📚 Southasia Review of Books - 8 October 2025
📚 8 October 2025
Hello reader,
When we announced our first-ever Southasia Review of Books giveaway in July, it was so great to see all the excitement from readers like you. Your responses meant a lot, so we’re back with another special title! To mark our latest Southasia Review of Books podcast episode, HarperCollins India is giving two lucky winners a copy of Aatish Taseer’s new book, A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile. Read on for details on how you can enter.
And thank you to everyone who wrote back last fortnight – hearing from you and getting to know what you’re reading is truly my favourite part of putting these newsletters together. This time, Santosh Kumar shared his thoughts on the award-winning journalist Neha Dixit’s book, The Many Lives of Syeda X (Juggernaut, July 2024):
“Neha’s book is a mirror to India under the Modi raj where the marginalised like Syeda have no place. It is a poignant piece of stark journalism, which is rare these days. It is worth reading to understand the real India.”
You can also listen back to my conversation with Neha Dixit on the SaRB podcast, where we talked about her years of reporting on inequality and majoritarianism in urban India, as seen through the eyes of a Muslim migrant woman.
It’s readers like you who make conversations like this possible and help sustain our mission to give Southasian literature the spotlight it deserves – just USD 5 per month goes a long way!
What upcoming books are you most excited about? If you have a minute, write to me at shwethas@himalmag.com.
📚 SaRB podcast and giveaway
In 2019, the Indian government under prime minister Narendra Modi revoked the writer Aatish Taseer’s overseas citizenship, effectively exiling him from the country he called home. Taseer’s new book, A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile (HarperCollins India, July 2025), retraces the places that shaped him, exploring how overlapping histories of culture, migration, and faith changes both people and places – and what it means to exist in societies scarred by prejudice and exclusion.
Tune in to the latest Southasia Review of Books podcast episode, where Taseer reflects on that journey.
Want to win a copy of A Return to Self? Just listen to our conversation and take the short quiz below. Two winners will be picked at random from all correct entries and announced on 19 October 2025. Don’t miss it!
The episode is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Youtube, or tune in wherever you listen to podcasts.
📚 Reviews from Himal’s pages this fortnight
Salil Tripathi’s portrait of Gujarati pride and contradictions
On the precipice of generalisations, ‘The Gujaratis’ exposes a shameful underside of Gujarati pride, Gujarat’s conflicted cultural landscape, and the community’s broader moral and political failings
By Hemang Ashwinkumar | 07 Oct 2025
📚 This month in Southasian publishing
Voices from the Rohingya genocide
For over four decades, the Rohingya have been forced from their homes, with more than 700,000 fleeing Myanmar during the 2017 military crackdown. Today, most live in Bangladesh’s refugee camps or precariously across Malaysia, India, Thailand, and beyond. Denied citizenship since 1982, the Rohingya remain stateless and vulnerable to exploitation.
The poet-activist Mayyu Ali has lived through, and resisted, this history of erasure. Deprived of a birth certificate and higher education, he began writing poetry as a form of resistance, later joining a network of activists documenting human-rights abuses in Myanmar.
When violence escalated in 2017, Ali and his family were forced into refugee camps in Bangladesh, where he continued to organise education programmes, trauma counselling and creative spaces for Rohingya youth, even as he faced threats from armed groups. Forced into hiding, he eventually found asylum in Canada in 2021, where he continues to speak for his people.
His new memoir, Eradication: A Poet at the Heart of the Rohingya Genocide (Pan Macmillan, October 2025), written with Emilie Lopes and translated by Siba Barkataki, offers a rare first-hand account of the world’s largest stateless population, and one of the most devastating humanitarian crises of our time.
In I Feel No Peace: Rohingya Fleeing Over Seas and Rivers (Hurst, February 2025), the journalist Kaamil Ahmed turns his gaze to the Rohingya diaspora. Drawing on years of reporting and hundreds of interviews, Ahmed documents the lives of those scattered across borders: families of missing children, survivors of trafficking, and communities betrayed by the very systems meant to protect them.
📖 From Himal’s pages: While Bangladesh’s response to the Rohingya crisis is often framed as humanitarian, it also exploits their labour, commercialises their misfortune, and keeps them dependent on foreign aid. Shafiur Rahman examines how this system perpetuates the refugees’ vulnerability.
Palestine, Partition and the Global South
Out this month, Parting Gifts of Empire: Palestine and India at the Dawn of Decolonization by Esmat Elhalaby (University of California Press, October 2025) traces an untold story of intellectual decolonisation among Arabs and Southasians in the 20th century. Linking the histories of partitioned Palestine and India, Elhalaby highlights forgotten scholars, feminist gatherings, and key meetings like Delhi’s 1947 Asian Relations Conference to reveal the shared efforts to forge new solidarities, institutions and fields of knowledge. The book offers an expansive intellectual history of anticolonialism, pan-Asianism, and the rise of the Global South.
Pankaj Mishra’s The World After Gaza: A History (Penguin, February 2025) by examines the ongoing conflict in Gaza to reconsider its historical roots and the fractured global response. Mishra juxtaposes the Global North’s narrative of liberal triumph with the Global South’s vision of decolonisation and racial equality, exploring fundamental questions posed by the present crisis and why these two halves of the world continue to struggle to communicate.
The Breakup of India and Palestine: The Causes and Legacies of Partition, edited by Victor Kattan and Amit Ranjan (Sanctum Books, February 2025), is the first study of political and legal thinking on the 1947 partitions of India and Palestine. The volume connects the movements of people, colonial policies and institutions across regions while probing the deep-rooted causes of partition – religious faultlines, majoritarian politics, and the challenges of governance in divided societies.
Together, these books explore how people grapple with fractured societies and the quest for justice – an especially resonant conversation this month, marking two years since Israel launched its genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
📖 From Himal’s pages: Among the Narendra Modi regime’s gravest moral and political transgressions is its support of Israel’s genocidal war and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people in Gaza. Revisit Harsh Mander’s essay on the Gaza apocalypse and India’s guilt.
In a wide-ranging review essay on three new books, including The Breakup of India and Palestine, Chintan Girish Modi asks: can India ever return to a principled policy on Palestine?
New Southasia crime reads
This season, writers of Southasian crime fiction are serving up suspense, twists and intrigue – across city streets to quiet Southasian towns, and from historical mysteries to modern whodunnits.
206 Bones (Westland, November 2025) by Salil Desai – one of India’s leading crime fiction writers and the creator of the acclaimed Inspector Saralkar mystery series – follows siblings Sunit and Niharika Welde, who uncover a skeleton beneath their ancestral Pune home. Senior Inspector Saralkar, PSI Motkar, and ASI Sania Zirpe must untangle buried family secrets and hidden crimes to uncover the truth behind a chilling murder.
Old Delhi becomes a labyrinth of danger in Murder in Moonlit Square by Paul Waters (Penguin India, October 2025), where Sister Agatha Murphy, an Irish nun and beloved teacher, teams up with a hotel manager to investigate a body found in a restored haveli-hotel, navigating local intrigues along the way.
In volume three of The Hachette Book of Indian Crime Fiction (October 2025), edited by Tarun K Saint, 21st century stories of obsession, betrayal and hidden motives unfold, featuring contributions from the genre’s stalwarts like Vaseem Khan, Madhulika Liddle, Tabish Khair, Tanuj Solanki, and others.
Kerala’s temple town sets the scene for The Lion’s Tale by Akhil K translated from the Malayalam by Sarita Ravindranath (Westland Ekadā, September 2025), a slow-burn thriller where the sons of a legendary Theyyam artist plot revenge for their father’s gruesome murder, while inspector George Alex investigates a double-murder in a high-security army facility called Area 11 that entangles the town.
A Hiding to Nothing by the Colombo-based author Chhimi Tenduf-La (Hachette India, July 2025) tracks the kidnapping of Devin Pinto, a young boy from Sri Lanka’s cloistered high society. As his family navigates back channels and secrets, they uncover illicit affairs, hidden motives, and the claustrophobic pressures of elite life.
The fourth book in Narini Nagendra’s beloved Bangalore Detectives Club series, Into the Leopard’s Den (Pegasus Crime, July 2025) brings 1920s India to life. This time, the amateur sleuth Kaveri Murthy investigates a string of murders from Bangalore to Coorg, unraveling colonial-era tensions, environmental issues and challenges for women in society.
“Who better to pry answers from unwilling suspects than a meddlesome aunty?” A Detective Aunty by Uzma Jalaluddin (Harper Collins, May 2025) sees widow Kausar Khan travel to Toronto when her daughter is accused of murder, and the incident is only the latest in a wave of local crimes which have gone unsolved. With sharp observation and the help of her teenage granddaughter, she uncovers secrets, betrayals, and the shocking truth hidden beneath the surface of her community.
Inspired by a real-life antiquities scandal in Pakistan, The Museum Detective (Soho Crime, April 2025) by the writer and journalist Maha Khan Phillips follows the archaeologist Gul Delani and her team of unlikely misfits through the country’s corrupt corridors, uncovering conspiracies and pursuing justice while searching for her missing niece.
🎙️From the SaRB podcast archives: A conversation with the Karachi-based author Taha Kehar on his novel No Funeral for Nazia, and reimagining the Southasian mystery genre.
Until next time, happy reading!
Shwetha Srikanthan
Associate Editor, Himal Southasian
💌 Are there any new books, authors or events you would like to see featured? I would love to hear from you. Please write to me at shwethas@himalmag.com.
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