Hello reader,
Last week, I was heartened to hear from so many of you sharing your thoughts on Arundhati Roy’s new memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me. I haven’t had a chance to dive in myself – it’s been a whirlwind of books and work – but here’s what one of our readers, the translator and writer Varsha Tiwary had to say:
“Arundhati Roy shows us her scars but from her vantage point they look more like edgy tattoos. The point of her memoir is not to embody the journey from the wound to the scar but to memorialise her mother’s personal journey (which is also her own). The fragments of past trauma when leavened by the duo’s spectacularly successful later life turn into incredibly hilarious anecdotes.”
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Beginning with the arrival of her grandfather from Sylhet to Manchester in the 1950s, award-winning food writer Shahnaz Ahsan’s new book The Jackfruit Chronicles: Memories and Recipes from a British-Bangladeshi Kitchen (Harper Collins, July 2025) traces not only one family’s journey, but the wider story of the Bangladeshi diaspora’s search for home and belonging. Part memoir and part cookbook, it’s a deeply personal exploration of identity, weaving stories and recipes to document the vibrant flavours of Bengali food and its place in Britain.
In our latest Southasia Review of Books podcast episode, Ahsan invites us into her family’s British-Bangladeshi kitchen, where we discuss how food embodies both resistance and remembrance, and reflects the complexities of diasporic life.
Tune in to our conversation on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Youtube.
One of the joys of reading Southasian books is seeing how they open unexpected windows like this into the region’s histories. And just as food holds such stories, so do textiles across Southasia – carrying the imprints of migration, labour, culture and identity.
That’s why I’m excited to share a message from our partners at MAP Academy: applications are now open for the MAP Academy & Nalli Fellowships for Textile Research. The programme will support four research fellowships on the region’s textile cultures from any part of Southasia. Do take a look – and spread the word if you know someone who might be interested. Read more and apply below!
Across Southasia, the making of textiles has critical socioeconomic, environmental and historical implications. Now open for applications, the MAP Academy & Nalli Fellowships supports new research on textile histories from the region. The programme will award four Research Fellowships of INR 5.5 lakhs each for one year, with a focus on tangible outcomes. An Advisory Committee will review your project after the submission deadline of 15 October, and final awardees will be announced in February 2026. To read more about eligibility criteria and apply, click here.
The explosion of unrest in Nepal this month was years in the making. With institutions burned to the ground and the army in control, Gen Z protesters – driven by a groundswell of anger at corruption, elitism and widening inequality – pushed for the former chief justice Sushila Karki to be appointed as the country’s interim leader.
You may have followed these developments in Himal’s pages through our Editor Roman Gautam’s analysis, Sushim Thapaliya’s social media timeline of the uprising, or Pranaya Rana’s in-depth pieces.
To complement our coverage, and to go beyond the headlines, we’ve put together a reading list of books on Nepal. While by no means exhaustive, we hope this collection offers historical, political and social context, helping you make sense of not just this month’s events, but also the deeper currents shaping Nepal’s future.
A History of Nepal by John Whelpton (Cambridge University Press, March 2025) traces Nepal’s big-picture evolution from its ancient origins through the overthrow of the Rana autocracy in 1950–1951 and the civil war following the 2001 royal massacre. Drawing on this wider history, Whelpton also highlights the country’s internal diversity and the pressures exerted by its powerful neighbours, India and China.
Nepal in the Long 1950s, edited by Pratyoush Onta, Lokranjan Parajuli and Mark Liechty (Martin Chautari, January 2024), situates the political and social transformations of the 1950s – the decade of Nepal first, failed democratic opening – within regional and global contexts. The collection explores how anti-colonial movements, postwar global restructuring and emerging forms of capitalism shaped Nepal and set the stage for later upheavals.
Nepal: Growth of a Nation by Ludwig F Stiller (Educational Publishing House Nepal, December 2022) surveys two centuries of history, examining land, labour, leadership, politics-for-profit and the centralisation of power in Nepal. The book traces how these forces constrained individual freedom and laid the foundations for Nepal’s enduring challenges of corruption and inequality.
Forget Kathmandu: An Elegy for Democracy by Manjushree Thapa (Aleph Book Company, January 2013) blends memoir, reportage and analysis to trace Nepal’s turbulent political history, particularly through the country’s second democratic experiment starting in 1990 – from monarchical rule and violent upheavals to the Maoist insurgency and fragile democratic government. The failures it highlights continue to resonate in the recent protests.
Battles of the New Republic: A Contemporary History of Nepal by Prashant Jha (Hurst, September 2014) chronicles Nepal’s transition after its civil war from from a Hindu kingdom to a secular republic, and unitary to federal rule. Blending interviews with leaders, on-the-ground reporting and historical analysis, Jha examines rebellions, elite power structures and Nepal’s wider struggle for justice and democracy.
Plains of Discontent: A Political History of Nepal’s Tarai by Maximillian Mørch (Fine Print, June 2023) brings focus to the country’s often-overlooked Tarai region, home to over half of Nepal’s population. Mørch explores the Tarai’s political struggles, social dynamics and marginalisation, illuminating the roots of an anger and discontent that continue to shape the country today.
(Special thanks to Amish Raj Mulmi, one of Himal’s Contributing Editors, for suggesting the addition of Nepal in the Long 1950s and Battles of the New Republic to this reading list.)
Amitav Ghosh has been awarded the 14th Pak Kyongni Prize, South Korea’s top international literary honour. Established in 2011 by the Toji Cultural Foundation in memory of one of the country’s most celebrated 20th-century novelists, Pak Kyongni, the prize recognises “the truest writer of our time.”
“It is a profound privilege to be a successor to writers like Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Antonia Byatt and Ismail Kadare, and to be associated with the memory of Pak Kyongni,” Ghosh said.
Ghosh was praised for expanding the frontiers of postcolonial and ecological literature and for giving voice to subaltern subjects, including nature itself. He was selected unanimously after a year-long review that began with over a hundred novelists.
Meanwhile, Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (Hamish Hamilton, September 2025), a sweeping cross-continental romance, is among the six titles shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize. Desai is the only previous Booker winner on this year’s shortlist; her last novel, The Inheritance of Loss won the 2006 prize.
September 2025 marks the first death anniversary of Sitaram Yechury, one of India’s most prominent Marxist leaders. Widely respected for his ideological struggle against Hindutva forces, Yechury’s work earned recognition not only from the Left and secular movements in India but also internationally.
His selected writings and speeches are collected in a new volume, Sitaram Yechury: A Towering Legacy, edited by his former secretary Veeraiah Konduri (New Era Publications, September 2025). The book is a tribute to the enduring icon, whose vision and influence continue to shape the Indian Left today.
This month also marks the birth centenary of the agronomist and father of India’s Green Revolution. M S Swaminathan: The Man Who Fed India by Priyambada Jayakumar (Harper Collins India, September 2025) traces the life of India’s pioneering agricultural scientist, from his childhood in Kumbakonam to his collaboration with Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution. The book highlights the many roles Swaminathan balanced – conservationist, Gandhian, philosopher, diplomat and institution builder – both in India and abroad.
Another recent volume, A History of India’s Green Revolution: Reign of Technocracy by Prakash Kumar (Cambridge University Press, August 2025), contextualises the Green Revolution, tracing agricultural modernisation from colonial crop development to post-independence reforms. Kumar explores how elites, states and the American modernisers shaped its outcomes, arguing that technocratic faith in technology ultimately defined India’s agrarian transformation.
📜 From the Himal archives: Read Tanya Matthan’s review essay exploring the long shadow of the Green Revolution over the Indian countryside, and how neoliberal interventions sowed the seeds of the crisis faced by farmers today.
This season brings a remarkable wave of new fiction by women writers from Pakistan. Probing identity, survival and the costs of freedom, these stories explore the ties that bind us to home across lines of class, gender and geography. Together, they offer vivid portraits of contemporary Pakistan and its far-reaching diaspora.
In a village in rural Pakistan, Tara longs to escape from the dust, dung and the violent grip of her brother. Marriage to a middle-class accountant takes her to the capital, but respectability soon becomes another cage. Her hunger for freedom grows, even as the spectre of her past looms large. Set against a backdrop of political violence and natural disaster, Dur e Aziz Amna’s A Splintering (Duckworth, September 2025) is a searing novel of motherhood, obsession and ambition.
📜 From the Himal archives: Read Dur e Aziz Amna’s short story, ‘A cold heart’, shortlisted in the Himal Short Story Competition 2019 here.
Kanza Javed’s What Remains After a Fire (W W Norton, Sept 2025) brings together eight unflinching stories of characters striving for more than their circumstances allow, and reckoning with the costs of their desires. Moving between Pakistan and the diaspora in the United States, Javed writes with sharp insight and empathy, exploring identity, agency and loss across divides of class, gender and religion.
Emahn is mischievous, big-haired, and larger than life, spending summers on the rooftops of Lahore before moving to Canada after marriage. Beneath her spirited exterior, though, she carries the weight of childhood trauma. When tragedy strikes, she must draw on her deepest reserves of strength, even if it means revisiting the past she tried to bury. Somia Sadiq’s novel Gajarah (GFB, Sept 2025) is braided with prose, poetry and myth, exploring sexual violence, justice, and what it means to belong to a land that pushes you away.
Inspired by a true story, Aisha Hassan’s debut novel, When the Fireflies Dance (Orion, June 2025) is a tale of love, loss and redemption. After his brother’s murder, seven-year-old Lalloo is torn from his family, who remain trapped in bonded labour at a brickyard outside Lahore. Years later, as he saves every rupee to buy their freedom and rekindles a lost love, Lalloo realises that escape will demand an unimaginable sacrifice.
Fauzia Rafique’s award-winning novella Keeru (Hachette India, July 2025), translated from Punjabi by Haider Shahbaz, follows Muhammad Hussain Khan – nicknamed “Keeru” after insects – who fled caste violence and false blasphemy charges in Pakistan to build a new life in Canada. Told through five voices, the novella overturns familiar tropes of migration and family, offering queer and feminist stories of resilience, and of finding love and hope, even a world away.
📜 From the Himal archives: Read an excerpt from Haider Shahbaz’s translation of Fauzia Rafique’s novella here.
Set against backdrops of political turmoil and the threat of violence, What Kept You? by Raaza Jamshed (Giramondo Publishing, July 2025) is a coming-of-age novel about survival and self-definition. Raised in Pakistan on her grandmother’s Partition-era tales of loss and resilience, Jahan learns to fear the world even as she yearns to challenge it. Years later in Australia, she faces new reckonings – a miscarriage, devastating bushfires and memories that echo across generations. Written in a lyrical blend of English, Urdu, and Arabic, Jamshed’s novel is a feminist “anti-tale” of metamorphosis and inheritance.
Until next time, happy reading!
Shwetha Srikanthan
Associate Editor, Himal Southasian
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