June nonfiction: Six recently published books that try to make sense of India's past and present

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The Dismantling of India's Democracy: 1947 to 2025, Prem Shankar Jha
India's democracy, once celebrated as an unprecedented experiment in pluralism and participatory nation-building, now faces a grave crisis. In this urgent and penetrating work, veteran journalist Prem Shankar Jha traces how the country's hard-won democracy – rooted in diversity and tolerance – has been steadily hollowed out since Independence – slowly at first, and since 2014, with determined ferocity.
Structural flaws in our Constitution, like the lack of state-funded elections, Jha argues, were made substantially worse by Indira Gandhi's ban on company donations to political parties. As parties increasingly turned to clandestine donors for election financing, politics became a near-criminal enterprise, facilitating the rise of a predatory state long before 2014. And now, under the Modi regime, the weaponisation of state agencies, the serious undermining of electoral processes and the transformation of governance into a tool of political vendetta threaten to tear down the last remnants of India's democracy.
Jha further argues that the erosion of democratic institutions, the rise of Hindu majoritarian politics and the normalisation of state repression are not isolated events but symptoms of a deeper transformation. Drawing on Indian history and global parallels, he makes the bold case that what India is witnessing is not simply a drift towards authoritarianism but the emergence of a distinctively Indian form of fascism. Our only hope cannot be, he says, an electoral victory for the opposition; it must be grounded in a commitment to both political accountability and cultural inclusivity.
A Man for All Seasons: The Life of KM Panikkar, Narayani Basu
KM Panikkar was a multifaceted man, one of India's first public intellectuals when India won its independence. His imprint is all over India's colonial and post-colonial history: from constitutional reform in the princely states, where he was a strong advocate for India's current federal model to charting India's maritime policy as a free country. He believed in an essential Hindu culture that held his land together, yet he was a committed secularist. He was Gandhi's emissary and the founder of the Hindustan Times. He was independent India's first and most controversial ambassador to both Nationalist China and the People's Republic of China. He was Nehru's man in Cairo and France and a member of the States Reorganisation Commission. He had enemies in the CIA as well as in India's own Ministry of External Affairs. He frustrated his admirers as much as he provoked their reluctant respect.
From the British Raj to the Constituent Assembly, across two world wars and an ensuing Cold War, KM Panikkar was India's go-to man in all seasons.
Through it all, he never stopped writing – on Indian identity, nationalism, history and foreign policy – material that remains as relevant today as it was seven decades ago.
Yet, about the man himself, strangely little is known. In A Man for All Seasons, Narayani Basu bridges that gap. Drawing on Panikkar's formidable body of work, as well as on archival material from India to England, from Paris to China, and from Israel to the United Nations, as well as on first-time interviews with Panikkar's family, Basu presents a vivid, irresistibly engaging portrait of this most enigmatic of India's founding fathers. Featuring a formidable cast of characters – from Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi and Sardar Patel to Zhou Enlai, Chairman Mao and Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia, Sam Dalrymple
As recently as 1928, a vast swathe of Asia – India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Nepal, Bhutan, Yemen, Oman, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait – were bound together under a single imperial banner, an entity known officially as the 'Indian Empire', or more simply as the Raj.
It was the British Empire's crown jewel, a vast dominion stretching from the Red Sea to the jungles of Southeast Asia, home to a quarter of the world's population and encompassing the largest Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and Zoroastrian communities on the planet. Its people used the Indian rupee, were issued passports stamped 'Indian Empire', and were guarded by armies garrisoned in forts from the Bab el-Mandab to the Himalayas.
And then, in the space of just fifty years, the Indian Empire shattered. Five partitions tore it apart, carving out new nations, redrawing maps, and leaving behind a legacy of war, exile and division.
Shattered Lands presents the whole story of how the Indian Empire was unmade. How a single, sprawling dominion became twelve modern nations. How maps were redrawn in boardrooms and on battlefields, by politicians in London and revolutionaries in Delhi, by kings in remote palaces and soldiers in trenches.
Its legacies include civil wars in Burma and Sri Lanka, ongoing insurgencies in Kashmir, Baluchistan, Northeast India, and the Rohingya genocide. It is a history of ambition and betrayal, of forgotten wars and unlikely alliances, of borders carved with ink and fire. And, above all, it is the story of how the map of modern Asia was made.
Tagore in Tripura: An Enduring Connection, Khagesh Burman
A part of Rabindranath Tagore's life that remains largely unknown is his connection to the state of Tripura. Tagore had close ties with four generations of the Tripura royal family, especially Maharaja Radhakishore, who helped set up and fund the Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan.
Tagore's relationship with the Tripura royal family began in 1882, when Maharaja Birchandra was so moved by his poetry that he sent his minister to congratulate the poet. During Birchandra's son Radhakishore's reign, Tagore was involved in Tripura's administration, advising the king on all state matters. He visited the state several times too. Later generations of the royal family continue to patronise Tagore and Visva-Bharati, sending several students with stipends to the university.
This book, written by a member of the Tripura royal family, explores their connection with Tagore, including the friendships and associations the poet formed and the ways in which Tripura appeared in his writings.
The Outsider: A Memoir for Misfits, Vir Das
When comedian and actor Vir Das found himself stranded on a pier in Cozumel, Mexico, watching his cruise ship sail away without him due to visa issues, it became a metaphor for his life: he's always been, and will always be, an outsider. Standing on that beach, he took in the absurdity of it all-broke, hungover, dumped, jobless, trousers full of sand. He knew the best way to deal with the situation wasn't to retreat. It was to laugh.
Vir's story is one of cultural dissonance and identity exploration. As a child, he bounced from India to Lagos, Nigeria, and back again. He navigated life between worlds, never quite fitting in.
In Africa, he was the kid from India, and back in India, he was the kid from Africa. As the only Indian kid costarring in War and Peace on stage at Knox College in Illinois, his outsider status was undeniable. Whether he's washing dishes at a Grand Lux Cafe in Chicago, navigating Bollywood, getting cancelled by an entire country and then embraced by that country all over again, or performing on stages from New York to Mumbai to Stavanger, Norway, Vir has learned to lean way into his place as an outsider, and to find humor and meaning on the fringes.
Meet the Savarnas: Indian Millennials Whose Mediocrity Broke Everything, Ravikant Kisana
In the early 2000s, India was expected to 'shine' and emerge as a rising superpower. It was the post-1990s golden generation – professionals fresh out of B-schools and engineering programmes – who were supposed to take us there. The Great Indian Dream was ready to lift off. Except we never left the ground.
No one could really explain what went wrong. Some blamed politicians, some corruption, some capitalism and some communal polarisation. Most people missed the giant elephant in the room – caste.
Caste in India is mostly researched and reported from the experience of the oppressed. Caste as a privilege is not well understood. How do caste elites respond to modernity? How do they understand culture, intimacy, love and tradition? Were their ideas, institutions and imaginations ever even capable of delivering upon the Great Indian Dream?