Best of 2025: Indian Writing

Team Kitaab shares a list of Best of 2025 featuring Indian Writers.

Indian writing in 2025 reveals a quiet but insistent turn towards the specificity of place, language, and lived experience. Across fiction and non-fiction, writers engage less with sweeping national narratives and more with the textures of everyday life: regional histories, marginal identities, ethical memory, and the slow work of bearing witness.

This list is shaped by an interest in such attentiveness. It brings together books that foreground craft, translation, and intellectual risk, reflecting a year in which Indian writing continued to expand its formal and political possibilities. It reflects an attempt to read Indian writing in 2025 through attention rather than scale, privileging books that engage closely with lived experience, regional language traditions, and ethical questions of power.

Editor’s Note: This list does not aim to be exhaustive, but representative of a year in which Indian writing showed renewed attentiveness to translation, marginal histories, and formal restraint.

This year-end portfolio brings together three curated reading lists published over consecutive days, reflecting distinct but interconnected literary geographies. These selections privilege attentiveness, translation, and critical engagement, and mark Kitaab’s first sustained experiment with list-making as editorial practice.

Conceived as an editorial experiment, it reflects our commitment to close reading, regional breadth, and critical engagement, rather than rankings or consensus. We see this as a beginning, not a canon.

Fiction

1. The Menon Investigation by Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari

A sharp, atmospheric mystery that uses the investigative form to probe social relations and moral ambiguity. The novel’s strength lies in how it embeds crime within everyday life, allowing suspicion, silence, and local histories to shape the narrative as much as the act of detection itself.

2. Real Life by Amrita Mahale

Mahale’s novel examines intimacy, compromise, and emotional precarity in contemporary urban India. With understated prose and psychological acuity, Real Life traces how relationships are shaped by ambition, uncertainty, and the quiet pressures of modern living.

3. The Comeback by Annie Zaidi

A novel about return to self, to public life, and to unresolved pasts. Zaidi explores gender, reputation, and resilience through a protagonist navigating both personal loss and social scrutiny, offering a layered portrait of reinvention in a judgmental public sphere.

4. Mudritha by Jissa Jose, translated by Jayasree Kalathil

Originally written in Malayalam, Mudritha is a deeply interior novel concerned with memory, womanhood, and emotional inheritance. The translation preserves the novel’s quiet intensity, foregrounding the power of regional literature in shaping contemporary Indian fiction.

5. Lores of Love and Saint Gorakhnath: Indian Folktales from the Bhakti and Sufi Traditions by Nalin Verma & Lalu Prasad Yadav

This collection revisits folktales rooted in Bhakti and Sufi traditions, foregrounding love, devotion, and spiritual dissent. The retellings emphasise storytelling as a living archive, where faith and folklore intersect to challenge rigid social hierarchies.

6. A Shimla Affair by Srishti Chaudhary

Set against the layered social world of Shimla, this novel blends romance with social observation. Chaudhary uses the hill town’s colonial afterlives and class structures to explore desire, secrecy, and the politics of respectability.

7. The Pretenders by Avtar Singh

A novel attentive to performance, aspiration, and social mobility in contemporary India. The Pretenders explores how class, language, and self-fashioning intersect, revealing the subtle negotiations individuals make to belong in spaces shaped by exclusion and ambition. Singh’s prose is controlled and observant, allowing social tension to emerge through everyday encounters rather than overt declaration.

8. The Courtesan, Her Lover and I by Tarana Husain Khan

This novel revisits the figure of the courtesan with empathy and historical sensitivity, examining art, love, and erasure. Khan’s narrative interrogates who is remembered, who is forgotten, and how women’s creative lives are often reduced to myth or scandal.

9. For the Love of Apricots by Madhulika Liddle

A gently humorous and observant novel that explores food, memory, and family history. Liddle uses culinary detail as a way of thinking about inheritance, nostalgia, and the quiet meanings attached to everyday pleasures.

10. The Tiger’s Share by Keshava Guha

A contemporary political novel that scrutinises power, ambition, and moral compromise. Guha’s narrative is alert to the mechanics of governance and public life, offering a timely examination of ideology, loyalty, and self-interest in modern India.

Non-Fiction

1. Sheher Mein Gaon by Ekta Chauhan

A grounded ethnographic study of Delhi’s urban villages, this book examines how culture, conflict, and community evolve amid rapid urbanisation. Chauhan foregrounds voices often excluded from narratives of the modern city.

2. The Other Side of Diplomacy — edited by Jayshree Misra Tripathi

An unusual and revealing anthology that shifts attention from official diplomacy to the lives shaped by it. Through personal accounts, the book explores mobility, displacement, and emotional labour in diplomatic life.

3. Called by the Hills: A Home in the Himalaya by Anuradha Roy

A reflective work that blends memoir, nature writing, and meditation on solitude. Roy’s prose is attentive to landscape and inner life, offering a quiet counterpoint to extractive narratives of the Himalayas.

4. Running Behind Lakshmi: The Search for Wealth in India’s Stock Market by Adil Rustomjee

A richly researched history of India’s stock market, tracing its evolution from informal nineteenth-century trading networks to the financialised present. Drawing on archival material and market experience, Rustomjee situates speculation, risk, and aspiration within broader social and political histories, offering a rare account of how ideas of wealth, chance, and modernity have shaped Indian public life.

5. The World After Gaza: A Short History by Pankaj Mishra

A searing examination of global politics, historical responsibility, and moral failure. Mishra situates Gaza within a longer history of empire and violence, challenging readers to confront uncomfortable global truths.

6. Nautch Boy by Manish Gaekwad

A memoir that interrogates caste, performance, and masculinity through the author’s life. Gaekwad’s narrative is raw and reflective, exposing how art and stigma coexist within marginalised bodies.

7. Meet the Savarnas by Ravikant Kisana

A provocative critique of caste privilege in contemporary India, focusing on savarna mediocrity and entitlement. The book uses satire and social analysis to unsettle dominant narratives of merit and success.

8. The Ghadar Movement by Rana Preet Gill

A historical account of the revolutionary anti-colonial Ghadar movement, foregrounding its transnational networks and radical imagination. The book restores attention to a movement often marginalised in mainstream histories.

9. Students Etched in Memory by Perumal Murugan

A deeply felt work reflecting on teaching, mentorship, and the enduring presence of students in a writer’s life. Murugan’s prose is intimate and restrained, revealing education as an emotional and ethical practice.

10. Loal Kashmir by Mehak Jamal

A personal and political meditation on Kashmir, memory, and belonging. Jamal’s writing resists simplification, foregrounding lived experience and emotional truth in a region too often reduced to headlines.

Taken together, these works suggest an Indian literary moment defined by attentiveness rather than spectacle to language, to marginal lives, to unresolved histories. Fiction and non-fiction here are united by a shared commitment to complexity, resisting easy conclusions or moral certainty.

As Indian writing continues to circulate globally, these books remind us that its most compelling energies remain rooted in the specificity of place, voice, and lived experience.

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