December nonfiction: Say goodbye to 2025 with these six new books on India and Indians

All information sourced from publishers.

Speaking of History: Conversations about India’s Past and Present, Romila Thapar and Namit Arora

Speaking of History brings India’s past into sharp, urgent focus. In these wide-ranging conversations, Romila Thapar, the distinguished historian, joins Namit Arora, writer and social critic, to explore how history is written, remembered and fought over.

Together, they pull back the curtain on the historian’s craft: how evidence is weighed, how interpretations are made, and why the past has become a battleground of politics and identity. From caste and gender to religion, mythology and nationalism, they revisit much contested terrain and ask the vital questions – what can we really know about our past, and why does it matter so much today?

The result is both erudite and refreshingly accessible: a book that challenges distortion and mythmaking, while celebrating history as an act of curiosity, argument and critical inquiry. At a time when the discipline is under siege, Speaking of History is both a defence of rigorous scholarship and a lively reminder that to engage with history in all its complexity is to undertake a profound journey – an inquiry not just into the past, but into ourselves.

The Social Life of Trains: A Journey, Amitava Kumar

The history of Indian trains is older than India itself. For over 150 years, the train has been part of the lives of most Indians. Today, Indian Railways transports hundreds of crores of passengers, about five times the current population of India. And, the railway lines that criss-cross the country, and are even longer than our majestic rivers, bind the landscape into a whole and give it a sense of a nation.

To explore just how trains in India have seeped into the national psyche, and to explore the gigantic enterprise that is Indian Railways, acclaimed writer Amitava Kumar took several journeys on some of the country’s celebrated trains, from the Himsagar Express, which traverses one of the world’s longest rail routes, a distance of 2,335 miles, from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, to the legendary Darjeeling mountain railway that has been praised in movies, literature, and songs. He then goes into the history of Indian trains, extols the magic of train travel, and explains how the importance of the railways will only grow as more and more Indians use a variety of trains to travel out of (and between) their villages, hometowns, and cities to various destinations in pursuit of work and leisure activities.

Mumbai: A Million Islands, Sidharth Bhatia

Since the East India Company merged seven islands into Bombay (now Mumbai), change has been constant – but now it is used as a weapon for displacement, disguised as development. Slums are erased overnight to make way for luxury towers priced in tens of crores. The working class is pushed to the margins-literally-and into distant housing projects with no infrastructure, transport or sanitation. Entire communities are uprooted while a new Mumbai is built for the privileged few, behind closed gates, inside glass walls.

Sidharth Bhatia’s Mumbai: A Million Islands is a piercing look at a city in the throes of relentless transformation. What is vanishing is not just space, but memory, history and the very fabric of a living city. Mumbai’s famed spirit of survival is being tested like never before. Where the original seven islands had symbolised a synergy, today they’re multiplying as fractures – social, spatial and economic – splitting the city into a million islands, each more isolated than the other.

Chitrakar, Benode Behari Mukherjee, translated from the Bengali by KG Subramanyan

Benode Behari Mukherjee (1904–1980) was one of the most influential and highly regarded artists in the history of modern Indian art. Chitrakar brings together four broadly autobiographical pieces written by Benode Behari after he lost his eyesight in the summer of 1957. “The Artist” is a selective reminiscence recapturing various pictures from the years of his childhood, apprenticeship and maturity, up to the time he became blind. “Master of the Household” is a candid and complex fictionalised account of his struggle to come to terms with his blindness and continue to be creative. “The Creator” is a simple, though telling, parable on the vanity of inordinate ambition. And “Art Quest” is an informal causerie that outlines his vision on art, its basic elements and their differences in range and reference.

In the sensitive and empathetic hands of KG Subramanyan, once his student and later himself a major figure in the Indian art scene, this translation, appearing for the first time in English, is a precious and timeless document.

In the Beginning there was Bombay Duck: A Food History of Mumbai, Pronoti Datta

From the Kolis, who have been fishing in the city’s waters since much before recorded history, and early settlers such as the Pathare Prabhus, to the people who poured into the developing city in the centuries of British rule and those, like the Sindhis, who found a safe haven here during Partition, this is the first truly comprehensive food history of India’s great metropolis.

The city’s nativists like to champion what they consider “original cultures”. But originality resides in the Mumbaikar’s inventive impulse, a quality encapsulated in the nativist’s favourite food, the vada pao: Were it not for the Portuguese, who transported the potato or batata to Bombay, and taught the Goans the art of baking bread, or pao, the vada pao may never have been conceived!

Celebrating this rich diversity of cultures and cuisines, this book covers migrants from the Kanara coast, who gave the city the Udipi restaurant; Parsis, who introduced diners to Persian and Gujarati-inflected dishes, and their Irani brethren, who served this food in their iconic cafes; and the myriad Muslim communities that made the old neighbourhood of Bhendi Bazaar a gastronome’s place of pilgrimage.

Tatyasaheb: The Story of a Bombay Entrepreneur, Tejaswini Apte-Rahm

Vaman Shridhar Apte arrived in Bombay at the end of the 19th century and began his career as an assistant to a textile merchant in Mulji Jetha Market. Within a few decades, he had risen to become one of the wealthiest men in the city, residing in a sea-facing mansion on a sprawling estate on the posh Peddar Road. Known to all as Tatyasaheb, Apte hailed from an orthodox Kokanastha Brahmin family – an unlikely background for someone who would find such remarkable success in the world of business.

Tatyasaheb: The Story of a Bombay Entrepreneur presents the life and times of Tatyasaheb (1875–1952). It charts his life from his origins in Girgaon, where he lived in the cramped quarters of Khatryachi Chawl, to his rising fortunes in the Gujarati bastion of MJ Market as the sole selling agent for Kohinoor Mills textiles. It traces his tumultuous relationship with Dadasaheb Phalke during his unexpected career as a silent film producer, when he produced over a hundred feature films, and his further success as a leading industrialist with the founding of the Phaltan Sugar Works.

Through it all, Tatyasahe’s immense grit, determination and his knack for being part of three key sunrise industries of the Bombay Presidency – textile, film and sugar – are a testament to his keen business sense and stature as one of the business pioneers of Bombay.

This book is also the story of Tatyasaheb’s family – a journey through the social customs and daily rituals of a way of life that has passed into history. No less is it the story of how Bombay became a wealth-generating dynamo by nurturing and, in turn, being enriched by the risk-takers and entrepreneurs who made the city into the business hub of today.