April nonfiction: Six new books that bring a reality check from India’s newsrooms to farmlands

All information sourced from publishers.

The Good Reporter: A Memoir of Journalism in the 21st Century, Disha Mullick with Geeta Devi, Harshita Verma, Kavita Bundelkhandi, and Lakshmi Sharma

In 2002, a group of women from a rocky, feudal belt in Uttar Pradesh made an unusual provocation: that despite histories of exclusion from education, uneven levels of literacy, training in fields, brick kilns and forests, they would publish a local newspaper. It would be sold on the newsstands of Bundelkhandi towns and villages.

Over the last 25 years, this newspaper – Khabar Lahariya – seeped slowly into other districts, states and mediums. It grappled, as media across the country and the world has, with the digital transformation of our lives. It became the first hyperlocal digital news channel entirely run by women.

In The Good Reporter, through a slow and embodied process of history-telling, with layered and contradictory memories, this story is turned inside out.

Ten women take the pen to interrogate and then shape a portrait-in-progress of complex, flawed, tenacious journalists and the continuing collateral damage of radical acts.

This is a story of an ever-changing rural India, and of the price we pay for chafing against the norms that still hold our worlds in place.

Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya: Beloved of God, Raziuddin Aquil

Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya (1238–1325), “Beloved of God”, is one of the most revered Sufi saints of India and a defining figure of the Chishti tradition. Born in Badaun, Uttar Pradesh, he later moved to Delhi, where he lived, taught and performed acts of service.

Following in the footsteps of his Sufi predecessors, Nizamuddin welcomed followers of all religions to his jama’atkhaana. He preached that the path to God was through service to humanity and loving all His creations. Nizamuddin’s teachings continue to resonate and his dargah, located in the eponymous Delhi neighbourhood, is thronged by devotees of all faiths even today.

Exploring Nizamuddin’s reflections on worship, love for God, music, poetry and surrender to the Supreme, this book situates his spiritual teachings within the moral and intellectual currents of 13th- and 14th-century Delhi. Through accounts of miracles, everyday encounters, acts of compassion and his views on sama (musical assemblies), faqiri (poverty) and the Sufi tariqat (path), it examines how Sufi thought was lived and practised by the saint and his followers. Historian and Sufi scholar Raziuddin Aquil draws on early biographies and hagiographies written by the saint’s disciples, blending philosophy, history and anecdotes to trace the enduring legacy of a saint whose beliefs continue to shape spiritual life in the subcontinent.

Water, Nature, Progress: Solutions for a New India, Arunabha Ghosh, Richard Damania and Parameswaran Iyer

Indians have a special relationship with water, from holy rivers to celebrations on the onset of the monsoon. Yet the world’s most populous country – India has 18% of the global population – has only 4% of the world’s available freshwater resources.

As the ultimate resource, the impact of water on public health, energy, agriculture, urbanisation, infrastructure, manufacturing and human development is pervasive, making water resource management vital to the country's future. But we have failed to pay it strategic attention. In an increasingly warming world, water may yet become India's weakest link. The issues at hand are complicated, from the need for equity between the agricultural, industrial and commercial sectors and the impact of unsustainable water management to increased urbanisation and climate change. Governed differently, though, water could become a driver of sustainable economic transformation.

Based on in-depth research, exhaustive data and real-world case studies, Water, Nature, Progress presents a blueprint for action through policy reform, public finance, private investment and behavioural change, charting the way forward.

A Touch of Genius: The Wisdom of India’s Nobel Laureates, edited by Rudrangshu Mukherjee

This book brings together, for the very first time, the work of all Indian (Indian citizens, naturalised Indians, and erstwhile citizens of independent India) winners of the Nobel Prize – Rabindranath Tagore (1913), CV Raman (1930), Har Gobind Khorana (1968), Mother Teresa (1979), Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1983), Amartya Sen (1998), Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (2009), Kailash Satyarthi (2014), and Abhijit V Banerjee (2019).

The book, which contains over 70 essays, stories, poems, songs, and prayers, is divided into ten sections – Memoir, Literature, Science, Economics, Religion and Philosophy, Aesthetics, Inequality and Injustice, Politics, India, and Nobel Lectures. Each of the sections contains illuminating chapters that provide the reader with extraordinary insights into the human condition, literature, art, science, religion, philosophy, politics, human rights, economics, and the world we live in.

Wild Wild East: Exiled Americans, Enslaved Indians and the Systemic Abuse of the H-1B Visa Programme, Tanul Thakur

This is the story of three men – Kumar Pandruvada, Virgil Bierschwale and Manu Mitra – ravaged by the vagaries of the H-1B visa programme. It is also the story of two nations, of transcontinental human trafficking, of corporate and immigration fraud, of wage violations so enormous that their official amount over the last two decades reaches at least $121.48 million. The real figure must be 100 times more, at a conservative estimate.

Wild Wild East unveils a scam that affects millions of American and Indian workers. A scam sustained and abetted – directly or indirectly – by thousands of firms, American politicians, think tanks, mainstream media, accrediting organisations and universities. Tanul Thakur, an ex-H-1B worker, spent eight years investigating byzantine connections to unearth a story of dizzying depth and shocking scope. This exposé – spanning Big Tech giants, outsourcing behemoths, mom-and-pop body shops, educational consultancies, visa mills and federal agencies – dismantles long-held myths about the Indian IT boom and American exceptionalism. It spotlights survivors, dissects data, probes history, parses court records and questions the law- revealing the inherent rot in the H-1B programme and the Trump administration’s attack on the labour movement. Shunning simplistic notions underpinning high-skilled immigration, which frame migrant and domestic workers as adversaries, this book has the mind of a muckraker and the heart of a novel.

Politics, Policy, and Predictions: Views from the Front Row of Parliament, Derek O’Brien

How have the inner workings and processes of Parliament changed?

In what ways have dissent and discussion within Parliament been “muzzled”?

How have lofty political promises converted to law?

Parliamentarian O’Brien follows in the footsteps of the argumentative Indian to interrogate the false media narratives and power politics rampant in the country. His astute observations, backed by thorough research and statistics, present not only a history of one of the most sacred institutions in India, but also trace a fact-for-fact erosion of that status in the last decade.