Year in review: Ten great book reviews of 2023
It's that time of the year: we at Himal Southasian have compiled a selection of some of our most-read book reviews for 2023. These pieces raise questions that deserve wider debate and deeper reflection, and we hope they serve as starting points for richer conversations on Southasia.
In no particular order, here's our selection:
Ashraf Hoque reviews Shabna Begum's From Sylhet to Spitalfields, a searing history of the lives of Bengali squatters in 1970s East London. Ashraf explores how this historic struggle for housing by Bengali migrants in London is a chilling reminder of how migrants in the United Kingdom were – and continue to be – treated by local authorities and the wider state machinery.
Ashraf highlights Begum's concluding words: "the 1970s Bengali squatters' movement is not a glimpse into a remote past – the challenges of the hostile environment policy, the potential for austerity 2.0, and the complexities of the intersections between race and class are as pronounced now as they were half a century ago." He notes that the story of Spitalfields – both past and present – sits at the nexus of unyielding global capital and the precarity of disenfranchised communities.
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Anuradha Sharma looks at a wave of new books that have shattered the fear-induced silence surrounding the 1986 movement for a separate Gorkha state in India. The writers' proximity to the Gorkhaland issue makes a huge difference in how they portray Chhyasi ('86) – the Nepali term for the agitation.
In the Indian-American writer Kiran Desai's acclaimed 2006 novel The Inheritance of Loss, the Gorkhaland agitation is only a backdrop; with the recent books, Gorkhaland is the main story. Anuradha writes that the post-Chhyasi generation of writers – like Chuden Kabimo, author of Song of the Soil (Fatsung), and Lekhnath Chhetri, author of Fruits of a Barren Tree (Phoolange) – have taken advantage of their temporal distance from the agitation to take a more objective view of it. In some ways, Anuradha writes, these authors are carrying forward the work that Desai had left incomplete in 2006 by providing insiders' perspectives on the movement. They are not only fighting against the erasure of an important historical event, but also setting the record straight.
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Kavitha Muralidharan's essay on Meena Kandasamy's Tirukkural: The Book of Desire unpacks the recent feminist intervention on Tiruvalluvar's unparalleled and widely celebrated Tamil classic. Muralidharan explores how an anti-colonial and feminist reimagining of the Tirukkural is long overdue – a text that has seen many translations and interpretations but, as Kavitha points out, very few of them attempted by women.
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Evan Tims asks, "Why, of all regions, is Southasia so prominent in contemporary climate fiction?" Evan takes a look at how Western cli-fi seems almost addicted to Southasia as a theatre for exploring its greatest concerns, yet often falls prey to stereotypes and uninformed perspectives.
Evan also notes that authors like Amitav Ghosh, Arif Anwar and Saad Z Hossain, either Southasians or members of the Southasian diaspora, have been pioneers of the literary movement to address climate change. And as we look to climate fiction for insight and reflection on our shared future, one has to read the climate literature of Southasia by Southasians, of which there is a sizable and growing tide.
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Ashik Kahina's essay introduces us to the Tamil writer Pandiyakannan, the first novelist from the Kuravar community, and his novel Salavaan – an intimate portrait of the lives of manual scavengers and their relationship to the state. "As much as Pandiyakannan's novel documents a community and a place," Kahina writes, "it also documents how a political movement that offered hope to the marginalised betrayed them."
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The corpus of knowledge surrounding the Himalaya, especially that authored by indigenous scholars, has been steadily growing, yet Western narratives continue to reflect a limited worldview. Amish Raj Mulmi looks at how John Keay, Erika Fatland and Ed Douglas' books on the Himalaya exhibit these ways of seeing, or failing to see, the mountains and their people.
Amish argues that colonial conceptions of the Himalaya persist in the modern day, not just through popular narratives that emphasise colonial histories of the region but also in sacred imaginations of the Himalaya.
Both Himalaya: Exploring the Roof of the World by John Keay and Erika Fatland's High: A Journey Across the Himalayas through Pakistan, India, Bhutan, Nepal and China represent how the Himalaya has come to be imagined in the modern era by those outside the region. In the former, the Himalaya must be defined by its encounters with the colonial explorer, thus creating a template for travelogues such as the latter, where the Himalaya is again interpreted by its contact – and alignment – with Western norms and ideas. Such works continue to impose a normative view of the Himalaya dating back to the heyday of colonialism, even if unconsciously. However, a course correction has been attempted in Ed Douglas' Himalaya: A Human History, which admirably places local histories first.
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Gautam Bhatia's essay introduces us to the extraordinary recent burst of anglophone speculative fiction (SF) from Sri Lanka, looking at the works of Vajra Chandrasekera and Yudhanjaya Wijeratne in conversation with each other and other contemporary SF writers. At its best, Bhatia writes, Sri Lankan SF celebrates the hybridity of the post-colony, taking the legacy of Arthur C Clarke or Iain M Banks, arguing with and against it, and weaving it into context.
Gautam explores how Vajra Chandrasekera's The Saint of Bright Doors is part of an extraordinary recent burst of anglophone SF writing from Sri Lanka that straddles both "universalising" and "particularising" tendencies. Yudhanjaya Wijeratne's The Salvage Crew reads like a love letter to science fiction. Gautam writes that, like the best of love letters, it is layered and has dimensions, communicating its message at many levels.
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Harish S Wankhede takes a deep look at how six books on Ambedkar examine his life and thought with sincere reverence as well as honest critique.
Harish places the new publications in three groups. The first is of three authoritative biographies – one each by the historian Ashok Gopal, the philosopher Aakash Singh Rathore and the Indian National Congress politician Shashi Tharoor – that present a chronological account of key personal and historical events in Ambedkar's life. In the second group, the philosopher Scott R Stroud and the scholars Christophe Jaffrelot, William Gould and Santosh Dass's books examine Ambedkar's philosophical grooming in the West and how certain foreign locations, universities and Western scholars shaped Ambedkar's ideological approach and motivated his political actions. Finally, a translation of the memoir of Savita Ambedkar, a social activist and Ambedkar's second wife, narrates the political troubles and emotional concerns that affected Ambedkar's last ten years.
Wankhede notes that while new anglophone publications on Ambedkar curate details of his life for a global audience, they also push him away from the "vernacular" Dalit-Bahujan minds that both admire him as a philosopher and derive inspiration from his legend. While exploring this gulf, Wankhede writes, it would also have been fruitful if the authors had reflected on applying these new perspectives to strengthen the battles against the social injustices and caste-based inequalities in India today.
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In an essay co-published with queerbeat, Chintan Girish Modi introduces us to the world of queer literature for children in India. Chintan speaks to parents and community libraries turning to children's books with queer themes to help young minds understand and be sensitive towards the lives of people who challenge heteronormativity and the gender binary.
As a journalist writing about children's books for over a decade, and as a former school teacher and teacher trainer, Chintan has learnt that reading aloud to children and buying books that children can read for pleasure are practices restricted to a small segment of Indian families. Parents from socioeconomically marginalised communities often do not have the resources to buy not just queer-themed books but any books for their children. Instead, they prefer to spend their money on what's most essential – school textbooks. Sometimes, their children access children's books through school libraries, non-profit organisations or the growing number of community libraries in India such as The Community Library Project in the National Capital Region.
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India recently voted in favour of a number of draft resolutions in the United Nations that criticised Israel's conduct in Gaza – which has already claimed more than 10,000 Palestinian lives – and supported aid for Palestinian civilians. However, deeper shifts have taken place in India's approach to Israel.
In an essay on Azad Essa's Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance between India and Israel, Rohan Venkat explores the ideological convergence of Hindutva and Zionism, and the consequences for Kashmir and Palestine – and argues there is much more driving India and Israel's deepening ties.
The most potent commonality between India and Israel isn't in the trade and defence ties they have been building over the past three decades. Instead, Rohan writes that it is in the movements that lie at the core of their political leaderships today – and the weaponising of civilisational imagery that serves to justify the excesses of both states.
Especially over the last decade, Hindu nationalist ideology has taken centre stage in India, with members of Modi's government and the wider RSS-led Hindutva ecosystem making clear that the country's Muslim minority will have to accept second-class status – and be prepared to be attacked and ostracised even if it does that.
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