Six new books that chronicle the challenges and triumphs of modern India
Mohan Gulrajani
September nonfiction: Six new books that chronicle the challenges and triumphs of modern India
The first modern biography in Assamese, a prison diary in translation, India’s queer past and future, and more.
All information sourced from publishers.Sheher Mein Gaon: Culture, Conflict and Change in the Urban Villages of Delhi, Ekta Chauhan
Delhi’s urban villages are paradoxical spaces – at once ancient and evolving, marginalised yet central to the city’s modern economy. These are places where centuries-old traditions coexist with pop-up cafés and start-ups, and where the past is never quite past.
Born out of state-led land acquisitions from the early 20th century, these villages were thrust into transformation through urban expansion. What emerged was not a seamless integration, but a complex in-between: part city, part village, part memory, part reinvention. This book journeys into those spaces – exploring how people remember, resist, and reimagine their place in a city that’s always on the move.
Through stories of place, identity, and power, Sheher Mein Gaon uncovers how these neighbourhoods reflect the deeper tensions of modern urban life – between tradition and progress, belonging and exclusion, history and ambition.
Unsilenced: The Jail Diary of an Activist, Seema Azad, translated from the Hindi by Shailza Sharma
On a crisp morning in February 2010, journalist-activist Seema Azad boarded a train from Delhi to Allahabad with a bag of books purchased from the World Book Fair. However, she never reached home. By nightfall, she, along with her partner Vishwa Vijai, had been forcibly arrested under the draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act – UAPA – charged with “waging war against the State”, and locked inside Naini Central Jail. Across their two and a half years of incarceration, as she and Vishwa Vijai repeatedly tried and failed to secure bail for themselves, Azad kept a meticulous jail diary, documenting the grim realities of life behind bars.
In this memoir, based on her jail diary, Azad pries open India’s carceral labyrinth: insect-ridden food, dilapidated barracks, deep-rooted caste and gender hierarchies, and the ceaseless indignities of a system built on bribes and exploitation. Woven into this reality are the unforgettable stories of the women prisoners she meets – a majority of them Dalit, Adivasi, Muslim – and the children who have never seen the outside world, all navigating a system designed to crush them. Against this backdrop of shared struggle, Azad chronicles her own legal battle through courtroom farces and media vilification, culminating in a life sentence and, finally, an unexpected release.
Vaccine Nation: How Immunization Shaped India, Ameer Shahul
When Edward Jenner pricked a young boy’s arm in 1796 to inoculate him against smallpox, he ignited a revolution. Vaccination would go on to transform human health, enabling the eradication and prevention of deadly diseases and saving countless lives. But India remained on the margins of these developments – its people often subjects of Western trials, but its own scientific institutions underdeveloped.
This began to change in 1893, when Soviet-born scientist Waldemar Haffkine arrived in Calcutta to combat endemic cholera. His pioneering efforts laid the groundwork for India’s first vaccines and vaccine laboratories and inspired a generation of scientists like Sahib Singh Sokhey and Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar, who, after Independence, transformed vaccination into a national mission of self-reliance.
Vaccine Nation is the untold chronicle of how India emerged from colonial dependency to become a global vaccine powerhouse. Today, India vaccinates over a billion people and supplies affordable vaccines to most of the nations across the Global South. But with the rise of geopolitical tensions, pandemic fatigue and profit-driven global markets, a new question looms: Can India retain its humanitarian spirit in a world where public health is increasingly privatised?
A Woman of No Consequence: Memory, Letters and Resistance in Madras, Kalpana Karunakaran
In this intimate, yet simultaneously anthropological, exploration of the life of her maternal grandmother, Pankajam (1911–2007), Kalpana Karunakaran achieves the remarkable: capturing the singularity of an exceptional woman, even as it situates her in a social universe shaped by the conventions of Tamil Brahmin orthodoxy. Karunakaran conveys with clarity how the “utterly ordinary” life of a “woman of no consequence” (as Pankajam writes of herself), lived out largely within the confines of family and kin, was quite far from ordinary.
The book draws extensively upon letters, glimpses of Pankajam’s life narrated through her thinly-disguised semi-autobiographical short stories that allowed her to ‘say the unsayable’ about love, intimacy and conjugality, and her autobiography, which she began writing in 1949 and kept writing till her last piece in 1995. What comes together is a riveting portrait of heartbreak and violence, yearning and delight, a housewife’s quest for intellectual growth and her talent for friendships across cultures and continents.
A Woman of No Consequence is about the chequered trajectories of a newly-born nation as seen through the lens of its daughters—restless women forcing home and nation to reckon with their stubborn striving for self-actualisation.
Being Modern: A Biography of Ananda Ram Dhekial Phookan, Gunabhiram Barua, translated from the Assamese by Banani Chakravarty
Ananda Ram Dhekial Phookan (1829–59), the subject of this first modern Assamese biography, was the most significant figure in early colonial Assam. Born into a family affected by the region’s political upheavals, including the First Anglo–Burmese War (1824–26), Ananda Ram embodied the various social and cultural transformations of the early nineteenth century.
Despite his short life, Ananda Ram left an indelible mark on Assamese society and scholarship. His crusade to establish Assamese as Assam’s rightful court and official language – displacing Bengali from its entrenched position – would prove pivotal to the making of modern Assamese identity. His diverse scholarship ranged from books for young readers to more serious and intellectually rigorous works on colonial law and language, among other subjects.
Gunabhiram Barua, the author of this book, intertwines Ananda Ram’s life story with a broader historical account of Assam’s transition into colonial modernity.
Forbidden Desire: How the British Stole India’s Queer Pasts and Queer Futures, Sindhu Rajasekaran
Before the British colonised the Indian subcontinent, it was largely Proto feminist and queer.
People from across the socio-economic spectrum explored and expressed their gender and sexuality in myriad ways. But to prudish Victorian eyes, this was scandalous. The Empire consistently curtailed Indian (wo)mxn’s sexual agency and the freedoms of sexual minorities.
All desire outside the heteronormative was marked as aberrant and sexually unchaste.
Colonial authorities passed a posy of laws to criminalise sexually agentive (wo)mxn and queer folks. From nautch dancers to courtesans, effeminate mxn, masculine womxn, trans and queer persons, even ascetic renunciants were classified as “sexual deviants”. Old prejudices were mapped onto new ones. Colonial India, in effect, amalgamated ancient and medieval fundamentalist codes of heteronormativity with Victorian attitudes towards sex.
Drawing from a wide range of disciplines including feminist historiography, anthropology, histories of sexuality, South Asian queer theory, decolonial and subaltern studies, the history of medicine, legislative history, and informed by the author’s primary archival research, Forbidden Desire aims to undo the deleterious effects of British colonialism on India’s rich queer past.
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Professor (Dr.) M. L. Gulrajani F.S.D.C. (UK)
Former Professor and Dean (I.R&D), IIT Delhi
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