Four new books open up debate on why same-sex marriage has come to anchor queer politics in India, and how the notions and politics of Southasian queer life shift across local, diasporic and transnational scales of identity and belonging
In ‘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
A fellow Tamil-descent immigrant writer reflects on the Sri Lankan-British poet Vidyan Ravinthiran’s memoir ‘Asian/Other’, exploring the porousness of identity in the Southasian diaspora and the challenges of writing beyond Western expectations
A conversation with the Sri Lankan-Pākehā writer on exploring anger, trauma, queerness and displacement in a multigenerational saga of three women from the Southasian diaspora
The Border-Gavaskar series between India and Australia matters far beyond cricket alone and can update Australian views of Southasia and the Southasian diaspora – if the country cares to pay attention
A conversation on the collective diary of 21 Afghan women writers who offer courageous and intimate testimonies on the events of August 2021, life under Taliban rule and far from home in exile
Sharing narratives about food and belonging for a writing workshop, Afghans living in Delhi preserve and construct ideas of home – both the remembered home lost to war in Afghanistan, and the home of refuge they are building in India
Sampanthan’s death prompted glowing tributes from Colombo but relative indifference in the Tamil community, which gained nothing from his and the Tamil National Alliance’s compromises with the Sri Lankan state
In exile from Sri Lanka and marginalised abroad, women who once fought in the country’s civil war are almost completely silenced – but through poetry some have found a way to speak out, to remember, to protest, to mourn and to heal
Three recent volumes show historians moving beyond assumptions of a bounded Subcontinent, contextualising the 20th century by centring regional and local politics that complicate nation-state narratives
Verghese returns to familiar themes in ‘The Covenant of Water’ – modern medicine, political upheavals, and more – to confirm himself as a writer of his own type of global novel
