Three recent books demonstrate how dancers negotiate individuality and collective identity through their work, and how their gender and sexuality is controlled and reproduced by caste mechanisms in modern Indian society
In ‘Crisis in Sri Lanka and the World’, Asoka Bandarage finds the sources of Sri Lanka’s present crisis and of the people’s struggle of 2022 in colonial underdevelopment and a warped global economic system – but solutions remain elusive
Pulapre Balakrishnan’s ‘India’s Economy from Nehru to Modi’ offers a valuable account of India’s economic history but neglects the social and political elements inseparable from it
Spanning Kerala, the Arabian Gulf and more, the celebrated Malayalam novelist’s works narrate the realities of globalisation from below, and the heavy burdens of displacement and migration
Three recent volumes show historians moving beyond assumptions of a bounded Subcontinent, contextualising the 20th century by centring regional and local politics that complicate nation-state narratives
New books by the imprisoned founding editor of NewsClick trace his personal and political journey across two grim periods, and weave in insightful critique of science and technology
Verghese returns to familiar themes in ‘The Covenant of Water’ – modern medicine, political upheavals, and more – to confirm himself as a writer of his own type of global novel
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
‘For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit’, an anthology of prison poems, testifies to the coercive nature of the state and society – yet its under-representation of regional poets speaks of wider exclusions
A new collection presents the harsh, even brutal lyricism of Lakdhas Wikkramasinha, forged amid the violence of the 1971 JVP insurrection and still unlike anything else in Sri Lankan letters
