2024 Highlights: Experts recommend great reads

Books, journal articles, government reports - this list has something for everyone.

To cap off the year I reached out to a range of scholars, practitioners, and policy experts with a simple question: what works on India or the subcontinent stood out to you this year?¹

Folks generously took time out of their busy holiday schedules to write back with solid recommendations. The eclectic list below has something for everyone—great book recommendations, interesting articles, and informative government reports.

I value these experts’ recommendations because they are keen observers and scholars of India and the subcontinent. I regularly turn to what they write to better understand our past and contemporary times. I am confident you will find something interesting in this list, irrespective of your core interests. I have arranged the list alphabetically and annotated some suggestions.

Indialog is a labor of love, and if you find any value in this newsletter, I highly urge you to share it with friends and colleagues. Enough from me, on to the recommendations —

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- Ajay Srivastava

Founder of the Global Trade Research Initiative (GTRI) and former Indian Trade Service officer with experience in trade policy-making and WTO and FTA negotiations.

Mr. Srivastava recommended a GTRI report: ‘The Trade War Missed Its Mark: The US needs a rethink on tariffs and check on the indirect supply of Chinese goods.’

Note: Mr. Srivastava regularly writes on trade and manufacturing-related issues. I interviewed him for the first edition of the ‘Policy Playbook’ for Indialog where we touched on India-China trade ties, India’s trade policy, and export competitiveness. You can read the interview here.

- Ananya Sharma

Assistant Professor of International Relations, Ashoka University

Dr. Sharma recommended Depletion: The Human Cost of Caring by Shirin M. Rai noting that “it is a brilliant read that lies at the intersection of political economy and gender, a must-read for IR [Intsernational Relations] scholars.”

- Avinash Paliwal

Reader in International Relations, SOAS, University of London [currently on secondment to the UK government’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) after receiving the British Academy’s Innovation Fellowship]

Dr. Paliwal read works focused on China and Europe this year and called Chen Jian’s Zhou Enlai: A Life a “masterpiece on modern China.” Some of his India/South Asia-related recommendations [included with his quotes] that “left a mark” include -

1. Funny Boy by Shyam Selvadurai. “Published in 1994 this is a classic. It unpacks trauma and tenderness in wartime Sri Lanka. I cannot recommend it enough to those who are yet to discover this marvel.”

2. Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka. “A hilarious and heartbreaking novel that unpacks the brutalities of the Sri Lankan civil war.”

3. Shadows at Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century by Joya Chatterji. “This book is a beautiful mediation on how the region came into being on all counts—political, social, economic, culinary, and more.”

4. Spying in South Asia by Paul McGarr. “A more accurate title of this book would have been Spying in India. McGarr has done great service in exploring Western intelligence interventions in India during the Cold War.”

5. Desperately Seeking Shahrukh: India’s Lonely Young Women and the Search for Intimacy and Independence by Shrayana Bhattacharya. “Brilliant book that lays bare the social, political, and economic challenges of being a woman in India.”

6. As for emerging scholars, I found articles authored by Angshuman Choudhury on Myanmar and India’s northeastern states of great value. He is now doing a joint PhD from NUS-KCL and was formerly associated with CPR. [I’d also asked experts to highlight emerging scholars/underrepresented voices through their recommendations].

Note: I should mention that Dr. Paliwal released his second book, the excellent India’s Near East: A New History this year. On India’s northeast and ties with Bangladesh and Myanmar, the book looks at “why (and how) India opted for peace, or waged war(s) in its near east” [p. 5]. This is one of the best books I read this year and is full of insights. It is striking how arms smuggling and narco-trade (re)shapes the region’s political economy and Dr. Paliwal’s grasp of regional dynamics is on full display. See, for instance, his take on Bangladeshi politics (written well before Sheikh Hasina’s fall) —

“Hasina could well experience a groundswell of protests moving forward. The staggeringly low voter turnout in the 2024 general elections, and the need to jail nearly 20,000 BNP activists and leaders in the run-up to the elections, signals serious anti-incumbency. Even allies such as the Jatiya party are frustrated with political stifling.” [p. 322]

One of the key takeaways from the book? “Exclusionary nationalisms and illicit political economies create pressures that complicate the geopolitics of India’s near east” [p. 325].

- Dinsha Mistree

Research Fellow, Huntington Program on Strengthening US-India Relations at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University

Dr. Mistree suggested The Oxford Handbook of Indian Politics edited by Sumit Ganguly and Eswaran Sridharan.

- Milan Vaishnav

Director and Senior Fellow, South Asia Program, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and host of the ‘Grand Tamasha’ podcast

Dr. Vaishnav suggested ‘Divine Intervention? Religious Organizations and Public Service Delivery in India,’ by Kartikeya Batra and Avantika Prabhakar. He writes -

“Kartikeya Batra and Avantika Prabhakar have a fascinating working paper which looks at one of the many ways in which religion and politics in India are intertwined. Specifically, they look at deras in Punjab and their impact on the public provisioning of social welfare. They find that villages in which a dera is present see an increase in government services, especially health and education. The mechanism at work is also very interesting; they suggest that deras have informal financial arrangements with the state that end up supplementing government functions. Anyone who opens up a newspaper gets a sense of how politically important deras and their leaders are, but this paper actually documents the mechanisms through which this influence is wielded.”

Note: I want to highlight three of Dr. Vaishnav’s works from this year. He edited Institutional Roots of India’s Security Policy, a one-stop text to understand India’s myriad security institutions. I have a chapter (co-authored with Dr. Rudra Chaudhuri) on the Research & Analysis Wing (R&AW, India’s external intelligence agency) in this volume that may be of interest to readers. You can read more about the chapter here.

Dr. Vaishnav also co-authored a fascinating paper on the political preferences of Indian Americans (the second-largest immigrant group in the United States and an increasingly important political subset). Thirdly, his paper on what the 2024 national elections say about the Indian political landscape (co-authored with Caroline Mallory) is a must-read. While the results stunned many, the BJP’s dominance shouldn’t be underestimated. Dr. Vaishnav and Ms. Mallory write,

“While coalition governance has returned to New Delhi, the BJP retains a position of national strength. It not only has the largest clutch of Lok Sabha seats but also controls a near majority of the Rajya Sabha (with its allies), has gained ground in southern and eastern Indian states, and remains the central gravitational force of Indian politics.”

- Paul Staniland

Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago and non-resident scholar, South Asia Program, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Dr. Staniland picked Righteous Demagogues: Populist Politics in South Asia and Beyond by Adnan Naseemullah and Pradeep Chhibber.

- Richard Rossow

Senior Adviser and Chair on India and Emerging Asia Economics, Center for Strategic and International Studies

Note: I requested Mr. Rossow to highlight government documents/white papers as he does a superb job (a public service really) of flagging such reads on social media [check his LinkedIn and Twitter/X] and he recommended the following [I’ve quoted his entire list below] -

“Here are five long reads and one shorter one (Buddhism) that caught my eye this year. Cities, villages, climate, heat, electronics manufacturing, and Buddhism.

- “Report on Municipal Finances,” Reserve Bank of India, Nov 2024: The RBI’s bi-annual report on the state of city finances (read: autonomy) across India. Urbanization and the devolution of power to cities will be the biggest megatrend in India over the next two decades.

- “Two Hundred and Fifty-Thousand Democracies: A Review of Village Government in India,” The World Bank, June 2024: a great study of strengths and weaknesses (and history) of village rule in India.

- “Prioritizing Heat Mitigation Actions in Indian Cities,” World Bank, Oct 2024: India’s summers are only getting hotter. Many people have little means to escape the non-stop furnace during the summer. Warning tools help; also, greening cities. Also looks at 3-hr mid-day work break; cool roofs.

- “The Next Dalai Lama: Preparing for Reincarnation and Why It Matters to India,” Vijay Gokhale, Carnegie India, Nov 2024: India’s former foreign secretary and China expert provides a comprehensive look at the pending crisis of Tibetan Buddhism.

- “Climate Investment Funds (CIF) Renewable Energy Integration (REI) Program,” Ministry of Finance, Oct 2024: The Ministry of Finance releases a powerful overview of the improvements required to India’s power sector to meet the nation’s renewables targets. Storage, infrastructure upgrades, stakeholder adoption. Such reports are a dime a dozen… but this is from the Ministry of Finance, which has more authority on these matters than the line ministries.

- “Electronics: Powering India’s Participation in Global Value Chains,” NITI Aayog, Aug 2024: Manufacturing in India isn’t easy. There are very real reasons why India is still not a real competitor to China and other emerging Asian nations as a regional manufacturing hub. NITI takes an honest look at the underlying reasons. As with the climate report above, not surprising to experts. But coming from the government, touchy issues like tariffs make this an interesting read.”

- Shibani Mehta

Senior Research Analyst, Security Studies Program, Carnegie India

Ms. Mehta suggested three books: The Many Lives of Syeda X by Neha Dixit, The Lucky Ones by Zara Chowdhary, and Planning Democracy: How a Professor, an Institute and an Idea Shaped India by Nikhil Menon. She also recommended the historical TV drama ‘Freedom at Midnight’ directed by Nikkhil Advani.

- Shivshankar Menon

Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP), Visiting Professor at Ashoka University, Chair of the Ashoka Centre for China Studies, former National Security Advisor (NSA) to the Indian Prime Minister (2010-14) and former Foreign Secretary of India (2006-09).

Amb. Menon wrote back with the following suggestions -

“Two books that I really enjoyed reading in 2024 were:

• Stephen Kotkin: Stalin; Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928 (Penguin, 2014)

• Steve Tsang & Olivia Cheung: The Political Thought of Xi Jinping (Oxford, 2024).

I realise that these are not focussed on India or the subcontinent but both seemed to me models of their genre— biography and analysis of political thinking and its effects on political action— and therefore universally applicable.

If your readers are interested in something a little lighter I would recommend:

• Sohail Rekhy: Angria; A Historical Odyssey (Penguin, 2024)

• Kamini Dandapani: Rajaraja Chola; King of Kings (Aleph, 2022).”

Note: I want to flag an edited version of a lecture Amb. Menon delivered at the Takshashila Institution (in February 2024) which was published as a paper by CSEP in August 2024. The paper “evaluates how India could analyse significant geopolitical trends to develop scenarios for the future.” Amb. Menon minces no words noting that India’s “greatest strategic challenge is China” [p. 11]. He also helpfully tempers expectations, writing - “This could well be India’s moment, but a moment is only a moment, and we need policies for the long haul, not for tactical but strategic gains. Hence the utility of thinking about the future, for India’s transformation will not be achieved overnight” [p. 16].

1. I asked folks what did you read this year - doesn't have to be something that was published this year.