📚 Southasia Review of Books - 13 August 2025

📚 13 August 2025

Hello reader,

In August 2019, the Indian government revoked Articles 370 and 35A, two key constitutional provisions on Jammu and Kashmir, thereby stripping the region of its autonomy and statehood. As the sixth anniversary of the abrogation approached, the union territory’s home department banned 25 essential books on Kashmir, including works by writers and scholars such as A G Noorani, Ather Zia, Anuradha Bhasin, and Arundhati Roy, for promoting “false narrative” and “secessionism”.

“It’s not the job of the state to determine what people can and cannot read – this is akin to arresting thinking, which I’m afraid points to an attempt to fashion an Orwellian future,” the Kashmiri-British novelist Mirza Waheed told Frontline. “People should be worried about this, writers, readers, those who work with books.”

In Kashmir, “haalaat” describes the period after 1989, the conditions under which the armed resistance for freedom gathered momentum. When the journalist Ipsita Chakravarty first visited the Valley in 2016, she found that the haalaat was constantly being turned into stories – often beginning with “dapaan” (“it is said”), a signature of Kashmir’s long storytelling tradition. In a place where conflict has seeped into language, culture and everyday life, these narratives form a distinctly Kashmiri record of events so often told from elsewhere.

This week on the Southasia Review of Books podcast, I speak with Chakravarty about her new book, Dapaan: Tales from Kashmir’s Conflict (Context, July 2025). We discuss what it means for the people of Kashmir to tell their stories – where history is contested, identity is under siege, and remembering itself a political act.

🎙️📚Ipsita Chakravarty on resistance, remembrance and storytelling in Kashmir: Southasia Review of Books podcast #30

Tune in to our conversation on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Youtube

📚 Reviews from Himal’s pages this fortnight

Searching for Swadesh Deepak in Hindi literature

Two new translations recall the lasting legacy of the Hindi playwright Swadesh Deepak, who disappeared in 2006 but whose critique of power in India remains prescient

By Kinshuk Gupta | 6 August 2025

📚 This month in Southasian publishing

Celebrating Southasian literature

The Chennai-based writer and naturalist Yuvan Aves’s book, Intertidal: A Coast and Marsh Diary (Bloomsbury India, December 2023), has been shortlisted for the United Kingdom’s Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing – an annual literary award for books celebrating nature and conservation. Aves is the first Southasia writer to be nominated for the prize.

Intertidal spans two years of observations on nature and resilience in coastal Chennai. Part memoir, part meditation, the book traces Aves’s life from a turbulent childhood to a deep bond with the natural world, through grief and trauma, and into a life of art and activism. It is also a call to action against coastal erosion, wetland destruction, and industrial pollution in southern India. Alongside urgent environmental concerns, Aves writes of community and healing – especially through working with children in nature, teaching them to protect the planet.

Recent translated fiction

Two translated short stories from Himal’s 2024 Fiction Fest find new life in print! 

Courtesans Don’t Read Newspapers (Penguin India, August 2025) by Anil Yadav, translated from the Hindi Vaibhav Sharma, collects stories of lives lived on the margins of Indian society. First published in Himal’s pages, the short story ‘Lord Almighty, Grant Us Riots!’ from this collection tells the tale of a Muslim weavers’ colony in the city of Varanasi. The colony floods every year, and nobody cares for these people and their plight. This time around, the water starts talking back. 

📖 Read the translated story here, and listen to Sharma’s reading of an excerpt here. 

Also from Himal’s fiction fest lineup is Fauzia Rafique’s novella Keeru (Hachette India, July 2025), translated from the Punjabi by Haider Shahbaz. Originally published in 2019, the award-winning novella is named after its protagonist, Muhammad Hussain Khan ‘Keeru’, a queer, Dalit man from Pakistan who escapes to Canada after being accused of blasphemy. In Canada, he becomes the owner of a small business, but the past has an inexorable habit of haunting him even in the present.

📖 Read an excerpt from Shahbaz’s translation here. 

New horizons of Indian SFF

From Westland’s IF imprint comes Between Worlds (IF, August 2025), an introductory anthology of new SFF writing. Rather than a “best of” compilation, the editor and curator Gautam Bhatia asked: what’s out there? The result is a collection of bold and diverse voices shaping the genre today. 

Blending the surreal with the urgent, these original stories explore memory, identity, rebellion and love. And beyond the fantastical, the collection also confronts real-world crises like climate change, AI, surveillance and more, offering a glimpse into the growing frontiers of Indian speculative fiction. 

📜 From the Himal Archives: Read about the present and deep past of anti-caste speculative fiction in Sreyartha Krishna’s review of The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF, plus Gautam Bhatia’s essay on how an extraordinary burst of SF writing from Sri Lanka looks afresh at home and the universe(s). 

Fragments of a Himalayan childhood

Kunzang Choden, the first Bhutanese woman to be published in English, has released her memoir, Telling Me My Stories: Fragments of a Himalayan Childhood (Bloomsbury, August 2025). 

Orphaned at a young age, Kunzang Choden’s early life was shaped by loss and absence. Written as a series of remembered episodes and reflections, the memoir moves between her childhood in a remote Bhutanese village, the schools she attended in India, and her present home at Ogyen Choling – now a museum honouring her ancestors.

Set against Bhutan’s rapid transformations in the mid-20th century, Kunzang Choden’s recollections offer a vivid portrait of a bygone era. Telling Me My Stories serves both as a historical record of fading social structures and lifeways, and as the personal story of a family navigating wider societal change. 

Vajpayee and the Hindu Right’s rise

Believer’s Dilemma: Vajpayee and the Hindu Right's Path to Power 1977–2018 (Picador India, August 2025) concludes Abhishek Choudhary’s two-part study of India’s first BJP prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee. 

This second volume draws on fresh archival documents and interviews to chart a history of India’s present, from the short-lived Janata coalition and the Vajpayee-Morarji Desai tussle over foreign policy, to Vajpayee’s failure to secularise the newly ascendant BJP and more. Choudhary traces these machinations to shed new light on major events in Vajpayee’s political career. 

📜From the Himal Archives: What explains Vajpayee’s continued popularity, at least among many Hindus, over two decades after he was voted out of power? Read Uttaran Das Gupta’s review essay on volume one, which unpacks the life and legacy of Vajpayee while puncturing misguided liberal nostalgia and hero-worship of the Hindu Right. 

Until next time, happy reading! 

Shwetha Srikanthan
Associate Editor, Himal Southasian

💌 Are there any new books, authors or events you would like to see featured? I would love to hear from you. Please write to me at shwethas@himalmag.com.

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