REVIEWING THE BOOKS read during the year is about cultivating a reflective space from which to make sense of the tumultuous world we live in. When events unfold with such rapid succession, there is scarcely a space to reflect on the meaning of what has gone by. Literature could be a way through which we sift the ephemeral from the more meaningful and find a way to engage with the world anew. Reviewing literature, both fiction and nonfiction, that engages with the complexities of law, justice and socio-political transformations in India and globally also allows an opportunity to thread together our pasts - of injustices and buried histories - and our many futures more intelligibly.
This year, I was reminded again as to why Gauri Lankesh matters so much, as to how we must pay attention to what is happening in Kashmir post abrogation of Article 370 and what the imaginative frontiers of the new stage of viro-capitalism may be. I was also drawn into a deeper understanding of how colonialism, racism and human rights came together in the Tokyo Trial, the battle for justice in Chile post Pinochet and the plural roots of Kannada culture.
I also found myself engaging with an alternative imagination of Indian Constitutionalism, the irreligious futures imagined by Periyar and how art, love and dispossession collided in Palestine.
