Himal Southasian

As Saudi Arabia and the UAE openly back rival forces in various theatres – from the proxy confrontations in Yemen and Sudan to the competing security architectures taking shape across Southasia – Islamabad’s pact with Riyadh confirmed Pakistan as a party to a Gulf rivalry it once claimed to merely observe. Islamabad’s growing proximity to Riyadh has pushed Abu Dhabi away and closer to New Delhi, and Pakistan’s ambitions and manoeuverings may have brought the Gulf’s big rivalry firmly to Southasia.

Salman Rafi Sheikh writes: https://www.himalmag.com/comment/pakistan-saudi-uae-iran-war

The Karnali basin’s heritage was provincial residue in Nepal's national imagination – which made it, when the insurgency arrived, both a target and an absence: important enough to destroy, invisible enough that its destruction would go unrecorded. Read Sushan Bhattarai's piece here: https://www.himalmag.com/culture/nepal-heritage-culture-maoist-civil-war

The scholarship on Nepal’s civil war has grown considerably since the Comprehensive Peace Accord that ended it in 2006. But the insurgency’s destruction of cultural heritage remains largely unaccounted for.

In April 2002, Maoist forces set fire to the Dullu Durbar, a palace in Western Nepal. Two decades on, the Dullu Durbar exists primarily as a negative space: a wall, a museum of surviving objects established in the shell of what was burnt, and an absence so complete that most accounts of Nepal’s civil war simply do not mention it. This is an attempt to take that absence seriously, and to ask why the taking-seriously has taken so long: https://www.himalmag.com/culture/nepal-heritage-culture-maoist-civil-war

Composite image by Aishwarya Iyer

The battle over Southasian history is also a battle over historiography. "Differing perspectives and ideologies that might oppose traditional historical narratives do not erase or replace them; they supplement them," Arshia Sattar writes in her review essay on Audrey Truschke’s new book, 'India: 5,000 Years of History in the Subcontinent': https://www.himalmag.com/politics/audrey-truschke-india-southasia-history

This month for Screen Southasia, we’re featuring two films by Rafeeq Ellias – 'The Legend of Fat Mama' (2005) and 'Beyond Barbed Wires' (2015) – that centre Chinese-Indian narratives.

Subscribe to our free documentary service: https://ow.ly/Xotx50Z3J2k

Arun Shourie's career — from leftist dissident and insurgency journalist to architect of Hindutva politics and scathing Modi critic — spans five decades of Indian democracy's transformation. Himal's editor Roman Gautam speaks to journalist Mihir Dalal about Shourie's intellectual journey, his rationalisation of Hindu majoritarianism, and what his story tells us about how India's elite abandoned the vision of its founding fathers. Watch the full conversation here: https://youtu.be/a1oHwfhANyw
Read the full piece on Himal's website: https://www.himalmag.com/politics/arun-shourie-bjp-modi-indian-express

This week in Southasia: Narendra Modi went on a diplomatic offensive this week, signing key pacts on defence, energy and shipping with the United Arab Emirates, even as tensions between Abu Dhabi and Tehran spiked due to the ongoing war in West Asia.

We've got our finger on the pulse. Sign up for Southasia Weekly to receive the latest from Himal and across the region: https://www.himalmag.com/newsletters

Romila Thapar’s new memoir, a study of student resistance in Myanmar, Goan histories in Zanzibar, and more: our latest Southasia Review of Books newsletter rounds up new fiction and non-fiction releases from across the region. Read this fortnight’s edition on our website, and subscribe to receive it straight to your inbox: https://www.himalmag.com/newsletters