India, Dec. 27 -- From books on pioneering Indian anthropologists, the history of tourism and India's video cultures of the pre-digital era to ones that broaden the contemporary reader's understanding of the Manusmriti, millennials and the middle class, there were lots of exciting reads this year.

Urmilla Deshpande and Thiago Pinto Barbosa's Iru; The Remarkable Life of Irawati Karve and Reema Desai Gehi's 'The Catalyst; Rudolf Von Leyden and India's Artistic Awakening broadened my understanding of the cross-cultural currents swirling around India and the world in the interwar years as well as the post-Independence period. While Karve did her PhD in Berlin under Eugin Fischer, scientifically disproving his theory of European racial superi...