Hello reader,
How well do we really know B R Ambedkar’s life, thought and legacy?
On this week’s episode of the Southasia Review of Books podcast, I speak to the public intellectual, scholar and activist Anand Teltumbde about his new book, Iconoclast: A Reflective Biography of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar (Penguin India October 2024).
In contemporary India, the iconisation of Ambedkar is being exploited by politicians across the spectrum in a project of ultra-nationalist myth-making. In view of the ongoing oppression of Dalits today, Teltumbde critiques the hagiography surrounding the towering anti-caste leader and the “devotional inebriation” of his followers. Instead, he argues that it is important now more than ever to engage with Ambedkar as he defined himself, as an “iconoclast”, a breaker of icons.
This episode is now available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Youtube.
Heart Lamp: Selected Stories (Penguin India, April 2025) by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi, has made the shortlist of the 2025 International Booker Prize! In the history of the prize, this is the first book translated from Kannada and the second Southasian translation – after Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand, translated from the Hindi by Daisy Rockwell in 2022 – to make the shortlist.
“These stories speak truth to power and slice through the fault lines of caste, class, and religion widespread in contemporary society, exposing the rot within: corruption, oppression, injustice, violence,” the judges said. “Deceptively simple, these stories hold immense emotional, moral, and socio-political weight, urging us to dig deeper.”
Watch this space for a forthcoming Himal review of the book.
[Read Deepa Bhasthi’s writing in Himal’s pages, including her short stories and reviews, here.]
In The Nehru Years: An International History of Indian Non-Alignment (Juggernaut, April 2025) Swapna Kona Nayudu traces Jawaharlal Nehru’s early years as India’s first prime minister and his conceptualisation of non-alignment at the height of the Cold War. From the Korean War, the Suez Crisis, the Hungarian Revolution, and the Congo Crisis – Nayudu’s study uncovers India’s diplomatic influence as the only non-aligned founding member of the United Nations.
Andrea Benvenuti’s Nehru’s Bandung: Non-Alignment and Regional Order in Indian Cold War Strategy (Speaking Tiger, October 2024) is another recent book that attempts to reconstruct Nehru and his Congress government’s role in organising the first Asian-African Conference in Bandung in 1955, shedding light on this long-neglected aspect of India’s Cold War diplomacy.
This month marks the publication of the Pakistan-born South Africa-based author Roohi Choudhry’s debut novel, Outside Women (April 2025, The University Press of Kentucky). Set in South Africa, Pakistan, and New York City, this novel weaves together the lives of Sita, an indentured laborer in 1890s Durban, and Hajra, an exiled Pakistani scholar who was forced to flee to New York City from her home in Peshawar. One hundred years apart, both women are forced to reckon with the cost of fighting for justice and try to find their place outside patriarchal and colonial spaces in their search for kinship and solidarity.
The Hyderabadis: From 1947 to the Present Day (Harper Collins India, April 2025) by Daneesh Majid promises a nuanced exploration of Hyderabad’s modern history, culture and socio-political landscape from the time of Partition to the present day. Majid uncovers how Hyderabad’s communities – shaped by the upheavals of 1947, the linguistic re-imagination of the state, its bifurcation, struggle for statehood and more – have influenced the cultural essence and identity of this cosmopolitan city.
Offering another rich alternative history of the city, Beyond Biryani: The Making of a Globalised Hyderabad by Dinesh C Sharma (Westland, January 2025) charts the journey of Hyderabad under a quasi-Mughal princely state till the 1940s to becoming the modern metropolis that it is today.
At the top of my March reads was Gypsy Goddess by Meena Kandasamy (Atlantic Books, April 2015) – a fictional retelling of the 1968 massacre of over 40 Dalits in Kilvenmani, a village in the Nagapattinam district of Tamil Nadu. The story follows the land-owners of the village who refused adequate living wages for their workers and made then work under brutal conditions, and the retaliation of these farming communities under the banner of the Communist Party, which led to tragic consequences.
The intersectionalities of caste- and gender-based violence is still overlooked in India. Importantly, in this novel Kandasamy underscores the role of Dalit women as the driving force of the agitations of their communities, and recognises the violence they have endured. She also locates her own identity as a Dalit writer, stressing that no amount of research, awareness and empathy can fully capture a lived experience. While many have worked hard to bring justice to this story as an important and devastating chapter of Dalit history in India, few have written about the Kilvenmani massacre and the experiences of the community with such clarity and intensity. A must read this Dalit History Month.
Do also read Kandasamy’s 2010 piece for Himal on her dream of annihilating caste, where she writes: “Irrespective of where we find ourselves in that hierarchy, we can militate against caste only if each of us make it a personal rebellion, a conscious choice to defy that oppressive, self-defeating system.”
✨What are you reading this Dalit History Month? Write to me at shwethas@himalmag.com to be featured in the next newsletter.
Until next time, happy reading!
Shwetha Srikanthan
Associate Editor, Himal Southasian
đź’Ś Are there any authors 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.
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