Year in review: Ten great Southasian culture stories of 2025
From a retrospective on the 1975 Hindi blockbuster Sholay to a personal essay on three Pakistani weddings in times of war, we at Himal Southasian take a look back at some of our most-read stories on culture for 2025.
Here’s our selection, in no particular order:
So far, a cricket World Cup has remained just out of grasp of the Indian women’s team. Thrice they have reached a World Cup final – in 2005, 2017 and 2020, across both the ODI and the Twenty20 formats of the game – and lost every time. This year, they had a golden chance to put this right.
Tanushree Bhasin writes on how the women’s game could have finally become central to the country’s sporting culture.
There is a widespread belief among many Southasian communities that a person’s caste can be identified, to some extent, by their speech. Abhishek Avtans argues that languages are indeed shaped by caste and social stratification becomes clear when looking at linguistic research across much of the Subcontinent – including the Hindi dialects of “touchable” versus “untouchable” villagers, Brahmin and non-Brahmin Tamil, and the social dialects of Tulu and Kannada.
When missiles landed in Karachi earlier this year, Zehra Khan woke up in recognition of a memory. She was a month away from her own wedding, and suddenly war was knocking on the door again.
In a personal essay, Khan reflects on her Pakistani family’s story of migration and survival across three weddings amid three conflicts: the 1971 Bangladesh war, the Kargil War, and the 2025 conflict following the Pahalgam attack.
Though there has recently been some new writing on caste slavery, many questions remain uninterrogated. These concern the precise nature of the relationship between caste and slavery, and what this reveals about the nature of caste in South India.
It was in London, when searching through the India Office Records – a trove of colonial-era administrative papers – that Sreyartha Krishna stumbled upon handwritten letters compiled by a 19th-century secretary that laid bare Eesoo’s story: the story, until now lost to history, of an escaped Dalit woman whose case in 1841 played a pivotal role in the leadup to the abolition of centuries-old system of caste-based slavery in India, and which reveals much about the importance of caste to slavery and the importance of slavery to caste.
The 1970s were not “simpler times”. They were just a time when the worst inclinations of the worst among India’s citizenry were largely unexposed. Beyond its entertainment value, 1975 Hindi blockbuster Sholay is emblematic of a nation still held in check by forces urging its people to be better than they were, but making the mistake of not confronting divides that ran deep and have since caught up with it.
Marking the film’s 50th anniversary, Anna M M Vetticad writes that Sholay now unwittingly underlines the degradation of India’s landscape over the last five decades and the representation of gender, caste and Muslims in Bollywood.
In December 2025, the Principal District and Sessions Court in Ernakulam delivered its judgment in an eight-year-long case involving the sexual assault of a South Indian film actor. It convicted six people of criminal conspiracy, kidnapping and gang rape, among other charges, but acquitted the Malayalam film superstar Dileep, rejecting the prosecution’s claim that he masterminded the attack.
Sumithra Prasanna writes that the case makes visible the experience of a survivor forced to confront not just the crime committed against her but also procedural barriers within the justice system that seem set up to shield powerful and well-connected men.
Anupam Debashis Roy’s grandmother once told him that their family was not really Namasudras, a Dalit community, deemed lower than the lowest caste in the Hindu order. They used to be Brahmins, she claimed, but proud and rebellious ones. Some of their ancestors rebelled against the misrule of Laxman Sen, a 12th-century king of the Sena dynasty in Bengal. As a result, they were driven out towards the Sundarban, the mangrove forests of the Ganga delta. While travelling through the Sundarban to get to Khulna, in what is now south-western Bangladesh, their paitas – the white threads that Brahmins wear around their torsos – were torn away by thorny plants. And so they were shunned from Brahmin society.
This story of once being Brahmin empowered him to venture down the road of education. In doing so, he discovers how his family had upended their social destinies by creating their own stories – and, in doing so, created better lives for their children through their mythological and actual battles against caste discrimination and religious prejudice in Bangladesh, East Pakistan and colonial Bengal.
In India, where Sumit Nagal is from, and where cricket takes up so much of the oxygen, tennis is surprisingly well-entrenched. It was introduced by British civil servants in the 19th century and has enjoyed popular participation ever since. Now, India is home to roughly a tenth of the world’s 90 million tennis players, and to some of the most accomplished tennis players ever.
In a wide-ranging profile, Shreya Menon writes about the Indian tennis star who has succeeded despite a dysfunctional sports administration and woeful funding – and Indian tennis is refusing to learn its lessons.
Shot dead by Hindu right-wing fanatics ten years ago, M M Kalburgi was an indelible figure in the world of Kannada scholarship. A spate of books have been published about him in Kannada since his death, but the English-language sphere has seen only little engagement with his work, in spite of his valorisation as a kind of martyr in the battle against India’s Hindu Right. Kalburgi also faced censure and controversy for the better part of his life, especially from an orthodoxy that did not appreciate his challenges to tradition or care much for the humanism that drove his intellectual and political convictions.
Srikar Raghavan’s essay presents a meticulous excavation of Kalburgi’s life and legacy, offering unprecedented insight into the man himself and into the religious, caste and political histories of what we know today as Karnataka.
The journalist and human-rights activist Richard de Zoysa’s killing still haunts Sri Lanka as a symbol of this impunity, which continued after his death and into another dark chapter of state-sanctioned violence during and after Sri Lanka’s Civil War. Decades after his abduction and murder, he has been subject to a new wave of posthumous attention – boosted in no small part by Shehan Karunatilaka’s Chats with the Dead, adapted for an international audience as the Booker Prize-winning The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, which features a protagonist who bears some similarities to de Zoysa. Rani, new Sri Lankan film directed by Asoka Handagama, is the latest work to wade in and to add to the corpus on de Zoysa’s life and work.
In his review of the film, Vihanga Perera writes that Rani absolves the Ranasinghe Premadasa government of the murder of de Zoysa, whose ghost still haunts Sri Lankan arts and society – and tarnishes the legacy of his mother, Manorani Saravanamuttu.