In The Nutmeg’s Curse, Amitav Ghosh explores the epistemic gap between Enlightenment modernity’s designation of all nonhuman beings as objects meant to cater to human needs, and the indigenous worldview that identifies these ‘objects’ as active, vibrant, sentient individuals. By Paromita Patranobish

When it comes to social realist fiction, there is a fine line between giving voice to the voiceless and speaking on their behalf. Areeb Ahmad analyses literature by Puja Changoiwala and Deepa Anappara to examine how the genre manifests itself in recent Indian novels in English.

Ram Devineni-created comic and puppet character Priya is India’s first girl superhero, a feminist icon inspiring a global environmental movement and systematic changes in ecological policies in India. By Anshika Ravi

What is the purpose of the Mahabharata? In his short, succinct volume Mahabharata: The Epic and the Nation, G.N. Devy tackles the biggest questions behind one the greatest epics ever composed. By Karan Madhok

In Daribha Lyndem’s novel Name Place Animal Thing, the effective use of layering of time, space, and cultural practices culminate into a generational arc of south Asian female adolescence and young adulthood. By Paromita Patranobish

Acclaimed Tamil author (most-recently of Resolve) Perumal Murugan spoke about satire and literature, about men and women, and about being ‘controversy’s favourite child’. By Medha Dutta Yadav

In his review of Sridala Swami’s collection Run for the Shadows (2021), Saurabh Sharma celebrates a poet whose ‘craft is like a prism, from which white light disperses into colourful bands’

Priyanka Chakrabarty dives into examples of contemporary South Asian literature to explore the blurred line between trauma and ‘trauma porn’. Can fiction account for lived experiences and realities of trauma without making the plot performative?

A collection of 45 essays and stories written by several Indian writers, The Book of Dog brings the canine-human connection front-and-centre: the dogs we love, adopt, lose, and remember forever. By Chittajit Mitra

Sayan Aich Bhowmik’s debut collection, I Will Come with a Lighthouse (Hawakal Publishers) dissolves the space between innate and extraneous, past and present, dreams and disillusionments, commonplace and cosmic, seamlessly flitting through rooms, cities, memory, borders and history. By Ritoshree Chatterjee

In Zilka Joseph’s new collection In Our Beautiful Bones, Chintan Girish Modi celebrates the in-betweenness of cultures, the confluence of food, culture, politics, religion, and beauty from the vantage point of an Indian displaced abroad.

A true Indian tale of agrarian crisis, caste, and gender inequalities, is brought together in the graphic narrative, Raindrop in the Drought—the story of Godavari Dange. By Priyanka Chakrabarty