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regular-article-logo Wednesday, 19 February 2025

The page turners of 2024: Non Fiction

Non-fiction books that stood out and stole the show this year

The Telegraph Published 27.12.24, 11:51 AM
Agni Yoga by Nicholas Roerich

Agni Yoga by Nicholas Roerich Wikimedia Commons

Packed with anecdotes, Sopan Joshi’s “Mangifera Indica: A
Biography of the Mango” (Aleph) comprises engaging information on the king of fruits and goes beyond the breathless annual debates about the best mangoes in the world.

From Phansi Yard: My Year With the Women of Yerawada
By Sudha Bharadwaj,
Juggernaut
A prison diary with an extraordinary capacity to document the self and the lives of others as well as interrogate the structures of power.

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The Book at War: How Reading Shaped Conflict and Conflict Shaped Reading
By Andrew Pettegree,
Basic
This book by a historian of books shows the proximity between reading and war by revealing how books conditioned readers to expect and support conflict.

The Day I Became A Runner: A Women’s History of India Through the Lens of Sport
By Sohini Chattopadhyay,
Fourth Estate
A testimony to the author’s creative talents that made her blend her journalistic expertise with her personal and political passions to excavate what lies beneath the relatively unknown stories of Indian women runners.

AIRPLANE MODE: AN IRREVERENT HISTORY OF TRAVEL
By Shahnaz Habib,
Catapult
Airplane Mode questions the chequered colonial legacy of global travel, its appropriation of geopolitical ambitions, and the increasing limitations posed by borders.

H-POP: THE SECRETIVE WORLD OF HINDUTVA POP STARS
By Kunal Purohit,
HarperCollins
Can a song trigger a murder? Kunal Purohit raises and then answers such questions relevant to New India.

THE COOKING OF BOOKS: A LITERARY MEMOIR
By Ramachandra Guha,
Juggernaut
A striking and poignant account of a personal and productive relationship between a celebrated author and his elusive editor.

Shooting the Sun: Why Manipur was engulfed by Violence and the Government Remained Silent
By Nandita Haksar,
Speaking Tiger
While searching for the causes of Manipur’s fire, which continues to rage, the book also asks why the government has done precious little to douse the flames.

Love Jihad and Other Fictions: Simple FACTS TO COUNTER VIRAL FALSEHOODS
By Sreenivasan Jain, Mariyam Alavi and Supriya Sharma,
Aleph
This necessary but chilling compilation of misinformation adroitly exposes the malevolent power of falsities and their crippling impact on a polity.

The Vagabond Princess: The Great Adventures of Gulbadan
By Ruby Lal,
Juggernaut
An invitation to readers to savour a tantalising archival quest that also offers a new mode of writing about history.

Asia After Europe: Imagining a Continent in the Long Twentieth Century
By Sugata Bose,
Harvard

A template of alternative wor­ld-making through people-to-people contacts and intellectual ferment.

Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder
By Salman Rushdie,
Hamish Hamilton
Brutal and tender, Knife is an engaging meditation on an attempt to take a life — that of the author’s.

Instruments of Torture
By Aparna Upadhyaya Sanyal,
HarperCollins
Revealing and discomfiting, Instruments of Torture bares the grim nature of deeply embedded social norms.

Code Dependent: Living in the shadow of AI
By Madhumita Murgia,
Picador
Artificial Intelligence, Madhumita Murgia argues convincingly, is the new troubling face of capitalism.

Shakespeare’s Sisters: Four Women Who Wrote The Renaissance
By Ramie Targoff,
Riverrun
Meticulously researched, Shakespeare’s Sisters illumines four luminous ladies from literary history and traces the complex political, patriarchal and religious backdrops to their lives.

Why We Die: The New Science of Ageing and the Quest for Immortality
By Venki Ramakrishnan,
Hodder & Stoughton
The Nobel laureate brings together a clutch of fascinating debates on death, the arbiter of all decisions of mankind.

Gujarat Under Modi: The Blueprint for Today’s India
By Christophe Jaffrelot,
Context
The author unveils Gujarat as a successful laboratory for the subsequent triumph of Narendra Modi and Hindutva in India.

Provincials: Postcards from the Peripheries
By Sumana Roy,
Aleph
The juxtaposition of characters, places, fiction and non-fiction helps rescue the provincials from the linearity of historical progression and also richly complicates the relationship between the vernacular and the metropolitan.

The Final Farewell: Understanding The Last Rites And Rituals Of India's Major Faiths
By Minakshi Dewan,
HarperCollins
An intriguing analysis of funeral-related beliefs and practices of India’s major religions.

Dance to freedom: From Ghungroos to Gunpowder
By A.K. Gandhi,
Fingerprint
A corrective literary pursuit that relocates the tawaif to the centre from the margins of historical apathy, disservice, ignominy and social censure.

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