Reading against the times in 2025: Arvind Narrain’s book recommendations on law, culture and resistance - Part I
Legal scholar Arvind Narrain reviews ten books he read over last year that engage with the complex truths of law and political transformations - from a post-370 Kashmir to an alternative thinking on the Indian Constitution.
Arvind Narrain
Published on: 12 January 2026, 10:59 am
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.
I am on the Hit List: Murder and Myth-making in South India, Rollo Romig (Context, 2024)
American journalist Rollo Romig has penned an evocative and tender tribute to Gauri Lankesh, bringing to a larger public the reasons why she was so loved and so hated at the same time. It is also a portrayal of a country going through a very difficult time as seen through the lens of the murders of writers, activists, scholars and intellectuals.
The assassination of journalist and activist Gauri Lankesh followed the assassinations of anti-superstition activist Narendra Dabholkar, communist leader Govind Pansare, and M.M. Kalburgi, a scholar of Kannada literature.
As per the chargesheet filed by the Karnataka SIT in Gauri’s assassination, the killing was undertaken by people associated with the Hindu Jagran Vedike, an offshoot of the Sanatan Sanstha. The chargesheet also notes that the killings were inspired by the ideology of the Sanathan Sanstha which is manifested in a book titled ‘Kshatradharma Sadhana’. The SIT investigation through ballistic testing is able to show that the same gun was used to kill Pansare, Kalburgi and Gauri. A second gun which was used against Pansare was the one which was used against Dabholkar.
The killings were not meant to stop with Gauri. The other figures on the hit list who followed were K.S Bhagwan and Girish Karnad. Thankfully the arrests were made and the spate of killings stopped. Of course the question remains as to why the Maharashtra police were singularly unsuccessful in their investigation. It was the criminal incompetence of the Maharashtra police’s investigation into Dabholkar’s killing which resulted in Pansare’s killing and the consequent murders of Kalburgi and Gauri. On this point, the Karnataka Police SIT needs to be congratulated on a job well done. The task of justice is now left to the criminal courts.
