This 368-page edited volume is a landmark achievement, bringing together different strands and voices in South AsiaFootnote ¹ on intellectual property (IP) scholarship. Scholarly discourse on IP law in South Asia has been dominated by perspectives from the global North, with South Asian voices transferred to the margins.Footnote ² The aim of the edited volume is to highlight different narratives developed in South Asian countries.Footnote ³ This collection lends voice to a variety of South Asian scholars, from professors to PhD researchers, providing space for practitioners and academics across different countries in South Asia to present their own analyses.

Part I of the volume, ‘Intellectual Property, History and Development’ (chapters 2–6), addresses central questions in IP scholarship through development and social justice lenses, examining IP theory, geographical indications (GIs), technology transfer, and decolonial approaches. Part II, ‘Intellectual Property Developments in South Asia’ (chapters 7–11), examines recent legislative and judicial developments across the region, including emerging questions concerning generative AI and copyright, trademark litigation in Nepal, and Afghanistan’s TRIPS compliance under challenging political circumstances. Part III, ‘Institutions, Courts and Practices’ (chapters 12–16), offers comparative institutional analysis, discussing Bangladesh’s new Patents Act, copyright exceptions for educational access, national IP policy development in Sri Lanka, women’s participation in IP systems, and the political economy of IP pedagogy in the region.

The introduction highlights the editor’s central concern: to what extent do South Asian IP practices reflect distinctively regional values?Footnote ⁴ This question pervades the volume’s structure, and several chapters engage it directly for example, by examining whether values of social justice, pragmatic realism, or developmental priorities may be discerned in regional IP jurisprudence and legislation.Footnote ⁵

The sixteen chapters provide a rich set of observations about how different South Asian countries have exercised their agency within different constraints, including those presented by the TRIPS Agreement. For example, chapter 12 by Mohammad Towhidul Islam and Sadman Rizwan Apurbo on the Bangladesh Patent Act 2023 (BPA) links doctrinal analysis of several important provisions found in patent statutes of South Asian countries to developmental concerns, and provides useful comparative data on patent filing patterns across the regionFootnote ⁶. This chapter examines Bangladesh’s way in strategically navigating TRIPS compliance while preserving its policy space for domestic priorities. Evidently, Bangladesh has learnt from the experience of its South Asian neighbours. The country has in certain respects taken a different route, particularly in compulsory licensing (CL) provisions and on exclusion of microbiological processes from patentability, which the authors describe as being ‘incompatible with TRIPS’Footnote ⁷. Under the BPA, the government may grant a CL which involve public interest, national security, or nutrition without fulfilling the requirement of non-availability at a reasonable price.Footnote ⁸ The BPA forgoes an enhanced efficacy requirement for patentabilityFootnote ⁹ (in contrast to India’s section 3(d) of the Patents Act 1970). This suggests that Bangladesh weighed India’s experience and chose a different approach, which is better suited to local needs and institutional capacity. The chapter reveals how Bangladesh has made legislative choices informed by their own experience.

Gargi Chakrabarti’s chapter on women’s participation in IP systems addresses a dimension of IP governance that has received inadequate scholarly attention.Footnote ¹⁰ The chapter’s most striking finding is empirical in nature: of the 576 registered Indian geographical indication (GI) products, only 139 involve women producers, ie 24.13% of the total, of which 75% are handicrafts.Footnote ¹¹ The author’s field research in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh revealed that women producers remain systematically excluded from decision-making processes around GI governance despite their pivotal role in production.Footnote ¹² GI associations rarely include women in collaborative decision-making structures.Footnote ¹³ The chapter also provides valuable comparative data on women’s representation in the legal profession across South Asia, noting that while only 9.5% of Indian High Court judges are women and 15.31% of Indian lawyers are women, Sri Lanka presents a strikingly different pattern: 65% of 1,097 licensed lawyers are women.Footnote ¹⁴ Chakrabarti’s analysis provides a nuanced view into the operationalization of IP governance by identifying the specific participatory barriers some of which are limited land ownership and lack of legal awareness, preventing women from transitioning from ‘primary custodians’ of traditional knowledge to recognized rightsholders. By documenting and bringing to light the significant yet often invisible role of women in Indian GI products, the chapter effectively challenges the gender-blind nature of prevalent IP discourse.

Chapter 14 by Althaf Marsoof discusses Sri Lanka’s need for a national IP policy and underlines the value of comparative institutional analysis while also showing opportunities for meaningful inter-chapter engagement.Footnote ¹⁵ Marsoof examines IP policies from Singapore, India, and Bangladesh to extract standards for what a sound Sri Lankan IP policy should include: independence and objectivity, inclusive process, empirically grounded evidence, adaptation to local needs, and implementation focus.Footnote ¹⁶ The chapter recommends GI promotion as a central pillar of Sri Lanka’s IP strategyFootnote ¹⁷, emphasising economic development potential and the protection of traditional knowledge. This is a practical policy proposal. Nevertheless, future work in this area might benefit from engagement with questions about GI governance that other scholars in the edited volume have raised, particularly regarding who benefits from GI systems, and whether existing governance meaningfully includes producers in decision-making.Footnote ¹⁸ These omissions point to a missed opportunity across the volume. Each chapter contains valuable material that could have helped or enriched other contributions of the edited volume through inter-chapter dialogue.

Future scholarship might examine how courts across the region interpret similar doctrinal questions (for example in the area of well-known marksFootnote ¹⁹), how different jurisdictions balance competing priorities in legislative drafting, and how regional actors articulate their objectives when participating in international IP forums. The question of South Asian values in IP is difficult precisely because it requires moving beyond description of what different countries have done, towards analytical claims about what motivates their specific choices and how IP law is embedded in broader social, political and economic structures.Footnote ²⁰ Future work might benefit from engaging with literature from other fields such as social sciences and development studies to probe what ‘value’ means in this context ie, whether it means moral commitments or duties, institutional priorities, or political economy constraints or even something else. This is an ambitious project that the volume has set into motion.

Overall, this volume makes an important and lasting contribution to South Asian IP scholarship. It assembles solid work on countries such as Afghanistan, whose IP scholarship is not easily accessible to international readers, and several chapters will be essential reading for IP specialists working on South Asian IP law. The volume additionally contributes to legal certainty within South Asian IP regimes by clarifying doctrinal ambiguities. An indicative example is Arul George Scaria and Varsha Jhavar’s analysis of Indian copyright law, which clarifies the critical distinction between the statutory ‘fair dealing’ exceptions under section 52 of the Copyright Act 1957 and the broader US-style ‘fair use’ model.Footnote ²¹ More importantly, by centring South Asian voices and creating space for scholars across the region to articulate their own thoughts, the volume challenges the marginalization that VyasFootnote ²² discusses and begins the work of building regional scholarly conversations.

This collection ultimately demonstrates that IP in South Asia is a truly human endeavour tied to identity, livelihood, and social justice. Through its focus on the ‘primary custodians’ of knowledge, be it women in rural agriculture or educators in the IP academia, the volume is an attempt to reclaim IP discourse. As a project of regional identity, this volume opens a transformative dialogue that will echo far beyond the ‘imagined’ borders of South Asia.