Verghese returns to familiar themes in ‘The Covenant of Water’ – modern medicine, political upheavals, and more – to confirm himself as a writer of his own type of global novel
Many in Southasia earlier saw Indian secularism as an example for their own countries – but Narendra Modi’s mixing of Hinduism and politics has crushed India’s singular standing
Two publications offer a window into the workings of Himalayan art collections in the West – where the buyers and sellers are more mysterious than the esoteric artefacts they trade in
Pakistan’s military is obviously backing Nawaz Sharif and the PML–N, at the cost of Imran Khan and his PTI, but how long until it again falls out with an elected government it once supported?
Punishment often begins even before arrest in Bangladesh thanks to sweeping legislation, unchecked surveillance and police impunity – with marginalised communities and the political opposition as prime targets
The disproportionate policing and incarceration of Denotified Tribes and other caste-oppressed communities must be understood as a result of colonial and Brahminical power
Pakistan’s prisons remain terribly overcrowded and under-resourced, and nascent efforts at progressive reform are stymied by ingrained attitudes of discrimination, including against religious and ethnic minorities
‘For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit’, an anthology of prison poems, testifies to the coercive nature of the state and society – yet its under-representation of regional poets speaks of wider exclusions
