian cinema
In The Maker of Filmmakers: How Jagat Murari and FTII Changed Indian Cinema Forever (Penguin, September 2025), Radha Chadha offers an intimate portrait of her father, the celebrated documentary filmmaker Jagat Murari, and the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), the iconic school he built. FTII trained a generation of top talent in the industry and played a key role in fuelling the Indian New Wave.
The Revolution of Indian Parallel Cinema in the Global South (1968–1995): From Feminism to Iconoclasm by Omar Ahmed (Bloomsbury Publishing, February 2025) traces the origins, evolution, decline and legacy of a film movement that produced a pantheon of innovative filmmakers and a distinctly regional visual identity. Importantly, the book examines the ways in which Parallel Cinema narrated a new “history from below” in India.
The Emergency of 1975 to 1977, with its suspension of civil liberties, censorship and extra-judicial state control, remains one of the most tumultuous periods in the history of postcolonial India. Yet its impact on cinema remained largely unexplored. Cinema and the Indian National Emergency: Histories and Afterlives edited by Parichay Patra and Dibyakusum Ray (July 2025, Bloomsbury Academic) tackles the fraught relationship between the state and the Indian film industry during era, highlighting the various modes of state suppression, censorship and surveillance of film productions.
Turning to contemporary cinema, Screening Precarity: Hindi Cinema and Neoliberal Crisis in Twenty-first Century India by Megha Anwer and Anupama Arora (University of Michigan Press, September 2025) explores how Hindi films mediate social precarity, revealing both the pressures of modern India and the social life of movies themselves.
Until next time, happy reading!
Shwetha Srikanthan
Associate Editor, Himal Southasian
💌 Are there any new books, authors or events you would like to see featured? I would love to hear from you. Please write to me at shwethas@himalmag.com.
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