South Asian Heritage Month 2023 reading list - Manchester University Press

South Asian Heritage Month (SAHM) first took place in 2018, and is now held annually to honour, recognise, and appreciate South Asian histories, communities, and culture, as well as to understand the rich cultural legacy of South Asian countries. Moreover, it celebrates the diverse heritage and cultures that continue to link the UK with South Asia.

The month begins on 18th July, the date that the Indian Independence Act 1947 gained royal assent from King George VI, and ends on the 17th August, the date that the Radcliffe Line was published in 1947, which finally set out where the border between India, West Pakistan and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) would be.

We’ve put together this reading list of titles with links to South Asia, from politics and history to literature and culture. Subscribe to our newsletter to get 30% off all these titles (form below).

Find out more about how to get involved in SAHM here.

B. R. Ambedkar

Shashi Tharoor

A short, digestible biography of this important Indian statesman, whose compassion and devotion to public standards should serve as a model for the politicians of our day.

British Bangladeshi Muslims in the East End

Fatima Rajina

This book delves into an in-depth discussion around dress and languages and how they have shaped the changes in the British Bangladeshi Muslim community in the East End of London.

Resistance and its discontents in South Asian women's fiction

Maryam Mirza

Resistance and its discontents in South Asian women's fiction examines the literary representation of a fascinating range of resistances enacted in response to various forms of oppression, and addresses the expectations, contradictions, anxieties and even inaction that resistance can generate, particularly for women.

Rethinking untouchability

Jesús F. Cháirez-Garza

This book explores the political thought of B.R. Ambedkar, one of the most important thinkers of modern India. Ambedkar's ideas transformed untouchability, often considered a millenary religious issue, into a political problem by linking it to larger ideas in the twentieth century such as liberty, slavery, race, and the creation of Pakistan.

Pluriversal sovereignty and the state

Ajay Parasram

This book explains how the processes of 'total territorial rule' at the core of the modern international system became normalised in Ceylon (Sri Lanka). It develops a decolonial framework informed by a 'pluriverse' of multiple ontologies of sovereignty to argue that the state itself is an outcome of imperial globalisation.

Monarchies and decolonisation in Asia

Robert Aldrich, Cindy McCreery

Provides new perspectives on the role of European colonial monarchies, and the monarchies of Asia, in the late colonial period, during the process of decolonisation, and in its aftermath.

The future of U.S.-India security cooperation

Sumit Ganguly, M. Chris Mason

This book provides an analytical overview of the state of the US-India strategic partnership from the U.S. and Indian perspectives.

Productive failure

Alpesh Kantilal Patel

This monograph provides novel methods for writing transnational South Asian art history outside of genealogy.

The United States in the Indo-Pacific

Oliver Turner, Inderjeet Parmar

This edited volume examines the legacies former US President Barack Obama leaves across Asia and the Pacific, as well as the endurance of, and prospects for, those legacies two years into the Presidency of Donald Trump.

Worlding the south

Sarah Comyn, Porscha Fermanis

Prioritising south-south networks and relations, this collection brings together for the first time literary studies of British colonies in nineteenth-century Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, South America, Southeast Asia, and the South Pacific Islands. It argues for the importance of a new literary history of the southern colonies that accounts for Indigenous, diasporic, and southern perspectives.

South Asians and the shaping of Britain, 1870-1950

Ruvani Ranasinha, Rehana Ahmed, Sumita Mukherjee, Florian Stadtler

The first anthology of primary material interdisciplinary study of the history of the South Asian presence in Britain over the period 1870-1950, it selects a wide range of official and non-official archival sources. and identifies four key areas of South Asian impact - minority rights, war, culture and reception, and representation.

Tea and empire

Angela McCarthy, T Devine

This book brings to life for the first time the remarkable story of James Taylor, 'father of the Ceylon tea enterprise' in the nineteenth century, and examines the dark side of planting life including violence and conflict, oppression and despair.

Enduring violence

Rebecca Walker

This book provides a rich ethnography of how Tamil-speaking communities in Batticaloa live through and make sense of a violence that shapes everyday life itself.

South Asia from the margins

Biswamoy Pati

Looks at the diversities of South Asian social History, focusing on Orissa. Examines the environment; health and medicine; conversion (in Hinduism); popular movements; social history of princely states; connections between the marginal social groups and nationalism; decolonisation; patriarchy; and gender-related violence.

Islam and identity politics among British-Bangladeshis

Ali Riaz

The first book-length study to examine identity politics among the Bangladeshi diaspora delves into the micro-level dynamics, the internal and external factors and the role of the state and locates these within the broad framework of Muslim identity and Islamism, citizenship and the future of multiculturalism in Europe.

Indian foreign policy

Harsh Pant

As India has risen economically and militarily in recent years, its political influence on the global stage has also seen a commensurate increase. From the peripheries of international affairs, India...

Borders and conflict in South Asia

Lucy Chester

Borders and conflict in South Asia is the first full-length study of the 1947 drawing of the Indo-Pakistani boundary in Punjab. Using the Radcliffe commission as a window onto the decolonisation and...

New international politics of South Asia

Vernon Hewitt

Fully revised and updated from the 1992 edition. First edition well reviewed.. Relatively little accessible literature in the area.

Cookies