In the Sundarbans, storms and cyclones have long forced families across the India-Bangladesh border to survive. In her new book, ‘The Undocumented: One Family’s Journey from Bangladesh to India’, journalist and author Nidhi Dugar Kundalia traces one such journey, that of Safrat and her two children, drawing on thirteen years of fieldwork in a Kolkata slum. On this episode, we talk to Nidhi about why people leave home, the perilous crossings into India, the trafficking networks, the lives of people in slums, and what it really means to live undocumented, from a hospital that won’t release a body without papers to a mother fighting to get her son into school.

References:

1. Nidhi Dugar Kundalia: Instagram, X, LinkedIn
2. The Undocumented: One Family’s Journey from Bangladesh to India by Nidhi Dugar Kundalia
3. Other books by the author: The Lost Generation: Chronicling India’s Dying Professions, White as Milk and Rice: Stories of India’s Isolated Tribes, 10 Indian Tribes and the Unique Lives They Lead
4. The Past is Beautiful: Virginia Woolf
5. How Delhi Police Sent Six Indians To a Bangladeshi Prison by The Telegraph India
6. ‘Disappeared’: In Bengal, Muslims picked up from homes in midnight raids, sent to detention centres by Rokibuz Zaman
7. Last hope: Family of Bangladeshi girl ‘shot by India’s BSF’ waits for justice from Supreme Court by Ariful Islam Kurigram
8. Home by Warsan Shire
9. Why border killing has not stopped by Jamal Uddin
10. How the Climate Crisis Is Impacting Bangladesh by Diego Rojas
11. New Town slum fire sparks political slugfest by The Statesman
12. Episode 9: Journalism, Narratives and Syeda X: In conversation with Neha Dixit

Women’s citizenship in India is a deeply contested subject. Even in the decades preceding independence, a generation of women leaders in India was closely engaging with the Indian state and society, negotiating ideas of citizenship and gender justice across various public spheres. These women leaders did not all share the same views. They were often in deep contention with one another over issues like women’s health, reservation, the rescue and repatriation of abducted women, social service and family planning.

South African Historian Annie Devenish closely examines these complex debates by studying the ideas and activism of leading figures within the All India Women’s Conference and the National Federation of Indian Women, and in India’s Constituent Assembly. Dive into this conversation to know more.

References:

1. Debating Women’s Citizenship in India, 1930–1960 by Annie Devenish
2. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
3. The Raj Quartet (four-volume novel sequence) by Paul Scott: The Jewel in the Crown, The Day of the Scorpion, The Towers of Silence, A Division of the Spoils
4. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
5. SEWA (Self-Employed Women’s Association) and Ela Bhatt
6. Sarojini Varadappan, Sarla Sharma, Vidya Munshi
7. Founding Mothers of the Indian Republic: Gender Politics of the Framing of the Constitution by Achyut Chetan
8. The Women’s Library at London School of Economics and Political Science
9. Hilda Seligman, Lady Dhanvanthi Rama Rau, Mridula Sarabhai, Muthulakshmi Reddi
10. Kerala Story by Sudipto Sen

Daisy Rockwell is an author, translator, and painter based in the United States, who translates from Hindi and Urdu into English, and has brought some of the most significant voices of South Asian literature to readers across the world. Her translation of Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand won the International Booker Prize in 2022, the first Hindi-language novel to receive that distinction.

In this episode, I am in conversation with Daisy to talk about her journey into Hindi and Urdu, the craft of literary translation, her first encounter with India, what artificial intelligence means for the future of the craft of translation, and much more. Dive into the episode to find out.

References:

1. Daisy Rockwell: Website, Instagram
2. Alice Sees Ghosts: A Novel by Daisy Rockwell
3. Works translated by Daisy Rockwell: Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree, Falling Walls by Upendranath Ashk, The Women’s Courtyard by Mastur Khadija, Tamas by Bhisham Sahni
4. Yashpal: This Is Not That Dawn: Jhootha Sach, Dada Comrade
5. Speaking of Siva by A.K. Ramanujan
6. Lessons learned: Susanne and Lloyd Rudolph, in memoriam

In the long history of post-Independence India, the woman voter was invisible, rarely spoken about, and almost never listened to. But today, something has changed. Women are voting in greater numbers than ever before, making independent choices and holding politicians accountable. Journalist Ruhi Tewari draws on two decades of travelling across various states in India, covering elections, to trace the emergence of this 'Mahila voter'. She explores how women vote, and why. Tune in to the episode to find out more.

References:

1. Ruhi Tewari: Instagram, X, LinkedIn
2. Book: What Women Want: Understanding The Female Voter in Modern India by Ruhi Tewari

What does it mean to recover the life of a woman who called herself a ‘humble housewife tied to mundane work’? In this episode, I am in conversation with Kalpana Karunakaran to discuss her book, ‘A Woman of No Consequence: Memory, Letters and Resistance in Madras’, a remarkable excavation of the life of Pankajam, a woman who defies easy categorisation.

Pankajam was a voracious reader who sought freedom from a fractured relationship with her husband. Her memories are vivid and layered, marked by a deep love for children, a spirit of travel, friendships forged across distances, and an attentiveness to nature, birds, and animals. Through it all, she reinvented motherhood entirely on her own terms. We explore why it matters to study a woman like Pankajam, someone who does not fit neatly into the conventional subject of feminist discourse and what her life reveals about resistance, memory, and selfhood. We also talk with Kalpana about her own mother, Mythily Sivaraman, a well-known Indian women’s rights activist.

References:

1. Kalpana Karunakaran: Profile, Instagram
2. Book: A Woman of No Consequence: Memory, Letters and Resistance in Madras by Kalpana Karunakaran
3. Tamil Nadu Science Forum
4. Mythily Sivaraman, Fragments of a Life: A Family Archive by Mythily Sivaraman (Life story of Subbalakshmi)
5. Indian Association of Women’s Studies, Vina Mazumdar
6. Jane Austen, Louisa May Alcott (Little Women), Anton Chekhov, Alexander Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy, Katha Prize Stories
7. Women’s India Association, All India Women’s Conference
8. Sarda Act: Child Marriage Restraint Act, 1929
9. Katherine Mayo and her book, Mother India (1927)
10. Mary Rajamani, Valentina Tereshkova

In this episode of Navigating India, released on March 22nd, 2026, exactly six years after India observed the Janta Curfew, an initiative by the Government of India to combat COVID, we are joined by journalist Jyoti Yadav to discuss her book 'Faith and Fury: Covid Dispatches from India's Hinterlands'. While much of India locked itself indoors during the pandemic, she set out from Delhi to the rural heartlands of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, documenting the hardships faced by migrant workers, the shortage of oxygen cylinders, the undercounting of deaths, children orphaned by the virus, and the collapse of the state's health infrastructure. Her book is an important record of India's pandemic years, raising serious questions that the nation has been too eager to forget, at a time when the media has largely written Covid off as a closed chapter.

References

1. Jyoti Yadav: Website, X, LinkedIn
2. Book: Faith and Fury: COVID Dispatches from India’s Hinterland by Jyoti Yadav