Ringed by a snow-coated massif, the Dal Lake shimmers under the bright sun as the shikara canoes skim over its iridescent waters: this snapshot of Srinagar is almost ubiquitous on the Internet. Millions of vacationers who visit this place every year to unwind probably imagine this city as little more than a summer retreat.
India
India’s development story has been told many times, but A Sixth of Humanity makes a compelling case that the familiar narratives no longer suffice. Authors Devesh Kapur and Arvind Subramanian seek to reinterpret India’s extraordinary, idiosyncratic, and often paradoxical economic journey over a 75-year arc as a single, interconnected developmental experiment whose successes and failures were not accidental, but the product of several political, social, and institutional elements.
The Ganges may be more famous, but the Brahmaputra is arguably a far more geopolitically important river. By the time it reaches Bengal, it forms the largest delta in the world, having crossed through Tibet, India and Bangladesh. This river, and the people who live along its banks, are the subject of River Traveller, the new book by Sanjoy Hazarika. Hazarika has spent decades writing about India’s Northeast. A journalist, researcher, and filmmaker, he wrote Strangers of the Mist back in 1994, a landmark work on the region’s fractured politics, history, and identity, along with several other books. His newest work blends is part travelogue, part reportage, shaped by decades of fieldwork. Through a series of vignettes, Hazarika follows the river’s trajectory through Tibet, Arunachal Pradesh, Assam down to Bangladesh.
I was born in Bombay and lived there, not far from the Gateway of India, for the first sixteen years of my life. I left the city by the bay soon after turning sixteen. When I returned decades later, I barely recognised it. The city and I had both gone through dramatic changes in the interim. So it was with real anticipation that I picked up The Only City, an anthology of stories about the city of my birth, edited by Anindita Ghose.
Over the past decade or so, Indian popular history publishing has seen a welcome trend. After a run of strong biographies on the great Mughal emperors, writers have begun to explore the lives of secondary figures, from the formidable empress Nur Jahan and the powerful princess Jahanara to the philosopher-prince Dara Shukoh and the chronicler-princess Gulbadan. It seems a natural progression, then, to move on to the senior, non-Mughal figures who were indispensable to the empire’s success. Rima Hooja’s The Emperor’s General is a prime example, a deeply-researched biography of a man who was, arguably, more central to the empire’s consolidation than any single imperial prince.
If, as is commonly supposed, Sanskrit is the mother of a multitude of Indian languages (first the prakrits whence emerged modern Indian languages such as Hindi and Bengali) who—or what—then was the father? In her recent book Father Tongue, Motherland: The Birth of Languages in South Asia, renowned linguist Peggy Mohan offers a narrative in which India’s languages, at least the Indo-European ones, have two parents, not just one. Insofar as these can be gendered, Sanskrit is more father than mother.
Although Half Light takes place on the cusp of India’s 2018 decriminalisation of homosexuality, Mahesh Rao uses this historic transition not as a centrepiece but as a lens to investigate the quieter dramas and private reckonings of those in the shadows of moments of social transformation.
When we think of colonialism on the Indian subcontinent, it is first and foremost the excesses of the British East India Company and the pomp of the Raj that come to mind. The legacies of Vasco da Gama and the Estado da India might be added as an afterthought. Outside the small circle of specialists, the mentioning of France in this context will almost certainly draw a blank. In this engaging and insightful account, Robert Ivermee shows that there is much to be gained from studying the “glorious failure” of the short-lived, but consequential French attempt to establish a vast territorial empire in Southern India.
Into the Leopard’s Den, the latest novel in the Bangalore Detective Club series by Harini Nagendra, opens with a home invasion gone wrong: An elderly woman in 1920s India, murdered by a mystery assailant during a robbery. Kaveri Murthy, amateur detective, takes on the case–and soon uncovers a whole array of other mysteries in the coffee plantations of Coorg: a ghost leopard stalking the woods, and a series of murder attempts against a widely-disliked colonial plantation owner.
Chetan Bhagat occupies a distinct and highly influential space in contemporary Indian letters in English. While his previous work 11 Rules for Life nudged Bhagat into self-help, 12 Years reverts to his signature formula—romantic disillusionment as middle-class catharsis. His phenomenal commercial success from his 2005 debut novel Five Point Someone to this latest, eleventh work of fiction rests on a well-honed formula that fuses relatable urban narratives, lucid prose, and themes reflecting contemporary Indian life: aspirations, romance, career anxieties, and societal pressures.
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