Tejaswini Kale reviews Monisha Raman’s The Highlands of Yore (Readomania, 2025), observing how the women she writes about feel realistic and intimate.
The Highlands of Yore by Monisha Raman is a story about the Raya community – an indigenous community settled in the fictitious mountain district of Betta in Tamil Nadu. With five interconnected tales linking the lives of women spanning nine generations, the book explores themes of survival, indigeneity, female solidarity, longing, human greed, and justice. Raman’s fiction, non-fiction, and nature writing have been widely published in various national as well as international journals. She is currently researching and writing about indigenous perspectives in conservation.
The Wayward Journey is set in the mid-16th century, where a once-powerful kingdom is about to collapse, and a young queen takes matters into her own hands. In Sisterhood of the Hills, the narrative shifts to the early 19th century, where a story about queerness and female solidarity in the community unfolds.
The Rise of the Alien Winds brings British colonisers to the mountains and a disconnect from ancestral knowledge and regressive ideas of gender roles. Set in 1993, The Sprouts of Dispersal explores the themes of human greed and the chokehold of patriarchy through a Raya woman struggling to make sense of her marriage. The Obscuring Highland Home, the final tale set in current times (2019), brings the fight that was suppressed for too long to the fore.
The women of the community – their histories, choices, and desires – are deeply intertwined with the land. The mountains are not just a breathtaking backdrop, but a life-force and collaborator protected by ‘the guardian spirit of the hills’ that ensures the survival of the community.
Raman’s writing is composed. The women she writes about feel realistic and intimate. They have nuance and emotional depth built with wisdom passed down through centuries of radical survival. They carry their lives and those of others imperfectly but authentically.
The book begins on a sombre note where a once mighty kingdom faces the possibility of defeat. Combined with the melancholic mood, portrayal of an old yet fascinating world, and the measured pace of the narrative, the book grips the reader steadily. The authenticity of life apparent in descriptions of what the people ate and wore, the details of trees and medicinal herbs they were surrounded by, gives the reader a concrete sense of place and its unique ecology.
Women make majority of the well-rounded principal characters. The outlier queen from 1565 – Matha Kupayani – who has scars on her arms from practicing sword fighting, is a fascinating character. In the first story, The Wayward Journey, she leads a group of palace guards and helpers, courtesans, healers, warriors, administrators, and royal as well as commoner children through a perilous journey to the highlands, which becomes their home for five centuries to come.
The women, descended from queens who fought with swords, endure in subtle yet powerful ways. Raman masterfully makes the reader feel the constant push and pull, the tightrope women walk while navigating their lives in patriarchal systems. Across all five stories, the women don’t demolish walls but push boundaries one step at a time without waiting for permission to live their lives the way they choose to.
In more ways than one, Matha Kupayani’s principles – focusing on agency, choice, consent, fraternity, and solidarity – shape the laws of the pastoral community that is chronicled in the second story, Sisterhood of the Hills. In this story, the deep respect the Raya people hold for the land and its resources is described.
Among the many themes the book handles – the dynamic nature of change, loss, justice, and identity rooted in land – what I loved most was the portrayal of the many hues of female desire. The female characters are beautiful examples of women written by women. They are not just survivors. They are dedicated to their personhood, and they challenge unfair norms by being fierce, strategic, clever, emotionally invested, and supportive of each other.
I admired the way Raman’s storytelling stays realistic and practical, rooted in every timeline it approaches, not giving in to the temptations of creating a fantastical, ideal world. With lyrical prose, Raman skilfully maintains a grip on the thread of hope and resistance in the face of insurmountable loss. Her writing has the quality of keeping pace with the way things happen in the world we live in. It views the ingenious and sometimes twisted ways in which humankind makes meaning with a detached benevolence, which is an achievement.
Throughout the book, male characters exist in the narrative but are decentered from it. It is the women who are running the show. Raman portrays the world we live in exactly as it is, but flips the gaze in the telling. She demonstrates for the reader a world where women were not dehumanized, where they lead without making themselves small to make society comfortable. At the end of each story, Raman brings the readers to a pivotal question and leaves them there. These questions quietly linger in the readers’ imagination for a long time, creating a sense of unease, awakening the resolve to rebel, and sparking a sense of justice.
Long after the book is closed, the mountains of Betta feel like a familiar place – they feel like the home we all share and must strive to protect.
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Reviewer’s bio
Tejaswini is a writer who works with fiction, poetry, screenplay, and memoir. A student of literature, she seeks books and libraries to make sense of the world around her. She is interested in building routine and practice around her creative pursuits. In 2024, she was shortlisted for the Rama Mehta Writing Grant and The Deodar Prize.
About the Book
There lives a community on the highlands of South India, where women have long been the keepers of knowledge, agents of choice, and fierce protectors of their people. Across generations, their lives unfold in vastly different worlds, yet they are united by the quiet rebellions and deep emotional truths that shape womanhood. A queen in the mid-sixteenth century who must save her lineage from encroaching enemies, a naive seventeen-year-old married to a middle-aged farmer who struggles with her powerful attraction to another woman, a lonely housewife in a crumbling marriage haunted by memories of an affectionate lover—what binds these women together? Set in Betta, a fictitious mountain district in South India, Highlands of Yore unfolds through a series of interconnected stories spanning five centuries, offering an intimate portrait of one resilient community told through the voices of its women. With lyrical prose and rooted imagination, this book is a tribute to indigeneity, ecological harmony, and ancestral wisdom—an ode to love: for family, for land, and for legacy.
About the Author
Through her writing, both fiction and non-fiction, Monisha Raman seeks to explore the imperceptible connection humans share with land. Her short stories and essays have been published by various literary and ecological magazines internationally and have also been anthologised. She is an alumnus of Granta Writers Workshop (nature writing). She lives in Chennai, South India. This is her debut work of fiction and is also forthcoming by Readomania Publishing in India.