HT reviewer Simar Bhasin picks her favourite reads of 2025

Two works that critique the nexus of politics and capitalism and also use varieties of English that reflect the hybridity and the geographically broad scope of the texts

This year, two works of literary fiction blew me away, both as a research scholar working on texts that may be termed as belonging to the genre of ‘migrant fiction’ as well as a literary critic. These were Fierceland by Omar Musa and Gurnaik Johal’s Saraswati. What stood out about both was their play with form, their use of English that reflected hybridity as well as the geographically broad scope of their texts that unravelled across continents and political contexts.

“What stood our about both Fierceland by Omar Musa and Gurnaik Johal’s Saraswati was their play with form, their use of English that reflected hybridity as well as the geographically broad scope of their texts that unravelled across continents and political contexts.” (Penguin, Hachette India)

Musa’s Fierceland is the story of two siblings Rozana and Harun who are the heirs to the blood money of their palm oil tycoon father, Yusuf. From Malaysian Borneo to Sydney and Los Angeles, the brother-sister protagonists of Musa’s tale encounter their father’s legacy in different ways, which comes to determine the shape their lives take. With the forests of Malaysia at its centre, the narrative explores the brutal legacies of colonialism on nation-states of the so-termed ‘Global South’ and the ongoing climate crisis in a globalised Anthropocene era of late-stage capitalism. The Bornean-Australian author enmeshes Malay phrases and slang within his writing that reflects the deterritorialisation of English for a hybrid postcolonial subjecthood.

Reviewer Simar Bhasin (Courtesy the subject)

A similar play with language is witnessed in Johal’s writing whose debut full-length novel Saraswati is an absolute treat to read. What Musa does with Malay, Johal achieves with Punjabi wherein words and phrases from the language are never accompanied with a glossary for non-native speakers. Saraswati weaves a tale that originates from Johal’s fictional romantic epic of Sejal and Jugaad. The protagonists in this novel, that take readers to Punjab, Pakistan, Kenya, Singapore, Canada, Tibet and even to locales such as Svalbard and the Chagos Islands, are the descendants of this inter-caste couple who eloped owing to familial resistance to their relationship. This central epic is in the vein of Heer-Ranjha, Sassi-Punnu, Sohni-Mahiwal, all romance epics from the Punjab and Sindh region that also come to be alluded to in the course of the narrative. The novel, which is centred on the event that the mythical Saraswati river has come back to life, becomes a political satire on how natural resources are used for diplomacy and appropriated to court power on the national and global stage. The decolonial poetics of these works, the eco-criticism inherent in them as well as the scathing critiques of the nexus of politics and capitalism, marks their authors out to be literary voices to watch out for.

Simar Bhasin is a literary critic and research scholar who lives in Delhi. Her essay ‘A Qissa of Resistance: Desire and Dissent in Selma Dabbagh’s Short Fiction’ was awarded ‘Highly Commended’ by the Wasafiri Essay Prize 2024.