📚 Southasia Review of Books - February 2024

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 another edition of the Southasia Review of Books newsletter!  

Some very exciting news this month: we launched Himal Southasian’s new Southasia Review of Books podcast. In the first episode, I had a terrific time speaking with the novelist V V Ganeshananthan about the books that inspired her searing latest novel Brotherless Night (2023) and women’s writing on the Sri Lankan civil war. 

Brotherless Night contends with the Sri Lankan civil war’s end by returning to its beginning through the voice of Sashi, a young Tamil woman growing up in the northern city of Jaffna. 

As the book’s title lets on, there were huge costs to this war absorbed by young men in Sri Lanka’s north and east, but there was also immense loss experienced by women – mothers, students, civilians, activists. Part of the success of Brotherless Night is that it humanises the lived experiences of Tamil women and the ways in which they’ve been affected by anti-Tamil violence. Through this novel, Ganeshananthan poses urgent questions on whose stories are told and who gets to tell the histories of conflict in Sri Lanka – all of which we explore further in this conversation. 

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, V V Ganeshananthan’s reading recommendations for women’s writing on the Sri Lankan civil war

I must start with the non-fiction book to which Brotherless Night is an homage, which is The Broken Palmyra: The Tamil Crisis in Sri Lanka, An Inside Account, collectively authored by University Teachers for Human Rights Jaffna, and with a section specifically authored by Rajani Thiranagama called ‘No More Tears Sister’. And she is, of course, the basis for the character Anjali Premachandran in the book.

My friend Rohini Mohan wrote the remarkable book The Seasons of Trouble: Life Amid the Ruins of Sri Lanka’s Civil War. Rohini is also a person who did incredible reporting and I think that she’s such an extraordinary journalist. She told stories that were really hard to tell and she told them with such care – I really admire that work.

Sharika Thiranagama wrote In My Mother’s House: Civil War in Sri Lanka, which addresses northern Tamil communities and also Muslim communities. Sometimes in the diaspora we draw the lines of community quite tightly, and Sharika demands that we draw them the way that they actually are – with more porousness and complexity, so I think she sets a tremendous standard for scholarship. 

Thamizhini, who was a commander in the Tigers and who passed away of cancer, wrote a memoir, In the Shadow of a Sword: The Memoir of a Woman Leader in the LTTE, that has been translated into English now. She was a great writer and that was a really interesting book. It is now available in both Tamil and English, so I’ll recommend that to folks. 

Tune in to the full episode for more reading recommendations from V V Ganeshananthan. 

📚 Reviews from Himal’s pages this month

This month in Southasian publishing

Southasia writers in solidarity with Palestine

Since 7 October 2024, the Israeli forces have killed at least 13 Palestinian poets and writers in Gaza, and over 10 libraries have been damaged or destroyed entirely. They – just like the over 70 Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza and the nearly 30,000 civilians massacred in the West Bank – deserve to be remembered and their works honoured. 

The Pakistani journalist and publisher Mehr Husain and the founder and executive editor of Ananke Sabin Muzaffar released a new literary anthology, Koi Hai: Letters to Palestine, aimed at speaking out against the months of violence by Israeli forces in Gaza and to express solidarity with Palestinians. 

Koi Hai (Urdu phrase for ‘Is anyone out there?’) comprises letters, poetry, translations and illustrations, from authors in Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, India and Palestine. The project is a collaboration between the independent publishing house headed by Husain, Zuka Books, and the global media platform Ananke, which published a digital version of the anthology in late January.

New fiction from Assam

From short stories to classics, coming-of-age tales and historical fiction, the past few months mark the publication of a wide selection of fiction from Assam. 

Somnath Batabyal’s new novel, Red River (February 2024), explores male friendships, migration and nationalism through a story of three boys who grow up in the early years of militancy in Assam. 

Translated for the first time from the Assamese by Partha Pratim Goswami, Mrinal Kalita’s Under the Bakul Tree (February 2024) is a novel that sheds light on the struggles faced by students across rural India. 

Rita Chowdhury’s The Divine Sword (January 2024), translated from the Assamese by Reeta Borbora, uses Assam’s history to weave an epic saga of dynasties and kingdoms.
 

The culmination of a literary project led by Untold and BEE Books in Kolkata, A Fistful of Moonlight: Stories from Assam (November 2023) is a collection of contemporary short stories edited by Mitra Phukan, Arunava Sinha and Lucy Hannah. 

What do we talk about when we talk about Bollywood?

A wave of new books adds to the growing scholarship on Bollywood film studies, inquiring into the almost forgotten pasts of Bollywood, how it retains its hold on global film culture, and the future of the industry.

Namrata Rele Sathe’s The Neoliberal Self in Bollywood: Cinema, Popular Culture, and Identity (February 2024) draws on film and feminist media studies and popular culture analyses to critique mainstream Hindi cinema texts produced in the recent decades.

In Networked Bollywood: How Star Power Globalized Hindi Cinema (November 2023), Swapnil Rai unpacks the transformation of Bollywood into a global entertainment industry by its stars.

In 1980s India, the Ramsay Brothers and other filmmakers produced a wave of iconic horror movies. In his new book, Seeing Things: Spectral Materialities of Bombay Horror (February 2024), Kartik Nair looks at how these films were made, censored, and seen as part of the world’s largest film culture.

Sunny Singh crosses five continents and 50 years of modern Indian history and cinema to explore Bollywood’s hold on the world’s imagination in her latest book, A Bollywood State of Mind: A journey into the world’s biggest cinema (October 2023).

📚 What I’m Reading

In this newsletter we highlighted a selection of women’s writings from Sri Lanka. A towering figure in this space, Yasmine Gooneratne, passed away this month at the age of 88. Gooneratne – a scholar, poet, creative writer and teacher – founded the literary journal New Ceylon Writing in 1970 and published nearly 20 books, including volumes of literary essays, poems and short stories, as well as novels and a family memoir.

To celebrate Gooneratne’s work, I revisited some of my favourites. Her remarkable first novel A Change of Skies (1992) infuses comedy and political commentary in the story of an upper-class Sri Lankan couple who move to Australia. The Sweet and Simple Kind (2006), perhaps Gooneratne’s most well-known book, is a family drama set during the 1950s and 1960s in the newly independent Sri Lanka. The Pleasures of Conquest (1995) is another layered novel with Gooneratne’s signature use of wit and satire. Set in the fictional country of “Amnesia” (a post-colonial Sri Lanka in disguise), the book uses a cast of international elites to parody the legacies of imperialism. 

What should I read next? Tell me about the books you read this month or any books you’re currently reading – and whether you loved or hated them. Write to me at shwethas@himamag.com.

Until next time, happy reading!  

Shwetha Srikanthan
Assistant Editor, Himal Southasian