Hello reader,
Welcome to another edition of the Southasia Review of Books newsletter!
On the 27th February 2002, two train carriages were lit on fire in Gujarat, claiming the lives of sixty Hindu right-wing volunteers. The next day, raging Hindu mobs poured into Gujarat’s streets looting, raping and burning alive the state’s Muslims. The massacre continued for three months.
In 2002, the writer Zara Chowdhary is sixteen years old and living with her family in the city of Ahmedabad. Instead of taking her board exams that week, Zara is put under a three-month lockdown, with her family and thousands of others fearing for their lives as Hindu neighbours and members of civil society transform overnight into mobs, hunting and killing their fellow citizens.
Zara’s debut memoir, The Lucky Ones (Context, September 2024), is a reckoning with this past that feels all too present today. It is about the refusal to allow the violence that tore Gujarat apart in 2002 to be forgotten or repeated. It is the rebellion of a young Muslim woman who insists she will belong to her country, family and faith on her own terms.
Tune in to our latest Southasia Review of Books podcast episode where I speak with Zara about The Lucky Ones and surviving the 2002 Gujarat pogrom that changed the course of her family and India’s political history.
The Southasia Review of Books podcast will be available once every two 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 and Youtube.
This is an edited transcript from the podcast interview. Please listen to the corresponding audio before quoting from it.
“The struggle in putting together this list was that it’s a very short list. There just isn’t enough literature out there when it comes to Gujarat. There is incredible reporting, and there is very brave writing, including Rana Ayyub’s Gujarat Files: Anatomy of a Cover Up (March 2016), and Dionne Bunsha’s Scarred: Experiments with Violence in Gujarat (Penguin, April 2007). That really became just so important for me as I went through it to remember each street, to remember each name, to remember the sound of the language in which the violence was justified and the words in which people mocked the victim. In that sense, some of these books do some incredible work in documenting and writing these things back into history and writing against erasure.
But while I was writing this book, I mostly ended up looking at either personal first-hand testimonies or bits and pieces that I could get of what folks like Nishrin Jafri or Bilkis Bano have said. There’s a few pieces of what I would think of as literary journalism, where folks have written to report, but then they have imbued it with a lot of soul. One that I really want to shoutout to is by a young academic and scholar, Heba Ahmed, who wrote this incredible piece called ‘Burying the Massacred: In the Shade of Kalandari’. Hiba writes about the cemetery where these mass graves exist in Ahmedabad and how these nameless parts of Muslim bodies were just buried with whatever dignity we could afford at the time. It’s pieces like that that really brought together my memory of this time and place.”
Tune in the full episode for more of Zara’s reading recommendations on contemporary Southasian Muslim writing.
Celebrating Southasian literature
The historian Shailaja Paik has become the first Dalit scholar to be awarded the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship. The MacArthur Foundation’s “genius” grant – which includes a USD 800,000 stipend – is not only giving recognition for Paik’s research on caste, gender and sexuality, but is an endorsement of her ongoing work to document the ideas and lives of oppressed communities.
Paik’s first book, Dalit Women’s Education in Modern India: Double Discrimination (Routledge, 2014), details Dalit women’s struggles for education and agency in colonial and contemporary urban Maharashtra. In her most recent book, The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India (Navayana, November 2022), Paik expands on these tensions between the state, anti-caste reformers and Dalit women to focus on the agency and lives of performers of Tamasha, a popular form of folk theatre practiced predominantly by Dalit women in Maharashtra.
From Himal’s pages, read Ranjana Dave’s review essay on how The Vulgarity of Caste, along with two other 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.
Huge congratulations also to the Kolkata-based writer Indrapramit Das for winning the Best Novella category at the 2024 British Fantasy Award for his book, The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar (Subterranean Press, June 2023).
Earlier this year, Das won the Best Novella award at The Subjective Chaos Kind of Awards for the same. In case you missed it, tune in to our Southasia Review of Books podcast conversation with Vajra Chandrasekera where he recommends Das’s works among a wave of new Southasian speculative fiction.
This month also marks the publication of Deep Dream: Science Fiction Exploring the Future of Art edited by Das (The MIT Press, October 2024). In this volume, ten acclaimed writers imagine the future of art across space and time, and the different ways in which art might evolve, devolve and transform in the decades and centuries to come.
Indian environmentalism and literature
The historian Ramachandra Guha introduces readers to the thoughts and writings of ten pioneers – from Tagore to Mirabehn and M Krishnan – who have informed the ways in which modern India approaches environmentalism in his new book, Speaking with Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism (HarperCollins India, October 2024).
The Living Legend: Ramayana Tales from Far and Near by Vayu Naidu (Penguin India, September 2024) is a novel that explores the intersection of legend and environmentalism in its reimagination of the Hindu epic and highlights nature as a central character to mirrors contemporary environmental concerns.
Sumana Roy’s Plant Thinkers of Twentieth-Century Bengal (Oxford University Press, August 2024) takes a diverse cast of writers and artists – such as Tagore, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Satyajit Ray – and, in studying their work as “plant thinkers”, looks at how their creative output affected Bengali life and thought, and in turn, how they derived their worldview and poetics from the natural world. For more on Sumana’s work, listen to our SaRB podcast conversation on her book, Provincials: Postcards from the Peripheries (Yale University Press, March 2024).
A portrait of Lahore
In his new book, Disrupted City: Walking the Pathways of Memory and History in Lahore (The New Press, October 2024), the historian Manan Ahmed Asif parses Lahore’s literary and cultural history and how this resonates among its people today. From the city’s cosmopolitan past to its fractured present, Asif also explores the impact of imperial and state power, dislocation and erasure on this centuries-old Southasian metropolis.
Sci-fi meets law
“What if you’ve been frozen in stasis for a hundred years for a crime you may or may not have committed?” Also out this month is the scholar and author Gautam Bhatia’s latest science fiction novel, The Sentence (Westland IF, October 2024). The story – set in a world where a century-old murder case has been reopened on the eve of a possible rebellion – intersects between science fiction, criminal law and alternative political structures, and raises intriguing questions on justice, rights and ethics.
Do also check out Gautam’s excellent newsletter, Words for Worlds, on all things science fiction and fantasy, with an Indian slant.
Southasian authors pledge to boycott Israeli cultural institutions
Jhumpa Lahiri, Pragya Agarwal, Rukhsana Ahmad, Aamina Ahmad, Tahmima Anam, Fatima Bhutto, Vajra Chandrasekera, Saraid de Silva, Siddhartha Deb, Mohammed Hanif, Tanaïs, Githa Hariharan, Guy Gunaratne, Sunny Singh, Saba Imtiaz, Meena Kandasamy, Jamil Jan Kochai, Shash Trevett, Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi and Mirza Waheed are among the thousands of prominent authors and literary professionals from around the world who have signed an open letter pledging not to work with “Israeli cultural institutions that are complicit or have remained silent observers of the overwhelming oppression of Palestinians.”
The campaign, organised by the Palestine Festival of Literature, is a powerful statement of condemnation and the largest commitment to a boycott ever made by the global literary community with regard to the Israeli cultural sector – including publishers, festivals, literary agencies and publications that are “complicit in violating Palestinian rights”, operating “discriminatory policies and practices” or “whitewashing and justifying Israel’s occupation, apartheid or genocide” in Palestine.
Until next time, happy reading!
Shwetha Srikanthan
Associate Editor, Himal Southasian