The Books That Shaped Our Year (2024)

Kashmiri writers, journalists, academics, authors pick their favorite reads of the year

A selected list of books read in 2024 by some of Kashmir’s writers, academics, scholars, columnists, and journalists. The list presents a diverse range of books across genres, including both fiction and non-fiction, that made an indelible impression on their minds, and the reasons their book choices resonated with them this year. The idea is to offer a diverse list of books you can explore as per your reading taste and liking. And also encourage young folks, including students, to read more. As Somerset Maugham says: “To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.” Or as Werner Herzog warns: “Our civilization is suffering profound wounds because of the wholesome abandonment of reading by contemporary society.”

Happy reading!

Mirza Waheed:

Percival Everett's novel “James,” a retelling of Mark Twain's 1884 classic “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” from the point of view of Jim—the slave who joins Huck on his journey down the Mississippi River—is the funniest book I've read about slavery. It's a profound, acerbic, and deep exploration of one of the darkest periods in history, yet it's also hugely entertaining. It's an extraordinary follow-up to Everett's previous novel “Trees,” which I also admired immensely.

This year, I listened to quite a few audio books, the highlight being “Anna Karenina” as read by Maggie Gyllenhaal. The accent doesn't take long to get used to, and once you're in, Gyllenhaal somehow makes Tolstoy's epic about love, marriage, adultery, and Russian society—which I'd read as a young college student—a fresh tour de force. I loved it; it has probably been the best nighttime book of the year, like good old never-ending bedtime stories.

On Palestine, I read the anthology “Their Worlds, Our Borders,” edited by Mahdi Sabbagh. The essays and reflections by writers such as Tareq Baconi, Dina Omar, Keller Easterling, Omar Robert Hamilton, Mabel O. Wilson, Omer Shah, Yasmin El-Rifae, and others are a necessary and eloquent guide to old and new solidarities with Palestine. They also present a sharp and timely reminder of the layered violence of settler colonialism. Mahdi Sabbagh's introduction, in which he expounds on the concept of sumud, or steadfast perseverance, is a treat.

Last but not least, I fell in love with Zahid Rafiq's debut collection "The World With Its Mouth Open." These are quietly shattering stories, full of poignant everyday glimpses of life in our broken and bruised city. These tales are surreal and darkly comic. One of the best books of the year for me.

(Mirza Waheed is a writer and novelist based in London)

Muhamad Maroof Shah:

Muhammad Ashraf Wani and Aman Ashraf Wani (known for Prehistory of Kashmir) have shown in their erudite and illuminating review of relevant work on the formative period of early Kashmir – The Making of Early Kashmir – how Kashmir emerged as “a cosmopolitan space, and a great centre of learning, a site of innovations and a hub of technologies, crafts and commerce” and became “a meeting place of different communities, races, religions and cultures.” They have given us, hitherto, the most comprehensive work on cosmopolitan nature and international connections of early Kashmir and documented wealth of evidences of its tolerant ambience. It is our misfortune that so far the world knows certain cosmopolitan spaces or centres of global culture but not Kashmir for want of historians who could have focused on early Kashmir and built readable narratives.

Abir Bazaz’s Nund Rishi: Poetry and Politics in Medieval Kashmir. This book is an unforgettable read as it formulated in contemporary philosophical idiom two key insights that, if given due attention, would help us better appreciate the nuances and depths in the lived experience of Islam in Kashmir that may interest the non Muslim world as well. Abir Bazaz has foregrounded the key term Sahaj employed by Nund Rish as “a way of translating the universalism of early Islam at a time when the Persian Sufis articulated Sufi metaphysics largely inaccessible to the local population” and presented a unique Sahaj (primordial, innate, spontaneous, simple) centric interpretation of Islam in Reshi corpus. The book explicates lesser known definition of Muslim as “the subject of a self-transformation and not necessarily a member of a particular religious community.”

The Muslim is defined not in terms of particular creedal affiliations (that remain in the background but existentially translated) or in technical Sufi terms but in terms of more general, moral universals and indigenous/Sanskrit concepts of conquering krodha (anger), lobha (greed), moh (attachment), ahankār (pride), and mad (lust) moral qualifications: a Muslim is one who meditates on the sayings of the wise, is free of anger and patient when confronted with aggression and turns his back on anger and associated complexes of greed, attachment, and pride.

As Bazaz notes, we can see the development of these ideas in Muslim North India also with the rise of the Chishti Sufi Order in the twelfth century. Patience and resisting temptation to express anger are connected with the key concept of preparation for death that constitutes converging point of religion with traditional philosophy, mysticism and literature. This idea of death is absent in a culture that somehow seeks to avoid it, flee from it, fight it through costly and mostly futile therapies at advanced stages of deadly diseases, that fails to note its central place in the very idea of life as being towards death. Echoing Socratic and Heideggerian insights on death, Bazaz’s Nun Rishi helps us face death with smile and appreciate how death is the “sweet drink” which “heals.”

Another book, the first of its kind by any Kashmiri author, on a topic that hasn’t received such a comprehensive treatment by any Muslim scholar is on Infaq by Prof A G Mir who passed away on the same day when he presented special address on the theme on Infaq in a Seerat Conference organised by ZIST Foundation (as if it was mission accomplished). It reviews sources and unearths wealth of evidence to show how an ontology of caring and living for the other – charity - lies at the heart of Islamic Tradition. It reminds us of mostly forgotten traditions ahd practices such as need for daily sadaqa, infaq of time or other resources besides obligatory charity of zakat, that it notes, is mostly ignored or not professionally calculated or disbursed. It calls or collective institutional mechanisms for collecting zakat and spending it on more productive instead of consumptive modes. So that takers become givers in due course.

Spanda Karika Trans. By M H Zaffar and Dr Arshid Malik. Those who have read Joseph Campbell would be thrilled to find arguably the simplest and most attractive techniques and ideas elaborated in the important Saivist text Spanda Karika that was so far untranslated and has been translated along with brief commentary on it by Prof Zaffar and Dr Arshid. Spanda Karika is a brief explication of key practices and doctrine of Kashmir Saivism in the backdrop of the principle of vibration. Translating Spanda Karika – one of the most original texts in the history of philosophy and mysticism – was long overdue. We can, as a community, only be obliged to likes of Zafar and Malik for taking up this daunting task. For great Kashmiri sages we are made of the substance of joy and spiritual journey is nothing but accessing or unfolding this. We are here on a sacred ground where every event, every moment is meaningful or part of spiritual odyssey. This world is a space to celebrate the gift of being, as Hafiz or Heschel would put it.

To be is truly is to be ecstatic and it is this exuberance and ecstasy of existence that knowing Siva, the Absolute Good. We find such simple techniques as attention to the gap between inspiration and expiration, doing what is most natural or satisfying or the pursuit of creative and blissful wellsprings of Spirit, approaching life as a work of art or the unity realized through the dialectic of subject-object polarity, presented. The spanda principle is established there in that state “to which gets reduced the one who is exceedingly exasperated or the one who is exceedingly pleased” or the one who regards this whole universe as a play.” We find a simple mantra for joy – “The feeling of grief is the thief of body; it proceeds from ignorance; if that ignorance disappear by Unmesa, whence can that grief exist in absence of its cause?” Reading this small classic that may take only an hour but a lifetime to assimilate, one wonders how far one has strayed from the founts of Spirit.

(Maroof Shah is a renowned scholar and writer)

Hilal Mir:

My favorite read of the year was ‘Shawls and Shawlbafs of Kashmir: Legends of Unsung Heroes’ by Dr Abdul Ahad, a writer and retired bureaucrat, was an exciting read on several counts. The central theme of this unique coffee-table-cum-history book is that the fame of the fabled Kashmiri shawl has drowned the centuries of misery the creators of these masterpieces - the shawlbafs - suffered at the hands of tradesmen and foreign rulers, from Afghans to Sikhs. At a time, when state curbs have made serious journalism or writing virtually impossible, reading this book felt nostalgic about the times when writing and discussions about Kashmir’s past did not carry the risk of detention without trial.

(Hilal Mir is an independent Kashmiri journalist and editor)

Mubashir Karim:

The Book of All Loves by Agustin Fernandez Mallo, Translated from the Spanish by Thomas Bunstead (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2024). If you think, as I did, that everything about love had already been written in the last so many centuries, think again! Mallo’s book is going to change that take. Mallo dexterously introduces us to new categories to think about in love (like Statistical love, Blade love, Geodesic love) while at the same time performing it within the experimental narrative of the book composed of disparate paragraphs and passages. It is a book that is a novel, a poetry book, a memoir, and a travelogue at the same time. Highly recommended for those who love the writing style of Roland Barthes (in A Lover’s Discourse), Jorge Borges, Jeanette Winterson, and Italo Calvino, including few others from the Oulipo style of writing.

The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates (One World, 2024). The publication and relevance of a book like The Message cannot be overstated in the times we are living in. The book’s immediacy and urgency bring to mind the giant literary figures like George Orwell, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Edward Said, among others, to whom Ta-Nehisi Coates pays respects throughout the book. The goal of the book, and political writing in general, according to the writer, is to make the reader “haunt” by exploring and uncovering those truths that have been normalized over the course of time. And trust me, the book absolutely haunts one, especially regarding the Palestinian Cause and the moral need for everyone around to be responsive towards it.

The Book Censor’s Library by Bothayna Al-Essa, Translated from the Arabic by Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain (Restless Books, 2024). Bothayna’s novel steadies itself between dark dystopian fiction and Children’s literature. “Does your child suffer from Imagination?” is a crucial question that the novel probes into thereby dramatizing the relevance and significance of storytelling as elevated lying. Taking cues from great classics like Alice in Wonderland, Zorba the Greek and 1984, the novel presents the story of a book censor, “a guardian of surfaces” who falls for the ‘traps of imagination’ in a landscape where it is considered a disease to imagine. The novel takes on a meta-fictional turn paying homage to a bulk of literature written in the same verve. While reading it, I was constantly reminded of Shahriar Mandanipour’s Censoring an Iranian Love Story, one of my favorite novels dealing with the issue of censorship published in the earlier decade.

Sand-Catcher by Omar Khalifah, Translated from the Arabic by Barbara Romaine (Coffee House Press, 2024). I keep a book in high regard if it possesses the capacity to change, or renew the reception of audience with regard to certain problems and issues, generalized over time. Sand-Catcher does exactly this. The term ‘Nakba’ predominantly evokes grave and solemn response from us as it should rightly do so. Omar Khalifa’s writing inverts this logic by its usage of caustic language, thereby staging a satirical portrait of Palestinians living in Jordan’s Amman. In the novel, four Palestinian journalists try to interview an old Palestinian man who has experienced Nakba in 1948. However, the man is in no mood to explicate and utter his weighty experiences so that his narrative becomes yet another spectacle for the media-hungry victimization of Palestinian narrative.

The novel through this, critiques not only what happened - “Palestine was lost”, as the character summarizes the whole situation - but satirizes the gluttonous appetite of the new media houses busy with churning the Palestinian narrative up to the point that it stays just news for them. At times hilarious, at times tragic, the novel aptly captures the Sisyphean quest of Palestinians living in strange lands wherein meaning making of their lives remains merely a headline for corporates.

(Mubashir Karim is Assistant Professor, Higher Education Department, J&K)

Gowhar Geelani:

At times, I wonder how long Ahmed Faraz’s “zulmat-e-shab” (the night of darkness/oppression) and Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s “gham ki shaam” (the night of sorrow) is. In today’s world there seems to be no end to human suffering. There is unimaginable pain in the world. From Palestine to Kashmir to elsewhere, there are miseries and horrors of violence.

Books were supposed to offer hope for a better future. Sadly, they no longer possess the power we thought they once did. In present times, books inflict pain. That said, chronicling pain is important to fight erasure of memory. Keeping the memory alive for posterity—even if documenting pain entails a personal cost—is a moral challenge.

In 2024, “Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste” by Indian journalist-author Ajaz Ashraf created an indelible mark on me. Ashraf’s book is a museum of memories, as it narrates powerful stories of intellectuals, poets, artists involved in a just struggle to knock down India’s social hierarchy, smash hierarchies based on caste and class, and how every single expression for justice and equality is crushed and criminalised. This book tells us that those involved in acts of resistance suffer. This poignant account is a grim reminder that all powerful modern States possess unbridled powers to silence dissenters, criminalise opinions of free thinking individuals and normalise fear in society. The book explains how the State enjoys monopoly over violence and relies on institutional memory to punish rebellion in any form.

Another book that I read this year is Kashmir at the Crossroads by Sumantra Bose. It is a meticulous analysis of the Kashmir conundrum.

Sheikh Abdullah: The Caged Lion of Kashmir by Chitralekha Zutshi is another book that I read in 2024. Zutshi analyses Sheikh Abdullah’s political journey with an academic temperament in a professional manner.

I also re-read A. G. Noorani’s Kashmir Dispute (1947-2012) since Kashmir’s regional autonomy was being discussed in manifestos of the region’s political formations and debated inside the J&K Legislative Assembly.

(Gowhar Geelani is a journalist and author of Kashmir: Rage and Reason, Rupa Publications, 2019)

Karan Mujoo:

I have reached that stage of life where years merge into each other seamlessly. Just yesterday I was twenty, and life stretched ahead of me like an endless highway.

In the blink of an eye, I am forty, and the finish line is faintly visible on the horizon. As Nicanor Parra says in his poem Chronos, ‘...the weeks are short, the months go racing by and the years have wings.’

The first book I would like to list is Nicanor Parra’s Poems and Antipoems. When it comes to poetry, the Chileans are blessed. I adore Neruda’s maximalist, baroque songs. But Parra, a physicist by education and profession, has no use for high lyricism. He tells young writers that they can write however they want; as long as they improve the blank page. And he lives up to this promise magnificently in this volume of ironic, irreverent poems.

The second book I read this year (and it took me the whole year to read) is William T. Vollman’s Europe Central. It’s a sprawling, magisterial, non-linear account of World War Two. Vollman brings to life characters like the artist Käthe Kollwitz, General Vlasov (who defected from the Soviet Army and joined the Nazis), the Soviet composer Dmitry Shostakovich, General Paulus and many others. All to shine a light on how authoritarian regimes work, whether they are in Fascist Germany or Communist Russia.

The third book mysteriously appeared in my Kindle one day. Rabih Alameddine’s An Unnecessary Woman turned out to be an utterly captivating read. It brought to life the city of Beirut through the eyes of a 72 year old woman who lives alone and works as a translator.

I had the pleasure to read and review Sadaf Wani’s City as Memory this year. It is a fantastic, intellectually courageous and moving work. Srinagar (pronounced

Sirinagar as she discovers) comes to life through its residents and their stories. Wani manages to give us a succinct history of the city and its myriad social, economic and religious conflicts.

The fourth book, possibly my favorite, which is why like dessert, I have saved it for last, is The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet by David Mitchell. Set in 18th century Japan, it tells us the tale of Jacob De Zoet, a Dutch clerk stationed at Dejima, an artificial island in Nagasaki Harbour. Mitchell masterfully weaves a tale of ambition in a complex society where there are multiple hierarchies of power. It has samurai, courtesans, cults, interpreters, merchants and pirates. What more could one ask for?

(Karan Mujoo is a writer. His debut novel is This Our Paradise (Penguin India, 2024)

Mehak Jamal:

Kashmir: The Case for Freedom is a brilliantly edited collection that should serve as a blueprint for anyone who wants to understand the Kashmir conflict. It brings together history, memoirs, poetry and reportage together in a seamless manner to understand the pulse of the place that is Kashmir. Kashmir has a long and complicated history that goes beyond its Accession to India, and the book does well to explain it. You can start it from any of the authors' chapters and not feel lost. The book surprised me and I was hooked from beginning to end.

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney. This was my first ever Sally Rooney book and I was immediately frustrated and enthralled by the brilliance and fickleness of her characters. I wasn't familiar with her minimal use of punctuation in her dialogues, often blurring the lines between thought and dialogue. While mostly you can tell, there are points where it can become an interesting game to guess which was which. The book is about two estranged brothers and their complicated relationships with each other, and with the women in their lives. I always love characters who judge others for things they themselves do—they are full of contradictions and very real. They are people I hate in real life, but love to read about.

(Mehak Jamal is a filmmaker and writer. Her first book Loal Kashmir is out this month from Harper Collins India)

Ajaz ul Haque:

Being Wrong by Kathryn Schulz: This book celebrates human fallibility as a virtue. It sharpens our ability to think deeper. Given my liking for such subjects, I liked it immensely. I strongly recommend this book to those interested in critical thinking.

Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari: It’s about the time we are in the time to come. How Artificial Intelligence is going to change our lives for better and for worse. With a magical ability of storytelling, the author narrates some complex realities in a simple, clean and riveting prose.

The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow: This one is about one of my favourite themes. Unpredictability. It’s a cleanly

written and forcefully argued account. It takes us away from a simplistic approach to success, failure, achievements, results or consequences. A brilliant

read.

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: As a reader, you simply flow with the book. It holds your hand and takes you to a

surprising world of joy which we normally ignore. The author hints at some

ordinary life experiences and makes them appear extraordinary.

Helen of Troy: goddess, princess, whore: by Bettany Hughes: A detailed account

of wars in the Greek background with Helen in the middle. Hughes articulates

history in a beautiful manner. She weaves myth, fact, history and mystery

together to create a narrative out of it.

The Colors of Violence: Cultural Identities, Religion, and Conflict by Sudhir Kakar: A wonder psycho-analytical study of Hindu-Muslim conflict in a historical background. I loved reading the book for its narrative flow and for the honesty it has been written with.

(Ajaz-ul-Haque is a columnist and producer, Educational Multimedia Research Center, University of Kashmir)

Muzaffar Karim:

Humare Liye Manto Sahib by Shamsur Rahman Faruqi (2013, M R Publications, New Delhi). I started this year with Shamsur Rahman Faruqi’s Humare Liye Manto Sahib and it was a huge letdown. The book is written in a conversational style and one understands the condescending tone regarding Manto or some of the fellow critics. However, what is missing throughout the book is a serious critical evaluation of Manto. What we find is rather his faults as a person and how those faults metamorphose into his faulty stories. Faruqi very early on in the book states that superior criticism is one that maintains a gap between what Eliot used to call ‘empirical self’ and ‘creative self’ but every time he finds a faulty story of Manto (faulty according to Faruqi) he leans back to his biography and the faults in his character. Sarkandon ke Peechey according to Faruqi is a failure, so is Nangi Aawazein and Khalid Miyan and Aulad and Bu and Thanda Ghosth and Khol Do and Sadak Ke Kinarey. A few that maintain

the standard, according to Faruqi, are Siyah Hashiye, Badshahat ka Khatima and Padhiye Kalima.

The only genuine critical evaluation that I found is where he acknowledges Manto as a precursor to ‘new short stories’ in Urdu and that he is not a writer who should be pigeonholed as a ‘partition writer’ or a ‘riot chronicler’ or only as a one who is ‘prostitute prone’. His evaluation of Modern writers like Kafka, Beckett and Nayyer Masud, later on in the book, is that they deliberately create a spectacle of narration so that the question of meaning or purpose is deferred. Faruqi also resorts to making wrong comparisons in the book e.g. he compares Manto’s ‘short stories’ with Greek and Shakesperean ‘Dramas’. Also, while

summarizing the critical thought of Michel Foucault, he turns him into a Marxist and ends up wrongly summarizing Derrida’s thought as something that proclaims that ‘there is no meaning’. What an erroneous reading by one of the towering critics of Urdu literature – quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus.

A Wizard of Eathsea by Ursula K. Le Guin (2016, Penguin Books, India). Before Harry Potter and Hogwarts there was Sparrowhawk and his school of magic. Written in 1968 the novel belongs to the series of four books that came to be known as Earthsea book series. The novel is a beautiful story of magic and magicians. But more than that it is a novel about self-exploration, an exploration that is necessary for one to become a human being as well as a magician with powers. The light that emanates from our self comes only by confronting the darkness within us. It is a novel that showcases how the world is a balance of the force and why disrupting that force can be apocalyptic and what it takes to restore the balance – it means facing the fears and hunting them before they hunt you down. The novel is a bildungsroman, coming-of-age and fantasy put together.

Marx in the Anthropocene by Kohei Saito (2023, Cambridge University Press, New Delhi). Kohei Saito’s book is an important one in the series of books that try to link Karl Marx’s critique of Capitalism and Capitalism’s devastating role in the ever-increasing environmental problems. Labour and Production being the raison d’etre of Marxism, it is believed that Marxism presents a Promethean thrust of pro-technology and completely disregards Nature.

Saito’s book fills the lacuna more so by supplying materials from Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) – Marx’s Notebooks that are usually ignored by many theorists. The book is an important one for the scholars interested in the topic as well as for the people who are looking for a non-Eurocentric and non-productivist approaches within Marxism.

(Muzaffar Karim teaches English in South Campus, University of Kashmir)

Hafsa Kanjwal:

The Haunting of Hajji Hotak by Jamil Jan Kochai (Viking, published in 2022). A collection of short stories by acclaimed Afghan American writer Jamil Jan Kochai, the Haunting of Hajji Hotak speaks to many of us whose homelands have been torn by war, occupation, and displacement. The evocative imagery and characters will stay with you. Kochai traverses the line between realism and surrealism in a way that masterfully blurs both.

Prophetic Maharaja by Rajbir Singh Judge (Columbia University Press, published 2024). Prophetic Maharaja: Loss, Sovereignty, and the Sikh Tradition in Colonial South Asia, is an evocative book that examines the fundamental question of what happens when a tradition—in this case the Sikh tradition—encounters the possibility of its loss, especially when that loss exceeds the very possibility of narration, reflection and redemption? Judge explores this question through the prospect of return of Maharaja Duleep Singh, exiled to the United Kingdom, who sought to restore the lost Khalsa Raj in the 1880s in the Punjab. The book examines both Singh’s efforts to restore Sikh sovereignty, but also the responses of the Sikh community to these efforts. In doing so, he challenges the genre of history-writing itself - the sorts of categories that it deifies and how it discusses processes like reform or conversion. A bold intervention that will resonate with students of Islamic studies and critical secularism studies.

When only God can See: The Faith of Muslim Political Prisoners by Walaa Quisay and Asim Qureshi (Pluto Press, published 2024). Muslim political prisoners, held under various carceral regimes around the world, have 'disappeared' from our conscience. Quisay and Qureshi have worked extensively with Muslim political prisoners during the so-called War on Terror, and in this book, examine how Islam has served as a source of strength and resistance in extremely horrifying conditions. From the role of ablution and prayer, to torture, and dreams, the voices of Muslim political prisoners are brought to the fore in an extremely heart wrenching and powerful book.

(Hafsa Kanjwal is Associate Professor of South Asian History)

Aurif Muzafar:

Being in academia has meant less fiction reading and heaps of academic and focused reading. But this year, to escape the humdrum of academics, I enjoyed reading a few works of fiction. I have a good mix of varied writings in my list of favourite books.

Until August by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Penguin. Gabo is one of my favourite writers, and I love his prose. Until August was published more than a decade after Gabo’s death and was written when he was fighting dementia and felt the story was not going along and should be destroyed, as the foreword to the book tells us. The book is a tale of a middle-aged married woman, Ana Magdalena Bach, who visits a cemetery every August where her mother is buried to find freedom and solitude.

Chronicle of an Hour and a Half by Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari, Westland Publications. It is a tragic story of mob violence induced by the news of intimacy between a young man and a married woman whose husband is away working. The love story immediately becomes a discussion for WhatsApp groups, leading to a dangerous turn. Kannanari has excellently woven the themes of life, women’s lives, jealousy, and the everyday life of a village in Kerala.

Identity by Milan Kundera, Faber and Faber. This year also meant reading and rereading some of Kundera’s works. Rereading Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being actually meant reading him as I could look at the book with a critical eye, which I could not do years ago. I felt a deep desire to converse with him about his politics and the themes discussed in the book. Identity felt like a refreshing read on love, friendship and what happens when the identity of the beloved vanishes in front of our eyes. I did not like the end of the book as it felt like Kundera had lost the plot and was struggling to manage its end. It has fascinating discussions on life and death, memory and emotion, the gaze of love, and much more.

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, Penguin. Things Fall Apart is a terrific, well-known novel and was gifted to me by a kind human who is both a mentor and a friend. The book is funny and tragic and tells the tale of a Nigerian clan whose ways of life are destroyed the day colonisers and missionaries arrive. The book details the complexities of the clan's culture and tradition, headed by a man called Okonkwo, who has battled great poverty to attain the vigour to lead.

The Naive and the Sentimentalist Novelist by Orhan Pamuk, Penguin. The book is a compilation of Pamuk's essays and contains great writing lessons. It is an excellent tour de force on the history of writing, great novels, and great novelists. I recommend this book to those interested in a book about novels. It discusses the works of Tolstoy, Mann, Dostoevsky, Schiller, Rousseau, Kafka, Joyce, and Faulkner, among other novelists.

How I Write: Writers on Their Craft by Sonia Falerio, Harper Collins. This is a book about novelists who share their writing process with their interviewers. It has some fascinating interviews with the best in the business. The book does not feature any interviews with Kashmiri authors, even though it claims to have platformed South Asian writers.

I read a good number of biographies on Sheikh Abdullah this year for my research, but I am shortlisting the following two, which I found the most interesting.

Sheikh Abdullah: The Caged Lion of Kashmir by Chitraelkha Zutshi, Harper Collins. Zuthsi is a well-known historian who has contributed to literature on Kashmir history. Her new book is a meticulous biography of one of the most contested figures in Kashmir’s modern history. It is a critical account of his eventful life, and while keeping him at the centre, it tells the history of modern Kashmir.

The Muslim Secular: Parity and the Politics of India’s Partition by Amar Sohal, Oxford Press. The book talks about the politics espoused by Sheikh Abdullah, Maulana Azad, and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan and how their political thought engaged with the questions of nationalism and minoritization. Abdullah’s case has been given special attention as he was the leader of a majority in his own region but was to battle the questions of his own minoritization and Hindu majoritarianism when it came to the Indian whole and the path he had chosen for the people he was leading.

Legalizing the Revolution: India & the Constitution of the Postcolony by Sandipto Dasgupta, Cambridge Press. This is easily one of the best books I have read this year. It ties closely to my own research and raises fresh questions about India’s constitutional founding. If you are interested in political theory and constitutional law, this book is best for you.

(Aurif Muzafar is a Doctoral Fellow in Law, NALSAR, Hyderabad)

Shakir Mir:

Priyanka Mattoo was genuinely livid when she entered a library in London hoping to find some good reads to riffle through. She encountered a couple of hard-bounds written in the 19th century about her homeland Kashmir with which she had unceremoniously parted.

An armed rebellion had broken out in 1989 and Mattoo's were caught up in Saudi Arabia. A timid hesitation to return to a place fraught with uncertainty segued into the grim realisation that the family may have permanently lost their homeland following news that the fires of unrest had incinerated their beautiful house.

Meanwhile, in London - where Mattoo's post-exodus globe-trotting journey had taken her briefly - the books that provoked her anger were Ernest Neves's Beyond the Pir Panjal and C.G. Bruce’s Peeps at Many Lands.

Both books appeared to have stereotyped Kashmiris as lazy and deceitful. “We’ve been churning out hand-embroidered shawls for centuries, painstaking woodwork screens, glassy smooth papier-mâché jewellery boxes with filigreed enamel,” she writes in her terrific memoir Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones (Penguin India). “They marvel at what locals have on offer, but, unlike the treatment of Western art of the time, there’s no discussion of the depth behind the humans who make it.”

It is remarkable that in times when the perennial Hindu-Muslim schisms continue to vitiate the political discourse in India, Mattoo doesn't allow them to mar her understanding about the place.

In contrast to Mattoo's disappointment over the lack of acknowledgement for the labour behind Kashmiri craftwork, William Dalrymple's The Golden Road walks the reader through the fascinating world of ancient India, situating it at the confluence of the many streams of knowledge production that freighted the specialised scholarship about arts and sciences out of its boundaries, delivering it to regions such as Balkh in Afghanistan.

As a case in point, Dalrymple brings up the history of Barmakids, a family of hereditary rectors of a Buddhist monastery in Balkh, who went on to join the high echelons of power in the Abbasid Empire. Freshly converted into Islam, Barmakids were able to acquire specialised knowledge of mathematics, architecture and medicine from Kashmir, a big centre of learning of that time.

Well-versed with the arithmetic behind designing big buildings, Barmakids were responsible for drawing the famous circular layout of the Baghdad city, inspired - probably - by the ancient Buddhist viharas of Kashmir.

In Kashmir Under 370, IPS officer Mahendra Sabharwal, who has served in J&K during the tumultuous decades of sixties, seventies and eighties, offers a valuable insight in how the mainstream leaders weaponised the special status to continue to keep the erstwhile state in limbo and perpetuated what India’s rightwing likes to call ‘soft-separatism’ in Kashmir.

The key highlight of the book, however, is its damning indictment of former J&K governor Jagmohan Malhotra pertaining to the case of Hawal massacre in Srinagar in 1990 involving CRPF soldiers who are accused of firing indiscriminately at the mourners of the slain Hurriyat leader Moulvi Farooq, resulting in 70 casualties.

Sabharwal reveals that he had initially decided to allow the mourners to lead the funeral procession from Soura Hospital to Mirwaiz’s ancestral residence in downtown Srinagar. “But Jagmohan’s habit of not listening led to him to overrule my decision,” he writes, adding that the controversial governor ordered the CRPF to stop the procession “at all costs.”

It is also somewhat hypocritical when the author - elsewhere in the book - voices heartbreak over the gutting of the Charar-e-Sharif mosque at the hands of Pashtun militants in 1995 and, in the same breath, call the title of Sheikh-ul-Alam (the patron saint of Charar shrine) to be dropped from Srinagar Airport so it could renamed after an Indian major who fought Pakistani raiders in 1947. It is a curious case of appropriation and erasure happening at the same time.

(Shakir Mir is a freelance journalist and book critic based in Srinagar)

Sadaf Wani:

Not to jinx it, but this year I was able to work on my undisciplined reading habits and maintain some semblance of continuity between my sporadic phases of intense reading and absolutely no reading. Short fiction provides achievable targets, especially when recovering from a slump. Two important translations of Kashmiri short fiction—Neerja Mattoo’s The Greatest Kashmiri Stories Ever Told and Hari Krishna Kaul’s For Now, It's Night—helped me through my slump. Both anthologies reveal fascinating aspects of everyday experiences and socio-political aspirations that remained central to Kashmiri life in the last century.

I enjoyed reading Less by Andrew Sean Greer for its gentle, funny, and heartwarming story. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun explores the contradictions and intersections between faith and technology, and it made me reflect on how intrinsic technology has become in our lives and whether it’s even possible to step back from where we are. Another Japanese author I read was Yoko Ogawa, whose Memory Police was a dystopian story about a place where the memory police take away memories they believe contribute to political instability. Once the memory disappears, the associated objects start disappearing too. The book fills you with a very familiar dread.

I thoroughly enjoyed Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah and how she uses the medium of the novel to reveal intimate portrayals of a life in transition—from Nigeria to America and then back again. It made me think a lot about what it means to leave home and what it means to return after you have left.

My favorite book of the year is Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, and I absolutely love how she writes. The language is so simple, yet what she conveys is so profound. I found myself reading deliberately slowly to avoid finishing the book. It was a brutal and beautiful account of how grief is a human condition and how there is nothing to do but make peace with it.

(Sadaf Wani is a researcher and author of City as Memory: A Short Biography of Srinagar, Aleph)

Saleem Rashid Shah:

There would be no wonder about the fact that Sheikh Abdullah on the morning of February 25^th, 1975 was afraid to go out to take oath as the Chief Minister of the state. Deep down in the heart of his hearts he believed that his people would accuse him of selling Kashmir down the drain after entering into an ominous accord with Indira Gandhi. His fears were not misplaced, recounts Chitralekha Zuthshi in her amazing biography of Sheikh Abdullah with an equally amazing title: ‘Sheikh Abdullah: The Caged Lion of Kashmir’.

The Kashmiri generation that came of age around 1975 and who witnessed the accord revile him to this day, but a generation earlier, that saw him fighting tooth and nail with the Dogra oppression call him their messiah. It is this Shakespearean dichotomy in the character of Sheikh Abdullah that Zuthshi puts to paper with great verve and wit.

Talking of Kashmir and Sheikh Abdullah, one is reminded of ‘Democracy’, a spine-tingling invention, which a few hundred years ago shifted the bandwagon of governance from bullet to ballot. By democracy do we mean the periodic ‘free and fair’ elections? John Keane in his book ‘The Shortest History of Democracy’ seems to disagree. He deals with democracy from its beginnings in Syria-Mesopotamia to the present day where it is thought to be in retreat. One of the impressive features of Democracy is that it gives people a chance to do stupid things and then change their minds. Lin Yutang, a Chinese writer once said that humans are more like potential crooks than honest gentlefolk, and that since they cannot always be expected to be good, ways must be found to make it impossible for them to be bad. For John Kean, therefore, a simple definition of democracy is the government of the humble, by the humble and for the humble.

One more important book that held me spellbound this year was Antony Loewenstein’s ‘The Palestine Laboratory’. Israel-Palestine conflict has been there for the past 70 years, but this year it assumed an unimaginable magnitude. The graphic visuals of the mutilated bodies of young teenagers coming from Gaza were hard for all of us to bear. Antony Loewenstein’s book ‘The Palestine Laboratory’ puts this 70 year long conflict in a new perspective.

Israel’s military-industrial complex, argues Loewenstein, uses occupied Palestinian territories as testing ground for weaponry and surveillance technology; it is this technology of occupation that they later export globally to authoritarian regimes to suppress dissent within their countries. In this way Israel has made many friends around the world by selling its state of the art technology that it ‘battle tests’ on the Palestinian people. An ‘indispensable nation’ is what Israel calls itself. In this stunning new book, Antony Loewenstein argues that ‘Palestine is Israel’s workshop’ where an occupied nation on its doorstep provides millions of subjugated people as a laboratory for the most precise and successful methods of domination.

(Saleem Rashid Shah is a Kashmiri researcher and a book critic.)

(Originally published in Inverse Journal)