The first book I ever read about India was Romila Thapar’s 1965 History of India, published by Penguin. That little book dazzled with its sprawling scope and storytelling magic, but one also felt the presence of the author’s critical mind tackling perennial questions: what is history; how do we understand it; what is the purpose…
Breakfast, the first meal of the day, in India carries two competing traditions. On one hand, ritual references to food offered to the gods each morning suggest the meal has always held a place of its own. On the other hand, for the labouring classes, breakfast was rarely more than the previous night’s leftovers, hurriedly…
A poignant debut novel that explores mother-son relationships, cross-cultural conversations, and the tribulations of getting older. Chitra Demands to Go Home tells the story of Chitra, a 75-year-old Bengali woman who feels trapped in an assisted living facility and just wants to go home. Chitra spent her life taking care of her children and her husband…
As luck would have it, this year two important scholars of India published memoirs reflecting their nine decades of life and learning. One of these, Romila Thapar’s Just Being, will be reviewed in the NYRB by none other than Wendy Doniger, whose For the Love of Stories has just been published in India. These twinned publications…
To open a European classical music archive is often to confront a mountain of scores. In this tradition, the written score has largely become the music—an enduring, material artifact that treats performance as a secondary act of execution. Yet, viewed globally, this absolute conflation of score and sound is an exception rather than the rule….
Shah Rukh Khan is such a well-known Indian actor that his name is likely to be recognized even by people who are not devotees of Bollywood films. Lavanya Lakshmi pays homage to a 1995 Shah Rukh Khan film, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (or DDLJ as she has it), in her debut novel, Leave and Come…
What motivates individuals to stand up against injustices that don’t personally affect them? Becoming Allies explores a vital but often overlooked dimension of social movements: the role of those who support a cause without being directly affected by its injustices. While most scholarship centres the conflict between social movements and the State, this book shifts…
Rat Race is a slice-of-life story following characters in a modern, capitalistic India as they balance the demands of ambition and family. While originally written by Mamta Kalia in Hindi as Daud at the turn of the millennium, and possibly qualifying as a “modern classic”, Jerry Pinto’s 2026 translation still aptly encapsulates many elements of…
Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, is known for his outfits. Since rising to become India’s head of government in 2014, photographers and journalists have long followed his clothing styles, each saying something about India. It’s part of a long tradition of using clothing to make a statement about India—and about defining a political brand. Nor…
A young, aspiring actor joins an itinerant theatre troupe to perform on makeshift stages in remote villages, traveling from place to place by truck, or in the absence of paved roads, by bullock cart. Readers will recall scenes from The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha by Satrajit Ray, or Shakespearewallah, by James Ivory. There is…
While philosophy has often figured in literature, the Indian philosophical universe of dharma, karma, yoga, consciousness, body, mind, desire, and so on has rarely been the foundation of Indian English fiction. In The Lady Who Carried the Monk Across the River: A Parable for Ordinary People, Pavan K Varma (who also happens be a former…
Gooday Nagar is a collection of short stories about the people (or, better, “characters”) of and around the eponymous fictional Indian town. If this sounds a bit like RK Narayan’s classic Malgudi Days, that’s no accident; one of the stories even references it. As a stylist, author Maithreyi Karnoor is hard to pin down. She…
Shefalee Vasudev’s Stories We Wear unpacks the contradictions behind image and appearance in the vast and diverse land that is India. Vasudev’s approach to her subject is encapsulated in a chapter about the homespun fabric once championed by Mahatma Gandhi which she titles “How Khadi Became Uncool”. She interviews several hands-on designer-entrepreneurs who are deeply committed…
The British Empire covered much of the world during the 19th century–and each time someone moved through it, they left a paper trail in their wake. Julia Stephens, the author of Worldly Afterlives: Tracing Family Trails Between India and Empire (Princeton University Press, 2025), uses that archive of documents to try to piece together the…
Vinu P is a “corpse collector”; that is, he retrieves the bodies of those who die “unnatural” deaths—victims of accidents, suicides, and abandonment, and so on—and assists the police in the enquiries that follow. This being India, where Vinu lives and works in Kerala, what might elsewhere be considered the duties of a first responder…