Robe and the Sword

Sonia Faleiro is the author of The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing, a New York Times Editor’s Choice and finalist for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, and Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars, a finalist for the Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage. Her reporting and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Financial Times, Harper’s, Granta, and the Times Literary Supplement. She lives in London, where she is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow and the founder of South Asia Speaks, a mentorship program for emerging writers.

“The Robe and the Sword is an uncomfortable book, and that is its virtue. Faleiro brings moral clarity to terrain that is usually tiptoed around.... Faleiro delivers a bracing wake-up call, exposing the West’s kitschification of Asian faiths and the East’s enthralment to charismatic, ultraviolent clerics.” —The Times(UK)“The Robe and the Sword weaves personal experience, historical analysis, and on-the-ground reporting from India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and the border with Myanmar. Faleiro pinpoints the unhealed trauma of colonialism as the source of much of the religious violence, and highlights its implications for Buddhists around the world.” —Tricycle: The Buddhist Review“The Robe and the Sword is a timely and important work. Just over 150 pages long, it is deceptively slim, accessible in form, but deeply expansive.” —The Week (India)“Sacrificing neither rigour nor readability, The Robe and the Sword is a brilliantly written treatise on a decidedly modern problem.” —The Federal“It is as a journalistic account of these developments, including the human stories of those at their heart—such as the Muslim victims of the violence in Sri Lanka or a Myanmarese monk who dated to stand against the rising chauvinist tide and is now living in exile, or even the Sri Lankan rabble-rouser, Gnanasara himself—that the book shines. It succinctly places each country’s crisis in historical context, and shows how religious revivalism and majoritarianism have been intertwined.” —Indian Express“Timely... What is most encouraging is Faleiro’s willingness to cast an unflinching eye at the anomalies that lie at the heart of modern Buddhism.” —The Telegraph (India)“A short and crisply written book that takes us on a vertiginous journey through Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand, with a couple of pit stops in India and Tibet.” —India Today“Sonia Faleiro’s The Robe and the Sword: How Buddhist Extremism Is Shaping Modern Asia arrives as a necessary corrective. Published by Columbia Global Reports in November 2025, this slim yet powerful work of narrative nonfiction shatters what has been termed ‘the West’s kitschification of Asian faiths’ while exposing uncomfortable parallels with India’s own treatment of religious minorities.” —American Kahani“Sonia Faleiro is a master of narrative reportage, illuminating every topic she touches. This book that connects colonial fault lines, broken economies, the scourge of Islamophobia, and extremism is one that only Faleiro can write. Pay heed: it is the story of our broken world.” —Fatima Bhutto, author of The Hour of the Wolf and co-editor of Gaza: The Story of a Genocide“With sharp insight and deep humanity, Sonia Faleiro’s The Robe and the Sword traces the long and uneasy bond between Buddhism and political power, offering a vital portrait of how faith, identity, and resistance are being redefined across the region.” —Thant Myint-U, author of Peacemaker: U Thant and the Forgotten Quest for a Just World and The Hidden History of Burma: Race, Capitalism, and the Crisis of Democracy in the 21st Century“With intellectual resourcefulness and rigor, Sonia Faleiro describes one of nationalism’s most insidious and least-noticed mutations. Briskly and accessibly, The Robe and the Sword charts the complex social-economic shifts that make even an ancient spiritual tradition devoted to renunciation hospitable to modern fanaticism.” —Pankaj Mishra, author of The World After Gaza“Sonia Faleiro’s The Robe and the Sword is a must-read piece of the puzzle of rising religious and ethnonationalism worldwide. This meticulous reporting and analysis offers a sorely needed broad take on Buddhist extremism’s impact on some of the world’s most vulnerable people. Faleiro is one of our best journalists and thinkers. Unflinching in pursuing narratives that disrupt our established ways of seeing, she insists that we enlarge our field of vision to see the critical historical and contemporary connections beyond national borders.” —V.V. Ganeshananthan, author of Brotherless Night