📚💖 Southasia Review of Books: For the love of Southasian literature!

Fed up with romance and sappiness? Bored by conventional stories of love? No matter how you feel about Valentine’s Day, what better way to celebrate Southasian literature than with stories that capture the many shades of love? So for some (anti-)Valentine’s Day reading, here are some of my favourite books from around the region on love that take a different approach. 

From the canon to the contemporary, the serious to the silly, these stories highlight the unique ways love unfolds across Southasia:

📚 Pyre by Perumal Murugan, translated by Aniruddhan Vasudevan (Penguin India, April 2017)

In Perumal Murugan’s powerful and compelling novel Pyre, an inter-caste couple elopes, setting in motion a story of innocent young love pitted against chilling intolerance. The rot of caste-based hatred, fear and violence in India is on full display in this story set in the rural Tamil Nadu of the 1980s. A must-read.

📚 In Sensorium: Notes for My People by Tanaïs (Harper Collins, February 2022)

The queer American-Bangladeshi artist, writer and perfumer Tanaïs’s expansive memoir is structured like a perfume itself: base notes, heart notes and head notes. In building a universe of memories and scent, the book interrogates love and desire, and the violence of caste, colonialism and patriarchy. From the origins of fragrances and of Bangladesh to stories about the women in their family, Tanaïs offers a journey through their cultural, sexual and artistic identities. 

📚 We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies by Tsering Yangzom Lama (Bloomsbury, September 2023)

A love letter to historical, cultural and familial ties, Tsering Yangzom Lama’s We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies reflects on displacement, the struggles to forge new lives, and the lengths one would go to stay connected to their homelands. Told through a family’s fifty-year journey, Lama provides a stunning portrait of Tibetans in exile. The novel also holds within it a love story, of ill-fated lovers who spend their lives longing for connection that never gets spoken. 

[From Himal’s pages, read Amish Raj Mulmi’s review essay on the book looking at how a new generation of Tibetan writers is laying claim to the voice of exile and pushing back against the fetishisation of Tibet by the West.]

📚 The Book of Gold Leaves by Mirza Waheed (Viking, October 2014)

The Book of Gold Leaves is a sweeping story of against-all-odds love, art and conflict in Kashmir. The story unfolds around Faiz, a papier-mâché artist, and his lover Roohi, as Srinagar transforms under conflict and the resistance movement. Through their love story, Mirza Waheed provides a distressing illustration of a situation in which society is fragmented, and home and homeland are lost under violence and oppression.

📚 The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories by Jamil Jan Kochai (Viking, July 2022)

The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories is a collection of stories featuring grief, the grey areas of love and blossoming romances, faith and martyrdom, and homeland and diaspora. The Afghan-American writer Jamil Jan Kochai’s witty writing seamlessly weaves in and out of conflict, and back and forth between Afghanistan and the United States, crafting stories that are both folkloric and distinctly contemporary, with deep empathy and care. 

📚 The Woman Who Climbed Trees by Smriti Ravindra (HarperCollins India, May 2023)

With the lyrical use of folklore and mythology, Smriti Ravindra’s debut novel explores love, sexuality, trauma and grief in unravelling the experiences of women across India and Nepal who leave their parents’ homes after marriage, and in the process become strangers to their own selves. The multi-generational story also traces the major political transitions of Nepal, and captures the long-ignored topic of the Madhesi experience. Jerry Pinto says it best: “If you have loved and wondered why, you will want to read this book.” 

[Listen to my SaRB conversation with Smriti on her novel and the representation of the Madhesi community in the literary imagination of Nepal.]

📚 Other Names for Love by Taymour Soomro (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, July 2022)

Other Names for Love is a story of fathers and sons, inheritance, belonging, love and desire set against the backdrop of Pakistan’s troubled history. Just as the title lets us on, Taymour Soomro deftly explores the lives of two men who grew up in different worlds, who love each other and still fail each other because of the cards life has dealt them and because of their own limitations.

📚 I Did Something Bad by Pyae Moe Thet War (St. Martin’s Griffin, October 2024)

If all this angst is too much, the murder-meets-romance plot gets new life from its setting in Myanmar in Pyae Moe Thet War’s I Did Something Bad. In this whip-smart and action-packed adventure rom-com, a journalist and a movie star team up to cover up a murder and fall in love along the way in Yangon. War has combined the high stakes drama of a thriller with all the banter and chemistry of a romance, with a little side order of social commentary. I adored this novel and I’m sure readers of romance and adventure will too.

📚 Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera (Tor Books, June 2024)

The Sri Lankan writer Vajra Chandrasekera’s Rakesfall is a “genre-dysphoric” story of resistance and the connectedness of all struggles against oppression. Following two people (or sometimes one) as they reincarnate across different worlds, the book spans different mythic pasts, present-day Sri Lanka and distant futures. Rakesfall is also a love story, but not a romantic one. The story and their relationship keeps shifting as they’re reborn. They become entangled in the politics of the places they encounter, betray each other, but ultimately keep finding each other as they recur. I’m still in awe of this fantastic book – one of my favourite reads of 2024. 

I also love when you write to us, so tell me about some of your favourite Southasian books on love by replying to this email.

Until next time, happy reading and happy (belated) Valentine’s Day!

Shwetha Srikanthan
Associate Editor, Himal Southasian

Thank you for reading the Southasia Review of Books. Are there any authors or new books you would like to see featured? We would love to hear from you. Please write to me at shwethas@himalmag.com.