Fiction and ethnographies are a wonderful way of entering the past and understanding our present. Here are some great authors and works that are set in modern South Asia:
Anything by Mahasweta Devi. For instance, Breast Stories.
Same with Dalit feminist author, Bama. My favourite is Sangati.
... and Girish Karnad - I love Tale Danda, a play depicting Basavanna's 12th century Virashaiva movement.
Saadat Hasan Manto's short stories are every historian's go-to for the Partition of India.
For a close look at the Indian Emergency of the 1970s, Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance.
Daniyal Mueenuddin's short story collection, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, presents a fascinating cast of characters inhabiting turn-of-the-century Pakistan.
Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers is a moving portrait of life in a Mumbai slum in neoliberal India.
BBC's In Our Time is a long-running podcast where the host engages with academics in a conversation that takes specialist topics to the general audience. The topics are wide-ranging in theme, date, and region! (They also cover Religion, Culture, and Science, in addition to History).