June Indian nonfiction: Six new titles that will take you closer to your reading goals

All information sourced from publishers.

Forwarded As Received: How Misinformation Turns Viral, Violent, and True, Saadia Azim

Misinformation has never felt truer than it does today. Claims that once invited examination and debate now float freely and settle into everyday conversation as facts. Repetition lends them authority; familiarity gives them legitimacy. In this quiet transformation, falsehood does not announce itself. It embeds, circulates, and endures.

This book examines how the seemingly harmless habit of forwarding messages has evolved into a powerful engine of distortion. What begins as an everyday digital reflex accumulates into an ecosystem where half-truths and manipulated narratives thrive, reshaping perception, deepening inequality, and normalising suspicion.

Grounded in the realities of the Global South, Forwarded as Received is an examination of our evolving information order – and of the life-altering choices we make, often unknowingly, with every forward.

Mixed Metaphors: The Art of Translation, Daisy Rockwell

Who is a translator?
What does it mean to be a translator?

Is she a musician interpreting a score?
Is he a conductor leading an orchestra?
Or a child building a Lego set?

What is the act of translation?

Is it making a patchwork quilt, bit by bit?
A monster?
A polygamous marriage?

Somersaulting through a curious, bewildering, often humorous set of metaphors, award-winning translator Daisy Rockwell navigates her quest to seek the perfect metaphor for the art of translation.

Mixed Metaphors is served as a series of puzzling questions with no easy answers. Yet, nestled in these pages is a profound philosophy of translation crafted by a translator and writer.

The book also features an assemblage of creative nonfiction, poems, and journal entries, alongside original, previously unpublished illustrations by Rockwell.

Chand Bibi: The Lives and Legends of a Warrior Queen, Sarah Waheed

In 1595, the Muslim warrior queen Chand Bibi of the Deccan sultanates defeated the most powerful forces of her time: Mughal imperial armies. Who was this queen? And what kind of world made her possible? In this, the first book about Chand Bibi, the author focuses on the inadequately studied subject of Muslim female power in premodern India.

The New Divide: Power, Control and the Cost of AI, Jibu Elias

Artificial intelligence has been affecting the way people think, work and create, and the questions that have arisen in its wake are as pressing as they are uncomfortable. Who benefits from this new technology? Who is left behind? And what happens when the tools we build begin to govern us?

In an age where humans are dazzled by machines that seem to think, Jibu Elias – researcher, writer and advisor on AI governance – peels back the glossy surface to reveal systems driven more by prediction than true intelligence; and a world where algorithms redesign economies, redraw social boundaries and challenge the very idea of human agency. Drawing on nearly a decade of experience across the Indian and the global AI governance landscape, Elias points squarely at the widening gaps between promises and reality: from mass job displacements and deepening biases embedded in AI systems to the rapid consolidation of power by tech giants shaping our future and the heavy environmental costs of unregulated innovation.

Moving beyond Silicon Valley optimism, The New Divide is a vital perspective from the Global South.

Guts, Glory and Empire: The Epic Story of Goans in Zanzibar, 1865–1910, Selma Carvalho

Zanzibar, situated off the coast of East Africa, was for long a junction for monsoon-driven sea routes connecting Africa, Europe and Asia. By the mid-19th century, it had risen to prominence as a busy, cosmopolitan trading post for cloves, ivory and, unfortunately, slaves. It became a beacon for missionaries, explorers, merchants, and a theatre of Europe’s imperial ambitions. It was at this time that Goans, who had long been travellers and traders to the East African coast, began settling in Zanzibar, flourishing under Sultan Barghash bin Said’s reign.

Among the early arrivals were CR Souza, DB Pereira and Brás Souza, who would all go on to become influential figures – ambitious, benevolent, but ultimately flawed characters. Their engagement with a host of lively per¬sonalities, including British arch-imperialists John Kirk and Gerald Portal, set in motion a compelling challenge to the empire’s authority over ordinary lives. Mistaken as “half-caste Portuguese”, they were at times favoured by Britain as law-abiding and industrious, and at other times dismissed as natives needing supervision, even as they began to assert tremendous agency over their own individual lives, gaining influence as physicians, musicians and interpreters to the sultan. Aware of their rights as Portuguese citizens, and making intelligent use of the privilege and protection extended to them by the sultanate, they pushed back against Britain’s erosion of their civil liberties.

In Guts, Glory and Empire, set against the backdrop of Europe’s ascendancy in Africa, Selma Carvalho brings us the story of this remarkable community and restores South Asian voices to Indian Ocean histories.

Dara Shukoh: The Faqir and the Throne of Thorns, Amit Ranjan

In Dara Shukoh, Amit Ranjan resurrects the remarkable life of Shah Jahan’s eldest son: heir to the Mughal throne, translator of the Upanishads, patron of the arts and one of the most intellectually ambitious figures of the 17th century.

Overshadowed for centuries by the reign of Aurangzeb, Dara has largely disappeared from mainstream historical memory. Through a richly layered narrative drawing from Mughal chronicles, Sufi traditions, Bhakti poetry and European travel accounts, Ranjan restores the prince to the centre of India’s cultural and political imagination.

At the heart of the book lies a compelling historical question: What might the subcontinent have become had Dara Shukoh, not Aurangzeb, inherited the Mughal empire?

A scholar of comparative religion and a devoted student of Sufism, Dara believed that spiritual truth transcended religious boundaries. He translated the Upanishads into Persian, engaged deeply with Hindu and Islamic philosophy, and sought what he called the meeting point of two oceans, an intellectual and spiritual synthesis between traditions.

But Dara Shukoh is also the story of political betrayal and imperial violence. Defeated by Aurangzeb in the brutal Mughal war of succession, Dara was paraded through Delhi in chains before being executed in 1659, a moment Ranjan presents as not merely a dynastic defeat, but the silencing of a cosmopolitan imagination.

Blending literary storytelling with historical scholarship, the book reimagines a lost India shaped by poetry, philosophy and intellectual openness.