The historian Irfan Habib talks to Harsh Mander about how the Hindu right is manufacturing the subcontinent’s history, with the support of the BJP leadership
Namit Arora and Romila Thapar on how identities in early and medieval India were formed, contested, and why a shared sense of “Indianness” may be a colonial-era development
A conversation with 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’
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
A conversation with the Indologist Wendy Doniger on her wide-ranging study ‘The Cave of Echoes’, the importance of understanding other peoples’ myths, and the Hindu right’s efforts to suppress the study of religion
This is part of the first season of Partitions of the Heart: Conversations with Harsh Mander, a Himal Southasian podcast series produced in association with Karwan-e-Mohabbat.
A conversation with the journalist Thomas Bell on his latest book, ‘Human Nature’, and the social, cultural and natural history of people’s lives in the Himalayan environment
This week in Himal
This week, Cyrus Naji unpacks newly released reports from the United Nations and Human Rights Watch, which critique the Awami League’s brutal crackdown on student
In her biography of the city, the Kashmiri writer highlights the complications of Srinagar’s identity and recentres the everyday lives of its people, particularly women
Sunela Jayewardene’s search for Ravan’s presence in Sri Lanka offers a counter to Sinhala Buddhist appropriation of the mythic king, but comes with its own pitfalls
