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A miniature painting depicting the Battle of Lanka from the Hindu epic Ramayana. Udaipur, circa 1653. Hindu nationalists have become increasingly invested in rewriting Indian history and mythology to serve a majoritarian political agenda. In 2014, a retired schoolteacher succeeded in pressuring Penguin India to withdraw Wendy Doniger’s book, The Hindus: An Alternative History on the grounds that it offended religious sensibilities under India’s blasphemy law. Doniger has spent over five decades studying Hinduism, and yet her work has long been a target of vilification by vocal groups of Hindu fundamentalists.

Wendy Doniger on the many lives of myths: Southasia Review of Books podcast #29

28 Jul 2025

Moving across cities and through her twenties, the protagonist of Alina Gufran’s novel is not fighting the doomed fight against a broken society in India and beyond. Instead, she’s confined by it, and she’s fighting mostly against herself.

Alina Gufran on millennial precarity and unbelonging in urban India: Southasia Review of Books podcast #28

14 Jul 2025

A screen displaying the homepage of ChatGPT, an AI language model.
In ‘Searches’, Vauhini Vara draws attention to and critiques a promise often made by AI companies – that they could help us tell our own stories. She does so by enacting a form of complicity in generating artificial language through the extraction of other people’s expressions of it, using a technology known to push insidious rhetoric, exploit human labour and deplete natural resources.

Vauhini Vara on big tech and our digital selves: Southasia Review of Books podcast #27

30 Jun 2025

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