Hello reader,
This week, we’re coming to you with a sharp new piece on the journalist, novelist and screenwriter Manu Joseph and his latest book, Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us, a non-fiction discourse on the ills of the Indian elite.
The writers Diya Isha and Huzaifa Omair Siddiqi unpack how Joseph, once a novelist of unsentimental insight, now writes as a prophet of “common sense”. Their essay traces how his fiction thrives on ambiguity and contradiction, but his non-fiction collapses these into a brittle moral certainty that flattens caste, inequality and power.
“The contrarian has become a recognisable figure within the system he claims to resist. No matter how hard Joseph tries to convince us he is a truth-teller, he is now a merchant of delusions.”
The essay also touches on a larger shift in Indian journalism – the journalist becoming the journalism, as Joseph’s own columns make clear. Much of what passes as “news” now shades into opinion and often stripped of context, circulating as quick takes rather than sustained inquiry.
And at Himal, this is precisely the kind of drift we try to push against. If you value independent, regionally grounded criticism, please consider supporting us. It’s what allows us to keep publishing work that asks difficult questions.
If you read the piece, I’d love to hear what you make of it. Write to me at shwethas@himalmag.com.
The sound and fury of Manu Joseph
How Manu Joseph’s ‘Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us’ falls short in diagnosing the ills of liberal India, and how the novelist turned provocateur has lost his way
By Diya Isha and Huzaifa Omair Siddiqi
Himal Interviews: Anand Teltumbde on B R Ambedkar and the limits of iconisation
Anand Teltumbde challenges the hagiography surrounding B R Ambedkar, calling for a more nuanced reassessment in view of the ongoing oppression of Dalits in India today
On the Buddha’s Trail in Bangladesh (Rupa Publications, April 2026) by Sunita Dwivedi follows a long journey that begins in Kushinagar and loops through Afghanistan, Central Asia, China and Tibet before turning toward Bengal and its overlooked eastern corridors. Tracing the routes that once linked Bengal to Tibet and southern China, the book maps not just circuits of trade but the movement of monks, scholars and texts that fed the region’s Buddhist monasteries.
Moving through present-day Bangladesh, it pieces together this older landscape through ruins and remains, from Somapura at Paharpur and Mainamati–Lalmai to lesser-known sites across the country. What emerges is a portrait of Buddhism’s past in Bangladesh that survives only in fragments today.
In 2002, a group of women from a feudal belt in Uttar Pradesh set out to publish a local newspaper. Over the next two decades, that paper – Khabar Lahariya – expanded across regions and formats, eventually becoming India’s first hyperlocal digital news channel run entirely by women.
In The Good Reporter: A Memoir of Journalism in the 21st Century (Simon & Schuster India, April 2026) turns that story inward. Ten of its journalists piece together a collective memoir, tracing both the exhilaration of breaking norms and the costs of doing so – offering a portrait of a changing rural India and the structures that persist.
In A Room in Bombay: A Memoir (W W Norton & Company, April 2026), the Indian-American author Manil Suri traces a life shaped by a single, crowded room in Mumbai – at once refuge and constraint for a family navigating religious tension, an unhappy marriage, and his own dawning understanding of his sexuality. Leaving for the United States at 20, Suri begins to build a life on his own terms. Yet the room, and the parents still bound to it, continues to pull him back, even as rising property pressures tighten its hold.
Drawn from over 2000 letters, the memoir reflects on home, obligation and the uneasy balance between seeking freedom for oneself and for those we leave behind.
Glyphosate, the world’s most widely used herbicide, sits at the centre of The Sovereign Poison: Glyphosate, Poisoncraft, and Regulatory Politics (University of California Press, April 2026), where Tom Widger examines failed attempts to regulate or ban it in Sri Lanka and the European Union.
Widger introduces the idea of “poisoncraft” – the cultural beliefs and practices through which poison is understood and contested. In doing so, he shows how pesticides become entangled in questions of fear, value and political meaning. The book ultimately traces how science, nationalism and public anxiety collide, revealing why states so often struggle to govern toxicity.
For 18 days each Chithirai, falling around April-May, the village of Koovagam in Tamil Nadu draws thousands of transgender women for a festival that is at once celebratory and spiritual. The festivities culminate in a ritual marriage to the deity Aravan at the Koothandavar temple – rooted in his story in the Mahabharata.
In Souls of Someone: Myth, Magic and Mourning in Koovagam (HarperCollins India, April 2026) Shino Cherian blends memoir and travel writing to trace the festival’s layered meanings alongside a more personal journey of grief and self-discovery.
In Worlds of Islam: A Global History (Allen Lane, April 2026), James McDougall traces the evolution of Islam across 14 centuries, from its beginnings in 17th-century Arabia to its place in the modern world.
Carried by armies, merchants and missionaries, the faith spread across regions as varied as Europe, Southasia, Southeast Asia and inland China, taking on diverse political and social forms along the way.
Moving into the modern era, McDougall follows how Muslims have navigated empire, nationalism and globalisation — offering a sweeping account of a religion defined by its diversity and adaptability.
Drawing from the histories of Partition and displacement, Andhar Bil by Kalyani Thakur Charal, translated from the Bengali by Asit Biswas (Tilted Axis Press, April 2026), follows a Dalit Matua community rebuilding their lives around Andhar Bil, a local water body, that mirrors the one they left behind. The bil becomes both setting and witness as the novel traces how memory, land and community are remade after rupture.
August 17: A Novel by S Hareesh, translated from the Malayalam by Jayasree Kalathil (HarperCollins India, April 2026), imagines a Travancore that refuses to join India, spiralling into coups, betrayals and revolutions. Told through the dispatches of a shadowy informant, it blurs fact and fiction to probe how nations are built and undone through narrative.
📖 From the Himal archives: A review essay by Deepa Bhasthi on S Hareesh’s novel Moustache, translated by Jayasree Kalathil, and the many lives of Malayalam magical realism.
A return to an earlier literary moment comes with Selected Stories by Saratchandra Chattopadhyay, translated from the Bengali by Anchita Ghatak (Ekadā, April 2026). Exploring marriage, caste and inequality, these stories by the early 20th-century Bengali novelist capture the moral dilemmas and inner lives of ordinary people with quiet precision.
Set in early 20th-century Kerala, Writing Death - Ego: A Novel by Rajalekshmi, translated from the Malayalam by Dhiya Sony (Chowringhee Press, April 2026), follows a sensitive boy whose aspirations give way to the constraints of adulthood. With psychological acuity, it dwells on love, loss and obligation, finding in the ordinary a more unsettling portrait of selfhood and disillusionment.
The Abyss by B Jeyamohan, translated from the Tamil by Suchitra Ramachandran (Transit Books, April 2026), centres on Pothivelu Pandaram, a seemingly pious and prosperous man whose wealth rests on a brutal trade. As his fortunes begin to shift, the novel lingers on the characters’ lives in all their strangeness and specificity, probing the limits of morality, faith and human dignity.
In Settler/Colonialism in Kashmir: Sovereignty, Catastrophe, Indigeneity (Manchester University Press, April 2026), Goldie Osuri reads India-administered Kashmir through the lens of settler-colonial geopolitics.
The book argues that modern sovereignty itself was shaped through settler-colonial practices, and that similar logics are at work in India’s governance of Jammu and Kashmir, with consequences that are both political and ecological. Linking the region’s political economy and the reshaping of geography, Osuri reframes Kashmiri resistance as an indigenous anti-colonial struggle, situating it within wider debates on settler-colonialism and planetary crisis.
📖 From the Himal archives: Maknoon Wani on the rise of settler colonialism in militarily occupied Jammu & Kashmir.
The Politics of Corporations in ‘New’ India, edited by Rohit Varman (Cambridge University Press, April 2026), examines the alignment between Hindutva and corporate power in India.
The volume reads Hindutva as both a political project and a form of capitalist consolidation, arguing that religion and nationalism are mobilised to sustain accumulation. Across its chapters, it traces how this shapes contemporary governance and public life, arguing that fascist destruction in India can only be checked by reining in corporate plunder and the ills of neoliberalism.
🎧 From the Himal podcast archives: Tune in to Saffron Siege, a series of conversations hosted by the peace activist Harsh Mander on the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s corrosion of India over 100 years.
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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