What Southasia Read in 2024

As 2024 draws to a close, we want to share with you recommendations for the best books on Southasia from recent times from some of our most engaged Southasia Review of Books readers. We did something similar for 2018, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023, when we asked leading writers and intellectuals for their recommendations – but this year we want to keep things in the community. Here’s what they had to say:.Aunohita Mojumdar.The Many Lives of Syeda X by Neha Dixit (Juggernaut, July 2024)The Many Lives of Syeda X by Neha Dixit is a brilliant book, the best kind of shoe leather immersive reporting. The book is very aptly named because we see Syeda not just as a Muslim in an increasingly communally charged India, but also Syeda the worker struggling to survive in India’s informal economy at a time when labour is moving from the organised to unorganised sector. We see Syeda as a woman and mother battling patriarchy but also enforcing norms on her daughter. Dixit’s portrait is deeply empathetic but refreshingly, does not sentimentalise, showing us the grit and grace of Syeda’s struggle to survive.In the portrait of Syeda and her co-workers we also get a vivid look at the many lives of Indians in current times. Dixit also has the gift of vivid prose that locates us immediately in the landscape she is creating. Since I read the book I can never pass by a bindi store without thinking of Syeda pasting hundreds of hundreds of bindis onto cellophane – one of the 50 plus jobs of Syeda that Dixit chronicles – all for a fraction of the pittance that we are willing to pay for it..Mahmud Rahman.Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel by Shahnaz Habib (Catapult, December 2023)Those of us who have traveled with Third World passports will recognise ourselves in this fascinating personal and political journey. We will remember some of our own journeys and we will for sure learn much about how Shahnaz Habib, a woman from India living in the United States traversed the world. She brings her own personal and family stories and much history into this book. No matter what passport you travel with, if you’re curious about travel’s complicated history in an unequal but fascinating world, you’ll find something here to make you rethink your own travels. I know I did..Brotherless Night by V V Ganeshananthan (Penguin Random House, January 2023)In some ways easy to read, in other ways really hard because of the horrors the novel chronicles. I knew the contours of the war in Sri Lanka but never in any detail. The author does not pull any punches, writes the truth against the Sri Lankan government’s war and Sinhala majoritarianism, criticises the Tamil Tigers who killed and tortured dissident Tamils, and exposes atrocities committed by the Indian peace-keeping troops. How do you tell a story of a complex war, one where ultimately no one wins? You do it as a witness testimony, focusing on a young woman, who aspires to be a doctor, trying to navigate the tragedies of her family, nation and country..Taha Kehar.Rosarita by Anita Desai (Pan Macmillan India, July 2024)In 2024, the Booker Prize-shortlisted author Anita Desai broke a long literary silence with a novella titled Rosarita, which features a daughter’s quest to discover the web of secrets surrounding her late mother’s past. In a congested, sun-dappled park in San Miguel, Mexico, an Indian student named Bonita comes across an unknown woman, who claims to know the former’s mother – the mystical Rosarita. Billed by the stranger as an “Oriental bird” from India who came to Mexico to paint, Rosarita remains an enigmatic figure throughout the novella. From the outset, she is absent from the linear arc of the narrative, but still emerges as a dominant presence through the thoughts and recollections of the other characters. Fuelled by rich, elegant prose, Rosarita explores the healing power of grief, memory and self-expression. .Nikhil Kumar.Ghuroob-e-Shehr Ka Waqt by Osama Siddique (Bookcorner, January 2023)Osama Siddique’s first Urdu novel Ghuroob-e-Shehr Ka Waqt is a haunting and lyrical ode to Lahore’s resilience and decline. Poignantly told, it explores societal decay through the eyes of Khalid, a lawyer grappling with the unraveling of his city and his life. The novel traverses Lahore’s smog-covered streets and dwindling cultural fabric, creating an intricate mosaic of nostalgia, despair, and hope. Siddique’s prose brims with a Dickensian attention to detail, interweaving biting satire with tender humanism. What lingers is not just the portrayal of a city on the brink but the enduring spirit of its people, who, amidst loss, continue to resist decay with small acts of care and defiance. A deeply affirming work, Ghuroob transcends its time and place to offer a universal meditation on resilience and renewal. My Beloved Life by Amitava Kumar (Aleph, February 2024)Amitava Kumar’s My Beloved Life is a quiet, compassionate exploration of an ordinary life rendered extraordinary by its tenderness and humanity. Jadu Kunwar, born into rural poverty in Bihar, rises to become a historian, moving from India to Berkeley and back, navigating questions of identity, caste, and belonging. Kumar’s prose sparkles with poignant details – Jadu translating Edward Thomas’s “Adlestrop” with his sister, his father’s pride in a simple bronze lock – each moment delicately reflecting the weight of history and the intimacy of family ties. The novel’s dual structure, shifting from Jadu’s third-person narrative to his daughter Jugnu’s first-person account, offers a richly layered exploration of generational love, loss, and guilt. Deeply rooted in personal and cultural memory, My Beloved Life is Kumar’s most moving work, a meditation on how lives, no matter how unremarkable they seem, are imbued with infinite worth.Loot by Tania James (Knopf, June 2023)Tania James’s Loot is a dazzling historical tapestry centered on Tipu Sultan’s fabled tiger automaton. Through Abbas, a gifted woodcarver, the novel explores themes of colonial plunder, artistic ambition, and cultural resilience. James vividly recreates 18th-century Mysore and its intersections with revolutionary France and Regency England, drawing readers into a world of intrigue and beauty. Abbas’s journey – from crafting the automaton with a French horologist to reclaiming his artistic legacy – unfolds with breathtaking detail and emotional resonance. James’s prose, spare yet evocative, navigates the complexities of colonial encounters and personal relationships with remarkable insight. Loot is historical reclamation, evocative rumination on the cost of creation, the permanence of loss, and the fleeting triumphs of beauty and resistance..Rebecca Mathai.1990, Aramganj by Rakesh Kayasth, translated byVarsha Tiwary 1990, Aramganj is the English translation of Rambhakt Rangbaz, a best-selling Hindi novel. The book takes a slice of two months in a small town mohalla that awaits the 1990 Rath-Yatra. Aramganj makes a perfect setting for a Greek chorus of quirky small-town characters discussing politics over paan, squabbling, calling out one another and pulling leg. A feudal, casteist set who haven’t turned communal, just as yet. Ashiq is a popular, much-admired Muslim, who runs a two-in-one tailor shop in Hindu-dominated Aramganj. He is more than that: a Bollywood dancer, a Ram-bhakt, a loyal friend, a man popular among the women, who admire both his looks, their chats and of course, the designer dresses he stitches. And then the Rath rolls by.The novel captures the seminal moment that birthed contemporary right-wing political discourse. The emotional churn that the sociopolitical events churn is made real not only through Ashiq’s heart-stirring tale, but due to the rich ethnographic detail of street level talk in the heartland. It captures all that laid the dry fodder to set the mohalla aflame in a way that only literature can: with humour, a big heart and an unflinching eye. .We’re on a mission to give Southasian literature the spotlight it deserves. Become a Patron to support the Southasia Review of Books!.Khademul Islam.The New India: The Unmaking of the World’s Largest Democracy by Rahul Bhatia (Context, August 2024)Rahul Bhatia’s work scrupulously deconstructs Modi’s Hindutva India. Its second part is a close examination of Aadhaar, the biometric identification project designed by an increasingly authoritarian Modi regime as an instrument of surveillance and coercion. The first part is superior reportage, with the author walking through Muslim mohallas-turned-ghettos, talking with riot victims, interviewing a slew of other people, re-tracing the bloody tracks of communal killings. This ground-zero account revealed a community, after a decade of Modi’s rule, hounded by cops, shunned by the courts, unrepresented in parliament, left to fend for themselves amid a larger community baying for their blood. The present embittered relations between Bangladesh and India is not wholly the result of Sheikh Hasina’s client regime sent packing by a popular revolt, it is also the delayed effect of the steady flow of news into Bangladesh about the Modi-Hindutva regime’s policy towards its Muslims. Especially Amit Shah’s Citizenship Bill, specifically weaponised to render them stateless.The Quiet Violence of Empire: How USAID Waged Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan by Wesley Attewell (University of Minnesota Press, April 2023)The American occupation of Afghanistan lasted twenty years, from 2011 to 2021. Mid-course, its objective in Afghanistan was re-defined as “nation building”, or “development”. The latter term, according to the author, is a cover for serving the needs of the American empire, whereby de-colonising nations are integrated into global “circuits of capitalist production, resource extraction, commodity circulation, and labor racialization.” USAID was founded in the aftermath of Castro’s Cuban revolution to counter, via “development”, similar revolutions elsewhere in Latin America. Its work, therefore, in Afghanistan substantially aided the US army’s counterinsurgency campaigns, helped to “stabilise” the country (“stabilisation operations” were a critical US Army mission), while shoveling considerable resources into Afghanistan’s infrastructure, for all empires have an abiding need for communication, connectivity and networks. This extraordinary book lays it all out, and while admittedly a difficult read, is an eye-opener for those interested in how the hegemon operates in the Global South, the many disparate soft power instruments of control and coercion it has at its disposal. The Age of Vice by Deepti Kapoor (Riverhead Books, January 2023)I picked up the book for a change of pace, though expecting it to be standard issue Indian crime fiction – middle-class private sleuths or generic tough cops seeking to solve not a murder or a heist as much as how to crack the code to bestseller success. But Deepti’s book turned out to be a hoot! It had sweep and scope, ranging from the uplands of Uttar Pradesh to Goa, from urban agglomerations to small towns (their hotel rooms “smelling of disinfectant and ghosts of human desire”), as it followed the nicotine-stained paths of Sunny (scion of a mob boss), Neda (journo in New Delhi) and Ajay (hitman), spinning a tale of malign political power and casteism, corruption and organised crime, the sins of old and new money in an India in the first flush of the new millennium. By the end, though, it felt more a state-of-the-nation novel with the crime stuff as its hook, which would account for its sprawl, for the switches from the flat sentences of hard-boiled crime capers to the lush prose of an off-track Goa beach. All in all, a heck of a read..Niranjan Kunwar.Radha: Wrath of the Maeju by Rishi Amatya (Safu, January 2023)In the past decade, there has been a proliferation of picture books anchored in Nepal; but there is still a dearth of chapter books (literature suitable for tweens and young adults) with Nepali characters and settings. Published by Quixote’s Cove, a “slow publishing house”, this project was a result of a writing fellowship programme and features a young Newari girl at the heart of the historic Patan community. Mixing elements of folklore and myth as well as fantasy and adventure, I’d like to enthusiastically recommend this book to anyone interested in Southasia. (You can find a review here.)Nepal in the long 1950s edited by Lokranjan Parajuli, Pratyoush Onta and Mark Liechty (Martin Chautari, October 2024) When the thirty-year autocratic one-party Panchayat system ended in 1990 in Nepal, I was in fourth grade. And it is only in recent years, primarily by studying the works of some of these editors affiliated with the Martin Chautari research institute, that I’ve begun to develop a more well-rounded understanding of our country's modern history. This collection based in the 1950s – a decade preceding the Panchayat era and following the tyrannical Rana regime that lasted for more than a century – is essential reading. .Kyi May Kaung.An Unlikely Prisoner by Sean Turnell (Viking Australia, November 2023)I first met Sean Turnell in 2002 at a Burma Studies conference in Gottenberg, Sweden. He came out of the woodwork, sounding like he’d received special permission and been embedded in Yangon, but he wasn’t. At that time, he was black-marked and was “demonstrating” by not going to Myanmar. A few years later he wrote Fiery Dragons, a book about money and banking in Myanmar.An Unlikely Prisoner uses little technical jargon, but speaks straight to you the reader, from the heart. Turnell was the economic advisor to the civilian government headed by the Nobel Peace Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi during the so-called Transition Period, which lasted almost a decade but ended with the most recent coup. Turnell has said he was paid by the Australian government through Australian Aid. I believe he was arrested because he was late leaving, and because he and other reformers tried to tighten up loans to junta wives and cronies. He was accused without evidence as a spy. His jailers were obsessed with MI5 and MI6. The present junta, called the State Administration Council, is very much in the mold of the granddaddy of all the Myanmar coups, Ne Win or “Bright Sun”. Ne Win was unbelievably paranoid. An Unlikely Prisoner is more powerful because of Turnell’s description of what he called The Box, that he was kept in; his wife Ha Vu’s voice, especially in the audio version, and the fact that like Solzhenitsyn and Win Tin, he first started writing it in his head in The Box, and then wrote it out quickly after he was released and deported back to Australia. He spent 650 days in Insein Prison in Yangon and in Naypyitaw prison. Best Laid Plans, A Lowy Institute Paper: The Inside Story of Reform in Aung San Suu Kyi’s Myanmar by Sean Turnell (Penguin, August 2024)In this Lowy Institute interview, Sean Turnell ties it all together. The Myanmar junta tried to stop this book by hiring an expensive lawyer. Turnell told The Irrawaddy that he did not have the means to fight the case in court. I am happy to see this in print and available now online.Damned If You Do: Foreign Aid and My Struggle to Do Right in Myanmar by Ellen Goldstein (Ballast Books, November 2023)Damned If You Do is about the disillusionment of a high-ranking aid officer at the World Bank during the so-called transition period. At first, just struggling with the intertwined bureaucracies of the UN, the World Bank, Foreign Ambassadors and the newly minted civilian government, Goldstein, tends to blame Suu Kyi. Goldstein says she “jumped before she was fired” and was back in Washington DC on 6 January 2021 when Trump tried to raid Congress. Then Min Aung Hlaing staged his February coup and it all came crashing down. Goldstein writes she was “ineffably sad” and didn’t know what to do next. As of today, 23 December, the Myanmar junta has bought more planes, still losing ground to the Brotherhood Alliance, bombing civilians daily. This book is comparable to Bertil Lintner’s famous book Outrage: Burma’s Struggle for Democracy, which gave a blow by blow account of the watershed events of 1988. .Pankaj Tripathi.Circles of Freedom: Friendship, Love and Loyalty in the Indian National Struggle by T C A Raghavan (Juggernaut, March 2024)Raghavan chooses characters from the circle of freedom fighters immediately outside the core circle – Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Azad. The lives, struggles and relationships of the barrister Asaf Ali, the activist Sarojini Naidu, the journalist Syud Hossain, the Congress politician Syed Mahmud and the firebrand leader Aruna Asaf Ali are interwoven with the freedom movement as the canvas. Their mutual relationships and where they intersect with more well known figures makes the reader see history as it was taking shape and more intimately. For instance, the long jail term for Nehru, Patel, Maulana Azad, Kriplani and Asaf Ali, together at Ahmednagar jail during the “Quit India” movement brings out the dilemmas and personal struggles of the various participants and of the Congress itself. Or, how the British scored a self-goal with the INA trials at the Red Fort. It also illustrates the dilemmas of a moderate Muslim nationalist fighting for independence. The book is based on meticulous research eschewing opinions but the way it brings these historical and yet not-so-historical characters together makes it imminently readable. Raghavan, after Attendant Lords and History Men, is making as big a mark as a historian as he did as a diplomat and Pakistan expert. History Men too had explored aspects of medieval and modern history through the relationships between three eminent historians. Raghavan as the deputy high commissioner in Islamabad was my boss during most of my nearly three-year tenure as the first secretary (commercial) in Pakistan (2005-2008). He later served as high commissioner in Islamabad, and still quite regularly writes on Pakistan for the Telegraph. .Vivek N D.The Unfinished Quest: India’s Search for Major Power Status from Nehru to Modi by T V Paul (Oxford University Press, May 2024)The Unfinished Quest unpacks the dreams, dilemmas and contradictions of a nation striving for greatness. Can India truly rise to the ranks of global power, or will its internal fractures and external rivalries keep it in the shadows? Paul’s book takes readers on a gripping journey through decades of ambition, offering a masterful exploration of India’s climb toward global prominence. From Nehru’s lofty ideals to Modi’s brash nationalism, Paul dissects the forces driving India’s rise and the dilemmas holding it back. The book opens with the dramatic Galwan Valley clash of 2020, a flashpoint in India’s contest with China and a stark symbol of its geopolitical balancing act. As Paul delves into India’s strategies joining the Quad, resisting China’s Belt and Road Initiative, and striving for strategic autonomy he paints a vivid picture of a nation navigating turbulent waters in an increasingly multipolar world. But this isn’t a triumphalist tale. Paul lays bare India’s contradictions: record-breaking economic growth offset by shocking inequality, its aspirations for global leadership undermined by domestic crises like communal divisions and faltering institutions. Combining razor-sharp analysis with striking data, Paul’s latest work is both a roadmap and a wake-up call for India’s global ambitions, a must-read for anyone curious about the future of power politics. Breathless: Tuberculosis, Inequality, and Care in Rural India by Andrew McDowell (Navayana, October 2024)Andrew McDowell’s Breathless: Tuberculosis, Inequality and Care in Rural India is an evocative exploration of the entwined worlds of disease, caste and social inequities in Rajasthan. This anthropological masterpiece goes beyond medicalised narratives to uncover tuberculosis (TB) as an “atmospheric illness”, deeply embedded in social, economic and environmental realities. Set in the village of Ambawati, McDowell masterfully illustrates how TB transcends its biological dimensions, affecting every aspect of life from kinship and caste to livelihood. He frames TB not merely as an infection but as a lens to understand how global inequalities manifest at the local level. Ambawati’s TB incidence, 2.5 times the national average, serves as a microcosm of broader failures in public health policy and governance. McDowell’s concept of “atmospheric entanglements” is a breakthrough. He vividly describes how poverty, caste and environmental conditions like dust and overcrowded homes merge to create the perfect storm for TB. Stories of suffering coexist with narratives of care, as neighbours fan fevers, share scarce resources, and navigate fractured healthcare systems. Despite these efforts, systemic neglect from the reliance on pharmaceuticals to underfunded infrastructure leaves Ambawatian lives precariously exposed. This richly textured book challenges readers to rethink TB as more than a medical issue. With gripping case studies and profound theoretical insights, McDowell highlights the urgency of addressing health inequities. Breathless is a must-read for anyone invested in global health, anthropology or the intersections of inequality and care.Kerala, 1956 to the Present: India’s Miracle State by Tirthankar Roy and K Ravi Raman (Cambridge University Press, November 2024)Tirthankar Roy and K Ravi Raman’s Kerala, 1956 to the Present: India’s Miracle State offers a compelling exploration of Kerala’s remarkable transformation from an income-poor region to one of India’s most prosperous states. The book challenges conventional narratives that attribute Kerala’s human development solely to state policies, instead unveiling a nuanced interplay of historical global connections, labour mobility and political reforms. Roy and Raman dive deep into Kerala’s economic history, arguing that its recent economic surge with per capita income 50 percent higher than India’s national average in 2022 has roots far older than its celebrated welfare model. The authors explore how Kerala’s coastal geography, extensive global trade history and migration-fuelled remittances created a foundation for its turnaround post-1990s economic liberalisation. Interestingly, the book reveals that Kerala, once a Marxist bastion, paradoxically leveraged capitalist growth to sustain its progressive social policies. One striking anecdote highlights how migration to the Gulf transformed rural households, injecting wealth that reshaped Kerala’s consumption patterns and economic trajectory. Yet, challenges persist: inequality is rising, and environmental degradation exacerbated by unchecked construction culminated in the devastating 2018 floods. Richly detailed and deeply analytical, Kerala, 1956 to the Present is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand how history, politics and global forces converge to produce economic miracles and their limits..Sign up for the Southasia Review of Books newsletter to receive a monthly curation of Himal’s latest reviews, interviews with select writers, books-related reading suggestions and publishing news from across Southasia!