Recommended Books

by Jerry Pinto

Author, journalist, and poet

More than almost any other destination, India demands that you immerse yourself in the local culture to make sense of all you see and experience. And wherever you're headed in India, there's probably a novel you can read to explore the ways people are shaped by the landscape and history around them.

Literature/Fiction -- The late R. K. Narayan, one of the grand old men of Indian letters, offers a panoramic view of village life in India. He focuses on a gentle prelapsarian village in Malgudi Days (Penguin), a good introduction to his work. For a more politicized investigation of the caste system, you might want to read U. R. Ananthamurthy's Samskara (Oxford University Press, translated from Kannada), which deals with a dilemma that convulses a village after the death of an unclean Brahmin; or Raja Rao's Kanthapura (New Directions), set in a village in South India that has to face the storms of Mahatma Gandhi's civil disobedience movement.

Small-town India is well represented in Arundhati Roy's Booker Prize-winning novel, The God of Small Things (HarperCollins), which will make you want to travel the waterways of Kerala to see the village life she describes so vividly. Bhalchandra Nemade's Cocoon (National Book Trust) is often referred to as India's Catcher in the Rye.

Each of the big cities has at least one big novel. Mumbai's industrial past is presented in a charming story of two boys who grow up in a tenement in Kiran Nagarkar's Raavan and Eddie (Penguin India), while its underbelly has been graphically documented in the doorstop-size Shantaram (Penguin India) by Gregory David Roberts. Mumbai is also where Salman Rushdie grew up, and the city is one of the backdrops of his Booker of Bookers, Midnight's Children (Vintage), which tells of two babies swapped at birth, one Hindu and one Muslim, one rich and one poor, both born on the stroke of midnight at India's independence. Mumbai is also the backdrop for his more notorious The Satanic Verses (Viking). Rushdie's style of magic realism laced with Mumbai's street lingo was anticipated in G. V. Dessani's single brilliant novel, All About H Hatterr (Penguin India).

Kolkata has inspired a plethora of books, including Amit Chaudhuri's plangent tale of growing up in A Strange and Sublime Address (Vintage) and Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide (Houghton Mifflin), which takes off from the 300-year-old city and stirs up sediment of language and memory in the distributaries of the Ganga, in the Sundarbans. Delhi has an eponymous novel, Delhi (Viking India), by one of India's most widely read writers, Khushwant Singh; the book deftly mixes history with contemporary life. (Singh's Train to Pakistan [Penguin India] should be read alongside Bhisham Sahni's Tamas [Penguin India] to understand the complicated ambivalence of India's relationship with its Islamic neighbor, Pakistan.) Chennai has been well-captured in C. S. Lakshmi's collection of short stories, A Purple Sea (University of Nebraska Press).

Another novel to sample is Vikram Seth's compendious look at arranged marriage, A Suitable Boy (HarperCollins). This enjoyable novel is set in several cities. If you drive from Varanasi to Agra, you will pass by the scene, described by Seth, of a disaster that befell pilgrims there in the 1980s. (You may also find yourself incorporating the phrase "a tight slap" into your speech; don't ask -- just read.) Other novels of repute include Rohinton Mistry's charming stories of the minuscule Parsi community in Such A Long Journey (Random House) and A Fine Balance (Faber & Faber), with its unforgettable characters, set during 1975's State of Emergency; I. Allan Sealey's fictionalization of the life of the adventurer Claude Martin in The Trotternama; and Anita Desai's Baumgartner's Bombay, which takes a compassionate but clear-eyed look at German Jews, refugees from the Holocaust, who stayed on after the British left.

Nonfiction -- A good way to start a hot debate (as if an excuse were needed) is to be seen reading V. S. Naipaul's India: A Million Mutinies Now (Vintage). Many Western readers respond to the mixture of fear and fascination with which Naipaul considers the subcontinent. A far more contemporary and intriguing account of the nation-state that has remained a democracy for most of its 50-year history is offered by Sunil Khilnani's The Idea of India (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).

Journalist P. Sainath's Everybody Loves A Good Drought (Penguin India) has won 13 international awards at last count for his account of the country's poorest districts and the ways in which development schemes almost never help the ostensible beneficiaries. Suketu Mehta's Maximum City (Viking) captures the frenetic mood of Mumbai with its breathtaking scrutiny of the city's underbelly. Read it in association with Bombay, Meri Jaan (Penguin India; edited by Jerry Pinto and Naresh Fernandes), an anthology of writings about the city that includes names as varied as Andre Gidé and Duke Ellington. Gita Mehta's Karma Cola (Vintage) is an acerbic and witty investigation into the way in which unscrupulous gurus marketed Indian spirituality to credulous Westerners in search of "enlightenment."

Those interested in Indian spirituality will uncover a wealth of material. A good way to begin is to look at Kamala Subramaniam's The Mahabharata (Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan), the great epic tale of the war between two clans related by the ties of kinship. The Mahabharata also contains the Bhagavad-Gita or "The Celestial Song," which is often seen as the core of Hindu beliefs. The Ramayana (Penguin) by R. K. Narayan offers a good introduction to the epic of Rama, who is exiled and whose wife, Sita, is abducted by the demon king Ravana. Penguin India also does a compact series that includes The Book of Krishna by Pavan K. Varma, The Book of the Buddha by Arundhathi Subramaniam, and The Book of the Devi by Bulbul Sharma.

For a more academic approach to Indian history, try the somewhat pedantic Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy, by Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal (Routledge); A History of India, by Peter Robb (Palgrave); or A Concise History of India by Barbara Metcalf and Thomas Metcalf (Cambridge University Press).

This is just a start. But be warned -- the writing on India is as seductive as the place it describes. Once hooked, you'll want more.