Hello reader,
We’re excited to announce our very first Southasia Review of Books giveaway! Two lucky winners will receive a copy of the writer and filmmaker Alina Gufran’s No Place to Call My Own (Westland, January 2025). To enter, simply listen to our latest SaRB podcast episode with Alina and take the short quiz below.
📅 Deadline: 29 July 2025
🎁 Two winners will be selected at random from all correct entries
👇🏽 Click below to take the quiz and enter the giveaway
Alina Gufran’s No Place to Call My Own seethes with a quiet anger of our times, tracing a young woman’s search for self and belonging amid the restless anxieties of adulthood in urban India.
As the protagonist Sophia navigates life and painful self-discovery across cities, the novel tackles issues related to class, religion and economic precarity. Unfolding against the backdrop of the #MeToo movement, the 2020 Delhi riots, and a global pandemic, the story also questions what it means to fit in when apathy becomes a mode of survival.
Tune in to the conversation with Alina Gufran on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Youtube.
Tsering Döndrup’s defiant reckoning with Tibet’s legacy of violence
The uncompromising writer’s English translator reflects on how Tsering Döndrup’s banned ‘The Red Wind Howls’ reckons with China’s erasure of Tibet’s suffering while reclaiming Tibetans’ right to critique their own culture and history
By Christopher Peacock | 11 July 2025
The present and deep past of anti-caste speculative fiction
‘The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF’ demonstrates the power of speculative and science fiction as instruments of the anti-caste struggle in Southasia, and these genres’ connections to the wide traditions of Dalit and Adivasi literature
By Sreyartha Krishna | 15 July 2025
Celebrating Southasian writing and ideas
Huge congratulations to the writer and educator Zara Chowdhary, who has been named the 2025 Shakti Bhatt Prize winner for her debut memoir, The Lucky Ones (Context, September 2024).
Chowdhary’s memoir is a reckoning with this past that feels all too present today. It is about the refusal to allow the violence that tore Gujarat apart in 2002, to be forgotten or repeated. It is the rebellion of a young Muslim woman who insists she will belong to her country, family, and faith on her own terms.
🎧Revisit our SaRB podcast conversation with Zara Chowdhary on The Lucky ones and surviving the violence of the 2002 Gujarat pogrom.
New translations
The Hunger that Moved a Goddess and Other Short Stories by Endapalli Bharathi, translated from Telugu by V B Soumya (SouthSide Books, July 2025), offers an intimate and unflinching portrait of women’s lives in a Telugu-speaking community. Bharathi’s stories trace the rhythms of rural life through the voices of women who both sustain and challenge the world around them, bringing forward a perspective often overlooked in Southasian Dalit literature.
Graphic narratives on India’s forests and fields
Ita Mehrotra’s Uprooted: A Graphic Account of the Struggle for Forest Rights (Context, July 2025) traces the lives and resistance of the Van Gujjars and Taungyas communities of Uttarakhand’s Terai region, as they navigate displacement, state hostility, and exclusionary conservation and development policies.
Mehrotra draws and documents the changing relationship that the communities have with the forests around them, and the larger histories of colonial extraction and of forest rights laws. Uprooted also asks what it means to belong to an environment under threat, and how new generations of the community are reshaping their long-running struggles for justice.
Our Rice Tastes of Spring by Anumeha Yadav, and illustrated by Spitting Image, (Red Panda/Westland, July 2025) is a visual ode to heirloom rice, traditional farming practices and the ties between land and community in Jharkhand’s Chhota Nagpur region. Centred on the story of Jinid’s family, it captures a way of life rooted in seasonal rhythms and ancestral knowledge, where each rice variety was chosen for its ability to thrive in a specific terrain or climate. But as market forces push promises of profit and uniformity, the community confronts the cost of abandoning their slow-grown, nutrient-rich rice for faster yields and polished grains.
Reckoning and revolution in Myanmar
Reproducing Revolution: Women’s Labor and the War in Kachinland (Cornell University Press, July 2025) by Jenny Hedström offers an account of the Kachin revolution in northern Myanmar from the perspective of female soldiers, activists, and women displaced by the conflict. Hedström argues that the household and women’s everyday labour is not separate from the battlefield, but deeply entwined with it as a gendered, political and militarised space.
Written during Myanmar’s Spring Revolution, Mandy Moe Pwint Tu’s poetry collection, Fablemaker (Gaudy Boy, September 2025) contends with the sudden death of her father, the country’s violent return to junta rule, and her effective exile to the United States. Drawing on Burmese folktales and letters to a “dear fellow fablemaker”, Mandy weaves together grief, belonging and hope, and reckons with the systems that failed the speaker’s father and her nation.
Together, these books shed light on how women’s lives are shaped by resistance, exile and war, and how their voices and actions are central to the revolution in Myanmar.
🌿📚Champaca Bookstore 2025 Reading Retreat
19–22 September 2025 | Olaulim Backyards, Goa
Join Champaca Bookstore for the second edition of their Reading Retreat, returning to the Olaulim village in Goa – this time with a focus on nature writing! Curated and facilitated by Thejaswi Shivanand, the three-day retreat offers a space to immerse yourself in reading, reflection and conversation.
Until next time, happy reading!
Shwetha Srikanthan
Associate Editor, Himal Southasian
💌 Are there any authors, events or new books you would like to see featured? Thoughts and suggestions? I would love to hear from you. Please write to me at shwethas@himalmag.com.
📚 Read past editions of the SaRB newsletter and dive further into Himal’s Books coverage.
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