Hello reader,
Welcome to another edition of the Southasia Review of Books newsletter!
In the three years since its return to power, the Taliban have excluded women and girls from almost every aspect of public life in Afghanistan, denying them access to education, employment, and even to be seen or heard outside their homes.
Published this August, My Dear Kabul: A Year in the Life of An Afghan Women’s Writing Group (Coronet, August 2024) is the collective diary of 21 fiercely brilliant Afghan women writers, compiled using WhatsApp messages, offering courageous and intimate testimonies of the fall of Kabul in 2021 and its aftermath, of life under Taliban rule and far from home in exile.
In August 2021, the women writers were in the process of publishing an anthology of short stories when their world was turned upside down. As they watched their cities fall, schools close, families and friends disperse and freedoms disappear, they stayed connected via WhatsApp messages to keep their creativity alive, support each other and bear witness to the turmoil unfolding around them. My Dear Kabul is their story.
For our latest Southasia Review of Books episode, it was a joy to be in conversation with Marie, Parwana Fayyaz, and Sunila Galappatti, who’ve each played an important role as writer, translator and editor in bringing this incredibly moving collective diary to life.
In one of our conversations from the past month, Sunila said she hoped that through platforms like SaRB, My Dear Kabul will reach audiences with whom its details resonate more personally, who know conflict more personally, from Afghanistan and everywhere.
We rely on the support of readers like you to make conversations like this possible and spotlight books like My Dear Kabul. Please become Himal Patron to help us do more great work on Southasian literature and to grow the Southasia Review of Books!
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 and Youtube.
Would you like to find out more about Untold’s work with Afghan writers and translators?
On 1 October, join Untold’s project manager, Lillie Razvi Toon, in conversation with literary translators Parwana Fayyaz (Dari/English), Sabrina Nouri-Moosa (Persian/Dari/French), Abdul Bacet Khurram (Pashto/Dari), and Persian/English editor and publisher Azadeh Parsapour, exploring the challenges and best practice for literary translation in countries with little or no publishing infrastructure, with a particular focus on Afghanistan.
This online event is part of a programme of events for International Translation Day 2024, promoted by English PEN and the National Centre for Writing. You can register to join the discussion here.
Celebrating Southasian literature
The JCB Prize for Literature has unveiled its longlist for 2024. The list includes five novels in English and five translated into English from Bengali, Marathi and Malayalam. The shortlist of five books will be revealed on 23 October, with the winner announced on 23 November.
The director of the prize, Mita Kapur, said the longlisted books offer “an evocative portrayal of the varied and complex nature of life in India,” and explore “a range of themes and experiences, capturing both the intricacies of daily life and the more profound, extraordinary moments.” Notably, the prize also recognises the crucial role of translators, whose efforts make diverse works of contemporary Indian literature accessible to wider audiences.
In June this year, I had the pleasure of moderating Himal’s Fiction Fest 2024 panel discussion featuring Jayasree Kalathil, where we discussed her translation of Sandhya Mary’s Maria, Just Maria (March 2024) from the JCB longlist.
Also on the longlist is Hurda by Atharva Pandit (October 2023) – the youngest ever author to be up for the prize. Pandit was a 2021 South Asia Speaks fellow for fiction, a programme that supports the literary arts in Southasia by offering emerging writers one on one mentoring for a full year.
If you’re an emerging writer based in Southasia and looking to produce a work of fiction, nonfiction, reportage, poetry or translation, you too can apply to join the Southasia Speaks class of 2025. Applications are open until 30 September. Himal’s own Editor Roman Gautam is among the fantastic lineup of mentors to learn from!
Environment, Empire and climate change
How have the histories of colonialism shaped the modern day climate crisis? A wave of new books attempts to answer questions on the exploitation of the natural world, and its crucial role in the making and unmaking of the colonial order.
Out this month, Sunil Amrith’s The Burning Earth: A Material History of the Last 500 Years (September 2024) is a big-picture global history of humanity’s extractive relationship with the natural world, and how the planet in turn has shaped human history. Amrith looks the stories of environment and Empire, of genocide and eco-cide, of the pursuit of profit and its costs.
[From Himal’s archives, tune in to a podcast conversation with Sunil Amrith for a discussion on the climate crisis, mass migration and his 2018 book Unruly Waters.]
Nothing could seem more contemporary than the climate crisis. Yet, in Chaos in the Heavens: The Forgotten History of Climate Change (March 2024), Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Fabien Locher show that we have been thinking about and debating the consequences of our actions upon the environment for centuries. In The Empire of Climate: A History of an Idea (April 2024), David N Livingstone reveals how climate has been critically implicated in the politics of imperial control.
Liquid Empire: Water and Power in the Colonial World by Corey Ross (July 2024) tells the story of how the waters of the colonial world shaped the history of imperialism, and how this imperial past still haunts us today in the face of mounting water shortages, rising flood risks and the depletion of sea life.
Colonialism and its afterlives have marginalised indigenous knowledge and cultures from across Southasia and the world. In Botany of Empire: Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism (June 2024), Banu Subramaniam believes that within these histories lie the tools of planetary survival in an era of the ongoing and enduring climate crisis.
The novel I read this month was picked from a list I’ve been building on new books by fresh literary voices from the Sri Lankan diaspora.
Guy Gunaratne’s sophomore novel Mister, Mister (October 2023) opens with a shocking act of self-mutilation. Yahya, a young British-Iraqi man in his 20s who is being held in a London detention center, cuts out his tongue so that he can recount his own life story. This was the captured poet-preacher and jihadist’s attempt at thwarting an interrogation from the titular “Mister”. Beginning as a somewhat slow-paced coming-of-age story of a deprived childhood in East London, the story transitions to a well-crafted second half that captivates with its depth and intensity.
Guy Gunaratne, who was born in Britain to Sri Lankan parents, explores identity and belonging in Britain today and how resentment grows among those who are made to be outsiders in this novel. Aspects, and of course the title of, Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (March 2007) also came to mind. But Mister, Mister goes beyond political disenchantment, diving into a narrative that challenges immigration, colonialism and radicalisation. The novel was also inspired by the myths and stories surrounding Shamima Begum, a radicalised British schoolgirl who joined the Islamic State in Syria and was stripped of citizenship in 2019.
[From Himal’s pages, read Rahul Rao’s review essay on the spectre of racialisation that haunts brown Britain.]
As I read my way through this list – including Amma by Saraid de Silva (April 2024), When I open the Shop by Romesh Dissanayake (March 2024), Your Driver Is Waiting by Priya Guns (January 2024) and Safe Haven by Shankari Chandran (May 2024) – let me know if there are any any other titles on your radar, or if you would like to see a piece on the Sri Lankan literary diaspora in Himal’s pages.
Write to me at shwethas@himalmag.com.
Until next time, happy reading!
Shwetha Srikanthan
Assistant Editor, Himal Southasian