The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World
By William Dalrymple,
Bloomsbury
An Indian Renaissance aided by the spread of Indian sciences, philosophies and religions across the ancient and the medieval worlds is subjected to a scholarly dissection.

Shattered
By Hanif Kureishi,
Hamish Hamilton
Written after a life-altering accident, the book stitches together moments of vulnerability and resoluteness that constitute the ebb and flow of the human condition.

Speaking with Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism
By Ramachandra Guha,
Fourth Estate
Ten conscientious objectors caution us that humanity is hurtling towards a disaster that would destroy all life forms.

India’s First Radicals: Young Bengal and the British Empire
By Rosinka Chaudhuri,
Viking
A corrective perspective on the Young Bengal movement that was based on values that went on to form some of the founding blocks of the Republic.

Policing and Violence in India: Colonial Origins and Contemporary Realities
Edited by Deana Heath and Jinee Lokaneeta,
Speaking Tiger
The anthology brings together historians, legal scholars, anthropologists, activists, lawyers, and survivors to argue how the police, conceived as colonial enforcers, remain “violence workers” in a State-sanctioned economy of brutality.

A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile
By Aatish Taseer,
Fourth Estate
While interrogating the idea
of exile, this ruminative work weaves in history, philosophy and spirituality.

The World After Gaza
By Pankaj Mishra,
Juggernaut
An autopsy of our collective conscience in the wake of an Armageddon in Gaza.

Plant Thinkers of Twentieth-Century Bengal
By Sumana Roy,
Oxford
Bengali luminaries who not only responded to the depletion of plant life but also created a plant poetics that changed the way a people would imagine and live with plants are resurrected on these pages.

The Undying Light: A Personal History of Independent India
By Gopalkrishna Gandhi,
Aleph
A very special work that reflects on personal impressions gathered over time about situations, institutions, individuals, all of which constitute India for the author.

Indira Gandhi and the Years that Transformed India
By Srinath Raghavan,
Allen Lane
The writer brings back to life the years during which one of India’s tallest politicians held India’s destiny in her hands. This is a masterly contribution.

Chhaunk: On Food, Economics And Society
By Abhijit Banerjee,
Juggernaut
These essays dwell on economics, food, society and everything in between.

Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia
By Sam Dalrymple,
Fourth Estate
In a world still grappling with the consequences of partitioned lands and colonial cartographies, this book forces readers to reconsider the lines they have inherited.

Private Revolutions: Coming of Age in a New China
By Yuan Yang,
Bloomsbury
Yuan Yang chronicles the fascinating tales of China’s transformations
through the eyes of its women
of steel.

India: 5,000 Years of History on the Subcontinent
By Audrey Truschke,
Princeton
At a time when selective representations have been weaponised for stoking hatred and divisiveness, this book chooses not to paper over the extraordinary complexity that characterises the Indian historical experience.

Charlottesville: A Story of Rage and Resistance
By Deborah Baker,
Viking
It offers a panoptic view of an America that pauses and rehearses its violence over
and over again.

Caste: A Global History
By Suraj Milind Yengde,
Allen Lane
Self-consciously political and invested in forging a cosmopolitan Dalit universalism to fight for social justice and equality.

Native Nations: A Millennium in North America
By Kathleen DuVal,
Profile
Dismissive of the old, prejudiced portrayals of Native Americans, Kathleen DuVal pushes for reimagining this constituency in an informed manner.

Dapaan: Tales from Kashmir’s Conflict
By Ipsita Chakravarty,
Context
This meticulous and empathetic reportage reveals the fragile and the fierce lives in Kashmir through an unusual and under-researched medium — Kashmir’s folklores.

For a Just Republic: The People of India and the State
By Partha Chatterjee,
Permanent Black/ Ashoka University
One of India’s foremost commentators charts the road to a just Republic.