Books

The present and deep past of anti-caste speculative fiction
‘The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF’ demonstrates the power of speculative and science fiction as instruments of the anti-caste struggle in Southasia, and these genres’ connections to the wide traditions ...
Tsering Döndrup’s The Red Wind Howls, his most politically charged work, unfolds against the backdrop of Tibet’s history of erasure and violence – a legacy Tsering Döndrup dares to confront head-on in all his writing.
The uncompromising writer’s English translator reflects on how Tsering Döndrup’s banned ‘The Red Wind Howls’ reckons with China’s erasure of Tibet’s suffering while reclaiming Tibetans’ right to criti ...
A photograph of Parveen Shakir in speaking into a microphone at a public event. She is mid-sentence, with one hand raised in an expressive gesture. She's wearing a cream-coloured kameez with a red and green dupatta and a pearl necklace, and she's sitting on a platform in front of a dark background with another person slightly visible in the distance.
By
Karishma M
The renowned Urdu poet’s 1976 debut collection finds new life online even as romantic expression for and by women continues to be dismissed
Tshering Tobgay in traditional Bhutanese attire, wearing glasses and a red patterned gho, stands at a podium delivering a speech at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2024. The background setting is an assembly hall, with the United Nations emblem visible on the front of the podium. Multiple microphones and papers are in front of him. Blurred attendees and tiered seating are also visible in the background.
Tshering Tobgay’s memoir is all praise for Bhutan’s monarchy and fledgling democracy, but it misrepresents the Lhotshampa expulsion and the fraught political history of the “Kingdom of Happiness”
Muslim women protest against the hijab ban in Karnataka colleges in 2022. Banu Mushtaq’s International Booker Prize-winning short-story collection Heart Lamp, translated by Deepa Bhasthi, offers a rare and unflinching look at the lives of Muslim women in Kannada society.
By
Meghna Rao
Banu Mushtaq’s International Booker-winning ‘Heart Lamp’, translated by Deepa Bhasthi, marks many historic firsts for Kannada literature and offers an unflinching look at Muslim women’s lives in Karna ...
Virginia Woolf’s influence is not simply literary, it is architectural, foundational to modernism as we know it. But it is no small thing to have a white, upper-class Englishwoman as the voice in your head when you are a brown, middle-class girl in Karachi.
By
Zehra Khan
A century on from the publication of Virginia Woolf’s ‘Mrs Dalloway’, a young writer recounts how Clarissa Dalloway’s famous walk has spanned London and Karachi, and continues evermore
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