Essay

“Yes, our son is gay”: A Nepali father’s awakening

A path-breaking personal essay calling for social acceptance and full rights for Nepal’s LGBTIQ+ community

What really makes a Sikkimese?

India’s Supreme Court set off a storm by describing Sikkimese-Nepalis as people of “foreign origin.” As “Indian” Old Settlers fight for new rights, Sikkim’s Bhutia-Lepcha and Nepali communities face a reckoning over belonging and identity.

| May 01, 2023

How agrarian utopianism shapes Sri Lanka

The idealised "village" was at the core of the people’s struggle last year. As a fundamental of Sri Lankan nationalist thought, agrarian utopianism helps to explain the country’s past and imagine a different future.

| Apr 17, 2023

Why the movement against Rampal plant in Bangladesh failed

Five years after a people’s movement to stop a power plant near the Sundarban, Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League government has pushed the project through. Why did this movement fail where others in Bangladesh have succeeded?

| Feb 24, 2023

The Muslim-left legacy of an Urdu library in Mumbai

The Awami Idara, rooted in a working-class Muslim neighbourhood, connects the long history of Southasian Muslim labour activism to political movements and events across Mumbai, Southasia and beyond.

| Jan 09, 2023

Finding food in Chandrapur

An up-close account of hunger, food insecurity and ineffective state policies from a district in central India.

| Dec 23, 2022

Refusal and responsibility

The predicament and precarity of Tibetan intellectuals in China.

| Aug 26, 2022

Tamil Sikh

A fragment of memory from 1984.

| Jun 14, 2022

On non-political Assamese

How two civil-society groups have defined politics in Assam.

| Apr 13, 2022

Remembering a Southasian feminist

On the life and times of Kamla Bhasin.

| Oct 15, 2021

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Latest Articles

In Mizoram, a refugee crisis highlights Mizo tribal affinities and hostility

Shared Zo identity has Mizos extending hospitality to Chin and Kuki-Chin refugees from Myanmar and Bangladesh. More remarkable is that Chakmas, mistreated by the Mizo majority in Mizoram, have welcomed Kuki-Chin refugees too

In ‘Agra’, a grim portrait of the repressed Indian man

Director Kanu Behl’s Hindi feature film examines the sexual obsession and frustration of men, mental health and the transactional nature of human relationships in a patriarchal society where space is in short supply

When neoliberalism came to the Indian farm

With a focus on agricultural policy since the 1990s, 'Distress in the Fields' demonstrates how neoliberal interventions sowed the seeds of the crisis faced by farmers today