The best books on South Asian history and culture that draw upon the ordinary lives and unheard perspectives

Reading Guha was an eye-opening experience for me for at least two reasons. One, he was the founding figure of subaltern historiography; and two, abandoning the colonial knowledge project, he introduced a whole new horizon of South Asian studies to his readers. First by acknowledging and then by understanding the consciousness and politics of the colonial marginal, Guha explored peasant insurgency in a new light.

In his battle against colonialist and nationalist historiographies, Guha also distanced himself from his Marxist colleagues in history. 

Willem van Schendel is one of those first few names who are the authority on Bengal Borderland. Schendel's interest in the Bengal Borderland and Bangladesh has been persistent for decades.

This particular volume is significant because the author focused on the complex and intertwined relationship between border-making in the region and the historical perpetuation of 1947. The book helps one to see how the Partition, far from being an event from the past, has yet been unfolding in the lands and lives of people living there. I consider it to be an intervention of both Partition studies and Borderland studies.

A historian by training, Schendel has taken his methodological venture into the realm of anthropology, and his empirical research reciprocated the political history with a rich social corpus.

This book by Joya Chatterji is a path-breaking one, as it posed a challenge against the hegemonic narratives dominant in the 1947 Partition studies to date.

Before Chatterji's work, Partition studies largely agreed upon the fact that apart from the British, the only home-grown villain behind the communal plot of Partition was the Muslim League and its leadership. Scholars in the field also agreed that the Indian National Congress was a secular platform.

Chatterji, however, argues that in the case of Bengal, the upper-class Hindu Bhadraloks were against the Partition in 1905. However, this same section of people in 1947 went for Partition along the communal line. And Congress, besides Hindu Mahasabha, had taken up communal politics.

This book is probably among the first ones written by a Pakistani author on the history of the 1971 war, aka Liberation War of Bangladesh, which thrilled me as a reader. It challenges not only the statist-nationalist accounts of Pakistan but those from India and Bangladesh as well.

Anam, the author, accomplished commendable work by talking to people across the cartographies and bringing up diverse and contradictory perspectives about the pretexts and events of 1971-related politics. While after all these years, both the state and society of Pakistan and Bangladesh remained taboo to each other, such a venture appears to be the silver lining of knowledge sharing between the entities in the two territories.

Unsettling for the conformists, nationalists, and statists, this piece of work is a must-read for everyone interested in the region.

Delwar Hussein, an anthropologist, conducted his research along the north-eastern borderline of Bangladesh. He has been fascinating in depicting the transformation of the borderland from a site of evolving nation-states to the catchment area of cross-border neoliberal capitalism.

Hussein crafted the minute details of how the cement factory had changed the communities, lives, and livelihoods at that margin. The marginality of the Borderlanders is central in this work; however, as often, Borderland studies surprise us, this book also talks about opportunities and hopes. It would enable its readers to look into the postcolonial nation-states with an unorthodox approach.