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.

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

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

My mother on modern Indian classical music. Taught me what plain prose can do when it is paying attention.

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

On South Asia's nuclear and military knots. The title says it plainly.

My mother again, on the pandemic year from inside a Chennai household.

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.

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