📚 Southasia Review of Books - August 2024

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Hello reader,

Welcome to another edition of the Southasia Review of Books newsletter! 

What does the life of a working-class Muslim migrant woman look like in today’s India? In this month’s Southasia Review of Books podcast episode, I had a great conversation with the Delhi-based independent journalist Neha Dixit on her new book The Many Lives of Syeda X: The Story of an Unknown Indian. 

Neha traces the life of a working-class Indian migrant woman, her friends and family over the course of thirty years, spanning from the early 1990s to the present day. Syeda, a tenacious worker in the unorganised sector left Benares for Delhi with her husband and three small children in the aftermath of riots triggered by the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. In Delhi, she settled into the life of a poor migrant, juggling over 50 types of unskilled work in three decades, earning very small sums in the process. 

This empathetic account draws readers into an understanding not just of the personal experiences of inequality but of the intractable reasons for its continuation. It is a searing account of life in modern India that spotlights the struggles and aspirations of its minorities and women. 

Take a look below for a special reading list curated by Neha Dixit on books that reflect the experiences of inequalities in India and beyond. 

The Southasia Review of Books podcast will be available once every four weeks. If you like this episode, please share widely, rate, review, subscribe and download the show on your favourite podcast apps. You can listen to the full episode on Soundcloud, Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Youtube.

📚 From the podcast, Neha Dixit’s reading recommendations for books that reflect the experiences of inequality in India and beyond

This is an edited transcript from the podcast interview. Please listen to the corresponding audio before quoting from it. 

One of the very important books that I would like to recommend is Caste Pride: Battles for Equality in Hindu India by Manoj Mitta (Context, 2023), which traces the history of caste in the justice system in India and the kind of cases that were being brought in. It’s really enlightening in terms of what to make of what is happening in terms of caste in the Subcontinent.

The other book I would like to recommend is Women Workers and Globalization: Emergent Contradictions in India by Indrani Mazumdar (Bhatkal & Sen, 2007), which is a very deep study on home-based workers. Home based workers are still not recognised as workers in many of our countries, and these are mostly women.

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich (Picador, 2011) is about the working class in the United States. She went undercover as a worker in various places in the United States to understand what the life of a working class person is. 

The Warp and the Weft: Community and Gender Identity Among the Weavers of Banaras by Vasanthi Raman (Routledge, 2010) tells us the handloom story in the Subcontinent. It tells us what is happening with the kind of liberal economic policies that we have now and the condition and the kind of negligence of people among the working classes. These are the books that I would recommend.

📚 Reviews from Himal’s pages this month

This month in Southasian publishing

Celebrating Southasian literature

This August, Sanaa Alimia’s Refugee Cities: How Afghans Changed Urban Pakistan (2022) and Omar Kasmani’s Queer Companions: Religion, Public Intimacy, and Saintly Affects in Pakistan (2022) were announced as the winners of the biennial Bloomsbury Pakistan Book Prize 2024. 

Listen to a Himal podcast conversation with Sanaa Alimia on the long history of racial profiling, harassment and deportation of Afghan migrants in the context of Pakistan’s recent crackdown, and to learn more on how refugees and migrants from Afghanistan have shaped Pakistani urban landscapes. 

The New India Foundation also announced their longlist of the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay Book Prize 2024 which honours the best non-fiction books on modern and contemporary Indian history published the previous calendar year. 

The longlist comprises 10 books that provide a window into understanding independent India, including Joya Chatterji’s Shadows at Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century and Ashok Gopal’s A Part Apart: The Life and Thought of B.R. Ambedkar.  

From Himal’s pages, revisit Amanda Lanzillo’s review essay on how three recent volumes, including Shadows at Noon, show historians moving beyond assumptions of a bounded Subcontinent, contextualising the 20th century by centring regional and local politics that complicate nation-state narratives. In another wide-ranging essay, Harish S Wankhede explores how Gopal’s A Part Apart and five other new reappraisals show the gulf between Dalit-Bahujan and anglophone writing on B R Ambedkar. We hope to unpack more of these longlisted titles in forthcoming essays. 

Women in translation month

Over the past few years, “Women in Translation” month has become a critical platform for questioning the underrepresentation of women writers in translated literature and exploring the significance of bringing their works to wider audiences. In the Southasian context, it brings up vital questions: Why aren’t more works by Southasian women being translated, and why is the translation of women’s writing significant for the region? 

By highlighting the contributions and perspectives of women across the region, publishers, editors, writers and readers are challenging prevailing narratives and biases that have led to a lack of representation and recognition. To turn our focus to this critical issue around women writers and translators is to shed light on the specific barriers, challenges, and prejudices they face. So this August, we’re highlighting two new works of Southasian literature in translation. 


In the three years since its return to power, the Taliban have excluded women and girls from almost every aspect of public life, denying them access to education, employment and the justice system. Out this month, My Dear Kabul: A Year in the Life of An Afghan Women’s Writing Group (Coronet, August 2024) is the collective diary of 21 fiercely brilliant Afghan women, compiled using WhatsApp messages, offering courageous and intimate testimonies of life under Taliban rule. 

Whether it’s everyday conversation or poetry, these writings in translation honour the individuality of Afghan women and their voices, and in doing so amplifies solidarity and their collective power in the face of both horror and hope. 

Echoing the British writer Bernardine Evaristo’s words about the book, “I could not put it down and want everyone to read it, share it, discuss it, support it.” 

Two other books of the group’s collective writing in translation have been published previously. They are My Pen Is the Wing of a Bird (MacLehose Press, February 2022) and Rising After the Fall (Scholastic, October 2023). 

The soon-forthcoming novel from the International Booker Prize-winning author-translator duo of Tomb of Sand also deserves mention. Geetanjali Shree’s Our City That Year, translated by Daisy Rockwell (Penguin India, August 2024), is a tale of a city under siege, reflecting a society that lies fractured along fault lines of faith and ideology. 

Our City That Year is loosely based on the violence that led to the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992 and unfolds in a time of rising uncertainty and dread. Twenty-six years after its original Hindi publication, the book’s call to bear witness to India under the grips of religious nationalism is timelier than ever, speaking to the growing divisions across the Subcontinent’s borders. 


I will be in conversation with the writers and translators of My Dear Kabul and Our City That Year in forthcoming episodes of the Southasia Review of Books podcast. So please do send in any questions or voice notes to shwethas@himalmag.com.

📚 What I’m Reading

My introduction to Janice Pariat, one of the most distinctive new literary voices from Southasia, was through her most recent novel Everything the Light Touches (October 2022). But it was when I started reading Seahorse (November 2014), her first novel, I knew I’d have to dive into more of her words.

Seahorse begins with the disappearance of an art historian, Nicholas, who leaves behind his lover, Nehemiah, a college student in New Delhi who is also the narrator of this tale. Janice explores the distance between these two characters by alluding to the myth of Poseidon and Pelops with lyrical water imagery. Travelling between New Delhi, London and Britain, who Nicholas is, and why he is important to Nehemiah, is slowly revealed through the book. 

Janice defies the divide between prose and poetry: “Perhaps this is why people write. Because we are always, constantly, on the verge of unimaginable loss. And this careful arrangement of lines is a way of saying ‘Let it always be there’.” There were many beautiful lines like this that made me actually close the book just to let it sink in. 


This month I also started reading Insecure Guardians: Enforcement, Encounters and Everyday Policing in Postcolonial Karachi by Zoha Waseem (October 2022). This deeply-researched ethnographic account explores the lived experiences of the police against Karachi’s violent political landscape and the institution’s contested relationship with the state and society in Pakistan – parts of which I found resonate within a Sri Lankan context as well.


What should I read next? Tell me about the books you read this month or any books you’re currently reading. Write to me at shwethas@himalmag.com.

Until next time, happy reading!  

Shwetha Srikanthan
Assistant Editor, Himal Southasian