Welcome to the Southasia Review of Books podcast, where we speak to celebrated authors and emerging literary voices from across Southasia. In this episode, Shwetha Srikanthan speaks to the writer Aatish Taseer on history, syncretism and the search for belonging at the heart of his new book, A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile (HarperCollins Fourth Estate India, July 2025).

https://www.himalmag.com/podcast/aatish-taseer-history-exile-return-to-self

In 2019, the Indian government under Narendra Modi revoked the writer Aatish Taseer’s Overseas Citizenship, exiling him from the country where he had grown up and lived for thirty years. This loss prompted a journey revisiting the places that shaped his identity, exploring broader questions of the ties that bind us to home. 

Spanning Istanbul to Uzbekistan, the high Andes to Mongolia, Taseer’s new book, A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile traces a life shaped by displacement and curiosities. He examines how overlapping pasts of culture, migration, and faith shapes both people and places, and what it means to exist in societies scarred by prejudice, exclusion and a contempt of history. 

This episode is now available on Youtube: https://youtu.be/kXecyexfed8

Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/4nC6unj

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6kW2u2LhfxK1AR86405Z52

✨Thank you for listening to the Southasia Review of Books Podcast from Himal Southasian. If you like this episode, please share widely, rate, review, subscribe and download the show on your favourite podcast apps. ✉️Let’s keep the conversation going – please share your thoughts on the episode. Leave us a comment on Youtube or write to us at [email protected].📼If you haven’t already, do subscribe to the Himal Southasian YouTube channel and help us spread the word by sharing these episodes widely.🙏🏼 To make conversations like this possible, we need the support of our listeners like you. Become a paying Himal Patron to support the Southasia Review of Books: https://www.himalmag.com/support-himal📚 Sign up to receive the Southasia Review of Books newsletter for Himal’s spotlight on Southasian literature, our latest conversations, and more: https://bit.ly/southasia-review-of-books

In this episode, Harsh Mander speaks to historians Mridula Mukherjee and Vinay Lal about the origins of the RSS, the ideologies of its founders, the it played (and did not play) in India’s freedom struggle, and its role during the Partition riots.

Mukherjee talks about how in pre-independence India, the idea that Hindus must constitute a separate nation that opposed including minorities already existed and the RSS was set up in 1925 with the purpose of forming a militant group – directly inspired by Europe’s fascists – that would form its ideological core. Lal points to how the RSS ideologue, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, wanted to “militarise Hindudom” to counter the British attempt to portray Indians as effeminate – which is an important reason why the RSS focuses on physical culture and hyper-masculinity.

You can watch the video of this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/7VbD_HMJF-8

This episode is part of Season Two of Partitions of the Heart. In this season, Harsh Mander speaks to leading scholars and observers who have studied the RSS closely. Together, they examine its roots and core principles, its Hindutva agenda, and its corrosive role in India’s public and social life across a century.

“Saffron Siege” runs from 17 September to 3 December 2025, with a new episode releasing every Wednesday. Himal’s podcasts are available on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Production: Imaad ul Hassan, Ayushi Malik, Lydia Smith, Ritika Chauhan, Nayantara Narayanan

Support Himal Podcasts and Himal's independent journalism for just USD 5 per month: https://payhere.lk/pay/oee1bdaf1

Himal Southasian is Southasia’s first and only regional news and analysis magazine. Stretching from Afghanistan to Burma, from Tibet to the Maldives, this region of more than 1.4 billion people shares great swathes of interlocking geography, culture and history. Yet today neighbouring countries can barely talk to one another, much less speak in a common voice. For three decades, Himal Southasian has strived to define, nurture, and amplify that voice.

Read more: https://www.himalmag.com/

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Since June, Pakistan has experienced yet another season of severe monsoon flooding, with particularly heavy impacts across the Punjab region. Flood waters and landslides have claimed many hundreds of lives and displaced hundreds of thousands more. The Pakistan Disaster Management Authority announced that, by 10 September, that 900 people had died and about four million were impacted by the floods.

The 2025 floods mark the third major event in the past 15 years – following the catastrophic flooding of 2010 and 2022. Climate change-induced weather phenomena are making extreme rainfall more common. But there is also unplanned development and dam mismanagement that are turning these extreme events into disasters.

In this episode of State of Southasia, Daanish Mustafa, a professor of critical geography and an expert on hydropolitics talks to Nayantara Narayanan about how climatic variability, unregulated development, and colonial water governance intersect to exacerbate Pakistan and other Southasian countries’ vulnerabilities to floods. Mustafa questions planning paradigms that rely on statistical "normality" and outdated colonial models and advocates for a shift toward participatory, democratic forms of environmental governance, grounded in local knowledge systems, social equity, and an understanding of water as both an ecological and cultural entity.

You can also listen to this episode on:

🎧 YouTube: https://youtu.be/_6rWl2S8yxM

🎧 Apple podcasts: https://apple.co/3WboIQn

Episode notes:

Daanish Mustafa’s recommendations:

The disastrous redesign of Pakistan’s rivers - Vox (video)

The Indus Rivers: A Study of the Effects of Partition - Aloys Arthur Michel (non-fiction)

Drowned and Dammed: Colonial Capitalism and Flood Control in Eastern India - Rohan D’Souza (non-fiction)

Further reading from Himal’s archives:

Pakistan loses nothing from India’s suspension of the Indus Waters

TreatyUnpacking the floods in PakistanManaging floods in

BangladeshExplainer: Why embankments won’t solve Nepal’s flood woesIs

Kerala’s pokkali the rice of the future? 

Himal Southasian is Southasia’s first and only regional news and analysis magazine. Stretching from Afghanistan to Burma, from Tibet to the Maldives, this region of more than 1.4 billion people shares great swathes of interlocking geography, culture and history. Yet today neighbouring countries can barely talk to one another, much less speak in a common voice. For three decades, Himal Southasian has strived to define, nurture, and amplify that voice.

Read more: https://www.himalmag.com/

Support our independent journalism and become a Patron of Himal: https://www.himalmag.com/support-himal

Find us on:

https://twitter.com/Himalistan

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In this episode of "Saffron Siege: The RSS at 100", Apoorvanand discusses how the Hindu and Hindutva common sense kept the RSS popular even though it was banned after Gandhi's assassination in 1948. He talks to Harsh Mander about how it emerged from the shadows of being a banned organisation, how it grew from strength to strength through the 1960s, 1970s up till 2014 when Narendra Modi became prime minister, and the leaders who legitimised it along the way.

You can watch the episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Osrg7Zy0GP4

This episode is part of Season Two of Partitions of the Heart. In this season, Harsh Mander speaks to leading scholars and observers who have studied the RSS closely. Together, they examine its roots and core principles, its Hindutva agenda, and its corrosive role in India’s public and social life across a century.

“Saffron Siege” runs from 17 September to 3 December 2025, with a new episode releasing every Wednesday. Himal’s podcasts are available on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Production: Imaad ul Hassan, Ayushi Malik, Lydia Smith, Ritika Chauhan, Nayantara Narayanan

Support Himal Podcasts and Himal's independent journalism for just USD 5 per month: https://payhere.lk/pay/oee1bdaf1

Himal Southasian is Southasia’s first and only regional news and analysis magazine. Stretching from Afghanistan to Burma, from Tibet to the Maldives, this region of more than 1.4 billion people shares great swathes of interlocking geography, culture and history. Yet today neighbouring countries can barely talk to one another, much less speak in a common voice. For three decades, Himal Southasian has strived to define, nurture, and amplify that voice.

Read more: https://www.himalmag.com/

Become a paying Patron of Himal: https://www.himalmag.com/support-himalFind us on:

https://twitter.com/Himalistan

https://www.facebook.com/himal.southasian

https://www.instagram.com/himalistan/

In her new book ‘The Jackfruit Chronicles’, the award-winning food writer Shahnaz Ahsan invites us into her family’s British-Bangladeshi kitchen, showing how food carries both resistance and remembrance, and reflects the complexities of diasporic life in Britain: https://www.himalmag.com/podcast/shahnaz-ahsan-food-bangladesh-diaspora

Welcome to the Southasia Review of Books podcast, where we speak to celebrated authors and emerging literary voices from across Southasia. In this episode, Shwetha Srikanthan speaks to the award-winning food writer Shahnaz Ahsan about her new book, The Jackfruit Chronicles: Memories and Recipes from a British-Bangladeshi Kitchen (Harper Collins, July 2025). 

Part memoir, part cookbook, The Jackfruit Chronicles is a deeply personal exploration of food, family and identity. Through stories and recipes, Shahnaz documents the vibrant flavours and captivating stories of Bengali food and its place in Britain. Beginning with the arrival of her grandfather in Manchester in the 1950s, the book traces not only one family’s journey, but also the wider story of the Bangladeshi diaspora’s search for home and belonging.

This episode is now available on Youtube: https://youtu.be/GnWLGrFyB3A

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0SwZazJ5odQSPuQrTrY9vd

Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/4n8PQvk

Let’s keep the conversation going – please share your thoughts on the episode. Leave us a comment here on Youtube or send me an email (shwethas[at]himalmag[dot]com).

To make conversations like this possible, we need the support of our listeners like you. Become a paying Himal Patron to support the Southasia Review of Books: https://www.himalmag.com/support-himal

Sign up to receive the Southasia Review of Books newsletter for Himal’s spotlight on Southasian literature, our latest conversations, and more: https://bit.ly/southasia-review-of-books

In this inaugural episode of the podcast “Saffron Siege”, Harsh Mander speaks to Rajmohan Gandhi, a renowned historian and grandson of Mohandas Gandhi, on the hostility of the Hindu Mahasabha and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh towards Gandhi that ultimately led to his assasination in January 1948.

Rajmohan Gandhi describes how Gandhi's demand for an India that belonged equally to all religions, communities and identities set him against the Hindu right. “Those who ultimately did kill him did not want an India for everybody. They wanted an India where some people would be supreme, others would be subservient or junior or second-class,” says Rajmohan Gandhi.

He describes how the Hindu Mahasabha and Hindutva ideologues were also advocates of Partition and kept their distance from India’s struggle for independence from British rule. “Those who do any serious study will know that the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha kept aloof from the freedom struggle and they openly said that the Muslims are a real enemy and in fact we should cooperate with the British.”You can watch this conversation on YouTube:

This episode is part of Season Two of Partitions of the Heart. In this season, Harsh Mander speaks to leading scholars and observers who have studied the RSS closely. Together, they examine its roots and core principles, its Hindutva agenda, and its corrosive role in India’s public and social life across a century.

“Saffron Siege” runs from 17 September to 3 December 2025, with a new episode releasing every Wednesday. Himal’s podcasts are available on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Himal Southasian is Southasia’s first and only regional news and analysis magazine. Stretching from Afghanistan to Burma, from Tibet to the Maldives, this region of more than 1.4 billion people shares great swathes of interlocking geography, culture and history. Yet today neighbouring countries can barely talk to one another, much less speak in a common voice. For three decades, Himal Southasian has strived to define, nurture, and amplify that voice.

Read more: https://www.himalmag.com/

Support our independent journalism and become a Patron of Himal: https://www.himalmag.com/support-himal

Find us on:

https://twitter.com/Himalistan

https://www.facebook.com/himal.southasian

https://www.instagram.com/himalistan/

All eyes have been on Nepal since last week when a large but loosely organised protest by young people in Kathmandu turned into a revolution that brought down the government. On September 8th, many groups of young college and school goers took out a peaceful protest march in Kathmandu. There had been rising anger about systemic corruption and nepotism among the political class that was the foundation for these protests.

The immediate trigger, however, was a government announcement of a social media ban.The announcement of the ban itself was due to a government requirement that tech companies register in Nepal and many not having done so but was also seen, by many of the protesters, as a way for the government to silence dissent and criticism. For many weeks before the protest, videos had been circulating of so-called “nepo babies”, that is, children of rich and influential people flaunting lavish lifestyles while much of the rest of Nepal was dealing with poverty and the lack of jobs and opportunities for advancement.

The government came down hard on the protests. Police fired into the crowds and at least 19 people were killed on 8th September. Things then got out of hand. On the 9th, there was widespread violence in anger and retaliation. Mobs set buildings, including the parliament, ablaze, and attacked politicians, their families and anyone who as seen to be close to power. More people were killed with a reported death toll of 51 by the weekend. The prime minister KP Oli resigned, army patrols took over the streets and rumours and speculation took over. The power vacuum has led to fears in Nepal of foreign interference, or a push for a return to monarchy, or even a takeover by the army. Meanwhile, Gen Z-ers have been holding public town hall-style meetings on the online platform Discord to discuss their agendas and a way forward. On Friday night, they voted for Sushila Karki, a former chief justice, to lead the interim government.

In this episode, we look at what Nepal’s GenZ and others hope for in the coming days, months and years, and what about Nepal’s politics, economy and society they see as needs fixing. Nayantara Narayanan speaks to the Ujjawala Maharjan, a poet and educator from Kathmandu, Anjali Sah, a law student in Kathmandu originally from Madhesh, and Tashi Lhozam, a climate activist and social scientists from the Humla district in the highlands of Nepal.

This episode is also available on

🎧YouTube: https://youtu.be/qQwZGV6gWVk

🎧 Apple podcasts: https://apple.co/4n0KJx3

Himal Southasian is Southasia’s first and only regional news and analysis magazine. Stretching from Afghanistan to Burma, from Tibet to the Maldives, this region of more than 1.4 billion people shares great swathes of interlocking geography, culture and history. Yet today neighbouring countries can barely talk to one another, much less speak in a common voice. For three decades, Himal Southasian has strived to define, nurture, and amplify that voice.

Read more: https://www.himalmag.com/

Support our independent journalism and become a Patron of Himal: https://www.himalmag.com/support-himal

Find us on:

https://twitter.com/Himalistan

https://www.facebook.com/himal.southasian

https://www.instagram.com/himalistan/

A conversation with the British-Bangladeshi writer on her debut novel, The First Jasmines, and the untold stories of women who survived the violence of the 1971 Liberation War: https://www.himalmag.com/podcast/saima-begum-novel-bangladesh-liberation-war-birangona

Welcome to the Southasia Review of Books podcast, where we speak to celebrated authors and emerging literary voices from across Southasia. In this episode, Shwetha Srikanthan speaks to the British-Bangladeshi writer Saima Begum about her debut novel The First Jasmines (Hajar Press, July 2025). 

In 1971, during the nine-month war that gave Bangladesh its independence from then West Pakistan, the Pakistan Army carried out a brutal crackdown against Bengalis in which hundreds of thousands of women were detained and repeatedly brutalised. 

What the women had experienced was one of the first recorded examples of rape being used as a weapon of war in the 20th century. However, an uncanny silence has remained when it comes to the birangonas’ own testimonies. 

Within Bangladesh, widespread stigma led to the women being ostracised by their communities, and their accounts are suppressed by silencing and shame. Today, a plaque at the Liberation War Museum in Dhaka reads: “There are not many records of this hidden suffering.” Yet across the country, there are survivors with stories to tell.

Set against the final weeks of the Liberation War in Bangladesh, Saima Begum’s novel follows two sisters, Lucky and Jamila, who are captured and imprisoned by the Pakistan military.

Through their story, Begum writes the birangona women back into a history from which they had been largely erased. The First Jasmines brings to light the experiences of the women who endured unimaginable violence and injustices in 1971 and its invisible aftermath – women whose voices have largely been excluded from national memory and popular narratives.

This episode is now available on Youtube: https://youtu.be/GsfNH8aFHus

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0SQfCXYyUvczJwIT0obwLp

Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/45RJ0Em

Let’s keep the conversation going – please share your thoughts on the episode. Leave us a comment here on Youtube or send me an email (shwethas[at]himalmag[dot]com).

To make conversations like this possible, we need the support of our listeners like you. Become a paying Himal Patron to support the Southasia Review of Books: https://www.himalmag.com/support-himal

Sign up to receive the Southasia Review of Books newsletter for Himal’s spotlight on Southasian literature, our latest conversations, and more: https://bit.ly/southasia-review-of-books

On the 22nd of August, Colombo police arrested the former president of Sri Lanka Ranil Wickremesinghe over allegations that he used public funds on a two-day personal visit to the United Kingdom in September 2023.

Sri Lanka’s anticorruption units have been cracking down on corruption cases since the president Anura Kumara Dissanayake came to power in September last year on a promise to fight corruption. More than a dozen political leaders from the previous government and former government officials have been arrested or being investigated for corruption and malpractice. Wickremesinghe’s arrest is the most high-profile one in this yet. In the wake of his arrest, a number of politicians from Wickfremesinghe’s party and others in the opposition have rallied behind him, calling the case unfair and politically motivated.

In this episode of State of Southasia episode, associate editor Nayantara Narayanan speaks to writer, editor and researcher Marlon Ariyasinghe to talk about what Wickremesinghe’s signifies in the larger politics of Sri Lanka, what about its culture has changed and what has remained stubbornly unchanging. You can also listen to this episode on:

🎧 YouTube: https://youtu.be/Z6s98j6P0K0

🎧 Apple podcasts: https://apple.co/3I29HNk

♦️Himal Southasian is Southasia’s first and only regional news and analysis magazine. Stretching from Afghanistan to Burma, from Tibet to the Maldives, this region of more than 1.4 billion people shares great swathes of interlocking geography, culture and history. Yet today neighbouring countries can barely talk to one another, much less speak in a common voice. For three decades, Himal Southasian has strived to define, nurture, and amplify that voice.

♦️ Read more: https://www.himalmag.com/

♦️ Support our independent journalism and become a Patron of Himal: https://www.himalmag.com/support-himal

Find us on:

♦️ https://twitter.com/Himalistan

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A conversation with Vishwambhari Parmar on curating and translating The Blaft Anthology of Gujarati Pulp Fiction, and uncovering the genre’s darker and more irreverent worlds in Southasian literature.

Welcome to the Southasia Review of Books podcast, where we speak to celebrated authors and emerging literary voices from across Southasia. In this episode, Shwetha Srikanthan speaks to Vishwambhari Parmar, the curator and translator of The Blaft Anthology of Gujarati Pulp Fiction (Blaft Publications, December 2024).

The term “pulp” comes from the cheap wood-pulp paper on which stories considered lowbrow were printed on. Their content often reflected society’s darker sides: crime, corruption, misogyny and problematic caricatures. And despite – or because of – their racier subject matter, pulp fiction was wildly popular in Southasia. 

These stories also helped shape much of what we now consider canon in Southasian science fiction, noir, horror and romance. Over time, paperbacks, comics, and higher-quality magazines largely replaced pulp publications – but the stories never stopped being written.

The Blaft Anthology of Gujarati Pulp Fiction, curated and translated by Vishwambhari Parmar, and edited by Rakesh Kannah, preserves this rich and often overlooked Gujarati literary world. From supernatural crime thrillers and folk horror, to Mumbai underworld revenge fantasies, the anthology brings a taste of Gujarat’s bestselling adventure, dark fantasy and mysteries to wider English-reading audiences.

Let’s keep the conversation going – please share your thoughts on the episode. Leave us a comment here on Youtube or send me an email (shwethas[at]himalmag[dot]com).

We’re on a mission to give Southasian literature the spotlight it deserves. Become a paying Himal Patron to support the Southasia Review of Books: https://www.himalmag.com/support-himal

Sign up to receive the Southasia Review of Books newsletter for Himal’s spotlight on Southasian literature, our latest conversations, and more: https://bit.ly/southasia-review-of-books