Reading against the times in 2025: Arvind Narrain's book recommendations on law, culture and resistance - Part II
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: 22 January 2026, 09:09 am
IN THE FIRST PART of this two-part series, I explored books that reminded me why Gauri Lankesh matters, what is happening in Kashmir post-abrogation of Article 370, the imaginative frontiers of viro-capitalism, how colonialism, racism and human rights came together in the Tokyo Trial and an alternative imagination of Indian Constitutionalism.
In this concluding piece, I delve into how art, love and dispossession collide in Palestine, the battle for justice in Chile post-Pinochet, the plural roots of Kannada culture and the irreligious futures imagined by Periyar.
6. Enter Ghost, Isabella Hammad (Jonathan Cape, 2023)
This is the story of the performance of Hamlet in the occupied West Bank by a troupe of Arab Israelis in which the protagonist, Sonia Nasir, is an actor who is a UK citizen but of Palestinian origin. Part of the narrative is how Sonia gets slowly involved in the play directed by Mariam, who is an Israeli citizen of Palestinian origin.
The play is set against the backdrop of Palestine which is a "tiny place" that "occupies such a large space in the global mind." For the protagonist who returns to Palestine to visit her sister, Palestine is an ever-present reality in spite of living in the UK. As she puts it, "even if I cannot live in it, my soul will reawaken if there is a Palestinian State."
The history of Palestine, from the Nakba to the daily protests in the West Bank to the restrictions on movement in the West Bank, along with the stories of those who protest, those who collaborate and those who choose to leave the country, forms the backdrop to the performance of the play, giving Hamlet a particular Palestinian resonance.
What does it mean to perform Hamlet in the West Bank against this backdrop? While the book is about these complicated histories, it is also about questions of the meaning of art, love, sex and marriage on which there are several acute and moving observations.
What does art mean in the context of a suppressed people? As Mariam puts it, "when you read a novel about the occupation, and feel understood, or watch a film and feel seen, your anger like a wound is dressed for a brief time… you might feel a flowering in the chest at this sight of your community's resistance embalmed in art, beauty created out of despair." Does creating art out of dispossession only mean that the suffering is relieved temporarily and "perhaps our Hamlet would be just another version of the narcotic…?"
However, the play is not easy to perform in the West Bank – from challenges of securing funding, the hours spent getting through checkposts, to the search for a venue, to Israel's efforts to not allow the play to be performed, to Israeli soldiers intimidating the audience during the performance of the play. To do a play in the West Bank was to "throw our efforts into the audience and leave us cowering before the faceless gods of Fate and State."
Sonia's acting as Gertrude is interspersed with her thoughts on her failed marriage to Marco, a writer in London. Her marriage collapses as her attraction to Marco “shut off like a tap. I did not like his smell, and when he touched me, which was rare, I felt a cat's repulsion." There is a brief affair with one of the Palestinian actors and one senses Sonia's need for connection and the inability of sex to fully provide that form of human connection. Alcohol is a stimulant which lubricates this human connection or as Sonia describes it, "alcohol was clinging delicately to the inside of my head, trimming my awareness of myself and my surroundings."
Is the connection Sonia craves to be satisfied by a relationship, or by her work as an actor, or by her increasingly satisfying connection to both art and politics in Palestine?
