New visions of the past, fresh perspectives on the present, and big questions for the future. From Barkha Dutt and Nandita Iyer to Ramachandra Guha and Neerja Chowdhury, Saurabh Sharma previews the most-anticipated Indian non-fiction releases in 2022.

- Saurabh Sharma

Now in the third year of the COVID pandemic, it appears that we’re no longer fighting the virus alone, but a whole family of viruses, with all its variants discovered or still in hiding. This fight has become a part of us—and naturally so, has found a place in the arts, too, where creative minds are responding to the challenges of the new world in unique ways.

For writers and readers, these responses have created a whole new genre of work: Pandemic Literature. For the last two years, several books have been published that discuss the pandemic or have in one way or the other been inspired by it. 2022 will be no exception.

The pandemic narratives

One such work is award-winning journalist Barkha Dutt’s courageous and sensitive coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic, To Hell and Back: The Story of India’s Covid Journey in 12 Photographs, to be published by Juggernaut Books. Known for her exceptional ground-reporting, Dutt has garnered many accolades in journalism after working for over two decades with NDTV and her own venture Mojo Story. Since the first lockdown in March 2020, Dutt and her team have been covering the pandemic and their reporting has been lauded for its humanistic coverage. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s arguable that the announcement of the first lockdown—when a population of over a billion was given just a cruel four-hour notice—not only failed to meet its goal, but also proved devastating for the country’s economy. To Hell and Back shall be a crucial reminder of India’s catastrophic failure to manage the crisis.

Immediately after the lockdown announcement, veteran journalist Karan Thapar interviewed Jayati Ghosh, professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, for The Wire. In the interview, Ghosh, talking about the impacts of the lockdown on the Indian economy, described the then situation, which still holds, as “falling off a cliff.” In her book The Making of a Catastrophe: The Disastrous Economic Fallout of the COVID-19 Pandemic in India (Aleph), Ghosh elaborates that metaphor, documenting the repercussions of the policies of the government and their unwillingness to holistically understand the situation at hand, and the impacts it has had on the Indian economy.

Amitava Kumar’s fictive response to the world overwhelmed by fake news and authoritarianism A Time Outside This Time (Aleph, 2021) was among The Chakkar’s best reads of 2021. His latest nonfiction project The Blue Book (HarperCollins) is a journal that the novelist has maintained over the years, painstakingly documenting the lies and falsehoods spread and deaths that remained undocumented during the pandemic years. It reflects the time we live in and what characterises our lives while the most brutal of the pandemics faces us.

Books that taste nice

2022 will also witness the release of a few of the most interesting culinary books. While the nutritionist Nandita Iyer’s Thali: Indian Vegetarian Recipes (Roli Books) shall explore the diversity of a vegetarian diet, providing 70 easy-to-make Indian cuisines, Shubhra Chatterji will leverage her food journeys for over a decade to outline the culinary history of India with her book Rasa: The Story of India in 100 Dishes (Hachette).

There’s no dearth of narratives that cater to a specific state’s history of food either. In Mirchi and Morels: Feasting in Kashmir (Hachette), well-known food critic Marryam H. Reshii presents the food landscape of Kashmir in 75 recipes and highlights what makes each one of them a special part of the Kashmiri cuisine. And in The Goa Cookbook (Roli Books), chef and owner of Patro’s Deli & Antonio, Pablo Miranda uncovers the influences and rituals that are associated with the Goan delicacies.

As a chai enthusiast, I’m particularly excited about the well-known chef and tea connoisseur Pallavi Nigam Sahay’s A Sip in Time: India’s Finest Teas and Teatime Treats (Hachette), a visual book with over 60 delectable dishes that make the perfect companion for teatime.

Dutt and her team have been covering the pandemic and their reporting has been lauded for its humanistic coverage. To Hell and Back shall be a crucial reminder of India’s catastrophic failure to manage the crisis.

This year, Speaking Tiger Books will be publishing Scandinavian-origin Indian author Zac O’Yeah’s part travelogue, part memoir and completely entertaining book Digesting India: A Writer’s Notebook of Travels with the Tummy. The book shall be an adventurous ride through the landscapes of Indian gastronomic art.

Looking back in time

Did you know that several women also played an instrumental role in the making of the Constitution of India? If not, then await the release of The Fifteen: The Lives and Times of the Women in India’s Constituent Assembly (Hachette) by Angellica Aribam and Akash Satyawali. The book documents these women’s legacies, throwing light on the beliefs they stood by to ensure the making of one of the finest documentation of rights in the world.

Another book promising to be a fascinating recollection of history is of the seven foreigners who supported the Indian cause, and enriched the country with their influences. In Rebels Against the Raj: Western Fighters for India’s Freedom (Penguin), Ramachandra Guha narrates their stories. He argues that all of them engaged with the politics of Mahatma Gandhi. While some of them detested the father of the nation, others were admirers of the ideals he stood by.

Swapna Liddle—the author of Connaught Place and the Making of New Delhi (Speaking Tiger Books) and the Convener of the Delhi Chapter of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH)—and Pramod Kapoor—the founder of Roli Books—will examine Delhi’s vibrant cultural history in City of Gated Walls: The Incredible Map of Shahjahanabad (Roli Books). The volume will chart the capital right from the time when a mapmaker in 1846 attempted to depict its crucial landmarks to the city’s evolution in recent years.

In her latest book In Search of the Divine: A Living History of Sufism in India (Hachette), Rana Safvi—a celebrated author and proponent of India’s Ganga-Jamuni Tehzeeb—will document the fascinating history of Sufism in India. The book will take a deep dive in this mystical dimension of Islam, providing a wealth of information regarding the impact of the Sufi tradition on various communities in India. Hachette will also be releasing another book by Safvi, a translation of Begumat Ke Aasoon by Khwaja Hasan Nizami from the original Urdu, Tears of the Begums: Stories of Survivors of the Uprising of 1857. This work will be translated for the first time and will sit comfortably with the significant records of Indian history.

A one-of-a-kind historical account Empires of the Sea: A Maritime History of India (Pan Macmillan) by writer and historian Radhika Seshan will examine trade routes and networks built across the seas that helped India maintain relationships with the world at large. The book shall also be underlining the instrumental role that India’s shores played in demonstrating its plurality.

Another such unique record of history is Forgotten Kings: The Story of the Hindu Shahi Dynasty (Simon & Schuster) by Changez Saleem Jan. This will be the first time that a book on little-known rulers of this dynasty—which lasted from the 9th through the 11th century Afghanistan—will be published. This account will put things in perspective to understand the contemporary political turmoil in Afghanistan.

The big questions facing India’s democracy

No one knows why prime ministers do what they do in the event of a catastrophe, or when they act merely according to their whims and fancies. But one can trust the well-known and multiple-award-winning journalist Neerja Chowdhury, who has examined the Indian politics of the past twenty years to develop an eye-opening account How Prime Ministers Decide (Aleph). Full of accounts of people who have held top positions in India and informed by hundreds of interviews with ministers and political analysts, this book uncovers the major decisions made by several prime ministers over the years, from Shah Bano to Mandal Commission to nuclear testing to demonetisation.

While Chowdhury assesses incidents, reverse engineering chain of events leading up to the thought that provoked a particular decision, investigative journalist Josy Joseph in his latest The Birth of a Nation (Context, an imprint of Westland) digs into a history of documentation that will reveal how India as a nation came to be. These first-hand accounts of India’s becoming will not only examine how India integrated to form a single, giant unit but will also provide illuminating narrative regarding how power got centralised in the country.

However, a democracy’s true function is to remain open to debate any idea and not be threatened by opposing views. Over the years, one such discussion has polarised the society, creating neat pro- and anti-tradition segments: the Sabarimala temple entrance issue. Jitheesh P.M., a fellow at the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, breaks away from this binary and uncovers several facts about the Sabarimala temple in his book Sabarimala: A Social History of a Temple in Kerala (LeftWord). The author not only argues that this restriction around women’s entry is a recent one, but also puts into perspective the majoritarianism at play, which defines the contemporary divisive atmosphere in the country. The book features an introduction by Meera Velayudhan.

In the north of the country, this divisiveness was felt when armed police forces broke into Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia University on 15 December 2019, beating students and damaging the university property after students undertook a protest march against the draconian Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). Nehal Ahmed’s memoir Everything Will Be Remembered: Jamia to Shaheen Bagh (LeftWord) is a courageous response to these events, and on the ongoing, state-sponsored violence inflicted on students.

The Indian state, however, didn’t stop there. The right-wing central government and its arms orchestrated a series of ‘experiments’ to stifle scholarship, increased fees, and restricted opportunities to students from the margins to snatch away from them a chance of better education and to muzzle dissenting students. This forms the core of another book by LeftWord, Students Won’t Be Quiet, a series of seventeen essays that documents the violence against students in its many forms by the present government.

A singular achievement of the anti-CAA-NRC-NPR protests is that they initiated a conversation about the construction of citizenship, making people think about the elements that help define their citizenship status. In Who Is a Citizen (Context, an imprint of Westland), Malavika Prasad will not only study the construction of citizenship—right from the debates in the Constituent Assembly to the most contemporary discussions—but will also examine the creation of Hindutva strongholds by the present government to disenfranchise select communities via the CAA-NRC-NPR trinity.

Seminal narratives

Do you know that there are divers who travel to the end of New Zealand to cage an animal that travels the lines between myth and reality, a monster, whose lineage can be traced back to 400 million years: the Great White Shark? Indian marine anthropologist Raj Shekhar Aich, who conducted the first-ever white shark cage diving ethnographical research (New Zealand) and first academic investigation of the Sundarbans Shark attacks (India), tells this unique narrative, which is at the intersection of humans and the white sharks, in Iridescent Skin: A Multispecies Journey of White Sharks and Caged Humans (Niyogi Books).

Oral historian and author of best-selling work Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory (HarperCollins Publishers) Aanchal Malhotra is out with her second nonfiction work In the Language of Remembering: The Inheritance of Partition (HarperCollins Publishers). In this, she attempts to engage with the people with the material memory of the Partition once again, but these are the people who did not witness the Partition but were engaged with it via the objects that their previous generations chose to carry with themselves when they crossed the border.

While histories of all kinds get told, the role of women is often undermined. Movements and Moments (Zubaan), which is a record of individual and collective histories, shall work as an equaliser. Each one of the narratives in this book remain unheard and undocumented previously. They celebrate the oft-forgotten and seldom recorded women-led protest movements and campaigns. An open call for essays was announced for this book, and stories from Vietnam, Thailand, Philippines, India, Nepal, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile and Ecuador are recorded in it.

Big questions of privacy resurfaced in India in the wake of the pandemic, especially after a spyware software was used by the Indian government against dissenters and several opposition party leaders. Privacy threats, however, have been an ongoing issue, even if they’ve traditionally occupied little space in our day-to-day concerns. Siddharth Sonkar’s What Privacy Means: Why It Matters and How We Can Protect It (Hachette) not only defines privacy holistically, but also explains how it can be protected while arguing that this aspect of safeguarding people’s privacy is enshrined in our constitution.

First-person singular

Who remembers Aparna Shewakramani from the Netflix’s Indian Matchmaking (2020)? In this Netflix original documentary series, Shewakramani was presented as someone who had unrealistic choices for a partner. Though the men in the show also shared what they desired from their partners, Aparna’s clarity was ridiculed, and the top matchmaker Sima Taparia labelled her hard to please. In her book, She’s Unlikeable: And Other Lies That Bring Women Down, which will be published by HarperCollins Publishers, Shewakramani documents how her personhood was erased in the series by the portrayal of herself as a villainous character.

Full of accounts of people who have held top positions in India and informed by hundreds of interviews with ministers and political analysts, this book uncovers the major decisions made by several prime ministers over the years, from Shah Bano to Mandal Commission to nuclear testing to demonetisation.

In Uncaged: My Days in the CBI and the IPS (Speaking Tiger Books), Amar Pratap Singh, a former CBI director, unravels his dealings in the most sensational cases of recent times: the 2G and the commonwealth games scam, Aarushi-Hemraj double murder, and the Big Bull. Pratap Singh, who was also involved in safeguarding the CBI via the Lokpal Act, recounts stories that defined the thirty years he spent in his profession.

The well-known theatre practitioner, who played Muhammad Ali Jinnah in Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi (1982), Alyque Padamsee’s memoir Let Me Hijack Your Mind (Penguin) will be a one-of-its-kind book to be released this year. The book shall provide insights into the opinions Padamsee held regarding several things and the beliefs that the late actor and director held dear to him, showing everyone how to leave the old doings behind to embrace a newer way of life for good.

Translated by Fehmida Zakeer, The Dreams of a Mappila Girl (Yoda Press) by B. M. Zuhara is also an eagerly anticipated book. This memoir of the author growing up in a small village in Kerala will not only provide glimpses of how secluded Muslim women lived at the time, but also invite readers to witness the life inside a semi-rural village in a newly independent India.

Yoda Press will also be publishing the retired IPS officer and civil servant Julio Francis Ribeiro’s memoir In Hope for Sanity. Francis Ribeiro, who was conferred with the Padma Bhushan in 1987, has lived an exemplary life without compromising his politics. This former civil servant remains a conscience-keeper in a deeply divisive, unequal, and vulnerable society. In Hope for Sanity, Francis Ribeiro covers several issues like corruption, governance, communalism and so on, giving readers an insider’s viewpoint.

Character sketches

Shashi Tharoor has come up with a well-researched account of B. R. Ambedkar’s legacy Ambedkar: A Life (Aleph) after writing a book on Nehru. In this book, Tharoor presents not only the instrumental role that Ambedkar played in creating the framework of the Indian democracy but also explains why the great leader, who championed Dalit rights, is often misunderstood.

Piecing together what was reported in a knee-jerk manner and the truths hiding behind what meets the eye, Rukmini Rao and Prosenjit Datta have written a report about VG Siddhartha, the founder of Café Coffee Day. The book Coffee King: The Life and Death of Café Coffee Day Founder VG Siddhartha (Pan Macmillan) will chronicle the dynamic businessman’s rise to fame and his death after plunging deep into a financial crisis.

It’s well-known that the role that the role of several figures close to Mahatma Gandhi were overshadowed by Gandhi himself, the great propagator of nonviolence. Prominent among those other figures shall always be Kasturba Gandhi—the Mahatma’s wife—who has often been written off as illiterate, having no ideology and opinion of her own. In Kastur, My Ba (HarperCollins), Tushar Gandhi (Gandhi’s great-grandson) argues otherwise. This book is an English translation of Kasturba Gandhi’s diary (written in Gujarati), found in the Gandhi Research Foundation of Jalgaon, and promises to finally do justice to Kasturba’s legacy.

One of the most illustrated figures in Hindi literary circles is the poet-writer Agyeya, whose unorthodoxy is only second to his literary legacy. Renowned journalist and award-wining author of Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India, Akshaya Mukul unravels the man in full in his Writer, Rebel, Soldier, Lover: The Many Lives of Agyeya (Context, an imprint of Westland).

Ikroop Sandhu’s Inquilab Zindabad (Yoda Press) is a graphic biography of Shaheed Bhagat Singh. A fearless student leader, Singh’s ever-lasting legacy is meticulously illustrated by Sandhu in this book that also gathers Singh’s interests in reading, writing, debating, and spending time with his comrades and the people he drew inspiration from.

Literary potpourri

This memoir of the author growing up in a small village in Kerala will not only provide glimpses of how secluded Muslim women lived at the time, but also invite readers to witness the life inside a semi-rural village in a newly independent India.

Soibam Haripriya edits an anthology on the idea of homeland, extending it to the nation, in Homeward (Zubaan). Though the book focuses on the north-eastern region largely and provides the construction of an idea we call ‘home’, it invokes political situations and geographical locations and engages with the boundaries and cartographies by expressing one’s vulnerability through the act of writing.

Period Matters: Writing and Art on Menstruation Experiences in South Asia (Pan Macmillan), edited by Farah Ahamed, including contributions by well-noted authors like Sarah Naqvi, Shashi Deshpande, Shashi Tharoor, Rupi Kaur and others, is a collection of artworks—poems, essays, short stories, photographs and drawings—on menstruation-related experiences in South Asia.

Sanjoy Hazarika and Madhurima Dhanuka edit the volume Hope Behind Bars: Notes from Indian Prisoners (Pan Macmillan), that gathers first-person experiences about the Indian prison system and provides readers insights into the true face of justice behind bars in our country. Contributor include Vrinda Grover, Sabika Abbas, Chaman Lal among others,

Child Labour: Global Challenges, Issues and Policy (SAGE) by Dr Anil Bhuimali and Dr Partha Chatterjee focuses on the rise of employment of underage workers both globally and locally and demonstrates how this situation was further aggravated by COVID-19, particularly in India. Backed with relevant data and the findings of credible surveys, this book also shares measures to tackle and curb this social menace.

Founder and CEO of Network Capital Utkarsh Amitabh in his book Passion Economy and the Side Hustle Revolution (SAGE Response) argues that the present situation presents us two questions: (1) Will the lost jobs come back? and (2) While there is still time in several yet-to-become iconic companies to become the employer of choice, will people wait for them? Answers to these questions can be found in Amitabh’s book, which concludes that people are likely to have a portfolio of professions in the coming years and that the side hustle is likely to become mainstream.

A number of the non-fiction works featured here not only lay bare the truth—the unadulterated facts—but they also enhance the narrative around the truth, providing different perspectives and enriching our worldview. For that reason, these books—and others that didn’t make it to this list—will be eagerly awaited.

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Saurabh Sharma is a reader and a writer. He works as a writer in an IT research and advisory firm in Gurgaon. He reviews books and pretends to write on weekends. You can find him on Instagram: @writerly_life and Twitter: @writerly_life.

Pandemic, History, Democracy, and Chai: Previewing the Indian Non-Fiction Palette of 2022