📚Southasia Review of Books - 27 March 2025

Hello reader,

On this week’s episode of the Southasia Review of Books podcast, I sit down with the Sri Lankan-Pākehā writer Saraid de Silva to talk about her debut novel, Amma (Moa Press/Weatherglass Books April 2024), now longlisted for the 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction! 

Amma is a multigenerational saga of three women from the Southasian diaspora as they navigate anger, trauma, queerness and displacement. At its core, the novel explores how deeply the past impacts the present, and how shifting circumstances and misunderstandings have forced the women apart, and what it takes to knit them back together.

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

📚 Reviews from Himal’s pages this month

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📚 This month in Southasian publishing

New exposés on Johnson & Johnson

The Johnson & Johnson Files: The Indian Secrets of a Global Giant (Juggernaut, March 2025) tells the story of how one of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical giants betrayed Indian patients. One of J&J’s major scandals concerns the misleading claims about the longevity of its hip implants, with patients frequently having to undergo a revision surgery before the company’s advertised timeframe. In this book, Kaunain Sheriff M investigates how this case was uncovered in India, and how J&J was brought to justice through the efforts of whistleblowers, patients and lawyers.

Gardiner Harris’s No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson (Penguin, April 2025) also raises life-or-death questions about the healthcare conglomerate in a reported exposé of Johnson & Johnson. As a pharmaceutical reporter for The New York Times Harris’s investigations led to looking beyond J&J’s image as the child-friendly “baby company” to uncover multiple disasters and piles of evidence showing decades of corruption and dangerous corporate practices that have threatened the lives of millions around the world. 

[Read Himal’s own investigative series Pills, Perils, Profits on Southasian pharmaceutical manufacturing and exports by two of India’s best investigative journalists Vidya Krishnan and Arshu John.]

India’s first woman anthropologist

This month marks the publication of Racializing Caste: Anthropology between Germany and India and the Legacy of Irawati Karve by Thiago Pinto Barbosa (De Gruyter, March 2025). Focusing on the legacy of Karve as a prominent scientist and India’s first woman anthropologist, Barbosa analyses how transnational and transcolonial entanglements in race science, particularly between Germany and India, shaped knowledge on caste and ethnicity in India.

In Iru: The Remarkable Life of Irawati Karve (Speaking Tiger, September 2024) Barbosa and Urmilla Deshpande, the writer and granddaughter of Karve, present an intimate portrait of her life and work as an anthropologist, philosopher, wife and mother.

Partition and the Urdu short story

Experiments in Silence: The Urdu Short Story After 1947 (Clemson / Liverpool University Press, March 2025) investigates the politics and ethics of silence in the Urdu short fiction published following the Partition of the Subcontinent. In this volume, by Sana R Chaudhry focuses on the genre of the afsana, or the short story form, to explore collective cultural trauma, unspeakability, and the fraught memories of Partition through a series of close readings and new translations of selected Urdu short stories by three of the most prolific Urdu writers of Southasia: Naiyer Masud, Saadat Hasan Manto, and Ismat Chughtai.

The Belt and Road Initiative and the Asian Century

India and China at Odds in the Asian Century: A Diplomatic and Strategic History by Vappala Balachandran (Hurst, March 2025) promises an insider’s account of the growing strategic competition between Beijing and New Delhi. Drawing on his personal experience as a former Indian intelligence officer, Balachandran charts the troubled path of China-India relations during the “Asian century’” and examines the Indo-Pacific’s future. 

The journalist Bertil Lintner’s latest, The End of the Chinese Century? How Xi Jinping Lost the Belt and Road Initiative (Harper Collins, October 2024), unpacks the history the BRI and what its failure might mean for the ‘Chinese Century’ and how China’s plans would affect India and the rest of the region. 

The Belt and Road City: Geopolitics, Urbanization, and China’s Search for a New International Order by Simon Curtis and Ian Klaus (Yale University Press, April 2024) explores how the BRI ushered in a new era of infrastructural geopolitics and how China’s investments are directly linked to its foreign policy goals. 

[From the Himal archives, read Amish Raj Mulmi’s review essay on Lintner’s The Costliest Pearl: China's Struggle for India's Ocean (Hurst, 2019) for a deep dive into what the simplistic narratives on China’s advances in the Indian Ocean miss.] 

Until next time, happy reading! 

Shwetha Srikanthan
Associate Editor, Himal Southasian

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