An excerpt from Chandu Maheria’s memoir, reflecting on growing up in Ahmedabad’s working-class chawls and the place of Mohandas K Gandhi in Dalit life and political thought
Spanning three decades and multiple linguistic worlds, Bhattacharya’s ‘Railsong’ writes India’s great events around the lives of its people – and not the other way around – reimagining the Great Indian Novel for the 21st century
Gyanendra Pandey’s new book reads the lives of India’s great 20th-century writers and reformers through the home, revealing how domestic life sustained gendered hierarchies even as they relegated it to the margins
Thant Myint-U’s new book on his grandfather, the first non-white secretary-general of the UN, revisits an era when the institution inspired expectations of internationalist diplomatic leadership that have since faded away
‘India: 5,000 Years of History in the Subcontinent’ revisits millennia of Southasia’s past beyond dynasties and nationalist mythmaking, while raising larger questions about the intellectual traditions that shape historiography.
In ‘Satirical Tibet’, Timothy Thurston shows how comedians and rappers are using satire as a tool of resistance under Chinese authoritarianism and surveillance
How Manu Joseph’s ‘Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us’ falls short in diagnosing the ills of liberal India, and how the novelist turned provocateur has lost his way
Angela W Little’s book spans the original vision and contemporary debates around Sri Lanka’s system of free education, but fails to fully capture its intertwined dynamics of learning, politics and nationalism
Ravikant Kisana’s ‘Meet the Savarnas’ dissects dominant-caste notions of merit, intimacy and power, showing how caste survives beneath India’s claims to modernity
In ‘Native ball’, the artist presents life in Kerala through a deliberate mix of fact and fabrication, combining photography and text to evoke a kind of magical realism
