Some of what’s
on the shelves.

A history of southern India from the Chalukyas to the Cholas, between roughly the sixth and twelfth centuries, told through the kings, temples and merchant guilds of the Deccan.

Her memoir, The Scope of Happiness, and her prison diary from the freedom movement, published together in one volume by Speaking Tiger.

A 1741 shipwreck, two competing accounts of a mutiny, and the court martial that followed. Grann shows how history gets written by the survivor who reaches the printing press first.

On the East India Company as the first corporate raid on a subcontinent. It reads as ancient history until the pages on shareholder returns start to sound familiar.

A novel that reads like a political history of Delhi's underclass, with its dynasties, its drugs and the shadow economy that pays for the visible one. As fiction, it can show what reportage cannot.

The IMF economist's critique of the course India's economy has taken since independence. It is short and sharp, and many rooms do not want to hear it, which I take as a reason to read it.

A Partition historian's account of twentieth-century South Asia, from the last days of the Raj to the present. It is long and dense, and I think it is essential.

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

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

I picked it up for the parts of the border story that mainstream Indian coverage skips.

The Rutgers historian clears away the pile of propaganda that has buried the sixth Mughal emperor. The book is short, and angry in the right places.

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

Pushpesh Pant on what Delhi has eaten under each of its regimes. He treats food as the most honest archive a city has.

How India became a multilingual nation, traced through the archaeology of its languages. It changed how I hear the street.

On the Mahatma, his experiments with celibacy, and the women who were drafted into them. It is uncomfortable reading, and it needs to be read.

The historian reads early modern empire as one connected world, in which no civilisation was sealed off from the others. It widens what "global history" is allowed to mean.

The single-volume political history of independent India, and the doorstop I keep reaching for when somebody asks when something happened.

Forty-odd portraits from Indian history that the textbooks left out. It reads like a cabinet of curiosities, and each portrait carries a political argument.

An empirical, data-driven study of the Indian Supreme Court, and the first of its kind. It shows what the bench does through the docket and through what the docket leaves out.

The late, great constitutional lawyer writing for the ordinary reader.

The margins are full of pencil and the post-it flags are fraying at the top.

The friendliest way into A Theory of Justice for those of us who need one.

The Delhi collective reads Indian law as literature and as a battleground.

The Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, kept at hand because compliance work for a non-profit runs through it.

A reading of the Indian Constitution as a document written to reshape the country it governs. The chapter on equality is worth the hardback price.

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

The Harvard Dalit scholar on caste in the diaspora, in policy, and in the discomfort of polite company. He turns down every seat he is offered at the wrong table.

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

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

The diary of a woman jailed under the UAPA, translated from Hindi. It is short and direct, and hard to put down.

Thirty-plus testimonies from inside India’s prisons, from people held under various counter-terror laws. The book builds its argument by accumulation.

A development economist’s account of why Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka have outperformed India on social indicators. Nationalists will find it an uncomfortable read.

A family memoir from the Dalit margins of Andhra, told without apology. It opens the conversation about caste in places where people would rather not start it.

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. It is long and careful, and I could not do without it.

Seven principles for doing data science with attention to power, starting from who collects data, about whom, and who is left out of it.

On women’s right to public space, told through Mumbai. This is the book that named the loitering problem and the politics of ‘a girl with nothing to do.’

On the women’s economy of India today. Chopra looks at what gets counted and what does not, and at the entrepreneurs and homemakers working in the gap between the two.

A collection that treats the hijab debate in India seriously, as a legal, religious and political question.

An anthology of women’s writing across two millennia of Indian literature. It is a book to dip into more than to read straight through.

Four short novels retelling the stories of the Panchakanya, one woman at a time. They can be read in sequence, or picked up one at a time like a meditation.

A dystopian novel set in a future where women are scarce and fought over. It is hard to forget once read.

The book that made "gender data gap" a phrase people use in meetings. Each chapter documents another place where the data leaves women out.

Adam Smith’s mother made his dinner every night, and she did it out of love. Marçal shows that economic theory, built on self-interest, never accounted 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. It is a slim book and a foundational one.

Traces how speech against minorities became ordinary in Indian political life, and what follows when it does. Published by Speaking Tiger and released in Delhi on 24 September 2026.

Reads today's nationalism, populism and political violence as a resentment with a long history, going back to the eighteenth-century quarrels over the Enlightenment.

The French historian treats populism as a form of democracy with its own logic and its own structure. It helps me read the current Indian mood without borrowing American vocabulary.

A former Facebook policy director on what she saw inside the room. Meta tried to stop the book from being published, and I count that in its favour.

A data journalist on what India’s statistics do and do not say. Read it with a red pen. The chapter on crime data alone is worth the cover price.

On the smartphone and the rewiring of adolescence. The argument oversteps in places, and the questions it makes a parent and a researcher ask are still the right ones.

On Aadhaar and the slow rearrangement of what it means to be a citizen.

The civil-services standby. It sits on the desk because sometimes I need to remember how Parliament 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 present moment does to the idea of a moral international order. It is as bleak as the title suggests.

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

I picked it up because the category is so strange. It is a serious attempt to think about how an ancient practice and a new kind of intelligence might sit in the same room.

A collection of essays examining the unique-ID project from the inside. Read it alongside Surveillance as Governance for the fuller picture.

A short essay on what Indian democracy still owes its citizens. It is old now, and the argument has aged in interesting ways.

Argues that much chronic illness and mental distress in rich societies comes from stress and trauma built into ordinary life, and that what passes for normal is part of the cause.

The Gita in the Penguin Classics edition, translated by the economist who also translated the unabridged Mahabharata into English.

The Berkeley economist on the long twentieth century as an incomplete slouch out of scarcity. It is long and uneven, sometimes infuriating, and still the most honest single-volume economic history of the period in print.

A short book on gift economies, told through a berry that ripens for the birds. For a day or two after reading it, a working week feels different.

The Stanford neuroscientist on free will. The book is long and polemical and does not flinch. You do not have to agree with it to come away sharper.

A data-driven study of why megaprojects fail and what the rare successful ones do differently. It is useful for anyone who scopes evaluations, budgets or programme rollouts.

It is still the friendliest way into the canon.

Evolutionary psychology at its most readable.

Adler's psychology, explained without the academic armour.

I reread it every so often, for the pleasure of it.

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. It has been useful in every international team I have worked in.

Picador popular science at its most ambitious, taking biology past the gene-centric story most of us were taught in school.

The old classic on visual literacy, and still the best primer on why a shot is doing what it does.

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

Modern Stoicism. It is sometimes overcooked, and useful in small doses before a hard meeting.

A little book of applied everyday philosophy, for the days when I cannot face another policy brief.

On the shelf as a curiosity. It is the startup gospel of the Indian creator economy, and worth reading to understand what many younger practitioners are absorbing.

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

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

366 entries, one for each day, each about a woman who changed things. The format makes the argument that there is no 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. It is the book to start with if you care about what a child is learning in a government classroom.

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

The Nobel laureate on ageing, death and the hype cycle around longevity research. He is careful with every claim he makes.

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

Orlean on the Los Angeles Public Library and the 1986 fire that almost destroyed it. The history doubles as an argument for libraries.

A 1948 classic of American self-help. It sits on the shelf the way most classics of the genre do, with an asterisk and some suspicion.

Sen’s later, looser and wider account of justice, which is pluralist, comparative and grounded in actual lives. It pairs well with the Rawls primer two shelves over.

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

On the sensory worlds animals live in that humans cannot perceive. It changed how I walk through a garden.

A graphic memoir of Findakly's childhood in Mosul under successive regimes, drawn by her husband Trondheim.

A book of 120 logic puzzles built around cosy crime and murder mysteries, from coffee-break grids to long series puzzles.

A 650-page Irish family novel about a car dealership, told by four narrators, and about the specific ways men and women wreck a marriage. It was shortlisted for the Booker and earns its length.

Huck Finn from Jim's point of view. Everett takes a novel most Americans think they know and hands the narration to the character it silenced.

A hundred-page novel about a coal merchant and the Magdalene laundries. Every sentence has had to justify its place, and most of them do.

A Booker-shortlisted novel about a Gujarati-British girl, squash and grief. It is short and devastating, and the prose holds its breath.

Comedy and feminist solidarity in a Gujarat village, in a book about microcredit loans and dead husbands. I have not read anything else like it.

The Penguin Hamish Hamilton hardback. It still asks 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 became the Apple TV series. It is sharper on the page than on screen.

Poetry that fights back, on the shelf for the days when the policy briefs are not enough.

Highsmith at her usual work: 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. This is the book that set off the campaign that led to the author’s announcement of his own "death", and to his later return.

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. This is the earlier novel, the one in which the writer was found.

My mother’s novel. A US Army musician in wartime Assam falls in love with Indian classical music and with 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. It maps the Indian feminist movement since the 1980s, 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. We have read it aloud more than once in this house.

The Mudumalai stories, read and read again.

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

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