đź“šSouthasia Review of Books - 22 October 2025
đź“š 22 October 2025
Hello reader,
This week, I’ve been thinking about writers – their journeys, the challenges and the worlds they build. For me, spotlighting Southasian literature means going beyond the latest Southasian titles: it’s about inviting you into conversations with writers about their process and the stories that shape their work.
When I spoke to the Mumbai-based author Amrita Mahale about her new novel, Real Life, for our latest Southasia Review of Books podcast episode, she told me it grew out of a “deep dark period of rejection.” After her now-acclaimed debut, Milk Teeth, was turned down by nearly 20 agents looking for something more plot-driven, she remembers thinking in frustration her next novel would be completely different: a murder mystery, a page-turner.
“Revenge isn’t motivation enough to spend five or six years writing a novel,” Mahale said. “But it’s funny how that ended up coming true in some ways.”
The legal scholar and sci-fi author Gautam Bhatia, in his latest Words for Worlds newsletter, also reflects on the long and often challenging road to publication, while emphasising that, at its heart, writing remains its own reward. His new novel, The Sentence, just won the 2025 Ignyte Award for Outstanding Adult Novel! Read on for some more exciting wins for Southasian literature below.
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đź“š SaRB podcast
In Amrita Mahale latest novel, Real Life (Penguin India, July 2025), the wildlife biologist Tara disappears from a remote Himalayan valley, sending her best friend Mansi on a search to retrace her steps. Meanwhile, the prime suspect, Bhaskar, unravels a disturbing labyrinth of obsession and half-truths.
Against a backdrop where technology, nature, caste, class and the pursuit of freedom collide, Mahale’s novel is a haunting exploration of love, loss and friendship. In a world constantly pushing for conformity, Real Life is a story about the many ways women vanish – from the world, and sometimes from themselves.
The episode is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Youtube, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
📚 Reviews from Himal’s pages this fortnight
Johnson & Johnson’s dark history in India and the United States
Two new books look at how Johnson & Johnson for decades put profits ahead of patients – including with contaminated baby power and faulty hip implants – and expose the failures of pharmaceutical regulation in India and the United States
Disha Shetty | 19 October 2025
đź“š This month in Southasian publishing
Celebrating Southasian literature
The Colombo-based writer Vajra Chandrasekera is the recipient of the 2025 Ursula K Le Guin Award for Fiction for his second novel, Rakesfall (Tordotcom, June 2024). Offering a striking and timely meditation on the genre and its potential, he writes:
“Rakesfall is a book about power, and it talks about the arrogance and undeserved self-belief of the powerful, their bottomless desire for more power, more wealth, until they shamelessly strive for not only a throne but godhood. This is in fact the world we already live in, which is why our oligarchs are obsessed with longevity, AI, and transcending mere humanity. Late capitalism’s death drive is so perfected that it is not only willing but eager to sacrifice the real present in pursuit of an imaginary future, and the language, the concepts they use to construct that imaginary, come from a vocabulary and a grammar built by science fiction. This is a dangerous dynamic, but not a new one. We cannot forget that the originator of modern political Zionism, Theodore Herzl, first wrote the occupation of Palestine as a science fiction novel, four decades before the Nakba. The speculative genres are as fertile ground for monstrous imaginations as they are marvelous ones. There is nothing inherently liberatory in the imagination, but it must be made so. It is necessary to pay attention to what is being written, to what we’re writing, and to what we are reading.”
🎧 Tune in to our Southasia Review of Books podcast conversation with Vajra Chandrasekera where we discuss Rakesfall, fantasy, fascism and much more.
📖 From the Himal Archives: Gautam Bhatia unpacks how an extraordinary burst of anglophone SF writing from Sri Lanka – including Chandrasekera’s The Saint of Bright Doors – looks afresh at home and the universe(s).
The finalists of this year’s Ignyte Awards were also announced this past weekend. These awards, founded in 2020 by L D Lewis and Suzan Palumbo, “seek to celebrate the vibrancy and diversity of the current and future landscapes of science fiction, fantasy, and horror by recognizing incredible feats in storytelling and outstanding efforts toward inclusivity of the genre.”
Gautam Bhatia’s The Sentence (Westland IF, October 2024) won the prize for Outstanding Adult Novel, and Sabaa Tahir’s Heir (GP Putnam’s Sons, October 2024) – the first book of her latest fantasy duology – took home the award for Outstanding Young Adult Novel.
Meanwhile, the New India Foundation revealed its five-book shortlist for the 2025 Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize, which honours exceptional non-fiction on modern and contemporary India. The winner will be named on 6 December at the Bangalore Literature Festival.
The five shortlisted titles are:
Savarkar and the Making of Hindutva by Janaki Bakhle (Princeton University Press, February 2024)
India’s Forgotten Country: A View From the Margins by Bela Bhatia (Penguin India, May 2024)
India’s Near East: A New History by Avinash Paliwal (Penguin India, July 2024)
Gods, Guns, and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity by Manu S Pillai (Penguin India, November 2024)
Engineering a Nation: The Life and Career of M Visvesvaraya by Aparajith Ramnath (Penguin India, September 2024)
📖 From the Himal Archives: Cyrus Naji explains why with the collapse of India-backed authoritarianism in Bangladesh – and Myanmar too – India’s Near East by Avinash Paliwal reads like a testament to the failure of New Delhi’s policy on its eastern flank.
A cartoonist’s journey to the scene of a communal riot
The comic-journalist Joe Sacco’s latest, The Once and Future Riot (Metropolitan Books, October 2025), offers a revelatory investigation into the deadly communal violnece that shook Uttar Pradesh in 2013, exploring the inner-workings and abuses of political violence in India and beyond.
The graphic narrative shows how the Muzaffarnagar riots reveal the enduring cycle of provocation and retribution: Hindus and Muslims, incited by rhetoric and rumour, turning upon one another as truth fractures along religious lines.
Immersing himself in the north Indian state, Sacco speaks to government officials, village chiefs, political leaders, victims and witnesses to understand the events of 2013. Along the way, he examines the role of savagery in democracy, the power of crowds and the stories perpetrators tell to justify bloodshed.
Known for his landmark works from Palestine to Footnotes in Gaza, Sacco brings his masterful visual reportage to a story that is deeply rooted in India – yet speaks to every fragile, multiethnic society today.
Decolonising Afghanistan
Decolonizing Afghanistan: Countering Imperial Knowledge and Power (Duke University Press, October 2025), edited by Wazhmah Osman and Robert D Crews, is among the first comprehensive volumes to probe how empire has shaped Afghanistan’s past and present. The book brings together new and often sidelined, ground-up perspectives that trace how Afghan communities have resisted, subverted and participated in colonial projects from the early 20th century to today.
Focusing especially on the United States’s intervention since 2001, contributors unpack the entanglement of knowledge and power that has long defined imperial governance in Afghanistan. Essays span topics from private security and biometric surveillance to gender politics, media narratives and the mobilisation of Afghan Americans – connecting these struggles to wider global movements for decolonisation and justice.
The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of US Power (The New Press, August 2022) brings together two leading thinkers, Noam Chomsky and Vijay Prashad, in a searing dialogue about the collapse of American power in Afghanistan and its echoes in Iraq and Libya.
The book pushes back against the media’s short memory, confronting the devastation left in the wake of decades of US-led wars, and the myths that continue to justify them. As the United States’s long occupations recede from view, they insist on an unsentimental reckoning and a clearer vision for the world that must follow.
New literary fiction
On the fiction front, beloved Indian writers return with new novel and fresh voices make their debuts.
Following her acclaimed A Burning, Megha Majumdar’s latest, A Guardian and a Thief (Knopf, October 2025), is set in a near-future Kolkata, where two families fight to protect their children amid a city on the brink. Ma, her young daughter and elderly father are preparing to join her husband in Ann Arbor, Michigan – but their visas are stolen the morning of their flight. Majumdar tells two interwoven stories set over the course of a week: Ma’s frantic search for the thief while contending with a worsening food shortage, and Boomba, the desperate thief whose escalating crimes are driven by the need to care for his own family.
📖 From the Himal Archives: “Hindutva in its current form is enabled by more than just strident ideologues, and Megha Majumdar is interested in its persuasive properties.” Read Atul Bhattarai’s review essay on A Burning.
In Sonora Jha’s Intemperance (Harper Collins, October 2025), a middle-aged woman, having left two husbands, celebrates her 55th birthday with a modern swayamvar – a contest inspired by an ancient Indian ritual in which suitors compete for affection. A respected intellectual in an American town, she risks societal ridicule even as her self-esteem and desires remain undimmed.
Rahul Pandita’s fiction debut, Our Friends in Good Houses (Fourth Estate India, October 2025), follows Neel, a journalist drawn to war zones, as he searches for a sense of home. From Delhi to the United States and back, he navigates fleeting relationships and ephemeral dwellings, questioning whether the anchorage he seeks lies in the world around him or within himself.
Sayantan Ghosh’s debut novel, Lonely People Meet (Bloomsbury India, October 2025), explores love, memory and identity. Karno, an aspiring novelist working as an editor and bookstore assistant, meets Devaki on the streets of Delhi, and the pair embark on a tender romance. But when a mysterious organisation reveals that Devaki is not who she seems, Karno must navigate a shadowy world where people rent fabricated lives and pasts can be rewritten.
Histories of Southasian migration
In Coolie Migrants, Indian Diplomacy: Caste, Class and Indenture Abroad, 1914–67 (Hurst, October 2025), Kalathmika Natarajan uncovers the forgotten role of indentured labour migration in shaping India’s diplomatic histories. Millions of labourers once sailed from the Subcontinent across the Indian Ocean, forming the roots of what is now the world’s largest diaspora. Yet discourse – defined by intersections of caste, class, race and gender – often cast the migrant worker as the “other” of Indian diplomacy. Natarajan shows how these journeys, and the enduring stigma of coolie labour, shaped the moral imagination of its foreign policy.
Drawing on rich, multi-archival research, she traces stories of quarantine camps en route to Ceylon, cultural missions in the Caribbean and immigrant life in Britain – revealing how caste, class and race were entwined in the making of modern Indian diplomacy.
đź“– From the Himal Archives: Rajendra Prasad writes the story of how Indian indentured labourers in Fiji overcame the political legacy of colonialism.
Also set amid the shifting tides of empire, Kalyani Ramnath’s Boats in a Storm: Law, Migration and Citizenship in Post-War Asia (Context, August 2025) traces the legal and personal struggles of Indian Ocean migrants navigating the post-war transformations as India, Burma, Ceylon and Malaya fought for independence. As new borders hardened, traders, merchants and labourers sought to hold onto the fluid lives they had long lived.
Through these migrants’ encounters with law and bureaucracy, Ramnath offers a moving account of how belonging and memory were forged and fractured. Unearthing these obscured histories, Boats in a Storm reminds us that citizenship and national identity were never fixed endpoints, but fragile constructs built on restless and enduring migrations.
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’d love to hear from you. Write to me at shwethas@himalmag.com.
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