Year in review: Ten great book reviews of 2024

It's that time of the year: we at Himal Southasian have compiled a selection of some of our most-read book reviews for 2024, looking at a wide range of Southasian literature that deserves closer critical attention. In no particular order, here's our selection: .“A glass of blood to drink”: The insurgent poetry of Sri Lanka's Lakdhas Wikkramasinha.In Sri Lanka, disaffection with the political status quo gave rise to a 1971 Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) insurrection among rural Sinhalese youths in the south that was violently quelled by the state. In the early 1980s, ethnic and political tensions would heighten into two brutal conflicts; an armed struggle for an independent state in the Tamil majority North and East that would intensify into a civil war and a second JVP insurrection. The shock of the first insurrection turned the world of Sri Lankan literature towards the political, and invited the country’s anglophone elite to an interrogation of themselves as the insurrection’s target. Among these writers was Lakdhas Wikkramasinha – the first Sri Lankan poet to be published in the New York Review of Books Poets series. Ashik Kahina unpacks how the new collection presents the harsh, even brutal lyricism of Wikkramasinha. forged amid the violence of 1971 and still unlike anything else in Sri Lankan letters..The real secrets around Himalayan art surround those who collect it.Western publications and exhibitions of Himalayan cultural property are merely the visible manifestations of a whole universe of money, power, crime and loss, Erin L Thompson argues in her review essay Himalayan Art in 108 Objects and Deities Unveiled: Himalayan Art from the Collection of Dr. John N. Loomis. The 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. .How should we define a Southasian 20th century?.Our contemporary understanding of Southasia – as a region connected by shared historical, political and cultural geographies – is a product of 20th-century transformations, including the emergence of nation-states and their claims on identities. Since the turn of the 21st century, scholars of Southasian history have consistently reevaluated the previous century’s accepted chronologies. How does our understanding of the century – and its impact on the historical imagination of Southasia as a region – change when it is narrated through the emergence of regional film industries, economic ideologies, or labour migration? Looking at three recent volumes Amanda Lanzillo explores how historians are moving beyond assumptions of a bounded Subcontinent, contextualising the 20th century by centring regional and local politics that complicate nation-state narratives. .We’re on a mission to give Southasian literature the spotlight it deserves. Become a paying Himal Patron to support the Southasia Review of Books!.How Benyamin’s fiction upended the illusions of Gulf migrant lives in Malayalam literature.The Gulf was always understood in Kerala to be a place of hardship, and the heat and sweat of the place has been part of Malayali folklore right from the 1970s, when the waves of migration for work across the Arabian Sea first began. But it was Benyamin who gave the Gulf experience with this dimension the imprimatur of wide public recognition. Where the hardship of the Gulf was something one otherwise encountered in a fleeting song or a letter or a private conversation, now it has taken on the concreteness of Malayalam prose. Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil unpacks how, spanning massive swathes of geography and shuffling together a medley of genres and styles, Benyamin’s works are a testament to the range of the Malayalam literary world. But regardless of the chosen setting and style for every work, Benyamin tells stories from the margins – and it is from the margins that the heavy burdens of displacement and migration, a world as seen by migrants can most easily be imagined..A Bangladeshi feminist’s personal – and political – history of her land.“I used to climb coconut trees as a child,” Noorjahan Bose writes in Daughter of the Agunmukha, in which the Bangladeshi writer and feminist activist recounts her memories spanning colonial-era Bengal in the 1930s and Bangladesh in the mid-2000s. It is a simple enough statement, but it pops up at such a tense, unexpected moment in the book that it catches the reader off guard – even as, in the very next instant, it feels like the most natural of responses from a narrator like her in her situation. Sarah Anjum Bari reviews how Bose’s memoir of her pioneering life recounts a host of stories born of female autonomy – all while spanning Partition, the Bangla Language Movement, the Liberation War and the post-independence history of Bangladesh..Dance and performance across boundaries of caste, gender and citizenship in India.If performance shapes how we read society, how do intersections between performance and society contribute to our understanding of identity, modernity and citizenship? Ranjana Dave writes on how three recent books – The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India by Shailaja Paik, The Dancer’s Voice: Performance and Womanhood in Transnational India by Rumya Sree Putcha, and Impersonations: The Artifice of Brahmin Masculinity in South Indian Dance by Harshita Mruthinti Kamath – mobilise these connections to demonstrate how caste, gender and sexuality collectively shape modern Indian society. These texts look at distinct regional yet transnational performance cultures, where key actors rehearse and consolidate societal meanings and positions, making these understandings visible via performers’ bodies..The spectre of racialisation that haunts brown Britain.The past struggles of brown and black immigrants have brought improvement in racial equality in the United Kingdom, but recent books – Thank You Mr Crombie: Lessons in Guilt and Gratitude to the British by Mihir Bose, We’re Here Because You Were There: Immigration and the End of Empire by Ian Sanjay Patel, Deadly and Slick: Sexual Modernity and the Making of Race by Sita Balani, The Shoulders We Stand On: How Black and Brown people fought for change in the United Kingdom by Preeti Dhillon – make clear that British liberalism’s claims of substantive progress are overly optimistic. The relationship between racialisations in successive historical conjunctures is less one of straightforward repetition than of haunting – an uncanny doubling in which things feel the same but are not quite, writes Rahul Rao in his review essay. This casts in a different light the question of how institutional racism relates to putatively older and cruder forms of racism. .Environmentalism is no longer just a fable in Southasian children’s literature.Environmental literature for young readers in India is a growing space. More and more authors have been writing consistently on environmental themes, and there has been an increase in publishers and platforms promoting such literature. Today, it’s also not uncommon to find a growing number of children’s books on environmental themes across Southasia. Although the attention on environmental literature for children may not be as pronounced in all countries within Southasia, rising awareness of environmental vulnerabilities is a common theme everywhere. In a wider-ranging essay, Meghaa Gupta explores how contemporary Southasian writing moved beyond moralistic animal fables of the past to draw young readers to new environmental realities. .Why New Delhi backed Sheikh Hasina – and botched its Bangladesh policy.Sheikh Hasina ruled Bangladesh with an iron fist for 15 years. In August this year she fled for her life to New Delhi, and the world was treated to images of a Gen-Z revolution in Bangladesh. Young men and women stood defiant in the driving monsoon rain. Protesters shook hands with armed soldiers atop armoured personnel carriers. And students managed traffic on the streets of Dhaka in the anarchy that followed the revolution. India became associated with Hasina’s repressive government over its years of uninterrupted rule, and resentment of India has erupted in Bangladesh on the streets, on social media, and in the offices of the interim government.With the collapse of India-backed authoritarianism in Bangladesh – and Myanmar too – Cyrus Naji argues that Avinash Paliwal’s book, India’s Near East: A New History reads like a testament to the failure of New Delhi’s policy on its eastern flank..The political economy of reporting on the War on Terror in the Afghanistan–Pakistan borderlands.Do the media and academia bring to light the suffering of local people caught in the warfare and violence? Or do they perpetuate war by producing a worldview that normalises and necessitates violence? Bakht Noor Nasar takes a look at how Syed Irfan Ashraf’s The Dark Side of Journalism and Saad Mohseni and Jenna Krajeski’s Radio Free Afghanistan show how local journalists in the Afghanistan–Pakistan borderlands became both victims and agents of geopolitical conflict and an exploitative global media – and looked to push back.