The Mittal Institute’s Winter Reading Recommendations

The winter chill in the air invites us to slow down and savor one of life’s simple pleasures: a good book. Reading in the winter is a ritual of comfort, reflection, and escape. We invite you to explore our list of reading recommendations – there is sure to be something for everyone on this list! We hope it inspires your own reading pursuits. We would also love to hear some of your recommendations. Tag us on Instagram or Twitter with #HarvardSouthAsiaReads. Happy reading!

“I recommend Chhaunk by Abhijit Banerjee. I am fascinated by our relationship to food as a microcosmic reflection of our engagement with the larger world of economic tradeoffs, ingredient supply chains, taste formation, preservation of inter-generational knowledge, social bonding and cultural affinities. This might just be a result of my connection to India where the daily preoccupation with food and the time cost of preparation is incredibly high for all varieties of reasons, or my propensity for wanting to cook up a storm in the kitchen. One of my favorite types of gift to receive is a well-written cookbook and I plan to gift this book by Abhijit Banerjee to myself this holiday season.​”

“I recently published my own memoir of my decades of studying Hinduism (Hindu and Catholic, Priest and Scholar: A Love Story, 2024), so have been thinking about other memoirs too, such as Diana Eck’s celebrated Encounting God: From Boseman to Benares (1993) and Wendy Doniger’s The Donigers of Great Neck: A Mythologized Memoir (2019). But the one I’d like to recommend is less well-known: Kenneth Rose’s The Light of the Self: A Memoir of a Spiritual Awakening (2019). Rose tells the story of his childhood spiritual yearnings in Brooklyn, New York, his wanderings away from and back to his Christian roots over the decades. He vividly recounts his participations in theistic and nondualist religious traditions of India, on his way to a kind of serene, nondual serenity later in life, at peace with all that life had given him. And it’s personal to me too: I too was born Catholic in Brooklyn in the same era, and have engaged in the study of Hindu traditions for over 50 years. It is so intriguing to ponder the similarities and differences between his journey and mine.”

“I want to recommend the book Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World by Anthony Sattin as winter reading. Though this book does not deal exclusively with South Asia, it looks at the connectedness of this region with Eurasian history. It captures a fascinating world of erstwhile empires spanning the age of the rise of Arabs to the fall of the Mongols.”

“I have one recommendation: Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories by Amitav Ghosh. This book is a fantastic exploration of the colonial roots of the opioid crisis that continues to exist today in many parts of the world, including the United States. Ghosh brilliantly articulates how the European colonial regimes were in fact precursors of today’s drug cartels. The book was an eye-opener, as it also manages to explain some of the reasons between the economic divergence of the poorer Northern and Eastern states of India, when compared with the Western and Southern states that are doing better.

“I recommend In Search of the Supreme by M. K. Gandhi, compiled and edited by V. B. Kher. In this book, Gandhi reflects on God, the nature of divinity, and his personal journey towards understanding both God and human consciousness. However, what stands out most is his acute awareness of his environment and audience. The book serves a broader purpose beyond spiritual realization, addressing the challenges India faced at the time.

Gandhi clearly aspired for a unified subcontinent. His deep understanding of the diverse, pluralistic religious landscape of India is evident as he discusses concepts like the oneness of God, karma, and ethical responsibilities toward others, aiming to connect and unify the people against the colonial rule. His assassination, just months after the 1947 Partition, underscores the tragic timing of his death, halting his efforts to promote a united land.”

“One of my favorite books of the last two years is After by Vivek Narayanan. It is a contemporary poetic interpretation of Valmiki’s Sanskrit Ramayana. Many of us who are from, or work on, South Asia are familiar with stories from this Hindu myth. But Narayanan purposefully makes these same stories unfamiliar. He doesn’t “translate” in the traditional sense, but finds experimental forms that emerge from the poetics underlying Valmiki’s telling. Narayanan parses popular characters and episodes to reflect on contemporary politics of gender and religious nationalism. Here, mythology becomes immediate, intimate, reminding us that we, in fact, inhabit it. The poems in this book are formally sophisticated, politically incisive, and profoundly moving. (They are also a wonderful escape from a long semester of academic reading!).”

“Despite the State is a journalistic account of the aspects of democratic politics and institutional priorities that fail to deliver social and economic mobility for most Indians. It traces contemporary issues in six very different states of India and narrates a range of overlapping as well as distinct factors that drive those issues. I enjoyed reading it and learned a lot about the dynamics of Indian democracy.”

“I recommend Mishal Husain’s book, Broken Threads: My Family From Empire to Independence.

Mishal Husain is a well-known broadcaster, journalist, presenter and interviewer in the UK. In the recent UK General Election she moderated the final televised Prime Ministerial debate between Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer. I was pleased to answer some questions for her and read through sections of her family history in its final writing stages.

Broken Threads is the story of her grandparents during the two closing decades of the British Raj and the impact of partition on their lives. The memoir is reflective of South Asian diasporic communities’ attempts to uncover roots through family histories often profoundly impacted by the upheaval of 1947. At times the author felt ‘as if I had no history of my own’ (p. 3.) Despite an ‘incomplete record’, she felt that ‘I could fill in the gaps with my own journey into the past, putting what felt like a jigsaw of the family story together’ (p.10). The puzzle has been successfully completed in a work that displays great empathy, and powerfully evokes a sense of place and time. Like many accounts of  partition, it is a particular narrative that contains universal elements, despite the fact that the traumas faced by her grandparents’ families who moved in elite military circles in 1947 appear relatively minor compared with those of ordinary migrants.

Family members flew to Pakistan. Mumtaz Husain, his Catholic wife Mary and their four children including Mishal Husain’s future father Imtiaz, then just four years old, looked down from their Dakota on the killing fields of the Punjab. Mishal Husain’s mother Shama, then two, had stayed with her mother, Tahirah Hamid, in the official residence of Claude Auchinleck in Simla as the violence spread to the former British summer capital. At the end of September 1947, they accompanied the Supreme Commander as he flew on an official visit to Pakistan where they were reunited with Shahid Hamid, who had served for 18 months as Auchinleck’s private secretary. However, despite the vast differences in partition migrant experiences, fortune could still play a part in the safety even of those who moved in elite circles. The Husains only at the last moment changed their travel arrangements in order to fly. The train on which they were scheduled to depart from Delhi turned out to be one of the notorious ‘ghost trains’ that arrived in Lahore full of corpses (p. 234).

Mishal Husain has entitled her work, ‘Broke threads’ yet the volume points to the fact that at elite level cross-border connections persisted  for a time after partition. It is a mistake to read back subsequent divisions into the early post-independence period. Tahirah made two visits to India to see her parents in Aligarh in which her husband’s former fellow Indian officers made her arrangements. Indeed, General K.M. Cariappa shortly to become the second Commander in Chief of the Indian Army met her at the airport at Delhi on her first visit from Pakistan (p. 257).

It should be clear from even this brief synopsis that Mishal Husain has pieced together a complex, and fascinating multi-layered family history. It provides yet another perspective on the highly differentiated impact of the 1947 partition and its aftermath. Any student of South Asia will find much which is both familiar and authentic, while also enjoying a beautifully written book.”