Southasia in books: 2020 edition

As the year ends with a flood of the inevitable, and somewhat oddly titled, 'best books of the year' lists, we have instead compiled our own recommendations which we hope will serve as a starting point for richer conversations on Southasia. These books raise questions that deserve wider debate and deeper reflection. Here are 12 noteworthy books reviewed by Himal Southasian in 2020.

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Vanni: A Family's Struggle Through The Sri Lankan Conflict by Benjamin Dix and Lindsay Pollock

"Dix and Pollock convey a remarkable deal of complexity in their characters. There appears, on the part of the writers, a genuine and concerted effort to stay true to the witness testimonies from which the story arcs of the primary characters are distilled. This commitment to truth, naturally and subtly – in ways perhaps originally unintended – subverts popular, mythical imaginations about the people of Vanni and the circumstances in which they found themselves."

Reviewed by Elijah Hoole 

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Sebastian & Sons: A Brief History of Mrdangam Makers by T M Krishna

"The personal stories of the makers and their families illustrate the many levels at which social conditioning, generationally internalised behaviour and casteism work. Sebastian & Sons only scratches the surface of the innumerable ways in which the Karnatic music world has erased the narratives of some of its most talented practitioners. One hopes for more critical voices of reason and dissent from other practitioners of culture in years to come. However, although there is yet a long way to go, this book is an impressive start."

Reviewed by Deepa Bhasthi

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The Costliest Pearl by Bertil Lintner

"The Costliest Pearl's chronological accounts of the countries in the Indian Ocean – oriented to demonstrate that China's rise is a threat to the status quo in the region – may serve as a balm to analysts who already adhere to Lintner's view. But it does little to convince the sceptic why Djibouti cannot have a Chinese naval base when it already hosts troops from the US, Japan, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, and, in the future, from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates."

Reviewed by Amish Raj Mulmi

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The chronicle by Intizar Husain, translated by Matt Reeck

"Even though Partition was a historical reality for Husain, he could not extricate himself from his syncretic roots. He has been criticised for being fixated with the past – a perspective that is not always shared by the muhajir community – but this fixation is not without purpose. This was his way of making sense of his position as an Indian migrant in a new land; a way to bring together his past and present."

Reviewed by Priyanka Lindgren

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Marrying for a Future: Transnational Sri Lankan Tamil Marriages in the Shadow of War by Sidharthan Maunaguru

"The book is a clear, fresh portrait of the Tamil community as phoenix; his fieldwork is a carefully observed aggregation of community tendernesses in the face of the often-cold bureaucracies around migration and marriage. The weddings herein may have assembled families only briefly, but the book itself is a remarkable and lasting testimony – in its own way, a document offering proof."

Reviewed by V.V. Ganeshananthan

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Uncivil City: Ecology, Equity and the Commons in Delhi by Amita Baviskar

"The book argues that the lives and landscape of Delhi have been undermined by a selective and self-serving rhetoric towards public space and the urban environment. "Bourgeois environmentalism"— as Baviskar terms it — is an environmentalism for the privileged few; a style of interpreting and legislating space based on the largely aesthetic categories of beauty, order, health, nuisance, and hazard."

Reviewed by Varun Nayar

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The Deoliwallahs: The True Story of the 1962 Chinese-Indian Internment by Joy Ma and Dilip D'Souza

"The authors of The Deoliwallahs write that the 1962–63 laws applying to 'foreigners' were used to target people who "looked Chinese". In recent years, as India and China have yet again locked horns over border disputes, fears of members of the community have raised their heads again. These fears are only bound to worsen with the emergence of COVID-19 related stigma and skirmishes between the militaries of China and India along the Line of Actual Control."

Reviewed by Uttaran Das Gupta

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Then There Were No Witnesses by Ahilan, translated by Geetha Sukumaran.

"Then There Were No Witnesses­­ is a document from which we cannot turn our eyes away, a testimony we cannot pretend not to exist. It speaks of war from within war, of death from near death and of life from lived experience that not many could conceive. It speaks of love in times of war. The voice that emerges through Ahilan's poems in this anthology is at once desperate and assertive, poignant and hopeful. It is both chilling and sensitive, and offers a naïve reader a wider understanding of life through war."

Reviewed by Kavitha Muralidharan

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Tawaifnama by Saba Dewan

"Well-researched and intricately written, Tawaifnama presents a nuanced account of the tawaif community's history when few such writings exist in the public realm. From Dharmman Bibi, a tawaif who marched into war with the British during the 1857 mutiny, to Sadabahar, one of the most influential tawaifs that Banaras had seen, to Pyaari Bai, a tawaif who became a radio sensation in Allahabad of postcolonial India, this book documents the rise, and often, the fall of a multigeneration tawaif family."

Reviewed by Kunal Purohit

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Resisting Occupation in Kashmir edited by Haley Duschinski, Mona Bhan, Ather Zia and Cynthia Mahmood

"Interestingly, despite the voluminous amount of anthropological work done on Southasia, there was hardly a single volume of anthropological work dedicated to Jammu and Kashmir. The authors of Resisting Occupation in Kashmir have, therefore, produced for the first time a full volume of anthropological writings, which makes its way into the dense narratives of violence and resistance in Kashmir. With every new chapter, the book presents a compelling account of the region, and does so without denying the complexity and difficulty of understanding Kashmir."

Reviewed by Amit Kumar

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A Burning: A novel by Megha Majumdar

"The novel shies away from easy resolutions and exclusively moral terrain. But moral categories have not yet collapsed. Majumdar is unsparing about the grievous human consequences of her characters' actions, which may be far from inconceivable but no less shocking for it."

Reviewed by Atul Bhattarai

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This Land is Our Land: An Immigrant's Manifesto by Suketu Mehta

"Mehta's book is an intelligent portrayal of the American culture of immigration that invokes migration as one of the most fundamental human activities, a lesson that his family learnt: "mobility is survival." While the book chronicles the global politics of hate, it also evokes humanism: it moves, shocks, educates and sensitises. A kaleidoscope of raw and riveting narratives, the success of the book lies in stimulating the reader to ask critical questions about the politics of hate. And yet, the book leaves some thorny questions unresolved – is fascism the wave of the future?" 

Reviewed by Ambreen Agha

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