May nonfiction: Six newly published books that present the many ways of seeing India

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03-05-2025

All information sourced from publishers.
Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel, Azad Essa
In the past decade, under the Narendra Modi-led government, India has changed dramatically. As the world attempts to grapple with the country's sharp turn towards authoritarianism and Hindutva, little attention has been paid to the way India has leaned on Israeli weapons, military tactics and technical support to build its own ethnonationalist state.
As a leader of the much-lauded Non-Aligned Movement, India was once perceived as a pillar of pro-Palestine solidarity. New Delhi had equated Zionism with racism, after all. It was the first non-Arab state to recognise the Palestinian Liberation Organisation. How, then, did Israel become a cornerstone of India's foreign policy? If India was an opponent of colonialism and apartheid, why does its agenda in Kashmir look so similar to Israel's settler-colonial project in Palestine? And how did a traditional supporter of the Palestinian cause become such a willing partner to Israel's genocide in Gaza?
Hostile Homelands puts India's relationship with Israel in its historical context, looking at the origins of, and connections between, Zionism and Hindutva. It examines the nature of India's changing position on Palestine and its growing military-industrial relationship with Israel from the 1990s onwards.
The Last Bench, Adhir Biswas, translated from the Bengali by V Ramaswamy
A village barber's son who migrated with his family from erstwhile East Pakistan to India in 1967 revisits his childhood in the lost land. When his father set up a hair salon in the local weekly market near their new home, it fell to the little boy to seek out customers and bring them to the shop for a haircut or a shave.
But the father was keenly aware that only an education could offer his boy a way out of the penury that had been their lot. Disappointed in his older sons who had both dropped out of school, he now pinned all his hopes on the youngest son. But school was brutal on the young boy who was always shown his 'place', the last bench, where he sat alone, with his cracked slate and a wet rag to wipe it clean.
His only refuge was his ailing mother, with whom he sometimes forayed into the woods and up to the outskirts of the village. They saw the world through each other's eyes. And after her passing, he found another constant companion: Bhombol, the dog that followed him like a shadow.
The Last Bench is a poignant childhood memoir about what it means to be invisible in an unequal society, about the exchanges between man and nature, and most of all, what it means to lose those whose absence changes everything.
Adivasi or Vanvasi: Tribal India and the Politics of Hindutva, Kamal Nayan Choubey
Akhil Bhartiya Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, popularly known as Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram or VKA is the tribal wing of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). As the largest tribal organisation in the country, it works in many areas of Kerala, Jharkhand and the North-east of India. Till the late 1970s, VKA's work was limited to a few districts of Chhattisgarh (then Madhya Pradesh), Jharkhand (then Bihar), and Odisha but it has gradually and continuously expanded its footprint in different parts of the country.
It is noteworthy that from its inception, VKA focused on spreading Hindu values by organising religious rituals in tribal areas and working in the area of education and hostels. It has tirelessly worked to provide medical help to the tribals from the mid-1960s. However, after the late 1970s, it started to work in different aspects of tribal communities' lives. By the 1990s, it also formally began to raise questions related to the rights of tribal communities over forest land and its resources.
Exploring its genesis, historical journey, the nature of ideological discourse, and various functions of the VKA, this book opens a window to the contribution of an organisation, which largely remained untold and therefore unknown.
Hijacked: A True Story of Surviving 331 Days with Somali Pirates, Pralav Dhyani
On 11 April 2010, Pralav Dhyani, a freshly minted deck officer in training on a cargo merchant vessel, was contemplating the intense discipline life at sea would require from him, when armed pirates forcefully boarded the ship off the coast of Africa. As confusion ensued, one thing became clear to Pralav: the MV RAK Afrikana was being hijacked. It was the beginning of a nightmare that Pralav – then all of 21 – has never been able to forget.
The crew was taken to an obscure location in Somalia, from where negotiations commenced with their ship's company for their release. For 331 days, the small band of men, who had come together from different countries to earn a living for their families, stuck together through mock executions and mental torture, terror and betrayal, as a complex web of politics and piracy revealed itself to them. It would be eleven months before Pralav and his crewmates would be free again.
Learning To Make Tea For One, Andaleeb Wajid
In the summer of 2021, India was throttled by the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Hospitals were running out of oxygen and the daily news recorded the soaring death count. Families were torn apart as beloved ones were quarantined or confined in intensive care units and lost to the deadly virus – leaving survivors without even a chance to say goodbye.
In that cruel summer, Andaleeb Wajid lost her mother-in-law, and then just five days later, her husband, even as she was hospitalised with COVID herself. Wajid's grief struggled to find words as she returned to a home that was shorn of the love that had once inhabited it and was now empty, but for her two children.
Wajid finally turned to her writing to make sense of it all. She found herself wanting to tell the story of her life and her loss. She chronicled her family life, of growing up as a cherished daughter of a father whom she lost too early. She wrote about her marriage, the happy companionship that marked it, and the many ways in which her husband and she looked at life so very differently. She described the incredible joys and the unbearable pain of motherhood too.
Learning to Make Tea for One is Andaleeb Wajid's journey through her grief.
Chasing a Conjecture: Inside the Mind of a Mathematician, Chandrashekhar B Khare
A conjecture is like an unfulfilled fantasy in the world of pure mathematics, where the most fantastic things happen routinely.
Proving a conjecture is like trying to make a fantasy come true, and it can consume a mathematician for years, just as the effort to produce a great work of fiction, music or art can take over the life of its creator.
This unusual, beguiling memoir is about such a journey. It begins with a child growing up in Mumbai, fascinated by mathematics, and ends with a man, just turned 40, winning a prestigious prize for proving, with a fellow traveller, one of the most important conjectures in number theory – the branch of mathematics that studies whole numbers.