📚 Southasia Review of Books - 30 July 2025

📚 30 July 2025

Hello reader,

For the renowned Indologist Wendy Doniger, the best way to approach myth is not by defining it, but to look at it in action, which is precisely what she has set out to in her new book, The Cave of Echoes: Stories About Gods, Animals and Other Strangers (Speaking Tiger, July 2025).

The book is about the universal art of storytelling and the diverse narratives that shape how people understand their world and their pasts. Drawing on Hindu epics, Biblical parables, Greek myths and modern mythologies, Doniger examines the enduring force of myth and tradition, and how they shape societies.

This week on the Southasia Review of Books podcast, I speak with Doniger about her wide-ranging study, the importance of understanding other peoples’ myths, and the Hindu right’s attempts to suppress the study of religion. 

Tune in to the conversation with Wendy Doniger on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Youtube.

📚 Reviews from Himal’s pages this week

What is the Belt and Road Initiative really?

Simon Curtis and Ian Klaus’s The Belt and Road City argues China is wielding the BRI to reshape the global cities around its own ideals – but good luck pinning down what those are

By Joshua Yang | 30 July 2025

📚 This month in Southasian publishing

Celebrating Southasian literature

In 2006, Kiran Desai rose to prominence with The Inheritance of Loss, which went on to win the Booker Prize that year. Now, nearly two decades later, Desai has been nominated for the 2025 Booker Prize longlist, this time for The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (Hogarth, September 2025), the novel that she was grappling with during that time, and also her first book since. 

In this novel, two immigrants to the United States return to India and meet on an overnight train. The Booker Prize’s judges describe it as a “vast and immersive” work that “enfolds a magical realist fable within a social novel within a love story.”

📜 From the Himal Archives: Writing on how home-grown authors have shattered the fearful silence surrounding the 1986 movement for a separate Gorkha state in India, Anuradha Sharma unpacks why Desai faced criticism for her portrayal of the agitation in particular and the people of the Kalimpong hills in general in The Inheritance of Loss. 

Hindustani classical music and its makers

My Life: Story of an Imperfect Musician (Niyogi Books, July 2025) is the autobiography of Ustad Allauddin Khan, the legendary Indian classical musician and founder of the Maihar-Senia gharana. Transcribed from his spoken accounts at Santiniketan in 1952, and translated from Bengali for the first time by Hemasri Chaudhuri, the book offers an intimate glimpse into the making of a maestro and his deep commitment to music as both performer and mentor.

The writer and reputed Hindustani vocalist Priya Purushothaman traces the lives of eight distinctive voices in Hindustani music in her new book, The Call of Music: 8 Stories of Hindustani Musicians (Hachette India, June 2025). These musicians have carried forward the tradition with conviction and artistic courage. Through their journeys, Purushothaman explores what it means to dedicate oneself to classical music, while also engaging with questions of caste, gender and religion.

Born in 1913 to a family of traditional musicians in Dharwad, Gangubai Hangal went on to become one of the most celebrated vocalists of Hindustani classical music. In the first full-length portrait of her life, A Life In Three Octaves: The Musical Journey of Gangubai Hangal (Westland, January 2025), Deepa Ganesh traces the historical moments that shaped Gangubai’s musical persona – from the arrival of the gramophone in India and the decline of the courtesan music tradition.

📜 From the Himal Archives: Despite the cult status she achieved in her lifetime, the 19th-century singer Gauhar Jaan remains a largely forgotten figure in the world of Indian classical music. Writing in Himal’s pages, the historian Vikram Sampath resurrects Gauhar Jaan’s passions, her demons and her music that captivated audiences across the Subcontinent.

From Indus to Irrawaddy: Rivers and regional politics in Southasia

Out this month, Trial by Water: Indus Basin and India-Pakistan Relations by Uttam Kumar Sinha (Stanford University Press, July 2025) follows the turbulent history of the Indus Basin, examining how the Indus Waters Treaty has been shaped by Southasia’s shifting political dynamics. Sinha explores the roles of key leaders in India and Pakistan, as well as the influence of external pressures, in shaping and reshaping one of the world’s most critical transboundary water agreements.

📜 From the Himal Archives: India’s suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty following the Pahalgam attack rekindled long-standing fears over water security in Pakistan. But as the water expert Daanish Mustafa argues in a recent piece for Himal, Pakistan’s paranoia over India suspending the Indus Waters Treaty after Pahalgam is largely unfounded. Here’s why. 

Looking eastward, the Tibetan river system – which includes the Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy, Salween, Mekong, Red and Yangzi – forms the largest contiguous network of rivers on Earth, flowing across eastern Southasia, mainland Southeast Asia and southern China. In The Range of the River: A Riverine History of Empire across China, India, and Southeast Asia (December 2025), Iftekhar Iqbal uncovers the interconnected histories of these vast waterways as sites of imperial contestation, communal and material exchange, regional political and economic entanglements. 

Exile and inheritance

“How do centuries of cultures evolving and overlapping, often violently, shape the people that subsequently emerge from them?” This is the central question driving A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile (Catapult Books, July 2025), a new travelogue-memoir by the writer and journalist Aatish Taseer. 

In 2019, the Indian government under the prime minister Narenda Modi revoked Taseer’s citizenship, effectively exiling him from the country where he grew up and lived for three decades. This sent him on a journey, from Turkey to Mexico and beyond, to revisit the places that shaped his identity, and to reflect on broader, and often fraught, questions about the forces that make a culture and a nationality. 

Another meditation on migration and identity comes in The Elsewhereans: A Documentary Novel (Harper Collins India, June 2025), a genre-bending work by the celebrated poet and novelist Jeet Thayil. Part fiction, travelogue and memoir, the book weaves together photographs and personal fragments into a story that unfolds across decades and continents. Through his reflections on memory and inheritance, Thayil maps the lives of those shaped by separation. 

Until next time, happy reading! 

Shwetha Srikanthan
Associate Editor, Himal Southasian

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