Indian
Nandita Haksar is an Indian human rights lawyer who writes books out of the cases she takes. She has spent four decades on the parts of the Indian legal system that attract the least sympathy — Naga self-determination, Kashmiri defendants in terrorism trials, migrant workers, refugees from Myanmar and Afghanistan — and her books are usually the record of a specific fight. Framing Geelani, Hanging Afzal examined the prosecutions following the 2001 Indian Parliament attack and the evidence used to secure a death sentence. The Exodus Is Not Over followed workers from the north-east fleeing rumour-driven violence. She has written on the ABC of Naga culture, and on the legal history of India's treatment of its borderlands. The Flavours of Nationalism (2018) is her most personal book: a memoir told through food, tracing a Kashmiri Pandit childhood, a marriage into a Tangkhul Naga family, and the way kitchens register the politics of caste, religion and region long before anyone says it aloud. She has taught human rights law and campaigned on statelessness and citizenship.