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Manjula Narayan picks her favourite reads of 2025
Featuring, among others, memoirs, the peculiarities of the Indian Internet, a biography of a commercial Hindi film director, and a study of the religious movements of Punjab, Haryana and Himachal, this is an entirely subjective list of the top 10 reads of the year
From insightful explorations of the peculiarities of the Indian Internet in Anurag Minus Verma’s The Great Indian Brainrot to Rudraneil Sengupta’s The Beast Within, a police procedural set in the National Capital Region, there were many superb reads across categories this year. Which is why I’m not even attempting to pick a single favourite book of 2025.
Ghee Bowman’s The Great Epinal Escape about hundreds of soldiers of the British Indian Army breaking out of a prison camp in France, dodging the German army, and trudging 100 km to freedom in Switzerland, recovers a brilliant shard of history. “It’s really interesting for me as a historian to ask why is it that this particular event has been pretty much forgotten until now,” the author said on the Books & Authors podcast.
Then, there is Santosh K Singh’s The Deras; Culture, Diversity and Politics on the varied character, caste and class affiliations of the deras of Punjab, Haryana and Himachal. The book also looks at the Ad-Dharmis, the Ravidassias, the connections to the Ghadar movement and to Ambedkarite thought, and presents the many links between the local and the global in this context.
Suraj Milind Yengde’s Caste; A Global Story touches on everything from Dalit activism abroad, to UK’s Punjabi Buddhists, the triple diasporas of Fijian Dalits, and more. “There’s no blanket statement that caste the way it operates in India operates the same way in Trinidad, US, UK... Every situation is different,” the author says.
As a fangirl of the Hindi cinema of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s that perfected the art of using songs as storytelling devices, I was struck by Amborish Roychoudhury’s Raj Khosla; The Authorized Biography.
Rahul Pandita’s debut novel, Our Friends in Good Houses, a work of autofiction, stood out for its portrayal of a woman Naxal.
2025 was definitely the year of the memoir.They Will Shoot You, Madam, Harinder Baweja’s recollection of her career as a journalist covering conflict in Punjab, Kashmir and even Afghanistan takes the reader back to difficult episodes in the history of the nation and shows how tenuous things continue to be in some cases.
Manish Gaekwad’s Nautch Boy; A Memoir of My Life in the Kothas that picked up where his 2023 memoir of his mother, The Last Courtesan, left off, is simultaneously joyful and affecting, especially in its portrayal of a queer childhood split between the relative freedom of the kothas and a buttoned-down boarding school in the hills.
And then there is Andaleeb Wajid’s moving Learning to Make Tea for One, a book on faith, family and coming to grips with the grief of losing both her mother-in-law and her husband to COVID within days of each other. “I’d never attempted a memoir. For me, writing something so personal and putting it out there for the world to see was difficult because I was reliving those days. But that’s when I realised, I don’t want to forget those days. A lot of people want to move past grief. You want things to be normal. But there is no normal after this. This is the new normal and I have to learn to live with it,” Wajid said on the podcast.
These then are my top 10 reads of 2025.
