Reading in 2025 took many forms. Some readers turned to novels for emotional depth and storytelling; others stayed with history, reportage, poetry, children’s books, and graphic narratives to better understand the world around them. These books were not chosen for any single reason—they were read because they felt absorbing, useful, challenging, or simply worth spending time with.
Bookmarks asked writers, editors, activists, artists, and scholars—including Mirza Waheed, Rita Banerji, Bijal Vachharajani, Rikant Kisana, Gita Ramaswamy, and Amogh Dhar Sharma—to share the books that stayed with them this year and to reflect on what those books offered them as readers. Their choices move across genres, countries, and time periods, bringing together new releases and older works that felt newly relevant.
Together, these responses form a varied reading list shaped by interest and curiosity rather than agreement.
Mirza Waheed’s new novel Maryam & Son will be published in January 2026. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement
Mirza WaheedI am reading Heen Looks Like Us (edited by George Abraham and Noor Hindi, Haymarket Books, 2025), as I write this. It is a landmark collection of Palestinian poetry years in the making; there are poems in it that are heart stopping, humane, full of fury, and beauty. I read some over and over. Najwan Darwish, Hala Alyan, Fady Joudah, Mahmoud Darwish, Refaat Alareer, and Naomi Shihab Nye are among the featured poets… If you he not bought a Christmas present for a loved one yet, I cannot think of a more beautiful, precious object.
The collection caps a rewarding reading year for me; I he been lucky to find books from across the world. Here are some of them.
The Land in Winter, Andrew Miller’s gorgeous, precisely evocative conjuring of two couples’ lives in post-war England during the Big Freeze of 1963, is the loveliest work of fiction, a polished gem that will last long. I admired Isabella Hammad’s big fat debut novel The Parisian. It is a sweeping, deft, deep epic set in the first half of the 20th century when Palestine is beginning to see the early fractures brought about by imperial machinations. I also keep thinking of Ibtisam Azem’s unforgettable fable The Book of Disappearance.
Jabra Ibrahim Jabra’s modernist novel The Other Rooms was a special treat thanks to a friend’s recommendation. This crazy, haunting absurdist fable set in an unnamed city, where state surveillance and intellectual repression rule, is a book for our times.
New novels by Ian McEwan and Abdulrazak Gurnah were profound and delightful, both writers displaying their peak powers at fiction-making. I loved reading Colm Toibin’s Long Island, his elegant, moving sequel to Brooklyn.
I was late to Murakami’s book about writing and the physical self and I am glad I found time for it. The novelist’s memoir of running, writing, including a breathtaking account of his marathon in the heat of Athens, imbued my writing cells with a new charge. Thank you, Murakami, the surfeit of cats is forgiven. Reading Down the Rabbit Hole by Juan Pablo Villalobos, I marvelled at the wild inventiveness of this dark, comic novella from some years ago.
Thomas Hardy has been an enduring interest since my teenage years, first his fiction, then poetry. I was happy to finally read Claire Tomalin’s magnificent biography of Hardy.
I admired Loal Kashmir, Mehak Jamal’s book of real-life stories of love and longing. The lonely battle of Bushra, from the “other” Kashmir, to return home echoes the many forms of devastation wrought upon my homeland. Sadaf Wani’s short biography of Srinagar, The City as Memory, is a valuable addition to books from Kashmir, also a reminder of the assured, powerful work by a new generation of Kashmiri writers, a highlight being Zahid Rafiq’s haunting, exquisite debut collection, The World with Its Mouth Open. Ipsita Chakrarty’s Dapaan is the best book of reportage on Kashmir in the last twenty years.
On my bedside is also Toni Morrison’s Beloved. I dip into it from time to time to feel the force of its prose.
In audiobooks, Dubliners as read by Chris O’Dowd, The Virginia Woolf Collection by various artists, and the reading of the year, Brighton Rock by Samuel West, were all exceptional.
If I am asked to recommend books for the new year, it would be Tahmima Anam’s ferocious new novel Uprising. Written in incantatory prose and set on an island community of women and children in Bangladesh, Uprising is masterful. And Mohammed Hanif’s latest, Rebel English Academy, is a crackling and funny, brura piece of fiction set around the time of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s hanging. In the new year, I am treating myself to Rahul Bhattacharya’s novel Railsong, Mahesh Rao’s acclaimed new work, Half Light, Sameer Hamdani’s history of Srinagar, City of Kashmir, Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, and Anuradha Roy’s book, Called by the Hills.
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Rita Banerji is an environmental filmmaker, conservationist, and the founder of the Green Hub Project, Dusty Foot Foundation. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement
Rita BanerjiOne of the books I really soaked in this year was Marginlands: Indian Landscape on the Brink by Arati Kumar Rao. I he long admired her work as a photographer, and to read her writings is a beautiful extension of that. A deeply engaging book which, while looking at the larger environmental context, makes you get close to the people who he intimate knowledge of the land—from the desert, the river, the delta to the glaciers. There is something to the slow immersive writing, that for a reader is transformational. It is a book I will keep going back to.
Super Powers On the Shore (Penguin India, 2025) by Sejal Mehta is another book that I really enjoyed reading. With quiet, understated humour, she unrels scientific facts with ease, turning creatures into characters that stay with you. The marine life of Mumbai comes alive in her writings, and it really makes you want to walk the shoreline as soon as you put down the book. I feel both the books are also very special in the way the authors he spent time being with the subject. While the writing styles are very different, the depth of learning and knowledge that emerges from both remain with you as a reader. I feel both the books are a great read for anyone, but if someone is interested in the environment and wildlife, then it is a must.
As an endnote do not miss out on the thriller series The Bangalore Detectives Club by Harini Nagendra. The last of the four-part series, Into the Leopard’s Den got released this year. Kery Murthy, the amateur detective, will become a fourite.
Bijal Vachharajani is a picture book editor and a children’s author who reads too many books. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement
Bijal VachharajaniJohannes is a dog and he has definitely seen you in his park, which is his home. He is keenly observant, and hence, he is The Eyes and the Impossible (Andersen Press). Author De Eggers perfectly inhabits the candid voice in this middle grade novel that brings together themes of friendship, freedom and the idea of belonging. Poorly rendered animals annoy me, but this one redeems the genre with the most free-spirited of animals. Shawn Harris illustrates Johannes onto classical fine art landscapes, offering space for quiet reflection, alongside the magnificent lyrical prose. So many sentences from this story he stayed with me, and I know I will be returning to this book again and again.
Closer home, I he been immersed in some excellent middle grade fiction—Sudeshna Shome Ghosh’s A Home to Haunt (illustrated by Pankaj Saikia, HarperCollins) has climate-displaced ghosts looking for homes in Kolkata; there is murder afoot in Lanya Karthik’s historic fiction, A Demon in Dandi (Duckbill); and Aparna Kapur’s Absence of Squirrels (Duckbill) makes some fabulous points about authoritarianism, while being irreverent.
The one book I gifted a lot this year was Dim Sum Palace by X. Fang. Little Liddy’s excited about eating dim sums the next day. No wonder, she finds herself falling into a food-filled dream. It is of course exciting, and delicious, but also a bit perilous when she becomes the dim sum filling. We read this picture book at the Pratham Books office as part of our “Drop Everything And Read Wednesday”, and it was followed by an intense momo cring. Only after the momos were devoured, were we able to admire the exquisitely-rendered dim sums on the end papers, the beautiful illustrations with the most adorable protagonist, and a fantastical landscape that felt like a bit of a nod to Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen.
In fact, I am ending the year by reading about Maurice’s editor—Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom (HarperCollins) collected and edited by Leonard S. Marcus. Ursula shaped many children’s books including those by E.B. White, Margaret Wise Brown, and Ruth Krauss, and these letters from 1937 to 1982 give an insight into her thought process. I am furiously taking notes.
That said, my “dil” became “Dilli” with the delightful Ee Ki Matra (Jugnu/ Ektara), written by Farah Aziz and illustrated by Rajiv Eipe where an adventurous matra goes romping about town, attaching herself to all sorts of things—objects, people, and animals—and creating a very singular sort of hoc. So “jail” becomes “jelly”, a “haath” suddenly becomes a “haathi” and ahem, “pant” transforms into “panty”! This Hindi picture book has the most playful of writing coupled with illustrations that will make you giggle, linger, and then reflect, as you turn the page towards the very surprising ending.
Shreeja Rao, 21, is a journalist and author of Little Tara’s Big Fire. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement
Shreeja RaoThe most memorable book I read this year was Natasha Tarpley’s I Love My Hair!. It is warm and quietly radical. A young girl of African heritage stands in front of a mirror and learns to see her hair as art, memory, and inheritance. The story refuses shame, not by debating it, but by giving the child language for delight. That stayed with me because it reminded me where selfhood is first built: in ordinary rooms, through everyday rituals, and in the presence of someone who truly sees you. It made me think about how literature can offer empowerment when the world does not.
It also pushed me back into my own work. This year, it helped me write with more tenderness and heart while working on Little Tara’s Big Fire, my book about how a girl’s voice grows strong enough to gather others into shared imagination and light a fire within. And it fed into my small contribution on Leaping Towards the Deep Blue Sky, a poetry anthology of Ambedkarite women from Maharashtra curated and edited by Shrujana N Shridhar, where voice is not just personal, but collective, urgent, and freeing.
Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari is a novelist based out of Calicut, Kerala. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement
Saharu Nusaiba KannanariOn November 7, 1938 a seventeen-year-old young man walked into the German embassy in Paris and shot down a junior clerk, Ernst vom Rath, probably mistaking him for the ambassador. His parents, who were living in Hanover, had been arrested by the German authorities and sent along with some 12,000 Jews to the Polish border.
Poland, which had anticipated Hitler’s deportation plans and passed a law stripping its expatriate Jews of their citizenship, would not accept them. He had been living in France for two years by then and the news of his family’s harrowing treatment at the border despaired and angered him. He bought a shotgun, walked into the German embassy, pretending to be a spy with important information and pulled the trigger five times. His name was Herschel Grynzpan and is the subject of Stephen Koch’s book titled Hitler’s Scapegoat.
Consequences were quick to ensue. Hitler, who was preparing for the anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch, his failed 1923 coup, happily seized on the incident and sent his personal doctor to treat Vom Rath, who died two days later, on 9th November. What followed was the Kristallnacht massacre, widely held to be the prelude to Shoah, the greatest organised mass murder in the history of the world in which anywhere between 5.2 to 5.5 million European Jews were exterminated. In 1940, when Germans took France, Hitler deployed a special Gestapo squad and had Grynzpan arrested, flew him to Berlin to put up a show trial to tell the world, Look, the Jews started the war.
I did not choose this book because it was one of the best history books I read this year. It is not. I chose to write about it because it brings to end a year I had spent reading great books on anti-Semitism and its consequences, from James Carroll’s Constantine’s Sword and R. Po-chia Hsia’s Trent 1475 to Christopher Browning’s extraordinary Ordinary Men. And because how eerily the Grynzpan Affair resembles and speaks to our times, to Gaza to be precise, where also a genocide is termed as war by the perpetrators and their allies and the victims are blamed for their own undoing. Herschel Grynzpan did not start the war.
Jews did not start the war. There was no war, only the annihilation of a defenceless people hatred against whom is deeply rooted in European Christianity. By using the Holocaust to aid Israel’s extermination campaign against a people who he nothing to do with it, most of Europe and its colonial cousins elsewhere he effectively upended “mea culpa” into “felix culpa” and is a gross abuse of history and fraud on conscience.
Raul Hilberg, the greatest Holocaust historian, laid out three phases of the Nazi destruction of Jewry: 1, You shall not live here as Jews. 2, You shall not live here. 3, You shall not live. Even though these three stages represented conversion, deportation and extermination, failure of one leading to the next, they also hold eerily true for the Palestinian condition as well. You just he to replace “conversion” with “apartheid” and you get there. I highly recommend Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine to understand why. It is one of the best books I read this year.
Balbir Madhopuri is a prominent Punjabi writer, poet, and translator. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement
Balbir MadhopuriI read the following books this year:
I Could Not Be Hindu by Bhanwar Meghwanshi. This book is anti-communalism and promotes secularism. It appeals to those who believe in democracy, the Constitution, and humanity.
Early Indians by Tony Joseph: A history of human beings that uses DNA evidence to show that Aryans originated from other lands.
Mother India by Katherine Mayo: A detailed critique of Indian culture and a strong opposition to Gandhi’s hypocrisy.
Dalit Struggle for Identity by Chinna Rao Yagati: A research-based work on the history of caste and untouchability, offering literary consciousness against the unjust caste model in Andhra Pradesh.
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee: A novel that won major literary awards. It speaks powerfully against racism.
Interrogating Marginalities Across Disciplinary Boundaries, edited by Anna Bochkoskaya, Sanjukta Das Gupta, and Amit Prakash (published in 2025): It is a detailed study exploring colonial and post-colonial India.
These books depict culture, casteism, racism, and poverty, but they also he a humanist approach. The focus is on the human being at the centre. Atrocities committed in the name of religion, caste, race, and culture are explained with a balanced, artistic, aesthetic, secular, humanistic, and pro-people vision.
Russian literature, Black literature, and Dalit literature he been my sources of inspiration. From the books mentioned above, I he translated 45 works into my mother tongue, Punjabi. I he also authored 15 books in Punjabi, three of which he been translated into many Indian languages.
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Rikant Kisana is the author of Meet the Sarnas: Indian Millennials Whose Mediocrity Broke Everything (Penguin Random House India, 2025). | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement
Rikant KisanaOne of my terrible reading habits (that I he been trying to correct for years now), is a giant skew towards non-fiction titles. This year was no different. Presently, I just finished Scamlands: Inside the Asian empire of fraud that preys on the world by Snigdha Poonam. The hook promised an entertaining stroll through a variety of “scams” unfolding in the wildlands beyond the comfortable gated communities of metropolitan India—but in reality, it is a portrait of desperation and the negotiation that the population “below the glass floor” tries to make sense of. I was really drawn to the caste and vulnerability intersections Snigdha has outlined.
In many ways I enjoyed this book like an unofficial companion piece to M. Rajshekhar’s Despite The State : Why India Lets Its People Down And How They Cope which looked at state and policy centric view of Indian social fragility, while Snigdha’s book gives us a glimpse at the jugaad-urgency driven solution from the marginalised which also prey on the other marginalised.
My interest in understanding the unfolding dysfunctionality took me to an older title, Christophe Jaffrelot’s The Pakistan Paradox: Instability and Resilience. Our neighbour’s political crisis is a perennial bugbear for our nation, but could it offer clues for our political future at a time when there is growing anxiety over democratic erosion in India? The political debates and dysfunction of democratic institutions in the face of authoritarian impulses, a compliant press and compromised judiciary– felt all too familiar.
A masterful tome by Jaffrelot, useful for students of postcolonial political history as well as current window-watchers of public crisis against the backdrop of “revolutions” in Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. People do not just come out on the streets randomly. It needs, as the Gen-Z say, “cooking”.
Another book that I was looking forward to all year was Anurag Minus Verma’s The Great Indian Brain Rot: Love, Lies and Algorithms in Digital India. Probably the sharpest cultural commentator of contemporary times, Anurag is most well-known for his offbeat humorous (visual) documentation of the absurd and dysfunctional, as an aesthetic. His debut book is a work of modern history of internet virality and social trends thereof.
A fantastic meditation on online fandoms, followers, nodding along the way to viral sensations (many forgotten now) from SSRians to Deepak Kalal, Puneet Superstar, to Neeraj Pepsu to Baba ka Dhaba—Anurag’s book feels like “Spotify Wrapped” of the past few years of viral sensations. Yet it deceptively also packs in enough trend-forecasting and social commentary that an astute reader can catch and future-gaze swiftly. Read with sharp eyes on this one!
Against form, I want to make a quick mention of a rare fiction title I read this year, from one of my fourite non-fiction writers, Annie Zaidi. The Comeback was a delightfully poignant and wholesome tale that only Annie can wee. One of the reasons for picking this up was that no one does small-town India world-building quite like Annie, and this does not disappoint. A reconciliation story that is sure to win smiles.
Ita Mehrotra is a graphic novelist and community-based arts educator. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement
Ita MehrotraOne book in 2025 I he both enjoyed reading and been inspired by for its refreshing use of the graphic narrative language, is Joshy Benedict’s The Pig Flip (HarperCollins, 2023). Set in rural Kerala, its compelling and intimate visual details bring the reader into the world of Babycha, his endless card games, his struggles with addiction and his ups and downs with family life.
The graphic style experiments playfully with panel layouts, formats of boxes and also with a drawing style that brings alive characters, conversations, and the environment that surrounds them. I especially like how light is treated within the colouring, setting the mood of various points in the day and night, that go a long way in enveloping the reader in this visually rich form of storytelling.
Lede E Miki Pohshna is a civil servant, writer and queer scholar from Sohkha, Meghalaya. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement
Lede E Miki PohshnaBlessings usually come through the simplest acts that bring joy to our mundane lives; and this year, my blessing comes—among all others—through the pure joy of being able to read these three amazing books.
At Swim, Two Boys (2001): A Classic by Jamie O’Niell. It took twenty-four years—a journey from Ireland to Sohkha—to grab my attention while researching for queer books. This book does not disappoint. What I like most about this it, is its reimagination of queer death, where it offers a possibility of a happy ever after. Joycean in its structure and prose and Yeatsean in its scale, this novel shows a new way of narrating queer love: the one that is at times sensuous, at times comedic, and at times tragic but one that never veers into overtelling or the melodrama.
Hing finished reading it this year, this book stands out because of its ability to wee together national history and a sense of queerness in a way that tends to reimagine that moment of great national awakening. The symbolism of this—two queer boys raising an Irish Flag on the Mugglins followed by their moment of intimacy—is one of the strongest symbolisms in queer literature.
Mother Mary Comes to Me (2025): “She is my shelter and my storm,” writes Arundhati Roy in this memoir and that sentiment alone perfectly captures the uneasy relationship that many children shared with their mothers. This book, in spite of being a memoir, manages to bring something that is deeply personal and turns it into a transpersonal experience.
As my mother struggles with her health, I reassess my own relationship with her, sometimes fraught, sometimes bitter and most of the time cordial. But in all of these she always is my shelter. In a way, this is the book that Roy might need to write and it is a book that I need to read and he read in order to make sense of the “storm” and move on from it with kindness. In a way, this novel offers a way for me to conduct a “silent inquiry” (to quote Conrad) into my own personal life and to let my “gangster” live freely.
Young Mungo: Queer? Gang rivalries? Denomination clashes? Strong female characters? Overcoming? Sibling rivalry? Toxic masculinity? Violence? All of these are central to the narrative. Published in 2022 by the Booker Prize Winner Douglas Stuart, this book came to me as one of the biggest inspirations for my writing. What is not to love about two working-class teenagers falling in love in impossible circumstances and yet he the courage to seek their happiness in each other?
As someone who is raised in a lower-middle-class family, this novel speaks strongly about queer longing in difficult places and yet it does it with such beauty and tenderness. I fear for Mungo and James even as I cheer for them because the precarity of their fate does not deter them from claiming each other.
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Jobeth Ann Warjiti is a writer, teacher and researcher from Laitkor, Meghalaya, and editor of the anthology, The Greatest Stories from the Northeast Ever Told (Aleph, 2025). | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement
Jobeth Ann WarjriAgainst Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement by Ashley Shew (Norton, 2023):
This is a book that was gifted to me by a friend and she could not he picked a better gift. So much of what we know about disability has been handed down to us by carers and disability professionals. This book, on the other hand, is written by a person with a disability. Ashley Shew suffers from Crohn’s disease, is a cancer survivor and an amputee. She is also neurodivergent, experiencing her environment through autism. The critical lens with which she looks at the disabled world offers a refreshing take on how one sees disabled people. She argues that to be human is to be inherently disabled.
Hence, disability is not a condition to be solved or erased but rather one that has to be embraced and made part of our built environments. She argues that sometimes, the most advanced technologies focus on solutions which, apart from enabling biases of their own, do not readily lend themselves to the practicalities of life as a disabled person.
Throughout the book, she does not lose sight of the critical pulse that frames her work, offering an alternative perspective to mainstream therapeutic solutions such as the Applied Behiour Analysis and the use of bionic limbs. Ultimately, the book reveals that those in need of improvement the most are people who believe that they are neurotypical and/or non-disabled and will remain so for the rest of their lives.
Vantage: John Barleycorn and the Road by Taneum Bambrick (American Poetry Review, 2019):
I he been following Taneum Bambrick’s work for quite sometime in online magazines. I adore their work for the manner in which the emotions in their poetry hit so close to home. This year, I purchased Vantage after hing read Bambrick’s Intimacies, Received the previous year. The book did not disappoint and will probably remain a fourite for years to come.
This is a poet who is careful about how emotions translate into language. For those who he not read her work, Vantage follows the experiences of a lone woman in a garbage collecting crew on the banks of the Columbia River and its reservoirs. Dams he been built across the river flooding what used to be towns inhabited by people and nearby forests teeming with wildlife. The stench of rotting carcasses and overflowing outhouses paint a picture of the Pacific Northwest rarely seen in the American canon. The brutality of a wounded landscape feels real, affecting how the people who live in it relate to each other.
Bambrick does not shy away or sugar-coat the filth associated with the crew’s occupation which overwhelms their private lives too. This is an America that does not make it to the front page news. Between juggling classes and social commitments, Bambrick’s work afforded moments of pause and reflection.
Mother Mary Comes to Me (Penguin Random House, 2025):
Arguably the most awaited book of the year and rightfully so. This book packs a punch similar to the way the Booker-winning The God of Small Things does. It was a journey of re-discovering Roy and the complexities of filial relationships. While I sympathise with Roy, I also nurture a soft spot for Mary Roy—a woman who derived joy from her career and was, perhaps, not meant for the nurture and care expected of motherhood.
Mother Mary represents for me what enforced motherhood and domesticity expected from all women does to those who do not wish to conform. What I liked most about the book, however, is that it reveals more about Arundhati Roy herself than her mother. Arundhati Roy: a person who is courageous, bre, cowardly, angry, kind-hearted, insecure…deeply human.
Behind You is the Sea by Susan Muaddi Darraj (Swift Press, 2024):
I stumbled on this book while researching for literature on Palestine. Susan Muaddi Darraj is a Palestinian immigrant living in America. This is her first novel with many of the chapters initially appearing as stories in various journals and magazines. I admire the way Darraj writes about her culture without being apologetic. This is quite a feat for ethnic writers who, most times, are compelled to over-explain their point-of-view to their (probably white) reader.
The book itself is inspired by a speech made by the conqueror, Tariq Ibn Ziyad, in 711 C. E. The story goes that Ziyad burnt the ships that would he carried his troops home causing them to fight the Spanish as the only way out to freedom. Darraj pays tribute to this historic moment by morphing it with the challenges that Palestinian immigrants face both within their community and without. Darraj skilfully wees Palestinian traditions that he survived her community’s crossing of the sea. More importantly, she shows what it means to lay claim to one’s identity and cultural heritage with empathy, grace, humour and, more often than not, pathos.
Gita Ramaswamy is an activist, writer and publisher. She is the author of, more recently, Land, Guns, Caste, Woman: The Memoir of a Lapsed Revolutionary (Nayana, 2022). | Photo Credit: Madhuraj/Mathrubhumi
Gita RamaswamyShattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia, Sam Dalrymple (HarperCollins, 2025):
It was a toss for me between this one and Mother Mary Comes to Me, but Sam Dalrymple’s book won hands down. After all, Arundhati’s book had better be a stunner, but Sam D is a fresh writer, just twenty-eight years old. This his first book, and such a brilliant one too.
A 540-page hardcover is rarely something you want to carry as you trel, yet I finished it in three days. It is that rare thing: a thick history that reads like a novel. The deeper I went, the more I realised how little I actually understood about the geographical extent of “India” before 1947. The India of the 1920s and 1930s was not merely today’s Republic plus Pakistan and Bangladesh. It included Burma, Nepal, Bhutan, Aden (Yemen), and every sheikhdom along the Gulf from Oman to Kuwait. Their people used Indian rupees, carried passports marked “Indian,” and were protected, however nominally, by the Indian Army. Then, in the space of a single lifetime—roughly 1925 to 1975—one of the largest empires in history splintered into more than a dozen independent states.
The book traces that collapse year by year, from 1928 to the birth of Bangladesh in 1971. To guide a reader through the chaos of the 1947 Partition, the Hyderabad crisis, the 1962, 1965, and 1971 without ever losing momentum is no mean achievement.
Along the way Dalrymple quietly detonates several comfortable myths. I knew, for instance, that Burma was separated from India in 1937, but I had no idea that the demand came partly from Hindu nationalists—including Gandhian—circles who argued that Burma lay outside the sacred geography of “Bharat.” The consequence was catastrophic: some 6,00,000 Indian Tamils, Telugus, and others were driven out in what amounted to ethnic cleansing; 80,000 died on the terrible trek back to India.
There are unforgettable vignettes throughout. A young Naga soldier declares he is “a Naga first, a Naga second, and a Naga last”. The fall of Hyderabad in 1948 sends shock wes through the Arab Gulf because so many Hadhrami and Hyderabadi merchants had thought of themselves as Indian. The Rohingya appear not as a footnote to Myanmar’s politics but as a people with centuries-old ties to Chittagong and Bengal.
Dalrymple does not merely report these stories; he inhabits them. One may raise an eyebrow at occasional romantic glances toward the old princely order—maharajahs as enlightened patrons and lion-preserving aesthetes—or at the rather harsh portrait of Subhas Chandra Bose. These are minor blemishes. What lingers is the scholarship. I am not someone who normally chases footnotes, yet I found myself constantly flipping to the back. The notes are a treasure trove: unpublished diaries, memoirs in eight languages (English, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, Konyak, Arabic, Burmese), private letters, and, for the 1971 war, the author’s own interviews. Handsome maps, drawn specially for the book, make sense of borders that no longer exist.
Above all, Dalrymple forces us to see South Asia’s map for what it is: a recent, contingent, and often brutal invention. While school textbooks obsess over the Radcliffe Line, he insists we also look at the lines drawn in London committee rooms, Rangoon refugee camps, Muscat palaces, and Naga hills. Borders, he reminds us, are made by power; they can also be unmade by resistance, grief, and time.
This is urgent, necessary history—written with the urgency of someone who realises how quickly we forget what was, only yesterday, one country.
Amogh Dhar Sharma is an academic based at the University of Oxford, and the author of The Backstage of Democracy: India’s Election Campaigns and The People Who Manage Them. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement
Amogh Dhar SharmaPankaj Mishra’s The World After Gaza is a book that I he recommended more than any other to family, friends, and colleagues this year. Through his unmatched erudition, Mishra lays bare how the tragedy of the Holocaust became fodder for justifying Israel’s ethno-nationalism despite the warnings of those who had witnessed the rages of antisemitism firsthand.
Many he criticized the book for giving insufficient attention to Palestinian voices—a critique that I found to be profoundly misguided. There he been (and will be) many sophisticated accounts of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and this book is not intended as a substitute for those.
Rather than pretending to transcend his subject position, Mishra uses his formative years in India to unpack the contradictions that Israel has long represented in the imagination of postcolonial countries. It is a singular achievement that the book retains its moral clarity and political urgency about the catastrophe unfolding in Gaza, while eschewing the simplistic narratives about historical trauma and victimhood that he led us to this point.
This was also a bounty year for good memoirs. Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me and Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow stood out for me and deserve to be read together. Both centre on the theme of loss of loved ones—for Roy, her mother’s death at the age of 89, but whose demise she had been preparing for all her life; and for Li, her two barely adult sons she lost to suicide in quick succession. Despite their common thread of bereement, I found it striking how radically the narrative of the books diverge from one another.
Roy pulls no punches in recounting the high and lows of her own life and her complicated relationship with her mother, but does so without lapsing into solipsism that would be all too easy for an author of her renown. Reading the memoir, I found myself constantly returning to stray passages from The God of Small Things and found in them a deeper emotional resonance and humour that I had previously missed.
As a meditation on familial loss, Yiyun Li’s memoir is uncharacteristically terse. She offers no easy self-help remedy, no easy to digest wisdom, no quick solutions for grief, and refuses to apologise for her anger at people who said the wrong things following her sons’ deaths (and others still who did not say anything at all). But in what would otherwise risk appearing nihilistic, Li sketches her journey of “radical acceptance” found in the everyday routines of life and by trawling through her archives of uncomfortable memories.
Finally, I ended the year with Jason Burke’s The Revolutionists, a magisterial account of the radical activists who launched a series of unprecedented hijacking and terror campaigns in the long 1970s. Some may quibble as to how far the book truly constitutes a historical guide to understand the present moment, but it is nevertheless a landmark literary achievement that could he only been produced by someone with Burke’s credentials.
Majid Maqbool is an independent journalist and writer based in Kashmir.
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