Champaca Recommends

Looking for something to add to your TBR? Our sister team Souk has partnered with Champaca, a women-run independent bookstore and café based in Bengaluru, for a fab reading list of nine page-turners celebrating women, just for you.

Over to Souk!

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Welcome to Community Recommends, a new Souk series where we ask fellow enthusiasts to share the things they love. Books, objects, places, ideas. The goal is simple: instead of algorithms or bestseller lists, we turn to our community for discovery.

For our very first edition, we’ve teamed up with Champaca, the beloved women-run independent bookstore and café in Bengaluru, to recommend 9 books—across memoir, fiction, criticism, history, and poetry—that look closely at how women live, think, write and move through the world. Some of these books challenge age-old scientific biases around gender and sex. Others present a capsule of women’s writing in India over the past two millennia. Some ruminate on the enduring nature of female friendships, while others reimagine history and modern-day society. Together, they offer many ways of reading women’s lives, across time, place and language.

01 Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh: India’s Lonely Young Women And The Search For Intimacy And Independence

King Khan becomes a conduit in Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh, as economist Shrayana Bhattacharya speaks to women across class, caste and language backgrounds to explore how work, romance, aspiration and popular culture intersect in post-liberalisation India. She presents the act of following Shah Rukh Khan as an act of rebellion; his films and public persona become a powerful lens through which the author examines ideas of longing, companionship and the search for autonomy among Indian women. The book listens closely to women’s interior lives, and treats ideas of fandom and everyday desire seriously.

02 Unbound: 2,000 Years Of Indian Women’s Writing

Unbound is an important collection of women’s writing in India, edited by author and award-winning novelist Annie Zaidi. The anthology gathers writing by Indian women across two millennia—poetry, essays, fiction and more—offering a sense of the scale and diversity of women’s voices in the subcontinent. With passion, bravery and wit, Unbound presents glimpses of a formidable literary tradition in India, placing contemporary conversations around gender and womanhood within a much larger context. It’s a powerful reminder that women have always written about and influenced the intellectual landscape of this region. (The INR 499 edition is currently available.)

03 Women Writing History: Three Generations

Three eminent historians, Romila Thapar, Kumkum Roy and Preeti Gulati, reflect on their lives in academia and the changing landscape of historical scholarship in India in Women Writing History. The book emphasises how feminist perspectives are critical to the effective functioning of institutions, and can expand the kinds of stories that are considered historically significant. It foregrounds women not just as subjects of history, but as its interpreters and knowledge-makers. 

For the full list of reads, head over to Souk!