📚Southasia Review of Books - 23 April 2025

📚 23 April 2025

Hello reader,

Ten years ago, the Mumbai-based journalist Rahul Bhatia started hearing the people he loved spout hateful comments about Muslims. How was it, he wondered, that “the old norms of secularism and equality – however flawed their execution – were being cast off”?

His book is his attempt at an answer; to find out “where the poison was coming from” by speaking to those responsible for, and those victimised by, a virulent strain of Hindu nationalism that has swept through India in the last decade.

The New India: The Unmaking of the World’s Largest Democracy (August 2024) chronicles the rise of the supremacist RSS movement, and the tensions around questions of citizenship. It sounds the alarm on how the push for a national identification project and its stated purpose – to curb corruption and improve welfare delivery – could be used instead to “deliver oppression more efficiently.”

Tune in to this week’s Southasia Review of Books podcast for the full conversation with Rahul Bhatia on the roots of Hindutva, the proliferation of Aadhaar and the surprising origins of India’s identification project. 

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

📚 Reviews from Himal’s pages this month

Why did they kill Gauri Lankesh?

Rollo Romig’s book uncovers the making of Gauri Lankesh, her fight against Hindu nationalism, and how the journalist’s murder exposes the cost of dissent in an increasingly intolerant India

By Laxmi Murthy | April 2025

📚 This month in Southasian publishing

Celebrating Southasian literature

The East Indian (Scribner, April 2024) by Brinda Charry wins the 18th biennial Society of American Historians Prize for Historical Fiction. Charry’s novel was inspired by a name written in a ledger 400 years ago in Colonial Virginia. The entry records the arrival of Tony, an Indian boy sold into indentured servitude in 1630s, and the first known east Indian in North America. Based on this historical figure, the story follows Tony as he ventures into the struggling English colony of Jamestown in the 1630s – weaving together a story of race, dislocation and colonialism.

Bengaluru as a global city

In The Future of Futurity: Affective Capitalism and Potentiality in a Global City (Duke University Press, April 2025) Purnima Mankekar and Akhil Gupta examine the lives and experiences of call centre agents of India’s business process outsourcing industry, who live in Bengaluru and work for customers in the Global North. Drawing on field conversations with managers, owners, and workers of BPO companies, Mankekar and Gupta unpack how the workers navigate a globalised world and imagine their futures in it.

Chronicles of a Global City: Speculative Lives and Unsettled Futures in Bengaluru edited by Vinay Gidwani, Michael Goldman and Carol Upadhya (University of Minnesota Press, November 2024) tracks Bengaluru’s dramatic “world-city” transformation over the past two decades. Moving the spotlight away from the urban elites, this book also explores how people caught up in the changing Bengaluru – from laborers, vendors, domestic workers, and platform delivery workers to property brokers and local politicians – experience, struggle and aspire to make a livable city for themselves.

Food and memories of Pakistan

Pakistan: Recipes and Stories from Home Kitchens, Restaurants, and Roadside Stands by Maryam Jillani (Hardie Grant Books, April 2025) – described as the first major cookbook on Pakistani food – explores the country’s many regional cuisines influenced by its shared borders and complex histories of migration. The journalist Jillani, who grew up in Islamabad and is now based in Manila, travelled across her home country to collect 100 recipes spanning the northern region of Gilgit-Baltistan to south-western Balochistan and beyond. 

Through Zareen’s Pakistani Kitchen: Recipes from a Well-Fed Childhood (Sasquatch Books, March 2025), Zareen Khan and Umair Khan promise to make Pakistani food accessible and hope to inspire women, especially other immigrant women, to entrepreneurship and activism. The couple focus on dishes from their hometown of Karachi, and also draws on Zareen’s Indian Memoni Muslim roots, to bring a diverse range of recipes. 

The award-winning food writer Sumayya Usmani Andaza: A Memoir of Food, Flavour and Freedom in the Pakistani Kitchen (Murdoch Books, May 2023) presents recipes of her childhood and the story of what it was like growing up in Pakistan and how the women in her life inspired her love of cooking. Here, Usmani plays with the concept of andaza: that the essence of a recipe is not a list of measured ingredients, but a more abstract feeling in your hands as a dish come together through instinct and experience. 

Sabzi: Vibrant Vegetarian Recipes (Norton, August 2025), a forthcoming book by the British human-rights campaigner Yasmin Khan, began as a project to reimagine the traditional Pakistani and Iranian dishes that she grew up with for her vegetarian partner. Iranian and Palestinian dishes are well represented in food media, but Pakistani foods are less so, Khan says to Publishers Weekly. “There’s such a diversity of food on the Subcontinent, and it’s a joy to see so many authors celebrating that diversity.” 

The Literary Activism series

Westland’s Literary Activism series has two new books out this month. On Failing (Westland, April 2025), by the award-winning novelist Amit Chaudhuri, is a collection of essays that deals with various aspects of failure in creative work and expression by novelists, scholars and filmmakers, including Sunetra Gupta, Sumana Roy and Michel Chaouli.

Memories of Rain (Westland, April 2025) by Sunetra Gupta – who is honoured as “the true heir to Virginia Woolf” – is a reissue of her acclaimed 1992 novel. The story, set in Calcutta and London, follows the fragile marriage of a young Bengali woman and an Englishman.

New Southasian fiction

Lindsay Pereira’s latest, Songs Our Bodies Sing (Penguin, April 2025), hits the shelves this April. The collection is about identity, survival, and the threads that connect us across borders. The stories introduce the reader to a striking cast of characters – immigrants in Toronto, a grieving father in London who finds solace in The Beatles, an antique dealer in Bombay, a tourist in Paris – to unravel the shared struggles of the East and West. 

From the archive, read Pereira’s story ‘Philomena Sequeira’, shortlisted in the Himal Short Story Competition 2019. 

Until next time, happy reading and happy World Book Day! 

Shwetha Srikanthan
Associate Editor, Himal Southasian

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

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