📚 Southasia Review of Books - December 2023
The Southasia Review of Books is a monthly newsletter that threads together our latest reviews and literary essays, curated reading suggestions on all things books-related from Himal’s extensive archive, as well as interviews with select writers and their reading recommendations.
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Hello reader,
Welcome to the last edition of the Southasia Review of Books newsletter for 2023!
This year, Himal Southasian brought you reflective review essays about everything from Sri Lankan speculative fiction to new books on the Gorkhaland agitation. As the year draws to a close, we’ve been looking back at some of our most-read book reviews for 2023.
Per Himal tradition, we also asked some of Southasia’s sharpest writers, thinkers and intellectuals for their most notable, talked-about and thought-provoking reads on the region from the past year. If you’re on the lookout for your next read and not sure where to start, here’s what Southasia read in 2023.
This month, we take a look at new works on two former Indian prime ministers of both ends of the political spectrum – Jawaharlal Nehru and Atal Behari Vajpayee.
Several recent books have considered Atal Behari Vajpayee’s life and career before his ascent to power as a microcosm of India’s post-independence history from the perspective of the opposition and the Hindu Right. Uttaran Das Gupta takes a look at how Abhishek Choudhary’s new biography, Vajpayee: The Ascent of the Hindu Right, 1924–1977, examines the life and legacy of India’s first BJP prime minister, puncturing misguided liberal nostalgia and the hero-worship of the Hindu Right.
“By removing the tapestry of myth and misinformation around Vajpayee’s persona, Choudhary reveals the tactical and ideological flexibility of the Hindu Right. This has allowed it, and allows it still, to make and remake its leaders according to the needs of the day,” Uttaran writes, “The success of this marketing strategy is evident in the persistence of liberal nostalgia about him even now.”
On the subject of myths, Tisaranee Gunasekara unpacks how in Nehru’s India: A History in Seven Myths, Taylor C Sherman looks to debunk Jawaharlal Nehru’s positive legacy, failing to see how his vision still saves the country from the worst of itself. Tisaranee argues that if Nehru’s India was a facade made of “myths” – especially the idea of a secular, pluralist country – as the book would have us believe, the present government of Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party would have gotten his Hindu Raj much easier and faster.
In an essay on Azad Essa’s Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance between India and Israel, Rohan Venkat explores the ideological convergence of Hindutva and Zionism, and the consequences for Kashmir and Palestine – and argues there is much more driving India and Israel’s deepening ties.
The most potent commonality between India and Israel isn’t in the trade and defence ties they have been building over the past three decades. Instead, Rohan writes that it is in the movements that lie at the core of their political leaderships today – and the weaponising of civilisational imagery that serves to justify the excesses of both states.
Take a look below for a special interview with Rohan Venkat, plus his recommendations for further reading.
Chintan Girish Modi offers a reading of the rare Indian foreign correspondent’s view of Pakistan: Never Tell Them We are the Same People: Notes on Pakistan by Kesava Menon, Reporting Pakistan by Meena Menon, and The Other Side of the Divide: A Journey into the Heart of Pakistan by Sameer Arshad Khatlani.
“It is not that there is no hope for peace, but also not that unity and understanding can be assumed as the default outcomes between India and Pakistan, stymied only by cynical political actors.” Chintan writes, “To see the messy truth of where things actually stand between the two countries, Indians, as well as Pakistanis, need more of what Kesava had: the chance to get to know the people on the other side.”
Chintan notes that even rarer than the Indian correspondent’s account of Pakistan, is the Pakistani correspondent’s view of India, and that there’s clearly a book waiting to be written on the subject.
In a review essay on The World in Words: Travel Writing and the Global Imagination in Muslim South Asia, edited by Daniel Majchrowicz, Sumaira Nawaz traces the rise of Urdu travel writing to unearth a new view on modernisation and globalisation in Southasia.
Sumaira also notes that anthologies like Three Centuries of Travel Writing by Muslim Women, edited by Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, Daniel Majchrowicz and Sunil Sharma, is a crucial step towards writing Muslim women back into the history of travel and showing how travel helped shape their public-facing selves for readers back home.
Interview with Rohan Venkat on India and Israel’s deepening ties
This is an edited excerpt from an upcoming episode of Himal Interviews. If you are a member, you will automatically receive links to new interviews in your inbox. If you are not yet a member, you can still listen to the full interviews for free on our website or by subscribing to our channels on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.
Shwetha Srikanthan: Could you give us an overview of India’s response to the Israel-Gaza war and how the turn towards Tel Aviv that New Delhi has taken more recently is a departure from the country’s history of solidarity with Palestinians?
Rohan Venkat: In the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attack on 7 October and the subsequent response from the Israeli state, India for the most part maintained official silence and the external affairs ministry of India did not comment for a few days on what was going on. Instead, the only official response that we got was Prime Minister Narendra Modi speaking in solidarity with Israel initially, and then having a phone call with Netanyahu a few days later. That alone was already a signal of something of a departure from previous ties where India always sought to mention the Palestinian issue when talking about Israel, even in complex situations like this one.
In the last decade, Modi has been much clearer about shedding those tropes of history. His external affairs minister has spoken about the hesitations of history that, because of vote-bank politics at home, have kept India away from a natural partner in Israel. Over the last 10 years, we have seen much more open support for Israel, open connections with the Israeli state and Israeli economy, and a general attempt to dehyphenate the Israeli-Palestinian cause for Indian foreign policy. India still officially maintains its support for Palestine, on paper calls for a two-state solution and so on, but in practice, its efforts have been at broadening its ties with Israel in the last decade.
SS: Over the last decade, Hindu nationalist ideology has taken centre stage in India, with members of Modi’s government and the wider RSS-led Hindutva ecosystem treating its Muslim population as subordinate. Could you tell us about this ideological convergence of Hindutva and Zionism?
RV: The ties between the Hindutva Right and the broader Zionist movement are, for the most part, ideological. They’re not direct ties in that these people are not necessarily in communication directly with each other and supporting each other. In part, because in in the middle years of the Zionist movement, it was seen as very much allied with the imperial powers or later the colonial powers at the time. Even the right-wing Hindutva writers and thinkers were still anti-imperial, and anti-colonial in some form. But they had a lot more ideological convergence in their ideas of what a nation-state ought to look like, particularly the ties between the ideas of religion, culture, language and land.
Often the Hindu Right looked to Israel as a model for what they would like to build in India. In the last 20-30 years, it has become even more so as we talk more about global ideas spreading and the idea of combating terrorism. The Indian Right uses this as a cudgel against the broader Muslim populace, deliberately conflating specific terror actors with the entire Muslim minority in India, and seeing Israel as a muscular version of what they would like to be, as a version that takes no qualms about treating the Muslim population as subordinate, with contempt, treating them all as potential terrorists.
SS: Alongside the defence partnership between India and Israel are also the growing agricultural and economic ties. Could you give us an overview of this?
RV: India is a big arms importer, one of the biggest in the world, in part because it doesn't have a sufficiently developed indigenous defence industry and it has tremendous defence requirements, given that it faces both internal insurgencies as well as hostile neighbours, both on China and the Pakistani side. So India has been looking for other potential allies from which to draw defence equipment, and Israel has emerged as one of the natural sources of arms equipment over the years, spreading now also to cyber weapons and surveillance technology. In part because of the complexities of global geopolitics, India needs Israel and Israel, which had always seen foreign policy and the defence industry go hand in hand, needs India in a sense as a great client of its big defence industry.
Economic has always been somewhat limited in part because of India’s older reluctance to work with Israel, and in part because the companies were often seen as competitive in the past. But in the last 20 years, they have been complementary rather than competitive, particularly drawing from Israel’s tremendous achievements in the agricultural space and Indian companies in the tech and services space. You now have large Israeli and Indian companies looking to each other as partners. Most prominently, as we mentioned in the review, the Adani group, which has grown in the last 10 years under the Modi government, has bought a significant stake in a port in Haifa in Israel. Between this and the India, Middle East and Europe economic corridor, which was announced on the sidelines of the G20, the India-Israel relationship could grow a lot more economically, particularly in the fields of tech, agri and food packing industries.
Rohan Venkat’s recommendations for further reading on India-Israel relations and Palestine
Azad Essa’s Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel (2023), is very important and very useful. I think it lacks in a couple of spaces, particularly there are aspects where it would be useful for a more nuanced account of some bits of history. But given the paucity of work on this matter, not just India-Israel, but India’s ties with the modern Arab world, there’s very limited, particularly non-academic, work on it. So Azad’s book is one to pick up and read, even if you want to be sceptical about certain bits of the account.
There are two books that I mentioned in the piece that at least draw the broader contours of the India-Israel relationship. One would be Nicolas Blarel’s The Evolution of India’s Israel Policy: Continuity, Change, and Compromise Since 1922 (2015) and the other is the JNU professor P R Kumaraswamy’s India’s Israel Policy (2010). Both of these are more academic works and they’re not really for the lay reader, but for those interested in the subject they draw out this relationship and the twists and turns over the history really well.
Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail (2017) is a wonderful little novella by a Palestinian author that gives you a sharp sense of what this world is like, and what this place was like in the early years, particularly of Zionism.
Because I live in Egypt at the moment, Lucette Lagnado is an author who had to flee Egypt soon after Israel was created. She wrote a memoir called The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit (2007), which is broadly about her Jewish-Egyptian family having to flee Egypt in part because of the consequences of the creation of Israel. Given that we are talking about refugees and what the consequences of the creation of the Israeli state has meant, I found it really an interesting read in this current moment.
This month in Southasian publishing
Stories of living with disability, Sri Lankan cookbooks, and new literary fiction Bangladeshi women writers
In the world Southasian literature, there’s still a long way to go in moving books on disability from the margins to the centre, undercutting the usual tropes of triumph-over-adversity and the inspiration clichés.
A few new books attempt to go further. Abhishek Anicca’s The Grammar of My Body: A Memoir (December 2023) is about the everyday stories of living with disability and chronic illness, navigating desire as a queer-disabled man, and more. Homeless Growing Up Lesbian and Dyslexic in India by K Vaishali (March 2023) is a queer memoir and exploration of growing up with symptoms of dyslexia and dysgraphia. Mostly Normal by Priyadeep Kaur (September 2022) is a collection of personal letters that bring perspectives on families of children with special needs. The disability rights activist Nipun Malhotra’s forthcoming biography No Muscle, Full Hustle (Westland 2024) co-authored by Anish Chandy, is a story of overcoming individual and systemic challenges to effect real change.
This month also marks the publication of a new literary thriller by Leesa Gazi, translated from the Bangla by Shabnam Nadiya. Good Girls is a tale about family secrets and expectations, and comes as a part of a wave of new literary fiction by Bangladeshi women writers. To name a few, Shurjo’s Clan by Iffat Nawaz (November 2022) merges magical realism with several violence-ridden moments in Bangladesh’s history to portray how grief and memories are inherited. Home of the Floating Lily by Silmy Abdullah (June 2021) and Hashim & Family by Shahnaz Ahsan (April 2020) are two other novels by Bangladeshi-origin women writers that explore the complexities of migration, displacement and familial conflict.
The past two years have seen a quiet renaissance of cookbooks focused on particular communities and cuisines of Sri Lanka. The latest of these books is Jayaflava: A Celebration of Food, Flavour and Recipes from Sri Lanka by Tasha Marikkar (December 2023) which offers a culinary tour of Sri Lanka, bringing together the diverse history and traditions and ingredients of the country. Hoppers: Recipes, Memories and Inspiration from Sri Lankan Homes, Streets and Beyond by Karan Gokani (December 2022) showcases signature recipes from the London restaurants of the same name and celebrates both home cooking and the food served at roadside markets and stalls across Sri Lanka. Finally, Rambutan: Recipes from Sri Lanka by Cynthia Shanmugalingam (October 2022) deciphers the rich oral tradition of Sri Lankan cooking experienced from the author’s immigrant parents’ kitchen in London to her northern Sri Lankan roots.
Literary festival season in Southasia
The season of literary festivals for 2024 is almost upon us, bringing plenty of opportunities to hear from authors at events across Southasia.
The 7th edition of the Kerala Literature Festival is to be held in Kozhikode from 11 to 14 January 2024. The lineup of over 500 speakers includes the novelist and short story writer in Malayalam, Benyamin, and the historian and curator-translator of Feeling Kerala: An Anthology of Contemporary Malayalam Stories, Jayakumari Devika.
Over in Sri Lanka, after taking a pause during the pandemic, the Galle Literary Festival is back from 25 to 28 January 2024. Inviting readers and thinkers from around the world, the festival’s 11th edition will host an international cast of acclaimed authors and speakers, including the Booker Prize-winning author, Shehan Karunatilake, and the Indian poet and writer, Janice Pariat.
The first-ever Ceylon Literary and Arts Festival, curated by the best-selling Sri Lankan author Ashok Ferrey, is set to take place from 8 to 12 February 2024 in Kandy and Colombo. The programme includes conversations with the Sri Lankan author Shyam Selvadurai about his latest book Mansions of the Moon, and the authors Ronya Othman, Amanthi Harris and V V Ganeshananthan discuss what it means to leave home, and how this shapes their literature.
The 11th Nepal Literature Festival is also returning to Pokhara from 16-19 February 2024. Watch this space for more updates.
We look forward to bringing you more reviews, literary essays, interviews and all things books related in 2024.
Until next time, happy reading and happy new year!
Shwetha Srikanthan
Assistant Editor, Himal Southasian