📚Southasia Review of Books - 7 May 2025

📚 7 May 2025

Hello reader,

This week on the Southasia Review of Books podcast, I spoke to Michelle de Kretser, one of Australia’s most celebrated writers, about her new novel, Theory & Practice (Catapult, February 2025). 

A young woman arrives in Melbourne to research the novels of Virginia Woolf. It is 1986 and theory dominates the universities. She looks back on growing up in Sri Lanka before her family migrated to Sydney. Later, she is disoriented when she discovers the problematic ways in which Woolf, her literary hero, portrayed Southasians in her diaries. 

Theory & Practice is an exploration of the intersections between private and public, personal and political. In pushing the boundaries of what a novel can be, and also asking questions of the act of reading itself, de Kretser shows without telling the messy gaps between our ideals and actions.

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

📚 This month in Southasian publishing

Celebrating Southasian literature

The winners and finalists for the Pulitzer Prize 2025 were announced on Monday. Huge congratulations to Rollo Romig, whose book, I Am on the Hit List (Context, January 2025) is a finalist of the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction! 

In her recent review of Romig’s book for Himal, Laxmi Murthy walks us through the making of Gauri Lankesh, her fight against Hindu nationalism, and how the activist-journalist’s murder exposes the cost of dissent in an increasingly intolerant India.

Caste in India and beyond

“How do caste elites respond to modernity?” Ravikant Kisana notes that many books on caste are written by savarnas, or dominant-caste elites, but the subjects are never about themselves. Meet the Savarnas: Indian Millennials Whose Mediocrity Broke Everything (Penguin India, May 2025) is Kisana’s attempt to turn the gaze back on savarnas – to document the lives and crises of India’s urban elites, and to frame them as a distinct social group that operates within itself and yet remains oblivious of its own privileges and systems of caste. 

And what about the impacts of colonialism, religion and nationalism on caste-based hierarchies around the world? Also hitting the shelves this month, Suraj Milind Yengde’s new book, Caste: A Global Story (Penguin India / Hurst May 2025), sheds light on the Dalit experience across borders, from indentured labourers in the 19th century Caribbean to present-day migrant workers in West Asia. Here, Yengde explores the global footprint of the anti-caste struggle – from its links with Black Lives Matter to international Ambedkarite organisations – calling for a cosmopolitan Dalit universalism.

The rise of a queer Nepali-American designer

From the acclaimed Nepali-American fashion designer, Prabal Gurung, comes a literary memoir chronicling his journey from Nepal to New York, and the harrowing experiences that shaped his ascent to becoming the designer he is today. Walk Like a Girl: A Memoir (Penguin, May 2025) traces the life of a young queer man who longed for a world beyond the prejudice he experienced growing up in Nepal and India. Drawn by the American Dream, Gurung came to New York as a hopeful immigrant, only to encounter new forms discrimination as he navigated the ranks of the city’s high society and high fashion. 

[From the Himal Archives, also read this personal essay by a Nepali father, Bhojraj Pokharel, translated by Niranjan Kunwar, calling for social acceptance and full rights for Nepal’s LGBTIQ+ community.]

The crossroads of war and disaster in Sri Lanka

Vivian Y Choi’s Disaster Nationalism: Tsunami and Civil War in Sri Lanka (Duke University Press, May 2025) explores how the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami catalysed new forms of governance and militarisation amid Sri Lanka’s decades-long Civil War. Tracing state-sponsored disaster management projects following the tsunami, Choi unpacks how these efforts created more insecurity and framed natural disasters and terrorism as inevitable risks in need of management. Disaster Nationalism also centres the experiences of Tamil and Muslim communities in Sri Lanka who were among the most affected by the tsunami and conflict. In so doing, Choi shows how life continues against perpetual threat and uncertainty – caused by natural disasters and state-sanctioned violence alike.

📚What I’m reading

Two books that I recently enjoyed are A Flat Place: A Memoir by Noreen Masud (Penguin, April 2023) and Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture by Gaiutra Bahadur (University of Chicago Press, October 2013). 

By meditating on the nature of flat topography and contrasting that with recollections of her unstable and confined childhood, the British-Pakistani author constructs an original and haunting exploration of landscape and memory in A Flat Place. 

Coolie Woman traces the life story of Bahadur’s great-grandmother, who boarded an indenture ship in Calcutta in 1903 and disappeared into history. She was one of thousands of Indians who left India as “coolies” – the indentured labourers who replaced the newly emancipated slaves on sugar plantations in the colonies. Taking readers across three continents and countless colonial archives, Bahadur tells the story of not only her family, but also the fraught history of indenture. I was particularly drawn to this book after Sohel Sarkar’s review essay for Himal on Waiting on Empire by Arunima Datta (Oxford University Press, November 2023), which resurrects the largely forgotten travelling ayahs – one of the many other groups of Southasian migrant workers in the British Empire. 

For further reading, I’d also recommend Sreyartha Krishna’s recent piece for Himal on the forgotten history of caste slavery and the story of Eesoo – a Dalit woman whose courage in 1841 challenged a centuries-old system of caste-based slavery and hastened the promise of freedom for millions. 

✨What are you reading this month? Write to me at shwethas@himalmag.com to be featured in the next newsletter.

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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