TCA Raghavan, Author: Best of Books 2025: My Choice

 I greatly enjoyed David Van Reybrouck’s Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World (Vintage) about Indonesia’s struggle against Dutch imperialism. It weaves a compel­ling narrative of how Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta led a freedom move­ment and simultaneously forged a nation out of—even by Indian standards—mind-boggling diversity. It is a useful corrective to an India centrism which sometimes colours our understanding of global decolonisation after World War II.

Challenging received wis­dom, Sanjaya Baru’s Secession of the Successful: The Flight Out of New India (Vi­king) is a deeply contrarian perspective on Indian elite migration which mainstream accounts present as Indian globalisation. Baru’s thought-provoking and rigor­ous revisionism sees the phe­nomenon as a “flight out of new India”. Brain Drain is thus not an outmoded construct but a clear and present challenge.

Ravi K Mishra’s Demog­raphy, Representation, De­limitation: The North-South Divide in India (Westland) exemplifies how a historian can enrich a contemporary political debate by revisiting its roots. Mishra examines India’s demographic history from the 1870s to arrive at a more nuanced understand­ing of the North-South debate on delimitation of seats in Parliament.

Thant Myint-U’s biography of his grandfather, for­mer UN Secretary General U Thant, Peacemaker: U Thant, the United Nations and the Un­told Story of the 1960s (Jug­gernaut), is a comprehensive and rigorously researched ac­count of the principal sites of Cold War contestation in the 1960s and how a diminutive and self-effacing secretary general from Myanmar got the UN to play a central role in maintaining or restoring peace.