The Hindu on Books newsletter: The women with pens

(This story is part of The Hindu on Books newsletter that comes to you with book reviews, reading recommendations, interviews with authors and more. Subscribe here.)

Dear reader,

Last week, the shortlist for the Women’s Prize for Nonfiction was announced. Six books have been selected, including Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me (Penguin Random House).

While the Women’s Prize for Fiction was established in 1996 to “highlight and remedy the imbalance in coverage, respect, and reverence given to women writers versus their male peers,” the Prize for Nonfiction was established only in 2024. According to The Guardian, the list this time was announced along with some data on gender imbalances in the nonfiction market. Although women writers are reportedly increasing market share in what the Prize calls “authoritative” genres, such as popular science and philosophy, men continue to dominate most categories. This is what makes a prize such as this important.

Women write for many reasons. To record their inner lives, as Anne Frank did while documenting her experiences in hiding during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. To challenge dominant narratives, as Simone de Beauvoir did with The Second Sex, a monumental work that inspired women around the world. To document emotional experiences, which is what the writers of the anthology, Love, Sex and India (Westland), edited by Paromita Vohra, do. As an act of subversion, as Ismat Chughtai did in her writings in the Urdu. And of course, there is the simplest and perhaps most common reason: many women want to write, can write, and love to write, just like many men.

Recently, Humayun-Nama (Juggernaut), written by Gulbadan Begum — the daughter of Babur, the founder of the Mughal empire — was released with a new introduction by Ruby Lal. Gulbadan, who chronicles her life in the book, is considered the first female historian of the Mughal empire. Yet her work remains relatively little known, a reminder that history has often been written by men.

This is why we celebrate Women’s History Month in March. In a recent piece marking the occasion, Uma Mahadevan Dasgupta writes that “women’s writing has engaged in both creative expression and historical excavation.” Through literature, memoir, and ethnography, women’s stories — such as Annie Ernaux’s declaration, “I will write to avenge my people,” Asiya Islam’s A Woman’s Job: Making Middle Lives in New India, and Romila Thapar, Kumkum Roy, and Preeti Gulati’s Women Writing History: Three Generations — reclaim history. They do so by turning personal memory into a powerful record of lived experience and structural inequality. Read the essay here. 

Books of the week

We live at a time when anti-Pakistan sentiment is at an all-time high, and movies such as Dhurandhar, about an Indian spy in Karachi, are making a massive splash at the box office. It is hardly the “right” time to write a love story between an Indian and a Pakistani. Yet that is what Sarnath Banerjee has done with his latest graphic novel, Absolute Jafar (HarperCollins India). But Banerjee contends in an interview with Chintan Girish Modi that “there has never been a golden age of an Indo-Pak love story.”

We associate Jonathan Gil Harris with Shakespeare and early modern globalisation, but in The Girl from Fergana: Secrets of My Mother’s Chinese Tea Chest (Aleph), he turns to a different kind of storytelling. This is a moving portrait of his mother and also a long history of Jewish presence along the Silk Roads. Through the book, writes Sumana Mukherjee in her review, he “traces how borders — in their artifice, their politics, and their power — have shaped and distorted people over millennia.”

Ki. Rajanarayanan’s People of Gopallapuram (Penguin), set in rural southern India at the close of British rule, has been translated from the Tamil by Shubashree Desikan. Ki. Ra is a doyen of karisal kaatu literature, a body of work distinguished by its rootedness in local dialect, folk practice, agrarian struggle, and humanism. “In Ki. Ra.’s world, the non-human is never merely backdrop: bulls and birds, earth and plough, rain and drought, cotton and cacti, toddy and tongues breathe alongside the people, shaping their fates as intimately as kin,” writes Sudha G. Tilak in her review. 

Carlos Alcaraz, tennis’s newest star, is collecting trophies at a blistering pace. Last month, he defeated Novak Djokovic to win his first Australian Open. He was also the youngest man at 22 to complete a career Grand Slam. And the youngest-ever Channel Slam winner. It is this extraordinary rise that Mark Hodgkinson explores in Being Carlos Alcaraz: The Man Behind the Smile (Hachette). G. Sampath writes in his review, “[The book] doesn’t pack enough to hold the interest of the tennis nerd. But diehard Alcaraz fans wouldn’t want to miss it.” 

Do you love an experimental book? Swati Daftuar curates a list of books on “bold, experimental narratives that keep you turning the pages.”

Spotlight

Dwaipayan Banerjee’s book, Computing in the Age of Decolonisation (Princeton University Press), traces India’s ambitious but ultimately thwarted drive to build a self-reliant computing industry from the 1950s to the 1980s. In a three-series podcast, Jacob Koshy and Sobhana Nair talk to Dr. Banerjee about his research. Watch part 1 about the origins of India’s quest — first to procure and then to build a homegrown computer —  here. And watch part 2 about the incredible story of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Automatic Calculator, India’s first indigenous digital computer, here. Stay tuned for part 3! 

Nightstand

Arundhati Roy during the launch of her book ‘ Mother Mary Comes to Me’ in the city on Tuesday.
| Photo Credit:
THULASI KAKKAT

I must be the last person to read Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me, but better late than never. Such has been its popularity that none of my library’s three copies were available after its release — until, finally, last week, they took pity on me and handed one over. I had also ordered a copy, so now I have two on my bedside table. I am hooked.  

Reading matters

Delhi’s iconic bookstore, Bahrisons Booksellers, recently opened its first luxury bookstore. The bookstore’s Instagram says this is a “new destination for exquisite coffee table books across fashion, art, design, travel and photography, featuring collector’s editions and iconic volumes from Assouline, Rizzoli, Phaidon, Taschen and more.” If you’re around Khan Market, check it out. 

Do write to me with suggestions, comments, and feedback to radhika.s@thehindu.co.in. Have a happy reading week!

Published – March 31, 2026 01:25 pm IST