📚Southasia Review of Books - 12 March 2025

📚 12 March 2025

Hello reader,

A new episode of the Southasia Review of Books podcast is here, and this time, I speak to Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil about his new book The Gulf Migrant Archives in Kerala: Reading Borders and Belonging (Oxford University Press, June 2024).

Join us as we talk about how migrants’ document the cultural imaginaries of Kerala and the Gulf and their transnational lives and aspirations. In analysing these cultural records from Malayalam literature, music and visual culture, we discuss Shafeeq’s pioneering effort to salvage the migrant archives in Kerala. 

[Do also read Shafeeq’s piece for Himal on how the celebrated Malayalam novelist Benyamin’s fiction upended the illusions of Gulf migrant lives in Malayalam literature.]

This episode is now available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Youtube.

🚀 Got a short story about the possible future of Southasia?

We want to read it! Submit your original short speculative fiction and be part of Himal’s 2025 Fiction Fest.

The clock is ticking – get your stories in before the 1 April deadline. More information and guidelines here.

📚 This month in Southasian publishing

Iconography and complicity

Out this month, Rahul Rao’s The Psychic Lives of Statues: Reckoning with the Rubble of Empire (Pluto Press, March 2025) spans India, South Africa, England, the United States, Scotland and beyond to reveal how statue controversies have shaped anti-colonial political thought, struggles over race and caste, and conversations on justice and cultural memory. By engaging with artists, scholars and activists, Rao unpacks how statues have become sites of resistance and contestation of our imperial past and postcolonial present through a personal and literary lens.

Watch this space for a forthcoming review in Himal’s pages! 

The first modernist Gujarati writer

Published in collaboration with the Ashoka Centre for Translation as part of the Chronicles Series of non-fiction translations from Indian languages, My Truth (Penguin India, March 2025), translated by Abhijit Kothari, is the autobiography of a towering figure in Gujarati literature. Narmadashankar Dave, described as the first modernist Gujarati writer, continues to be celebrated widely for his contributions as a poet, playwright, essayist, critic and social reformer of 19th century Gujarat. 

Kavitha Rao on untold histories

In Spies, Lies and Allies (Westland, March 2025) Kavitha Rao profiles two long-forgotten revolutionaries of India’s independence movement. This dual biography follows the lives of Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, the brother of the freedom fighter Sarojini Naidu, and M N Roy, a pioneer of India’s communist movement. From affairs with suspected Communist spies to surviving assassination attempts by the British secret service, Rao charts the duo’s trysts with spies, dictators, assassins and revolutionaries from around the world. 

Rao’s Lady Doctors: The Untold Stories of India's First Women in Medicine (Jacaranda Books, September 2023) offers another forgotten history of six pioneering Indian women in medicine from the 1860s to the 1930s, and how they fought to escape the bounds of patriarchy, family, caste and society. The book’s blurb notes that “the compelling stories of these radical women have been erased from our textbooks and memories, because histories have mostly been written by men, about men.” And what better way to celebrate March than by reading women’s history written by women. 

Modern motherhood and identity

Hitting shelves this month, Sanjena Sathian’s part social satire, part psychological thriller, Goddess Complex (Penguin, March 2025), explores reproduction in all its forms – from pregnancy to doppelgängers. Described as “feminist satire of our age of GirlBosses turned self-care influencers, optimization cults, internet mommy gurus, egg freezing, and much more,” Sathian’s new novel promises a timely examination of choice and how women are navigating their reproductive fates in America and beyond. 

📚 What I’m Reading

With the passing of MT Vasudevan Nair in December 2024, we recently published a piece by Anjana S on the Malayalam literary giant’s merits and limitations in addressing Kerala’s traditional caste, gender and social hierarchies.

While editing this piece I discovered an intriguing connection between MT and Sri Lanka. To learn more, I turned to his memoir, Bear With Me, Amma, translated by Gita Krishnankutty (Penguin India, January 2023).

When MT was ten years old, his father returned from Ceylon after an absence of nearly five years, accompanied by a young Sinhalese girl. There were whispers of her being the orphaned daughter of his father’s friend, or perhaps even his own daughter and MT’s sister. MT never learned the truth, but many years later, he wrote about this encounter in a story titled ‘In Your Memory’. 

During his stint as a journalist for a Malayalam daily, MT eventually travelled to Sri Lanka in search of answers. He retells these events in ‘Kadugannava: Oru Yathra Kurippu’, a story later adapted for the screen as part of a Malayalam anthology series celebrating 91-year-old MT's legacy. 

The memoir overall offers a tender glimpse into MT’s relationship with his mother, as well as the people, places and ideas that shaped his work. If Anjana’s piece piqued your interest – or if, like me, you’re curious about MT’s personal and literary influences – this book is well worth a read. 


✨ reader, tell me about any books you’re currently enjoying specific to Southasia – or an similar reading rabbit-holes you’ve fallen into. 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

Thank you for reading the Southasia Review of Books.

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