Some of what’s
on the shelves.

A Partition historian's twentieth-century South Asia, from the last days of the Raj to now. Long, dense, essential.

A thousand years of India's cultural exports across Asia. The paperback is already dog-eared.

The epic traced through the many regional retellings that kept it alive.

Picked up for the bits mainstream Indian coverage of the border quietly skips.

The Rutgers historian unpicking the pile of propaganda that has buried the sixth Mughal emperor. Short, sharp, angry in the right places.

How a Deccan princely city became a global tech capital, told through the people who built it rather than the IT parks.

Pushpesh Pant on what Delhi has eaten across regimes. A reminder that food is the most honest archive a city has.

How India became a multilingual nation, told through the archaeology of its languages. The kind of book that changes how you hear the street.

On the Mahatma, his experiments with celibacy, and the women who were drafted into them. Necessary, uncomfortable reading.

The historian re-reads early modern empire as a connected world rather than a series of sealed civilisations. Re-orients what "global history" is allowed to mean.

The single-volume political history of independent India. The doorstop you keep reaching for when somebody asks "wait, when did that happen?"

Forty-odd portraits from Indian history the textbooks left out. Reads like a cabinet of curiosities, argues like a political history.

The late great constitutional lawyer writing for the ordinary reader.

Margins full of pencil, post-it flags fraying at the top.

The friendliest onramp to A Theory of Justice for those of us who need one.

The Delhi collective reading Indian law as literature and as battleground.

The foreign exchange handbook, for the moments when compliance becomes its own genre.

A reading of the Indian Constitution as a document designed to reshape, not preserve. The chapter on equality earns the hardback price.

On the ambition of the Indian Constituent Assembly, which built a democracy in a country no political theorist of the time thought was ready for one.

A journalist’s memoir of hiding her caste her entire childhood, and what happened when she stopped.

Ambedkar’s unfinished essay on the origins of untouchability, reprinted in a modern annotated edition. Essential reading on the long argument over who belongs.

The diary of a woman jailed under the UAPA, translated from Hindi. Short, direct, hard to put down.

Thirty-plus testimonies from inside India’s prisons under various counter-terror laws. Builds its argument by accumulation.

A development economist’s account of why Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka have outperformed India on social indicators. Not a comfortable read for the nationalist.

A family memoir from the Dalit margins of Andhra, told without apology and without softening. The book that opens the conversation about caste even where the conversation does not want to start.

The Shudra-Dalit sociologist on the religion he was born outside of, written from inside a community the Hindu canon does not represent.

The French political scientist on the rise of the lower castes in north Indian politics. Long, careful, indispensable.

A collection that takes the hijab debate in India seriously as a legal, religious, and political question rather than a talk-show prompt.

An anthology of women’s writing across two millennia of Indian literature. The kind of book that gets dipped into rather than read straight through.

Four short novels retelling the stories of the Panchakanya, one woman at a time. Read them in sequence or pick one at a time like a meditation.

A dystopian novel set in a future where women are scarce and contested. Hard to unread.

The book that made "gender data gap" a phrase people use in meetings. Every chapter is a quiet accusation.

Adam Smith’s mother made his dinner every night. She did it out of love, not self-interest. The entire edifice of economic theory forgot to account for her.

The Columbia anthropologist on the rescue narrative that drove twenty years of Western policy on Muslim women, and what it missed about the women themselves.

The historian’s argument that caste cannot be analysed without gender, and gender cannot be analysed without caste. Slim, foundational, sharp.

On Aadhaar and the quiet rearrangement of the idea of a citizen.

The civil-services standby, on the desk because sometimes you need to remember how Parliament actually works.

The section on political tribalism is worth the rest of the book.

Stiglitz on what a progressive economic programme can still look like after forty years of neoliberal drift.

Pankaj Mishra on what the current moment does to the idea of a moral international order. As bleak as the title suggests.

The New York Times reporters on the inside story of the Twitter acquisition, layer by layer. A case study in how a platform can be unmade in public.

Picked up for the strangeness of the category — a serious attempt to think about how ancient practice and new intelligence might sit in the same room.

A collection of essays interrogating the unique-ID project from the inside. Read alongside Surveillance as Governance to get the full picture.

A short essay on what Indian democracy still owes its citizens. Old now, but the argument has aged in interesting ways.

Still the friendliest way into the canon.

Evolutionary psychology at its most readable.

Adler without the academic armour.

Periodic re-reads, for the joy of them.

Travels along the Indian coast, through the fish and the people who depend on them.

Forest tales that turn into conservation history if you read them slowly.

Cross-cultural communication made practical. Useful for every international team I have ever been in.

Picador popular-science at its most ambitious — biology past the gene-centric story we were all taught in school.

The old classic on visual literacy. Still the best primer on why a shot is doing what it is doing.

The Stanford behaviour design book that actually works, mostly because it asks for less than the others.

Modern Stoicism, sometimes overcooked but useful in small doses before a hard meeting.

A little book of applied everyday philosophy. The kind of thing you pick up when you cannot face another policy brief.

On the shelf as a curiosity — the startup gospel of the Indian creator economy, worth reading to understand what a lot of younger practitioners are absorbing.

A novel narrated partly by a giant Pacific octopus. Shorter and kinder than the premise suggests.

Short essays on self-sabotage, comfort zones, and the stories people tell themselves. The kind of book that works best read one essay at a time over several weeks.

366 entries, one per day, each about a woman who changed things. The format is the argument: there is never a day in the year without a woman who mattered.

Short chapters of lived-life wisdom from the former CEO turned leadership writer. Good for a hallway read between meetings.

Krishna Kumar on the politics of the Indian school curriculum. The book to start with if you care about what a child is actually learning in a government classroom.

Varoufakis writing for his daughter, which is also the best way into his larger argument. Short enough to finish in a weekend.

The Nobel laureate on ageing, death, and the hype cycle around longevity research. Careful, not cynical.

Why onions brown, why dal foams, and why your grandmother’s recipe is already obeying chemistry. The best cookbook on the shelf.

Orlean on the Los Angeles Public Library and the 1986 fire that almost destroyed it. An argument for libraries dressed up as a history.

A 1948 classic of American self-help. On the shelf the way most classics of the genre are — with an asterisk and some suspicion.

Sen’s later, looser, more capacious account of justice — pluralist, comparative, grounded in actual lives. Pairs nicely with the Rawls primer two shelves over.

The Aristotelian formulation of the capabilities approach, written for a non-specialist reader. The clearest argument I have read for ten things every human life needs.

On the sensory worlds animals live in that humans cannot perceive. The kind of science book that quietly rearranges how you walk through a garden.

The Penguin Hamish Hamilton hardback. Still asking more questions than it answers.

The facing-page English edition, for the Urdu I half-remember.

The sharpest opening chapter of any novel on the shelf.

The language from the rooms upstairs, in translation.

The 1960s food-science novel that turned into the Apple TV series. Sharper on the page than on screen.

Poetry that fights back. On the shelf for the days when the policy briefs stop being enough.

Highsmith doing her thing — a husband who writes crime novels, a wife who vanishes, and the inside of a suspicious mind. The paperback has seen some miles.

The Tamil novelist on a childless couple in a Kongu village and the temple festival that nearly tore them apart. The book that triggered the campaign that led to the author’s "death" announcement and his quiet resurrection.

The International Booker winner. An eighty-year-old widow goes silent, then crosses the Wagah border. The translation is part of the experience.

On the shelf alongside The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. The earlier novel — the one where the writer was found.

My mother’s novel. A US Army musician in wartime Assam falls in love with Indian classical music and a woman he cannot forget. The story spans decades and two continents.

The book-length record of the second COVID wave that I put together with a team of reporters.

My father on South Asia’s nuclear and military knots. The title says it plainly.

My sister Taranga Sriraman’s writing is in this collection. A post-1980s map of the Indian feminist movement, told by the women who built it.

Every family needs a tour guide.

A novel about a Rohingya boy born in an Australian detention camp. Read aloud more than once in this house.

The Mudumalai stories, read and re-read.

The myths told as if they were the week’s news.

A gentle introduction to a listening tradition the school syllabus rarely gets to.