Columnist lists six books for understanding Afghanistan

The brief

Context

In a weekly books column, Mumbai-based journalist Sonya Dutta Choudhury describes how her book clubs spent two years trying to understand Afghanistan through reading rather than travel. She discusses six titles — reportage, memoir, novel and travelogue — each offering a partial view of a country shaped by the Mughals, the destroyed Bamiyan Buddhas, Soviet occupation, civil war, the mujahideen, the Taliban and the post-9/11 US invasion. A recurring thread is that many of the best-known books about Afghanistan are written by outsiders, raising questions of who gets to tell a place's story. The column's centrepiece is the dispute between Kabul bookseller Shah Muhammad Rais and Norwegian journalist Åsne Seierstad, author of The Bookseller of Kabul.

Key facts

• The column discusses six books on Afghanistan read by the author's book clubs last year and again this year.
• Lyse Doucet, a BBC journalist, won the Women's Prize for Non-Fiction for The Finest Hotel in Kabul, set in Kabul's Inter-Continental Hotel.
• Doucet's book covers more than five decades of history — civil war, Soviet occupation, the US invasion and its aftermath — through one hotel.
• Taran Khan's Shadow City: A Woman Walks Kabul maps the city through libraries, cinemas, gardens and ruined architectural layers; Khan has Pathan ancestry and grew up in Aligarh.
• Norwegian journalist Åsne Seierstad lived with bookseller Shah Muhammad Rais's family for months before writing the bestselling The Bookseller of Kabul.
• Rais, angered by his portrayal, refuses to stock the book and wrote his own version, Once Upon a Time There Was a Bookseller in Kabul; the columnist could not find a copy.
• Rory Stewart, a former British diplomat, walked solo across Afghanistan in the winter of 2002, following the route of the 16th-century emperor Babur, in The Places in Between.
• Anand Gopal's No Good Men Among the Living follows three lives in parallel — a Taliban commander, a US-backed warlord and a village housewife — through the post-9/11 war.

Timeline

1. 16th centuryBabur, founder of the Mughal dynasty, conquers Afghan territory; his route is later retraced by Rory Stewart.
2. Over five decades up to the presentCivil war, Soviet occupation, the US invasion and its aftermath — the span covered by Lyse Doucet's The Finest Hotel in Kabul.
3. Post-9/11The war years chronicled by Anand Gopal through a Taliban commander, a US-backed warlord and a village housewife.
4. Winter 2002Rory Stewart makes his solo walk across Afghanistan.
5. Not dated in the sourceÅsne Seierstad lives with Shah Muhammad Rais's family and publishes The Bookseller of Kabul; Rais later publishes his rebuttal.
6. Last year and again this yearThe columnist's book clubs set themselves the task of understanding Afghanistan through books.

Who has a stake

• Sonya Dutta Choudhury, columnist and founder of Sonya's Book Box — Curates books for immersive understanding of people and places; travels to Afghanistan as an 'armchair traveller' through six titles.
• Shah Muhammad Rais, Kabul bookseller — Subject of a bestselling book he says misrepresents his home life; jailed for stocking books and tracts of opposing sides, and author of his own less-available rebuttal.
• Åsne Seierstad, Norwegian journalist — Author of the bestselling The Bookseller of Kabul, criticised in the column as sensational and written through a fiery feminist lens.
• Lyse Doucet, BBC journalist and war correspondent — Her Women's Prize for Non-Fiction-winning hotel narrative is praised as a clever device but faulted for too many fleeting characters.
• Taran Khan, Anand Gopal, Rory Stewart, Patmeena Sabit — Authors offering insider-descended, critical, anthropological and diaspora lenses respectively on Afghanistan.
• Afghans portrayed in these books — Their lives and culture are largely narrated by outsiders, with limited control over which version becomes widely available.

Why it matters

The column shows how narrative form — a grand hotel, a family, a walk, three parallel lives — shapes what readers believe about a country, and how much each version leaves out. The Rais-Seierstad dispute is a concrete case of representation and consent: the outsider's bestseller circulates globally while the subject's own rebuttal is hard to find. It is a reminder to read more than one account of any place, especially one known mostly through war reporting.