The Smart and The Dumb (Rs 599, Penguin) by Vishal Vasanthakumar is an analysis of how caste, class and gender still determine access to education in India, a country that boasts of private schools, colleges and coaching centres with turnovers in hundreds of crores, but fails to reach a majority of its children and young adults. Using data, interviews with students and reporting trips, it seeks to personalise a longstanding policymaking dilemma of independent India — how to use education to transform lives. How Long Can the Moon Be Caged? (Rs 599, Westland) by Suchitra Vijayan and Francesca Recchia is an account of many prisoners, activists, artists and academics who have been persecuted by the government in cases related to the 2018 Bhima Koregaon violence and the 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act protests, as well as those who have been branded ‘Maoist’ or ‘Naxalite’ terrorists despite internationally acclaimed track records of fighting for the rights of Dalits, Adivasis and Muslims in India. Green and Saffron (Rs 795, Orient Blackswan) by Mukul Sharma explores how Hindutva and environmentalism are not distant from each other in today’s India, wherein religion and policymaking often intermingle. Cases which are studied in this revised edition of the 2011 work include activist Anna Hazare’s efforts to revive the soil cover of a Pune village, environmentalist Sunderlal Bahuguna’s opposition to one of the world’s tallest dams in Uttarakhand, and how NGOs worked to check environmental damage in Vrindavan. Rosarita (Rs 499, Pan Macmillan) by Anita Desai is the first book in over a decade by the thrice-Booker-shortlisted writer, about a woman, Bonita, determined to forge her own path but finding it not what she expected. She has come far away from her home in India to Mexico, where a woman recognises her as resembling her (provincial) mother, who apparently made the same trip decades ago as a painter. Incredulous but intrigued, Bonita asks more questions and the tale begins. A Woman on a Suitcase (Rs 399, Penguin) by Shazaf Fatima Haider is the fourth novel by the Pakistani writer, about a newly married woman who is fed up of being repeatedly thrown out of her house by an abusive husband. She decides to leave him and start a journey that takes her from Karachi to London and back, one narrated with Haider’s signature styling of middle-class South-Asian homes.
