📚 Southasia Review of Books - May 2024
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Hello reader,
First up, some very exciting news: we are thrilled to announce Himal’s 2024 Fiction Fest! This April marks one year since the launch of the Southasia Review of Books newsletter, and we want to take a moment to thank all of you for reading us over the last year.
We’ll be bringing together a selection of exceptional short stories in translation from around the region, published across two weeks from 10 to 21 June. To launch the festival, we’ll also have an online event on 10 June at 6:30 pm IST with special readings and a panel discussion with the writers as well as renowned Southasian translators.
You’re among the first to know, so please register here to join the launch event. And keep an eye on our website and social-media channels in the coming weeks to get a taste of the next generation of Southasia’s literary voices in translation. You don’t want to miss this!
In this month’s SaRB podcast episode, I had a wonderful conversation with the Siliguri-based poet, writer and essayist Sumana Roy about her latest book Provincials: Postcards from the Peripheries (March 2024).
With writings ranging from Rabindranath Tagore to William Shakespeare, Bhakti poets to the Brontës, Sumana introduces us to the imaginative world of those who have celebrated provinciality. She challenges the dominance of the metropolis to reclaim the dignity of provincial life and challenges the imaginary barriers we tend to put between the rural and urban.
Take a look below for a special reading list curated by Sumana Roy on literature from the Southasian provinces.
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.
📚 From the podcast, Sumana Roy’s reading recommendations on literature from the Southasian provinces
To experience the joy of everydayness in the Indian provinces, I go to R K Narayan’s Malgudi Days, Ruskin Bond’s stories set in the Doon Valley, and Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay’s Pather Panchali. Mahasweta Devi’s stories of a deprived people in the neglected forest provinces remind us of how caste violence is the axis around which almost everything is organised here.
Indra Bahadur Rai’s fiction about living in the Darjeeling hills, available in Manjushree Thapa and Prawin Adhikari’s translations. Then there is writing from India’s Northeastern provinces in English and also a body of work from the many languages of the region that is gradually becoming available in translation.
I am slightly partial to writers from northern Bengal: particularly our poets writing in Bangla, Nepali, Kamtapuri. Their work is available not in the Calcutta-approved literature that Bengalis study as Bangla literature in school and university, but in little magazines that circulate among small groups.
To look at how outsiders look at the province and provincials – Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August and U R Ananthamurthy’s long short story Bara. The bibliography in Provincials: Postcards from the Peripheries has a list of Southasian writers who have written from or about the provinces.
📚 Reviews from Himal’s pages this month
This month in Southasian publishing
Celebrating Southasian literature
Huge congratulations to V V Ganeshananthan, who has been named the winner of the 2024 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction for her brilliant novel Brotherless Night. The award, which provides USD 150,000 to the winner, is the largest English-language literary prize in the world for women and non-binary authors in Canada and the United States.
[Tune in to our SaRB conversation with Ganeshananthan on Brotherless Night and women’s writing on Sri Lanka’s long history of anti-Tamil violence.]
We’re also beyond thrilled for Lavanya Lakshminarayan, whose debut novel, The Ten Per Cent Thief (published in Southasia as Analog/Virtual), has been shortlisted for The Arthur C Clarke Award, one of the most prestigious prizes in science fiction.
Lakshminarayan’s next novel Interstellar MegaChef is slated to be released in November this year. Think Masterchef or The Great British Bake Off – in space!
Pakistan’s past and present-day crises
Pakistan is facing several critical challenges – political, constitutional, economic, geopolitical, security-related and ecological. A wave of new books attempt to explore the past and what is at stake for Pakistan, both in terms of present-day crises and future trends.
Salman Masood’s Fallout: Power, Intrigue and Political Upheaval in Pakistan (May 2024) delves into the unpredictability of leadership decisions, both military and civilian, that leads to a constant state of crisis in Pakistan today.
In The Promise of Piety: Islam and the Politics of Moral Order in Pakistan (February 2024), an ethnographic study of Pakistan’s Tablighi movement, Arsalan Khan investigates both the promise and limits of the project in creating an Islamic moral order, and sheds light on Pakistan’s fragmented political landscape.
Maleeha Lodhi’s forthcoming volume, Pakistan: The Search for Stability (August 2024), also explores Pakistan’s mounting political, socioeconomic, security, demographic and environmental challenges. The nineteen essays by experts in a variety of fields offer historical analysis alongside discussion of future trends and prognoses.
From the Bronze Age to colonial rule and Partition, the formation of Bangladesh to the emergence of Baloch nationalism, Tahir Kamran’s Chequered Past, Uncertain Future: The History of Pakistan (August 2024) and Pervez Hoodbhoy’s Pakistan: Origins, Identity and Future (March 2023) reflects on how state and society have been shaped by historical forces and figures in Pakistan.
Timely reads for India’s election season
This month marks the publication of Bela Bhatia’s India’s Forgotten Country: A View from the Margins (May 2024). The book captures Bhatia’s decades-long investigations and research on the Naxalite movement, violations of democratic rights in India’s “forgotten country” – the hamlets, villages and slums, and more. Most importantly, this social history of rural India offers a window into the oppressive forces that control the lives of Dalits, Adivasis, bonded labourers, women and other maginalised groups.
Twilight Prisoners: The Rise of the Hindu Right and the Fall of India by Siddhartha Deb (April 2024) reveals India’s descent into a religious fundamentalist dystopia. Exploring how the prime minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party have exploited modern technologies, market forces and the media, Deb unpacks the impacts of theses changes on journalists, scholars, minorities, women and dissenters.
Rahul Bhatia’s forthcoming book The New India: The Unmaking of the World's Largest Democracy (August 2024) is another timely account of the country’s turn towards an alarming model of authoritarianism. The book builds on how Hindu nationalist ideology and the political use of misinformation and religious targeting threatens the freedoms and identities of people across India.
📚 What I’m Reading
This month I read the cult-favourite novel Harbart by Nabarun Bhattacharya, translated by Sunandini Banerjee. Set in Calcutta, this spectral and tragicomic story follows Harbart Sarkar, sole proprietor of a business that offers “Conversations with the Dead”. From the first chapter we learn that Harbart has killed himself after a night of drinking with local men, and the reasons why unfold over the course of the book.
Harbart was first published in Bengali in 1993, and the neoliberal reforms of the era and the decline of the Communist government in West Bengal, where the novel is set, clearly informs the book’s underlying political discourse.
You can find Siddhartha Deb’s excellent afterword to Harbart here. And we hope to explore Rijula Das’s new translation of Nabarun Bhattacharya’s Beggar’s Bedlam (July 2024) in a forthcoming review essay.
What should I read next? Tell me about the books you read this month or any books on your summer reading list. Write to me at shwethas@himalmag.com.
Until next time, happy reading!
Shwetha Srikanthan
Assistant Editor, Himal Southasian