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Hello reader,
Welcome to another edition of the Southasia Review of Books newsletter!
In a recent holiday reading list curated by leading authors for The Guardian, the Booker Prize-winning novelist Shehan Karunatilaka noted that “Sri Lankans from all corners of the planet seem to be writing wonderful stories and scooping up prizes.” One such author is the Colombo-based writer Vajra Chandrasekera, whose debut novel The Saint of Bright Doors (July 2023) won the much-deserved Locus, Nebula and Crawford awards, and is currently shortlisted for the Hugo, Ignyte, Le Guin and Subjective Chaos Kind Of awards.
In The Saint of Bright Doors, Vajra paints a vivid picture of a city on the brink – tracing Fetter’s path from child assassin raised to kill his saintly father to misguided adult with the ability to see devils, anti-gods and magical traces of their world. In blending the mundane and fantastical with the violence of colonialism and religious control, the book captures the complex of the power structures that shape us.
Vajra’s second and most recent novel Rakesfall (June 2024) is a complex portrait of death and reincarnations. This cross-genre science fiction epic, follows two souls as they reincarnate and echo across alternative realities; the mythic past to modern Sri Lanka and its long drawn civil war, to a far-future Earth abandoned by humanity. At its core, The Saint of Bright Doors and Rakesfall explore the connectedness of struggles for liberation and how they reoccur in different contexts of oppression.
Tune in to this month’s Southasia Review of Books podcast episode, where I speak to Vajra about his two fantastic novels and on writing fantasy and science fiction from Sri Lanka. Take a look below for a special reading list curated by Vajra on Southasian speculative fiction.
The Southasia Review of Books podcast will be available once every four weeks. If you like this episode, please share widely, rate, review, subscribe and download the show on your favourite podcast apps. You can listen to the full episode on Soundcloud, Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Youtube.
This is an edited transcript from the podcast interview. Please listen to the corresponding audio before quoting from it.
We have what seems like a sudden surge of Southasian speculative fiction, but many of these writers have been working for some time. Tashan Mehta has a new book out, Mad Sisters of Esi (September 2023), which I’m very much looking forward to reading and highly recommend even before I read it. Her first novel, The Liar’s Weave came out in 2017 and I don’t think it got nearly as much exposure as it should have. The year that The Liar’s Weave came out was also the year that Indra Das’s first novel, The Devourers, won a Lambda Award. Indra also has a new award-nominated novel out called The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar (August 2023).
Samit Basu has been publishing for almost 20 years now, and his most recent book, The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport (October 2023), was shortlisted for the Goodreads Choice and Locus. Samit’s previous book, The City Inside (June 2022), which along with The Liar’s Weave and The Devourers is one of my favourite works of Southasian speculative fiction, and among the very best, in my opinion, that the region has produced. So all of these writers demonstrate that Southasian speculative fiction has been here since the twenty-teens at the very least, producing these incredible works, and always were.
Another book that came out in India first but received insufficient attention in the West was Lavanya Lakshminarayan’s The Ten Percent Thief (March 2023). It’s up for a Clarke Award this year, which is wonderful because I think Lavanya is the only Southasian writer other than Amitav Ghosh, who won the award for The Calcutta Chromosome in the 1990s. Lavanya recently announced a new book coming out in November, Interstellar MegaChef (November 2024). It’s described as MasterChef in space – I know a lot of people who would be instantly intrigued by this.
In recent to upcoming debuts, we have Amal Singh’s The Garden of Delights (May 2024) from Flame Tree Press. I’m hearing a lot of good things, and Amal’s short fiction is great. Like me, he has been publishing short stories for 10 years before his first novel came out – so this has been a long time coming. Prashanth Srivatsa’s The Spice Gate (July 2024) comes out this year. I have read this one ahead of time, and it’s excellent. This year we also have Premee Mohamed’s The Siege of Burning Grass (March 2024). It’s a phenomenally good fantasy novel about war and pacifism. Premee is an Indo-Caribbean writer based in Canada. Her work is so good that I want to see it listed in recommendations of Indo-Caribbean diaspora writers as well as Southasian diaspora writers and Canadian writers.
Gautam Bhatia wrote a brilliant essay in Himal about Sri Lankan speculative fiction. We have multiple award-winning Sri Lankan speculative fiction writers, like Theena Kumaragurunathan and Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, and several new Sri Lankan writers who are just now publishing their first short stories. Megha Spinel, had a brilliant short story in Asimov’s Magazine just a couple of years ago, and I very much hope to see new work from her. Yudhanjaya has a new book coming out, it’s called Pilgrim Machines (September 2024), and should be up for pre-order now. Amanda Jayatissa, who is a Sri Lankan horror/thriller writer, has been putting out very nearly a book a year in the 2020s. I’ve only read the first one, My Sweet Girl (September 2021), which is brilliant. Amanda’s new book Island Witch (February 2024) sounds fascinating and is very high up on my TBR.
We are now in a situation where it is no longer possible for anyone to just off the top of their head list every Southasian speculative fiction author and every book of note in a quick summary. I think that’s a sign of health, and hopefully it will become ever more impossible to keep up.
Milestones in Odia literature
With a literary history spanning centuries, the languages of Odisha have found diverse expression in prose, poetry, mythology and history. And in 2024, there is much to look forward to in the space of Odia literary culture. The Odisha state government of India has recently implemented a series of initiatives for the promotion of the language, including a new policy to support the translation of Odia books to other regional and foreign languages.
July also marks the publication of The Big Book of Odia Literature by Manu Dash (Penguin India, July 2024). This first-of-its-kind curation of essays, stories, poems and plays aims to provide a history of language, literature and music that has defined the culture of a diverse state and its people.
For more on Odia literary culture from Himal’s pages, read S Deepika’s review essay on Basanti: Writing the New Woman translated by Himansu Mohapatra and Paul St-Pierre (Oxford University Press, June 2019).
A post-museum era?
We are seeing a wave of new books offering impressive critiques of Western museums as complicit in the enduring damages inflicted by colonial powers in Southasia and beyond. Françoise Vergès’ A Programme of Absolute Disorder: Decolonizing the Musuem (July 2024) demonstrates how insidiously the museum props up a colonial order, and offers a critical new approach to decolonisation. In Ghosts of the British Museum: A True Story of Colonial Loot and Restless Objects (April 2024), Noah Angell combines storytelling, folklore and history to digs deep into imperial pasts and unmasks the world’s oldest national museum as a site of ongoing conflict.
Adam Kuper’s The Museum of Other People: From Colonial Acquisitions to Cosmopolitan Exhibitions (April 2024), Nina Möntmann’s Decentring the Museum: Contemporary Art Institutions and Colonial Legacies (December 2023) and Our Colonial Inheritance: How slavery and colonialism continue to shape our present edited by Wayne Modest and Wendeline Flores (January 2024) tackle the murky legacies of imperialism and scientific racism within these institutions and the difficult questions of cultural appropriation and repatriation.
In Himal’s pages this month, we republished the renowned photojournalist and activist Shahidul Alam’s dispatches on Bangladesh’s uprising and the government’s brutal reprisal. A new exhibition book Singed But Not Burnt, edited by Indian writer and curator Ina Puri (January 2023), traces Shahidul Alam’s nearly 50-year career of using his camera to resist political corruption, and documenting suppression and the people’s struggles for freedom in Bangladesh. In the face of ongoing restrictions on freedom of expression in Bangladesh today, this volume provides a window into the resilience of those who continue to resist.
On the fiction front, I revisited the late Numair Atif Choudhury’s novel Babu Bangladesh!. This vivid portrayal of Bangladesh’s political landscape from the 1940s to 2019 merges the past and contemporary politics of the country with surrealism. Written as a biography of the political luminary Babu and his tribulations, the book also presents several keen observations and biting critiques that apply to Bangladeshi society and politics of today.
What should I read next? Tell me about the books you read this month or any books you’re currently reading. Write to me at shwethas@himalmag.com.
Until next time, happy reading!
Shwetha Srikanthan
Assistant Editor, Himal Southasian