Grand Tamasha is Carnegie’s weekly podcast on Indian politics and policy co-produced with the Hindustan Times, a leading Indian media house. For six years (and counting), host Milan Vaishnav has interviewed authors, journalists, policymakers, and practitioners working on contemporary India to give listeners across the globe a glimpse into life in the world’s most populous country.
Each December, Milan looks back at the conversations we’ve hosted during the course of the year and selects a handful of books that stayed with him long after our recording wrapped. This year’s selections span biography, history, and political economy—but they share a common thread: Each offers a bold reinterpretation of India at a moment of profound political and social churn.
In keeping with this tradition, here—in no particular order—are Grand Tamasha’s top books of 2025.
- A Sixth of Humanity: Independent India’s Development Odyssey
By Devesh Kapur and Arvind Subramanian. Published by HarperCollins India. - Believer’s Dilemma: Vajpayee and the Hindu Right’s Path to Power, 1977–2018
By Abhishek Choudhary. Published by Pan Macmillan India. - Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia
By Sam Dalrymple. Published by HarperCollins India.
Taken together, these books showcase the breadth of scholarship animating debates on India and South Asia today. They remind us that the region’s past remains contested, its present deeply complex, and its future still uncertain. I hope you find these conversations as stimulating and inspiring as I did.
One final note here: As you consider your year-end charitable giving, we hope you will choose to support Grand Tamasha.
This season, you might have noticed that we’ve expanded into video, allowing listeners to watch full-length conversations on YouTube. Listener contributions sustain the costs of production, research, and distribution—especially as we expand our video offerings.
The podcast receives no external funding beyond what our audience generously provides, and contributions from U.S.-based supporters are fully tax-deductible.
We would be grateful for whatever support you can offer. Please visit https://donate.carnegieendowment.org/for more information on how you can give.
On behalf of the entire team, we hope you have a wonderful holidays. Thanks for listening to the show—and see you in the new year.
Episode notes:
1. “The Forgotten Partitions That Remade South Asia (with Sam Dalrymple),” Grand Tamasha, October 29, 2025.
2. “A Sixth of Humanity and the Dreams of a Nation (with Devesh Kapur and Arvind Subramanian),” Grand Tamasha, October 22, 2025.
3. “Vajpayee and the Making of the Modern BJP (with Abhishek Choudhary),” Grand Tamasha, September 3, 2025.
4. Milan Vaishnav, “Grand Tamasha’s Best Books of 2024,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, December 17, 2024.
5. Milan Vaishnav, “Grand Tamasha’s Best Books of 2023,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, December 19, 2023.
6. Milan Vaishnav, “Grand Tamasha’s Best Books of the Year,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, December 20, 2022.
Transcript
Note: this is an AI-generated transcript and may contain errors
Milan Vaishnav: Welcome to Grand Tamasha, a co-production of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Hindustan Times. I'm your host, Milan Vaishnav. This is the final episode of season fourteen of the show, and at the outset I want to thank all of you, our listeners, for tuning in to the show week after week. None of this would be possible without you. I also want to thanks our partners at the Hindustan Times and the team that works on the show. Tim Martin, our audio engineer, Mira Varghese, who produces Grand Tamasha, and Andy Robaina, our South Asia junior fellow, who provides additional assistance. Each December, I look back at the conversations we've hosted on Grand Tamasha during the course of the year and select a handful of books that stayed with me long after our recordings have wrapped. This year's selections span biography, history, and political economy, but they share a common thread. Each book offers a bold reinterpretation of India at a moment of profound political and social churn. Now, it's always hard to select just a few books out of all of the books we featured this year, but here are, in no particular order, my three favorite books of the year. I want to start by highlighting A Sixth of Humanity: Independent India's Development Odyssey by Devesh Kapur and Arvind Subramanian. It was published by HarperCollins India. I want say upfront, as many of our listeners will know, I am not particularly impartial about this pick. I've known Devesh and Arvind for many years. I consider them close friends and mentors. I've regularly co-authored and continue to co-author with Devesh Kapur, one of the authors of this magnificent book. Having said all of that, I can say without any hesitation that this is a landmark piece of work. Devesh and Arvind have spent the past five to six years reviewing nearly eight decades of Indian history, politics, economics, even literature to produce a work that is as wide ranging as it is meticulously researched. I described this on the show in the episode we did with them as the political economy analog to Ram Guha's magisterial India After Gandhi, which is still probably the single best volume of history about the post-'47 era. In this new book, A Sixth of Humanity, Devesh and Arvind take on the audacious task of trying to explain how independent India attempted four simultaneous transformations, building a state, developing economy, changing society. And nation-building under the conditions of democracy and universal suffrage. And on literally every page of this book, there are nuggets or bits of data to digest. For those who are considering a PhD in social science, look no further than this book for the surplus of dissertation ideas. This is the kind of book that you will continue to take on and off the shelf, I think, for years to come. I want to share one clip from our conversation from this past October. In this clip, I asked Arvind about the chapter in the book, which is on fiscal federalism, in which Devesh and Arvind describe what's been called a quote-unquote internal aid model in which India's richer states subsidize its poorer regions. And I asked them about this model, but also to ask why they, in their own words, take issue with this terminology. Here is what Arvind had to say.
Arvind Subramanian: I'll tell you, I think, why we don't want to take too strong a view on this, about characterizing this. You see, look, for this following simple reason that when you have a nation... You want to knit it together. There are different regions, places, bring different things to the table. So in response to the incontrovertible thing that we show in the paper that in terms of fiscal resources, there's more transfer from richer to poorer states.
Milan Vaishnav: We're giving you human resources.
Arvind Subramanian: But there are other dimensions which we don't go into. Like for example, the common market. You know, so for example, Bihar could turn around and say, Tamil Nadu, we provide you cheap labor, or even Kerala, we'll provide you a cheap labor. Therefore, while you may be transferring fiscal resources, we are transferring human resources. And similarly that we're providing a market for you, for example, right? So, but.
Devesh Kapur: Also just to add Arvind, in the early decades, the freight equalization policy penalized the Eastern states, especially Bengal, Bihar, undivided Bihar and Orissa, and benefited the western and southern states.
Arvind Subramanian: Exactly, that's a very good point. So that's why you have to have to take this into totality and because you can't quantify these other things in a way that you can quantify the fiscal, you know, the fiscal assumes salience.
Milan Vaishnav: The second book I want to highlight is a book called Believer's Dilemma: Vajpayee and the Hindu Right's Path to Power, 1977 to 2018. It is a book by the author Abhishek Choudhary. It's the second volume of Choudhary's biography, a former prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee. The first volume came out in 2023 to much acclaim. It was called Vajpayee: The Ascent of the Hindu Right, 1924 to 1977. If you take these two books together. They tell the story of one of India's most enigmatic political leaders. He traces his journey from his early life in the state of Uttar Pradesh to his ascent to the highest office in the land through meticulous research, extremely graphic, textured storytelling. Choudhary illuminates Vajpayee's ideological convictions, his extremely complex partnerships and the discrete choices that he took that really shaped the BJP, the Hindu Nationalist Party that he co-founded. The book provides an honest, sometimes unsparing look at Vajpayee and his many colors and contradictions. And I think for anybody out there who wants to understand how the BJP's kind of electoral machine of today got its start and eventually found its footing, these are two books worth consulting. I wasn't able to speak with Abhishek after the publication of volume one, but I did get a chance to interview him for the second volume and in this clip I want to play for you, I ask Abhishek about the very complex relationship between Vajpayee and his long-term partner, fellow BJP leader L.K. Advani. You know, these are two men who are arguably the most responsible for first the emergence and then the sustained success of the BJP. Here's what Abhishek had to say.
Abhishek Choudhary: I mean, I was recently asked how I would sum it up in one word. And I said, I would say brotherhood. Uh, but let me give a longer answer. Yes, I do think there was rivalry between them. Yes, they wounded each other on some occasions, but the crucial thing is there was always a deep personal affection that was forced in their youth that endured for almost six decades. Um, so they met in '52. They started working together in '57. Advani came on board as his researcher. He helped Vajpayee tackle or let's say attack Nehru in parliament. And if, and if you remember Vajpayee managed to get a white paper on the matter of, you know, Chinese capture of Tibet and for that, I think some of the credit does go to Advani and while Vajpayee continued to be the face, Advani remained the backroom boy. I think it was only after Deen Dayal Upadhyay's death in, in Feb. 1968, that his climb was faster and it was of course back by Vajpayee himself. Five years later, Advani was made the party president in '73 and then they were together in jail during emergency for a few weeks. And all through emergency, Vajpayee was in, you know, uh, in touch with Advani through letters, uh again, during the Janata government, they agreed on most matters. And I think up to 1983, uh you know, Advani more or less agreed with everything that Vajpayee said. It was only after BJP's defeat in Delhi that year, you know, the one place, the only place they actually held power that they had got won during Janata government, that Advani began to tilt towards the hardliners.
Milan Vaishnav: And the third and final book I want to highlight is called Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia. It's by the author, Sam Dalrymple. Sam is a historian and award-winning filmmaker. He grew up in Delhi. He graduated from Oxford as both a Persian and a Sanskrit scholar. He just so happens to be the son of the legendary historian, William Dalrymple, who himself made an appearance on Grand Tamasha earlier this year. But I really thought Sam's book was quite special. You know, there have been countless books written about the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent. But Sam's books covers territory that, you know, I think even the most seasoned or veteran historian would find daunting. He tells the tale not of one, but five partitions that unspooled across the subcontinents in the 20th century. So in addition to the familiar story of India and Pakistan. He exquisitely captures the carving out of Britain's Gulf outposts, the forgotten separation of Burma, the unification of India's princely states, and the 1971 independence of Bangladesh. This is a sprawling, colorful, and very readable history that reveals how the borders we take for granted were really forged in moments of improvisation, of conflict, of chance. And I think it holds lessons with real resonance for a region still wrestling with the legacies of empire. In this clip I'm gonna play for you, I asked Sam what messages he wants readers to take away from the book. Here's what he had to say.
Sam Dalrymple: I think that the key message in some sense is how contingent all these national borders really are, how utterly random they are. I think you need to look no further than Northeast India, which is largely Tibetan-Burman speaking. You know, they speak languages closely related to Burmese languages. Today, Northeast India is an appendage to the rest of India connected only by a small section known as the chicken's neck. And places like Tripura that were once closely economically tied with South Asia's largest port at Chittagong suddenly became completely cut off from the global economy and turned into this utter backwater with a fully collapsed economy. None of the borders that we now see were in any way inevitable. And when we see South Asia constantly at war with itself, you know, persecuting minorities You know, sponsoring attacks over borders to each other's neighbors. It's important to remember how within our grandparents' lifetimes, within the lifetimes of people who are still around today, none of these borders existed and none of these groups were considered minorities.
Milan Vaishnav: So those are our three favorite books of the year, A Sixth of Humanity: Independent India's Development Odyssey by Devesh Kapur and Arvind Subramaniam, Believer's Dilemma: Vajpayee and the Hindu Right's Path to Power, 1977 to 2018 by the author Abhishek Choudhary, and finally Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia by Sam Dalrymple. All three of these books showcase the range of scholarship animating debates on India and South Asia today. You know, I think if they share one thing in common, it's that they remind us that the region's past remains contested, it's present and deeply complex, and its future still uncertain. And I'm pretty sure that you will find these conversations as stimulating and as inspiring as I did. This is the final episode of our fourteenth season. We are going to take a little break, as we do every year to recharge our batteries over the winter holidays. We will be back in mid-January with the fifteenth season of Grand Tamasha. One final note here for our listeners is some of you consider your year-end charitable giving. I hope you'll choose to support Grand Tamasha. This season you might have noticed that we've expanded into video allowing listeners to watch some of our full-length conversations on YouTube. Listener contributions sustain the cost of our production, our research, distribution, particularly as we get more and more into video. The podcast receives no external funding beyond what our audience generously provides, and contributions from U.S.-based supporters are fully tax deductible. We would be very grateful for whatever support you can offer. If you're interested, please visit donate.carnegiendowment.org for more information on how you can give. On behalf of the entire team, myself, Tim, Mira, Andy, and our colleagues at the Hindustan Times, We hope that you have a wonderful holidays. Thanks for listening to the show and see you in the new year!
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