Hello reader,
In a recent conversation on the Southasia Review of Books podcast, the writer Jerry Pinto captured something essential about translation: “Language is our best opportunity to understand what other people are like, what other people think, what other people’s lives are like, and we can’t squander that opportunity.”
It’s a lovely way to think about translation – as both the movement of words from one language into another and as an act of reaching across distances that might otherwise be impossible. Stories travel differently through translation, and in a region as linguistically diverse (yet increasingly fragmented) as Southasia, that kind of literary crossing is especially urgent.
This is also something we care deeply about at Himal, particularly through our annual Fiction Fest, which creates space for new Southasian writing and translation to find readers across borders.
So I’m thrilled to share that Himal’s Fiction Fest 2026 will run from 8 to 19 June, featuring six original translations of Southasian fiction. This year’s online launch event, organised in partnership with the Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation, will feature a conversation with the International Booker Prize-winning writer and translator Deepa Bhasthi and the scholar, poet and translator Parwana Fayyaz. The winner of the 2026 Armory Square Prize will also be announced at the event.
Click the link here to register, and I hope you’ll join us in celebrating of Southasian fiction in translation.
Himal’s independent regional journalism – the kind that spotlights translation, literary exchange and critical conversation across Southasia – is made possible by readers like you. Your support helps these stories travel further, so if you value this work, please consider becoming a paying Himal Patron today.
Are there any questions on translating Southasian literature that you’d like us to explore during the Fiction Fest? Send them my way at shwethas@himalmag.com.
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A conversation with the award-winning writer and journalist on the surprising origins of Aadhaar, the afterlives of the 2020 Delhi violence, and the people still resisting India’s majoritarian turn
Myanmar’s Spring Revolution: Students, Higher Education and Political Change by Marie Lall and Ikuko Okamoto (UCL Press, May 2026) examines the youth-led resistance movement that emerged after Myanmar’s 2021 military coup. Focusing on students and academics involved in both protest movements and alternative education initiatives, the book explores how the Spring Revolution has evolved into a broader struggle over the country’s political future.
🎧 From the Himal podcast archives: Ma Thida, one of Myanmar’s foremost activists and intellectuals, discusses the country’s political trajectory leading up to and beyond the 2021 coup – and the people’s enduring fight for democracy.
Weaponised Pluralism: The Far Right and Minority Recruitment in India by Felix Pal (Manchester University Press, May 2026) examines why far-right movements recruit from the very minorities they marginalise. Drawing on his time with the Muslim wing of the Hindu far right in India, Pal unpacks the strategic use of progressive performances to legitimise exclusionary politics. Grounded in the Indian context but reaching far beyond it, the book connects these dynamics to examples ranging from Palestinian soldiers in the Israeli army to Black Republican candidates in the United States.
The problem of how majoritarian politics takes root also run through Heartland Rising: The Making of Majoritarian India by Javed Gaya (Context, May 2026). Tracing contemporary Indian majoritarianism back to the upheavals of Partition and the constitutional debates of the 1940s, Gaya examines the fragility of constitutional safeguards and the rewriting of history in service of exclusionary nationalism.
🎧 From the Himal podcast archives: Felix Pal in conversation with Christophe Jaffrelot, Tanika Sarkar and Harsh Mander about his six-year-long research into the RSS and its affiliates.
What did it mean to be Goan in the shifting imperial world of 19th-century East Africa? In Guts, Glory and Empire: The Epic Story of Goans in Zanzibar, 1865-1910 (Speaking Tiger, May 2026), Selma Carvalho chronicles the rise of a Goan community in Zanzibar during the height of imperial expansion in the Indian Ocean. Following lives shaped by migration, trade and colonial rule, the book explores how Goans navigated the unstable terrain of race, citizenship and empire. In the process, Carvalho restores Southasian voices to broader histories of the Indian Ocean world.
📖 From the Himal archives: An interview with the historian Sujit Sivasundaram on his book, Waves Across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire.
The Penguin Masters: The Treasury of Ruskin Bond (Penguin India, May 2026) gathers together some of Ruskin Bond’s most beloved writings, from Rusty’s adventures and childhood recollections to personal essays shaped by memory, solitude and the rhythms of hill-station life. Spanning decades of work, the anthology revisits the quiet, intimate storytelling that has made Bond one of Southasia’s most enduring literary figures – attentive to small pleasures, old friendships and beauty in ordinary life.
Set between Washington DC and Istanbul, No God but Us by Bobuq Sayed (Harper/Hajar Press, May 2026) follows two queer Afghan men navigating exile and intimacy at the margins of society. Told through alternating perspectives, the novel moves through queer communities, migrant precarity and political repression while asking what freedom and belonging might mean in an increasingly hostile world.
In Uprising (Canongate Books / Scribner, May 2026), Tahmima Anam turns to a sinking island off the coast of Bangladesh, where children narrate the lives of women trapped in cycles of violence and exploitation. When a newly arrived woman refuses to submit to the island’s brutal order, the novel transforms into a story of collective resistance and female revolt.
The Man from Kashmir by Muddasir Ramzan (Bloomsbury, May 2026) unfolds through interconnected stories set in the fictional town of Poshmarg, where folklore, militarisation and dystopian futures bleed into each other. Using myths and memories, the novella captures the fragmented texture of life in Kashmir with imaginative force.
In Register Me as Kulbhushan, translated from the Hindi by John Vater (Penguin India, May 2026), Alka Saraogi revisits histories of Partition and migration through the wandering life of a man drifting through Kolkata in search of himself. Moving between East Bengal, Marwari households and the violence surrounding the Bangladesh Liberation War, the novel offers an expansive meditation on belonging.
Slow Burn by Amal Singh (Penguin India, May 2026) reimagines Mumbai through the story of a lapsed actor who slips into an alternate version of the city where he has become a film superstar. Blending speculative fiction with a darker portrait of ambition and celebrity, the novel explores the seductive illusions of success and the uneasy questions of failure.
In Just Being (Seagull Books, May 2026), Romila Thapar reflects on the people, ideas and experiences that shaped her long career as a historian of Southasia. Spanning her childhood in British India, her years studying in London, travels across archaeological sites in Asia and the making of the Centre for Historical Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, the memoir situates a personal life within larger political and intellectual histories. Along the way, Thapar returns to a topic that has animated much of her work: how rigorous engagement with the past might help shape a more thoughtful present.
📖 From the Himal archives: Romila Thapar on how moving beyond the colonial-era understanding of the history of the Subcontinent gives us a whole new way of looking at the region’s past.
Queer India Now, edited by Dhrubo Jyoti and Dhamini Ratnam (Queer Directions, May 2026), brings together essays, testimonies and reflections on what it means to live as part of the LGBTQIA+ community in India today. Spanning courtrooms, hospitals, police stations, nightlife and the arts, the anthology documents the everyday negotiations of identity, caste, labour, dignity and visibility in a society that remains deeply shaped by heteronormativity.
📖 From the Himal archives: Rahul Rao considers why same-sex marriage has come to anchor queer politics in India, and how Southasian queer life shifts across local, diasporic and transnational worlds.
Homes without Windows by Chandu Maheria, translated by Hemang Ashwinkumar (Juggernaut Books, May 2026), charts Maheria’s journey from the working-class chawls of Ahmedabad to a life shaped by reading, writing and anti-caste activism. A major voice in Gujarati Dalit literature, Maheria reflects on the everyday violence of caste prejudice alongside the turbulent social world of 1980s Gujarat, marked by communal violence and anti-reservation protests. Grounded in memories of family and survival, the memoir also charts the intellectual and political formation of a writer deeply engaged with debates on social justice.
📖 From the Himal archives: Hemang Ashwinkumar traces how Dalpat Chauhan, an unsung giant of Gujarati literature, fought to reclaim a Dalit history, identity and idiom resistant to Gujarat’s exclusivist politics and pride.
What would it take to unlearn the colonial structures that continue to shape which books travel across languages, and which do not? Violent Phenomena: Essays Toward the Future of Literary Translation (HarperCollins, May 2026), edited by Kavita Bhanot and Jeremy Tiang, brings together translators from across the world to rethink literary translation through the lens of identity and decolonisation. Rejecting older ideals of translator “neutrality”, the contributors instead foreground translators’ voices, politics and cultural locations as central to the act of translation itself. Featuring essays by writers and translators including Yogesh Maitreya, Onaiza Drabu and Sawad Hussain, the volume asks what a more politically conscious future for translation might look like.
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’d love to hear from you. Write to me at shwethas@himalmag.com.
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