📚Southasia Review of Books - 4 June 2025

4 June 2025

Hello reader,

We’re thrilled to announce Himal’s 2025 Fiction Fest: a celebration of original short speculative fiction exploring imagined futures of Southasia!

From 9 to 20 June, we’ll publish a selection of stories that push the boundaries of genre and region, along with two special online events featuring panel discussions with renowned Southasian publishers, editors and authors. 

You’re among the first to know, so please register now to join, and keep an eye on our website and social-media channels in the coming weeks for updates and story drops.

📚🎙️ Podcast of the week

Aruni Kashyap on stories of queer and displaced lives from Assam: Southasia Review of Books podcast #25

A conversation with the Assamese writer Aruni Kashyap on his new collection of short stories, The Way You Want to Be Loved, and crafting stories on love, resistance and belonging set against the long shadow of violence in India’s Northeast

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

Let’s keep the conversation going – please share your thoughts on the episode or on Kashyap’s book. If something resonated with you, or even challenged you, leave us a comment on Youtube or write to me at shwethas@himalmag.com. We promise to read and reply! 

📚 This month in Southasian publishing

Beyond binaries and borders

“What does it mean to be queer and Muslim in a world increasingly hostile to both?”

This Pride Month, On the Brink of Belief  (Penguin India, June 2025) – an anthology edited by the poet and thinker Kazim Ali – brings together queer writing from across Southasia. Featuring fiction, poetry and narratives by LGBTQIA+ writers from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal, the collection explores what it means to be queer, Southasian and Muslim in a world that often demands false binaries and enforces erasure. 

Developed through The Queer Writers’ Room – a literary initiative led by The Queer Muslim Project – the anthology aims to unsettle borders, faith and limits of belonging by breaking the silence imposed on queer Southasian lives, particularly those shaped by experiences of caste, gender and displacement. 

“Testimony for the Tibetan people”

Out this month is a landmark novel by one of Tibet’s celebrated authors – Tsering Döndrup.

The Red Wind Howls, translated by Christopher Peacock (Columbia University Press, June 2025), is a courageous and gripping portrayal of Tibetan suffering under Mao’s regime. Delving into forbidden history, the novel spans the famine of the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and the 1958 Amdo rebellion when Tibetans rose in armed revolt against the Chinese state. The novel is also partly set in the punitive labour camps to which Tibetans were sent after the failed rebellion, where many perished from starvation and forced labour.

Döndrup self-published the book in 2006, because no publisher would risk accepting it. When the authorities caught on, all copies were confiscated and he faced severe reprisals; he lost his job as head of the local archives, his passport was confiscated, and he has been under close surveillance ever since. 

Watch this space for a forthcoming essay on Döndrup’s life and work by Christopher Peacock.

Victims and vanguards: Women and the politics of Hindutva

Ascetics As Activists: Saffron Women of Hindu Nationalism by Koushiki Dasgupta (Bloomsbury, June 2025) explores the role of female ascetics within the discourse of right-wing Hindu nationalism in contemporary India. The book aims to shed light on how religion shapes gendered identities and political activism, particularly within the broader project of Hindutva, and critically examines the activism of the sadhvis of the Hindu Right.

[From the Himal Archives, read Atreyee Sen’s review essay on Kalyani Devaki Menon’s book, Everyday Nationalism: Women of the Hindu Right in India, exploring the many motivations and dimensions of women’s involvement in rightwing politics in India.]

In her new monograph, Hindutva and Violence Against Women (Speaking Tiger April 2024), the activist Brinda Karat argues that, while violence and injustice against women are not new in India, the rise of Hindutva – the ideological foundation of the RSS, the ruling BJP and the wider Sangh Parivar – has changed the extent and character of this injustice. 

Karat unpacks how the religious identities of both victims and perpetrator determines the approach of the state, police, and even the judiciary. Drawing on some of the most harrowing instances of gendered, communal violence in India, she shows how women of oppressed castes and religious and ethnic minorities are increasingly denied justice under a regime that weaponises identity while protecting perpetrators aligned with its ideology. 

New books on Indian cricket and its greats

The Rise of the Hitman: The Rohit Sharma Story (Rupa Publications, April 2025) traces the Indian captain’s journey from Borivali to global glory, culminating in a T20 World Cup win in 2024 and Champions Trophy victory in 2025 – told through the voices of teammates, coaches and close friends.

“How does a champion sportsman view the world? What drives him on and off the field?” I Have the Streets: A Kutti Cricket Story (Penguin, January 2025) offers an account of R Ashwin’s life before cricket: childhood struggles, middle-class roots, the joyful chaos of growing up in a “cricket-mad gully” in Chennai, and more. 

In Fearless (Harper Sport India, January 2025), Mohinder Amarnath – an iconic figure in the world of cricket in the 1970s and 1980s – revisits the highs and lows of his career. According to Sunil Gavaskar and Imran Khan, Amarnath was the best batsman of their era. But strangely, he kept getting dropped from the Indian team, making him the original ‘comeback king’. Co-written with his brother Rajender, the memoir offers a portrait of his life and a bygone era of Southasian cricket.

And finally, Australia and India’s legendary cricket rivalry comes alive in the journalist Gideon Haigh’s new book, Indian Summers: Australia versus India, Cricket’s Battle of the Titans (Westland Sports, June 2025). Spanning a century of fierce competition – from Warne versus Tendulkar to Cummins versus Kohli, and iconic moments of Chennai 1986 to Brisbane 2021 – the book unpacks the enduring ties between the two countries brought together, and often divided, by the game. 

[Read the cricket writer Benjamin Golby’s recent piece for Himal on how the cricketing rivalry with India can transform Australia’s view of Southasia – and of itself]

Until next time, happy reading! 

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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