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75 Best Indian Authors and their Books in English: The Must-Read List (2020 Update)

[Updated on 26-April-2020]

I’ve been trying to compile this list of Best Indian Authors in the English Language for a long time now. Every time I start, I get stuck up at zeroing in on the names.

There are so many great writers and novelists from India and of Indian origin, in the English language, that it is difficult to keep the list short.

Though I’m not a great fan of literary fictions and tend to incline towards mysteries and thrillers, I have tried my best to be unbiased and impartial.

While creating such lists, it is unavoidable to incline towards one’s preferences and tastes. If you are a fan of romance, you’d prefer Durjoy Dutta over Amish Tripathi; if you are a fan of humour, you’d prefer Sidin Vadukut over Ravinder Singh, and vice versa.

So, I decided to break down the list into different genres.

Also Read : 121 Best English Books by Indian Authors: The Definitive List (2024)

THE ALL-TIME GREATS OF INDIAN ENGLISH WRITING

TOP INDIAN LITERARY FICTION WRITERS

BEST HISTORIANS AND WRITERS OF HISTORY BOOKS FROM INDIA

BEST INDIAN AUTHORS OF RELIGIOUS/MYTHOLOGY BOOKS

BEST INDIAN AUTHORS OF HISTORICAL FICTION BOOKS

BEST MYTHOlOGICAL FICTION WRITERS IN INDIA

THE BEST WRITERS OF ROMANCE NOVELS IN INDIA

BEST MYSTERY AND THRILLER AUTHORS IN INDIA

TOP-MOST WRITERS OF SCI-FI/FANTASY NOVELS IN INDIA

BEST CHICK-LIT AUTHORS IN INDIA

BEST AUTHORS OF SELF-HELP AUTHORS IN INDIA

Also Read : 121 Best English Books by Indian Authors: The Definitive List (2018)

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About the Author

Father to Ahaana. Husband to Mayuri. Co-founder at bookGeeks. Engineer at BMM.

Check latest articles from this author:

Swami vivekananda books | a list of 28 best books, sudha murty books | a list of 32 books by sudha murty (genre wise), 10 books on the partition of india that will break your heart (2024), related articles, latest indian novels 2024: discover india’s latest literary treasures.

10 Best Indian Authors to Read Once in a Lifetime

Discover the literary treasures of India with our curated list of the ‘Best Indian Authors’ to read in 2024. From timeless classics to contemporary masterpieces, explore the diverse voices that have shaped Indian literature. Uncover the brilliance of renowned writers, their impactful storytelling, and the rich cultural tapestry woven into each narrative. Whether you’re a seasoned reader or a newcomer to Indian literature, this blog post is your guide to the must-read works that showcase the depth and beauty of Indian storytelling.

Books by Best Indian Authors

1. train to pakistan.

Ten million people—Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs—were on the move when the new state of Pakistan was publicly established in the summer of 1947. Nearly a million of them had perished by the time the monsoon arrived, and everyone in northern India was either hiding, in fear, or in arms. A few small towns tucked away in the furthest corners of the boundary were the last remaining havens of tranquility. Mano Majra was a village among them.

At the outset of this timeless book, Khushwant Singh continues, “It is a place where Sikhs and Muslims have lived together in peace for hundreds of years.” The community gets its first taste of the horrors of the civil war when the “ghost train,” a silent, magnificent burial train filled with the dead of thousands of refugees, comes one day at the end of the summer. The narrative of this remote community submerged in a sea of religious hatred is told in Train to Pakistan. It also tells the tale of a Muslim girl and a Sikh boy whose love endures and surpasses the devastation caused by conflict.

Amazon | Bookshop.org

2. Midnight’s Children

On August 15, 1947, at exactly midnight, Saleem Sinai was born—the exact day India gained its independence. Saleem is welcomed by fireworks, enthusiastic spectators, and Prime Minister Nehru personally. However, when he becomes older, he discovers the sinister ramifications of this coincidence. His every action is reflected and amplified in circumstances that affect the direction of national affairs; his existence is intrinsically linked to the history of his country; and his health and well-being are inexorably linked to that of his nation. The telepathic abilities that connect him to the 1,000 other “midnight’s children” in India—all of whom were born in that first hour and possess magical abilities—are arguably the most amazing.

This book is a masterful expression of the universal human comedy that is also an intriguing family saga and an astounding evocation of a large region and its people. Even after four decades of publication, Midnight’s Children continues to be regarded as a seminal piece of fiction and a masterful reading by one of the greatest authors of our day.

3. A Suitable Boy

A Suitable Boy paints a broad, panoramic picture of a complicated, multiethnic society in transition by telling the tale of common people entangled in a web of love, ambition, humor, grief, prejudice, reconciliation, the most careful social graces, and the most horrific brutality.

The central theme of Vikram Seth’s book is love: it tells the story of Lata and her mother Mrs. Rupa Mehra’s search for a suitable boy for Lata, whether through strict parental evaluation or affection. This engrossing story immerses us in the vividly imagined world of four sizable extended families during the early 1950s in a newly independent India that is going through a difficult period. It tells a captivating account of their lives and loves.

4. The God of Small Things

The God of Small Things offers such magic, mystery, and sadness that, literally, this reader turned the last page and decided to reread it. Immediately. It’s that haunting. —USA Today

Arundhati Roy’s contemporary masterpiece, which has been compared favorably to the writings of Faulkner and Dickens, is a potent blend of political drama, forbidden love story, and dramatic family history. The arrival of their stunning baby cousin, Sophie, completely upends the world of the seven-year-old twins, Rahel and Estha. This incident will reveal “big things [that] lurk unsaid” in a nation teetering perilously near instability, as well as an illegal relationship and unintentional and intentional disasters.

The God of Small Things is a lush, lyrical, and unsettling Booker Prize winning classic that launched the author’s illustrious career of fiction and political criticism, which is still going strong today.

5. Partitions

Stunning debut book about uprooted kids and their escapes to safety, set in India during the bloody 1947 partition. As India is split into two countries, there is communal violence on both sides of the newly drawn boundary, and hordes of migrants are fleeing the chaos and bloodshed.

Twin Hindu boys Shankar and Keshav lose sight of their mother at an overrun rail station and join the throng of people searching for her. Simran Kaur, a young Sikh girl, has fled her father because he would sooner poison his daughter than see her violated.

And as he hobbles toward the newly formed Muslim nation of Pakistan, Ibrahim Masud, an aged Muslim physician, rediscovers his calling as a healer. He was driven from his hometown. This odd trio bands together as the displaced endure a range of tragedies, breaking every self-preservation guideline to create a hopeful future.

Partitions, a dramatic, brilliant tale of families and nations torn apart and rebuilt, presents a remarkable novelist with the power and elegance of a poet.

6. The Henna Artist

Captivated me from the first chapter to the final page. —Reese Witherspoon

The Henna Artist opens a gateway into a world that is simultaneously lush and interesting, stark and merciless. It does this through painting a vivid and captivating portrayal of one woman’s battle for fulfillment in a culture that is veering between the traditional and the modern.

Lakshmi, 17, leaves her violent marriage behind and travels alone to Jaipur, a brilliant pink city from the 1950s. There, she becomes the most sought-after henna artist and confidante among the upper-class, wealthy women. But she can never divulge her own as she is trusted with the wealthiest people’s secrets.

Lakshmi is well-known for her unique designs and wise counsel, but she has to exercise caution to stay away from envious rumors that could destroy her reputation and her business. One day, while she pursues her dream of living a self-sufficient existence, she is shocked to see her husband standing in front of her after all these years, bringing along a lively little girl who is her sister, a sister Lakshmi never knew she had.

All of a sudden, the prudence she has painstakingly cultivated as defense is called into question. She continues to persevere, using her gifts and encouraging everyone around her in the process.

7. Inglorious Empire

India’s economic contribution to the global economy was equal to that of Europe in the eighteenth century. After 200 years of British domination, by 1947, it had dropped six times. In addition to enslaving people and using deceit, the Empire also slaughtered defenseless protestors, blew up rebels with cannons, institutionalized bigotry, and starved millions of people.

Shashi Tharoor challenges British imperialism’s justification of itself as enlightened tyranny serving the interests of the governed by showing how every purported imperial “gift,” including the rule of law and the railways, was created only with Britain’s interests in mind.

He continues by demonstrating how India’s deindustrialization and the devastation of its textile sector served as the impetus for Britain’s Industrial Revolution. Tharoor uncovers the disgraceful truth of Britain’s tarnished Indian heritage with striking effect in this audacious and perceptive reevaluation of colonialism.

8. Annihilation of Caste

The political essay “Annihilation of Caste,” written by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, a well-known political figure, eminent jurist, Buddhist activist, philosopher, anthropologist, historian, orator, writer, economist, scholar, and editor, was first published in May 1936 and spoke out against the caste system and Hindu orthodox religious leaders.

Throughout his life, Dr. Ambedkar battled for the rights of the Dalits and other socially oppressed groups, as well as the abolition of societal evils like untouchability. Jawaharlal Nehru chose Dr. Ambedkar as India’s first Law Minister in his Cabinet. 1990 saw the posthumous awarding of India’s highest civilian accolade, the “Bharat Ratna.”

One of the most important—yet little-known—pieces of Indian political literature is this one. It is a fearless critique of Hinduism and the caste structure. Ambedkar provides an academic analysis of Hindu texts, which support a rigidly hierarchical and immoral societal structure. Mahatma Gandhi, the most well-known Hindu in the world, openly addressed the provocation.

9. The Night Diary

A gripping, nuanced story of the human cost of conflict appropriate for both children and adults. -Kirkus, starred review

A moving, intimate, and hopeful story of India’s partition and one girl’s quest to find a new home in a split nation, in the style of Inside Out and Back Again and The War That Saved My Life.

1947 saw the division of India, which had just gained independence from British domination, into Pakistan and India. Thousands of people are killed crossing borders each year as a result of the division that has heightened tensions between Muslims and Hindus.

Half Hindu, half Muslim Nisha, twelve, no longer knows what her nation is or where she belongs. Nisha and her family flee to Pakistan after Papa determines it is too dangerous for them to remain there. Initially, they go by train, but eventually, they walk to their new home.

Nisha can’t imagine losing her homeland as well, especially after losing her mother when she was a kid. The journey is lengthy, challenging, and hazardous. Despite the fact that her nation has been destroyed, Nisha maintains hope that she will be able to rebuild herself.

The Night Diary, narrated through Nisha’s letters to her mother, is a poignant account of a young girl’s search for her own identity, her home, and a bright future.

10. The Namesake

Dazzling…An intimate, closely observed family portrait. —The New York Times

Meet the Ganguli family, recent Calcutta immigrants who are yearning to return home despite their best efforts to assimilate into American society.

The name they give their newborn child, Gogol, represents all the tensions that arise from upholding tradition in a foreign land—tensions that will follow Gogol throughout his own tortuous journey through betrayed allegiance, hilarious digressions, and heartbreaking love affairs.

Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri masterfully captures the experience of immigration and the complex relationships across generations in her book The Namesake.

More Historical Fiction Books

• The Lost Apothecary by Sarah Penner
• The Things We Cannot Say by Kelly Rimmer
• The Hotel Nantucket by Elin Hilderbrand

Disclaimer: This blog post may contain affiliate links. If you click on these links and make a purchase, The Crimson Books may earn a small commission at no additional cost to you.

About the Author

TCB Team is a dedicated group of individuals who are passionate about literature and committed to critically analyzing and evaluating various literary works. The team consist of diverse members with varying backgrounds, interests, and expertise, which allows for a comprehensive and multifaceted assessment of books across different genres and themes.

Our primary goal is to provide insightful and unbiased reviews that help readers make informed decisions about their reading choices and contribute to the broader discourse surrounding literature.

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12 best Indian novels that everyone needs to read

If you can’t travel there, the next best thing is to delve into one of these of works of fiction, article bookmarked.

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From the cultural splendour of Delhi, Agra and Jaipur to the glamour of Bollywood, India is a fascinating place.

It’s the second most populous country in the world and there’s no better way to learn about its diverse culture and complex history than to read about it.

India has a long and distinguished literary record. The country’s first written works date as far back as 1500BC and its oral tradition is even older than that.

Centuries on, India’s literary culture is flourishing – as shown by the impressive number of Indian novelists who have won the Booker Prize over the past 50 years.

These include Arundhati Roy, the author of The God of Small Things , Aravind Adiga, who wrote The White Tiger, and Kiran Desai, the author of The Inheritance of Loss . Salman Rushdie, who was born in India but is a British citizen, won the 1981 Booker Prize for Midnight’s Children .

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We’ve chosen a mix of classics from years gone by and contemporary novels that portray modern-day life in India. Our main criteria was that the novels should be original, compelling and superbly written – the kind of books that convey the country’s distinctive culture in literary form.

Some of our choices, such as Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance , shine a light on times of political upheaval, while books like The Year of the Runaways by Sunjeev Sahota, relay the struggles of migrant workers who leave India and cross the world to look for work. In other words, there’s something to suit all literary tastes.

You can trust our independent reviews. We may earn commission from some of the retailers, but we never allow this to influence selections, which are formed from real-world testing and expert advice. This revenue helps us to fund journalism across The Independent.

‘A Fine Balance’ by Rohinton Mistry, published by Faber & Faber: £9.99, Waterstones

Set in 1975, when prime minister Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency due to civil unrest, this fine novel is the story of four strangers – a widow, a young student who has been uprooted from his idyllic hill station home and two tailors who have fled the caste violence of their native village. The quartet are thrust together, sharing a cramped apartment and facing an uncertain future in the middle of India’s political turmoil. Shortlisted for the 1996 Booker Prize, Mistry’s beautifully written novel is a literary tour de force.

‘A Suitable Boy’ by Vikram Seth, published by Orion: £9.22, Amazon

Published in 1993, this huge tome – one of the longest novels published in a single volume in the English language – is a much-loved classic. Set in newly independent, post-partition India, it follows the stories of four families, focusing on Rupa Mehra’s efforts to arrange the marriage of her spirited student daughter Lata to “a suitable boy”. The first screen version of this epic story is currently being filmed in India and will be shown on BBC1 in late 2020. “It’s a charming, almost Austenesque story, with a delightfully relatable heroine, set against the turbulent background of India in the years following partition,” says TV screenwriter Andrew Davies.

‘The God of Small Things’ by Arundhati Roy, published by Harper Perennial: £8.99, Foyles

This ambitious debut novel took the literary world by storm when it was published in 1997. Roy had previously been working as a screenwriter, actor and aerobics instructor but within months her book had sold all round the world and scooped the Booker Prize. Set in the southern state of Kerala, it relates the childhood experiences of twins Estha and Rahel, who see their world shaken irrevocably by the accidental death by drowning of their visiting English cousin. Lyrical, magical and beautifully written, it’s the compelling story of intertwining family lives, birth and death and love and loss.

‘Midnight’s Children’ by Salman Rushdie, published by Vintage: £9.99, Waterstones

Salman Rushdie’s classic novel has been feted by Booker judges an astonishing three times. It won the Booker in 1981, was judged to be the Booker of Bookers for the award’s 25th anniversary in 1993 and in 2008 was voted the greatest Booker Prize winner of all time. Born at the stroke of midnight, at the precise moment of India’s independence, Saleem Sinai, the novel’s protagonist, is one of 1,001 “midnight’s children” – all of whom have special gifts and are telepathically linked. Rushdie says in the introduction to the novel that in the west people tend to read the novel “as a fantasy” while in India readers think of it as “pretty realistic, almost a history book”.

‘The Inheritance of Loss’ by Kiran Desai, published by Penguin: £7.19 Amazon

When Kiran Desai’s second novel won the Booker Prize in 2006 head judge Hermione Lee described it as “a magnificent novel of humane breadth and wisdom, comic tenderness and powerful political acuteness”. Set in 1986, it’s the powerful and very accessible story of a bitter old judge who lives in a dilapidated mansion high in the Himalayas, his orphaned granddaughter Sai, who has fallen in love with her tutor, and his cook, whose son Biju is working in New York and trying to stay one step ahead of the US immigration services.

‘Shantaram’ by Gregory David Roberts, published by Abacus: £10.99, Foyles

Gregory David Roberts’s rollercoaster life reads like a thriller. An ex-armed robber and reformed heroin addict, he escaped from an Australian prison to India, where he lived in a Mumbai slum, launched a free health clinic, joined the mafia and worked in the Bollywood movie industry. This page-turning debut novel is based on his own experiences in the Mumbai underworld and runs to a hefty 900 pages.

‘The White Tiger’ by Aravind Adiga, published by Atlantic: £8.99, Waterstones

The enthralling story of Balram Halwai’s journey from “sweet, innocent village fool” to ruthless entrepreneur scooped the Booker Prize in 2008. This brilliant debut novel tells the searing tale of two Indias – one of them Balram’s home village, where sewage seeps down the road and children are “too lean and short for their age,” the other the city of Delhi, with its noisy shopping malls, traffic jams and slums. Look out for the film too – a Netflix adaptation is underway, with Rajkummar Rao and Priyanka Chopra in the lead roles.

‘The Year of the Runaways’ by Sunjeev Sahota, published by Picador: £8.95, Amazon

Sunjeev Sahota’s second novel follows the lives of three migrant workers, Tochi, Avtar and Randeep, who flee India to look for work in England. The first half of the book features sections about their lives in India, relating their disparate reasons for moving to the other side of the world. Randeep marries to secure a visa, Avtar poses as a student and Tochi arrives in the UK on a fake passport in the back of a lorry. The book was shortlisted for the 2015 Booker Prize.

‘The Lives of Others’ by Neel Mukherjee, published by Vintage: £8.95, Amazon

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Costa Novel Award in 2014, Neel Mukherjee’s second novel is set in 1960s Kolkata and opens with the shocking account of a desperate man, who is unable to feed his starving wife and children and murders them before killing himself. This shocking scene is juxtaposed with the story of the wealthy Ghosh family, one of whom has become involved in extremist political activism. A powerful generational story of the chasm between the haves and have-nots.

‘The Great Indian Novel’ by Shashi Tharoor, published by Penguin: £5.99, Abe Books

First published in 1989, this book has a big title but Shashi Tharoor makes it clear from the start that it’s in deference to “its primary source of inspiration” – The Mahabharata , one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India. In Sanskrit Maha means great and Bharata means India. Tharoor uses The Mahabharata as a framework for this satirical novel about the major Indian political events of the 20th century, from British colonial rule through to “the struggle for freedom and the triumphs and disappointments of Independence”.

‘Witness the Night’ by Kishwar Desai, published by Simon & Schuster: £7.71, Amazon

When a traumatised young girl is found barely alive in a house where 13 people have been murdered, the local police assume she is the killer. But a feisty gin-swilling social worker brought in to review the case is convinced the girl has been framed and sets out to prove her innocence. Kishwar Desai wrote her stunning debut novel in just four weeks, driven by anger at the hidden scandal of killing baby girls that still exists in parts of India. It went on to win the Costa first novel award in 2010.

‘Polite Society’ by Mahesh Rao, published by Tinder Press: £14.99, Foyles

If you’re looking for a lighter read, try Mahesh Rao’s beautifully observed and witty second novel, a contemporary version of Jane Austen’s Emma . Ania Khurana is a spoilt, rich 25-year-old living in a luxurious Delhi mansion. She knows everyone who is anyone in the city but she’s bored and in need of entertainment. Following in Emma Woodhouse’s matchmaking steps, Ania first finds a husband for her spinster aunt, then sets her sights on doing the same for her friend Dimple, only to find that the path of true love doesn’t always run smooth.

The verdict: Indian novels

Choosing a favourite out of these 12 extraordinary novels is a tough task but for beautiful writing and characters you really care about Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance is in a league of its own. If books with present-day themes are more to your taste don’t miss Sunjeev Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways . Set in both India and Sheffield, the city where three Indian migrants travel to seek work, it’s an insightful, timely read.

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100 Best Books and Novels by Indian Authors

In a country as large and diverse as India, there is always a story waiting to be told. Which is why, we’ve saved you the trouble and put together some of the timeless gems that are available in Indian English writing today. Here are our top 100 picks, written by critically-acclaimed Indian authors, or authors of Indian origin.

In this brilliant retelling of the Ramayana, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni places Sita at the centre of the novel: this is Sita’s version. The Forest of Enchantments is also a very human story of some of the other women in the epic, often misunderstood and relegated to the margins: Kaikeyi, Surpanakha, Mandodari. A powerful comment on duty, betrayal, infidelity, and honour, it is also about women’s struggle to retain autonomy in a world that privileges men, as Chitra transforms an ancient story into a gripping, contemporary battle of wills.

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The Far Field by  Madhuri Vijay 

Latitudes of Longing by  Shubhangi Swarup

An astounding exploration of intense longings, Shubhangi Swarup’s novel begins in the depths of the Andaman Sea, and follows geological and emotional faultlines through the Irrawaddy delta and the tourist-trap of Thamel, to end amidst the highest glaciers and passes of the Karakorams. The story sweeps through worlds and times that are inhabited by: a scientist who studies trees and a clairvoyant who talks to them; Lord Goodenough who travels around the furthest reaches of the Raj, giving names to nameless places; a geologist working towards ending futile wars over a glacier; octogenarian lovers; a superstitious dictator and a mother struggling to get her revolutionary son released; a yeti who seeks human companionship; a turtle who turns first into a boat and then a woman; and the ghost of an evaporated ocean as restless as the continents.

Paper Moon by  Rehana Munir 

When her estranged father passes away, Fiza, fresh out of college, discovers that he has left her a tidy sum in the hope that she will open a bookshop… Overnight, Fiza’s placid life is thrown into a whirl of decor decisions and book-buying sprees, unconventional staff and colourful patrons, small pleasures and little heartbreaks, as the store — Paper Moon — begins to take shape in a charming, old Bandra mansion. To top it all, she is being wooed by Iqbal, a mysterious customer who frequents the shop, and Dhruv, her ex-boyfriend, her feelings for whom are still confused.

The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters  by  Balli Kaur Jaswal 

The Shergill sisters never needed each other–until they did. Rajni, Jezmeen, and Shirina Shergill have never been close but when their mother dies, she has only one request: that they take a pilgrimage across India to carry out her final rites. While an extended family holiday is the last thing they want, each sister has her own reasons to run away from her life. Rajni is the archetypal know-it-all eldest but her son dropped a bombshell before she left and, for the first time, she doesn’t know what the future holds. Middle sister Jezmeen, always a loudmouth, has translated her need for attention into life as a struggling actress. But her career is on the skids after an incident went viral and now she’s desperate to find her voice again. Shirina, the golden child, has confounded expectations by having an arranged marriage and moving to the other side of the world. But her perfect life isn’t what it seems and time is running out to make the right choice. As the miles rack up on their jaunt across India, the secrets of the past and present are sure to spill out.

Adulting by  Neharika Gupta 

Social media manager and popular blogger Aisha is flirty and flamboyant … even as she battles personal demons that tell her she must stop eating if she wants to stay pretty.

Ruhi couldn’t be more different from her friend Aisha. Working at Literacy Publishing, she feels grossly underappreciated by the editor-in-chief, who happens to be her mother. What keeps her going are her own ambitions – and her handsome author Tejas.

Bestselling novelist Tejas has a bad case of writer’s block. He leans on Ruhi for emotional support before getting enamored by Aisha as he struggles to live up to everyone’s expectations, including his own.

The Swap by  Shuma Raha

There is nothing really wrong with Priya Bakshi and Akash Srivastav’s six-year-old marriage … except that Priya is having an affair. And Akash, too, seems to be on the lookout for sexual adventure. When Tarun, their richer, older, and manipulative friend, tells them about Delhi’s couple-swapping parties, Akash wants to jump right in. With some reluctance, Priya agrees to give him company. Soon, Priya and Akash find themselves in a world of swinging couples and sexual abandon, joined by friends who are equally keen to test the waters. But as the clothes come off and the secrets begin to tumble out, it seems that none of them will emerge unscathed.Witty and racy, The Swap is a sparkling social novel about sex, marriage, and morality.

Bhaunri by  Anukrti Upadhyay

Can too much love be a dangerous thing? Bhaunri is married, as is the custom in her tribe of nomadic blacksmiths when she is still a child. When she is finally sent away to her husband’s home as a young woman, she finds herself drawn deeply and powerfully towards the gruff and handsome Bheema. Bheema, however, is far from the ideal husband, and when he strays one time too many, Bhaunri’s love for him begins to fester and grow into something dark and fearsome.

The Twentieth Wife by  Indu Sundaresan 

Mehrunnisa – the Sun of Women – one of India’s most legendary and controversial empresses … a woman who overcame insurmountable obstacles through sheer brilliance and determination … whose love shaped the course of the Mughal Empire. She is the twentieth wife. The daughter of refugees from Persia, growing up on the fringes of Emperor Akbar’s opulent palace grounds, Mehrunnisa first encounters Prince Salim on his wedding day. Eight years old at the time, she decides that she too will one day become Salim’s wife – unaware of the great price she and her family will pay for this dream.

Those Pricey Thakur Girls by  Anuja Chauhan

From the bestselling author of The Zoya Factor and Battle for Bittora …

Spot-on funny and toe-curlingly sexy, Those Pricey Thakur Girls is rom-com specialist Anuja Chauhan writing at her sparkling best.

Baaz by  Anuja Chauhan

The USSR-backed India-Mukti Bahini alliance is on the brink of war against the America-aided Pakistani forces. As the Cold War threatens to turn red hot, handsome, laughing Ishaan Faujdaar, a farm boy from Chakkahera, Haryana, is elated to be in the IAF, flying the Gnat, a tiny fighter plane nicknamed ‘Sabre Slayer’ for the devastation it has wreaked in the ranks of Pakistan’s F-86 Sabre Squadrons. Flanked by his buddies Raks, a MiG-21 Fighter, Maddy, a transport pilot who flies a Caribou, and fellow Gnatties Jana, Gana, and Mana, Shaanu has nothing on his mind but glory and adventure – until he encounters Tehmina Dadyseth, famed bathing beauty and sister of a dead fauji, who makes him question the very concept of nationalism and whose eyes fill with disillusioned scorn whenever people wax eloquent about patriotism and war…Pulsating with love, laughter, and courage, Baaz is Anuja Chauhan’s tribute to our men in uniform.

The Radiance of a Thousand Sons by  Manreet Sodhi Someshwar 

Niki’s determination to complete her dead father’s unfinished book, his life’s work, takes her from India to New York City where her pursuit of a mysterious immigrant woman turns into an obsession that begins to imperil her daughter, her marriage, and, eventually, Niki herself. When a blizzard blankets NYC, Niki finds herself on a path where the present and past collide violently. Propulsive and poetic, this elegant literary thriller melds the fervour of Punjab with the frenzy of New York. Spanning the cataclysms of Partition and 9/11, via the brutality of Emergency and the pogrom of 1984, the novel explores the impossible choices women are forced to make in the face of violence, the ties that connect them across ages, and the secrets they store.

Jorasanko by  Aruna Chakravarti 

A sensitive portrayal of the hopes and fears, triumphs and defeats experienced by the women of the Tagore household. in a sprawling novel that spans a unique phase in the history of Bengal and India, Aruna Chakravarti provides a fascinating account of how the Tagore women influenced and were in turn influenced by their illustrious male counterparts, the times they lived in and the family they belonged to. Jorasanko mirrors the hopes and fears, triumphs and defeats that the women of the Tagore household experienced in their intricate interpersonal relationships, as well as the adjustments they were continually called upon to make as daughters and daughters-in-law of one of the most eminent families of the land.

The Mountain of Light by  Indu Sundaresan 

The much-awaited novel from the author of the bestselling Taj trilogy! Told in her inimitable trademark style, Indu Sundaresan’s The Mountain of Light is a wondrous and historically rich tale, as clear and as dazzling as a diamond itself.

Koi Good News? by  Zarreen Khan 

When Mona Mathur of Dehradun had married her college sweetheart Ramit Deol of Amritsar, there were two things she wasn’t prepared for:1. The size of the Deol family – it put any Sooraj Barjatiya movie to shame2. The fertility of the Deol family – they reproduce faster than any other species are known to mankind for four years now, Mona and Ramit have done the unthinkable and remained childless. Of course, that also means that they’ve battled that one question day in and day out: ‘Koi Good News?’ It doesn’t matter that they have been happy to be child-free – they are married; they are expected to make babies. After all, there are grandparents, great-grandparents, uncles, aunts, and even colony aunties in waiting.

The Gypsy Goddess by  Meena Kandasamy

Village landlords force peasants to break their backs in the paddy fields or suffer beatings as punishment. So it is little wonder that the communist party begins to gain traction, a small spark of defiance spreading from villager to villager. As communities across the region begin to take a stand against the landlords, the landlords vow to break them: party organizers suffer grisly deaths and the flow of marketplace food dries up. But intimidation only serves to make the villagers’ resistance burn more fiercely. Finally, the landlords descend on one village to set an example to the others.

Nobody Killed Her by  Sabyn Javeri 

The nation sinks deep into mourning as news of former Prime Minister Rani Shah’s assassination arrives. Intelligence agencies, opposition leaders, the army top brass, her closest relatives – all seem to be shifting in their chairs even as special investigative teams gear up to file a report. Conspiracy theories abound for there were many who stood to gain if she pulled out of the imminent elections. The needle of suspicion points most immediately to Madam Shah’s close confidante Nazneen Khan, who was seen sitting right beside her in the convoy and, oddly, escaped the bomb blast unscathed. Sabyn Javeri’s tale of intense friendship between two ambitious women unfolds in a country steeped in fanaticism and patriarchy. Set against a backdrop of intrigue and political machinations, this is a novel about love, loyalty, obsession, and deception.

Daura by  Anukrti Upadhyay

A journey into the dark heart of the desert. A young District Collector is posted to one of the furthest outposts of rural Rajasthan and finds himself drawn deeper and deeper into the lives and troubles of the common people there. Then one day, with the help of a mysterious musician, the Sarangiya, he has an encounter with beauty in its purest, most absolute form – an encounter that precipitates a dangerous descent. The pages from the journal he keeps are combined with the narratives of various people around him to create a compelling account of his slide away from reality.

Ghachar Ghochar by  Vivek Shanbhag ,  Srinath Perur

Cuckold by  Kiran Nagarkar 

The time is the early 16th century. The Rajput kingdom of Mewar is at the height of its power. It is locked in a war with the Sultanates of Delhi, Gujarat, and Malwa. But there is another deadly battle being waged within Mewar itself. who will inherit the throne after the death of the Maharana? The course of history, not just of Mewar but of the whole of India, is about to be changed forever

The White Tiger by  Aravind Adiga

Winner of the 2008 Booker Prize, now a major Netflix film starring Priyanka Chopra and Rajkumar RaoMeet Balram Halwai, the ‘white tiger’: servant, philosopher, entrepreneur, murderer…

The White Tiger  is a tale of two Indias. Balram’s journey from the darkness of village life to the light of entrepreneurial success is utterly amoral, brilliantly irreverent, deeply endearing, and altogether unforgettable.

Selection Day by  Aravind Adiga 

Serious Men by  Manu Joseph

The Illicit Happiness Of Other People by  Manu Joseph 

Rumi: A New Translation by  Farrukh Dhondy 

Marked by the lyrical beauty and spiritual insight, a deep understanding of human suffering that coexists with rapturous abandon, the poems of Jalaluddin Rumi continue to be relevant almost eight centuries after they were composed, with contemporary audiences finding new meanings in them. Rumi’s poems bring together the divine and the human, the mystical and the corporeal to create a vivid kaleidoscope of poetic images.

India’s Most Haunted by  K. Hari Kumar 

There are places where the past lingers, making shapes in the moonlight and blowing in the curtains even as the air goes suddenly still. K. Hari Kumar, the bestselling author of spine-chilling horror fiction, brings you the terrifying tales of some of India’s most haunted places – including Bhangarh Fort, Malabar Hill’s Tower of Silence, and Jammu and Kashmir’s notorious Khooni Nala. Whether you read them at night or in daylight, these stories will remain with you long after you’ve turned the last page.

Best Indian Short Stories by  Khushwant Singh

Dopehri by  Pankaj Kapur 

The Belated Bachelor Party   by  Ravinder Singh

Parliamental by  Meghnad S.

Raghav Marathe, cynical millennial turned reluctant policy analyst, arrives in Delhi with his boss, Prabhu Srikar of the RJM party, and a first-time MP with a tendency to throw up. As they navigate their way around Parliament, handling backroom deals, nepotistic party heads, and laws that seem to be tailor-made to benefit the ruling party, they learn that politics and idealism don’t always go together. While Srikar tries to adapt to his new avatar and lie low, Raghav uses his Twitter alter ego, @Arnavinator, to vent his frustration and spread chaos.But when a new bill that threatens freedom of expression is bulldozed through with impunity, Srikar and Raghav must make a choice – to compromise on their values or to stand up for what is right. But at what cost? And can they and their unlikely allies – a jaded lawyer, an ambitious journalist and a rising YouTube star – really make a difference?

Best Indian Short Stories: Volume 2 by  Khushwant Singh 

India’s Wars by  Arjun Subramaniam

The Japanese Wife by  Basu Kunal

An Indian man writes to a Japanese woman. She writes back. The pen-friends fall in love and exchange their vows over letters, then live as man and wife without ever setting eyes on each other – their intimacy of words tested finally by life’s miraculous upheavals.The twelve stories in this collection are about the unexpected. An American professor visits India with the purpose of committing suicide, and goes on a desert journey with the daughter of a snake-charmer. A honeymooning Indian couple is caught up in the Tiananmen Square unrest. A Russian prostitute discovers her roots in the company of Calcutta revolutionaries. A holocaust victim stands tall among strangers in a landscape of hate. These are chronicles of memory and dreams born at the crossroads of civilizations. They parade a cast of angels and demons rubbing shoulders with those whose lives are never quite as ordinary as they seem.

14: Stories That Inspired Satyajit Ray by  Bhaskar Chattopadhyay 

Narasimha by  Kevin Missal 

Narasimha, once a brave soldier, has left the war and lies low as a physician in a village. But a familiar face from his past seeks his help to stop the tyranny of the blind usurper Andhaka. If Narasimha refuses, the world might just end. What will he do? And why did he leave the war in the first place? Prahlad, the interim king of Kashyapuri, is torn between the ideals of his unrighteous father and his love for Lord Vishnu. Whom will he choose? Hiranyakashyap, the ruler of the Asura Empire, wants to avenge the death of his wife. To do that, he must go through the Trials and get the ultimate weapon – the Brahmastra. But the Trials have sent so many others to their death. Can Hiranyakashyap survive?

Pather Panchali by  Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay

Pather Panchali is a vivid, moving and authentic portrayal of the life of a Brahmin household seen through the eyes of the two young children of the family, Opu and his elder sister Durga. Few authors in any literature can rival Bandhopadhyaya’s understanding of the child mind.

Ivory Throne by  Manu S. Pillai 

In 1498, when Vasco da Gama set foot in Kerala looking for Christians and spices, he unleashed a wave of political fury that would topple local powers like a house of cards. The cosmopolitan fabric of a vibrant trading society – with its Jewish and Arab merchants, Chinese pirate heroes and masterful Hindu Zamorins – was ripped apart, heralding an age of violence and bloodshed. One prince, however, emerged triumphant from this descent into chaos. Shrewdly marrying Western arms to Eastern strategy, Martanda Varma consecrated the dominion of Travancore, destined to become one of the most dutiful pillars of the British Raj. What followed was two centuries of internecine conflict in one of India’s premier princely states, culminating in a dynastic feud between two sisters battling to steer the fortunes of their house on the eve of Independence.

The Twice-born by  Aatish Taseer 

When Aatish Taseer first came to Benares, he was eighteen, the Westernized child of an Indian journalist and a Pakistani politician, raised among the intellectual and cultural elite of New Delhi. Nearly two decades later, Taseer leaves his life in Manhattan to go in search of the Brahmins, wanting to understand his own estrangement from India through their ties to tradition. Known as the twice-born – first into the flesh, and again when initiated into their vocation – the Brahmins are a caste devoted to sacred learning. But what Taseer finds in Benares, the holy city of death, is a window on an India as internally fractured as his own continent-bridging identity. At every turn, the seductive, homogenizing force of modernity collides with the insistent presence of the past. From the narrow streets of the temple town to a Modi rally in Delhi, among the blossoming cotton trees and the bathers and burning corpses of the Ganges, Taseer struggles to reconcile magic with reason, faith in tradition with hope for the future and the brutalities of the caste system, all the while challenging his own myths about himself, his past, and his countries old and new.

Solo by  Rana Dasgupta 

Before the man lost his sight, he read this story in a magazine. A group of explorers came upon a community of parrots speaking the language of a society that had been wiped out in a recent catastrophe. Astonished by this discovery, they put the parrots in cages and sent them home so that linguists might record what remained of the lost language. But the parrots, already traumatised by the devastation they had recently witnessed, died on the way. Wondering if, unlike these hapless parrots, he has any wisdom to leave to the world, one-hundred-year-old Ulrich embarks on an epic armchair journey through the twists and turns of his country’s turbulent century – and through his own century of lost love and failed chemistry – and finds his way to an astonishing epiphany of redemption and enlightenment.

Sex, Scotch & Scholarship by  Khushwant Singh  

In this anthology, which comprises some of Khushwant Singh’s best writing, you can look forward to some talk of sex, a little of scotch and much scholarship. The collection attempts to mirror the author’s concerns and passions-his love of nature, his anguish over the situation in Punjab, his interest in religions of the world, and his scholarly research on the one into which he was born, Sikhism.

Darkness by  Ratnakar Matkari 

A boy who can predict the exact date a person will die… An elderly woman who knows that death is close, but learns how to cheat it… A child with a dangerous friend who happens to be invisible… A ghost who can’t stop reliving his suicide over and over again…People you’ll wish you never have to meet, and stories you’ll never forget.

Accidental Magic by  Keshava Guha 

Dozakhnama by  Rabisankar Bal

Who tells the greatest story God or Manto? Dozakhnama: Conversations in Hell is an extraordinary novel, a biography of Manto and Ghalib and a history of Indian culture rolled into one. Exhumed from dust, Manto’s unpublished novel surfaces in Lucknow. Is it real or is it a fake? In this dastan, Manto and Ghalib converse, entwining their lives in shared dreams. The result is an intellectual journey that takes us into the people and events that shape us as a culture. As one writer describes it, I discovered Rabisankar Bal like a torch in the darkness of the history of this subcontinent. This is the real story of two centuries of our own country.

Shivaji: The Great Maratha  by  Ranjit Desai 

 Young Shivaji reaches Pune, a dying fort city, with his mother Jijabai and lights the first lamp within its ruins. While his father Shahaji Bhosle is away on deputation by the Adil Shah sultanate after having failed in a revolt against it, Shivaji learns how an empire is built from the ground up. Thus begins the life of the Great Maratha. What awaits Shivaji is nothing short of the vast scroll of history, and it takes him from Surat to Thanjavur and all the way to Aurangzeb’s durbar in Agra. He dreams of freeing his land from the clutches of Mughal rule, and though he suffers many defeats and personal losses along the way he never gives up his vision of Hindavi Swaraj. Amidst political intrigue and a chain of skirmishes, Shivaji becomes a leader, a warrior and a tactician par excellence, driven by immense pride and love for his motherland.

Inheritance by  Balli Kaur Jaswal

Fifteen-year-old Amrit disappears from her house in the middle of the night and returns a different person. Over the next two decades, her actions affect three generations of her Sikh family in Singapore. When Narain, her brother, leaves his new life in America to take care of her, he must find his place again in a country and a community that will not accept him for who he is. Gurdev, the eldest, raises his three daughters with fear and caution over what they might become. And Harbeer, whose wife has left him, is the unyielding patriarch who must reconcile his pride and learn to cope with his own demons.

Sugar bread by  Balli Kaur Jaswal 

Ten-year-old Pin knows she must not become like her mother Jini but doesn’t know why. She tries to figure out her mother’s moods through her cooking, even as she fights other battles-being a bursary student in an elite Christian school, facing hateful racial taunts from Bus Uncle and classmates like Abigail Goh.

When her meddlesome Nani ji Kulwant moves in, installing portraits of Sikh gurus whose features seem the change according to the atmosphere in the house, she brings with her a new set of rules. And old secrets begin to tumble out.

Strangers to Ourselves by  Shashi Deshpande

 Set in Mumbai, Shashi Deshpande’s novel tells the story of an unlikely love between two unusual people. Tender and tempestuous by turns, it draws you into the conflicts, languid pleasures and sharp sorrows of falling in love with a stranger who can never entirely be yours.

Ravan and Eddie  by  Kiran Nagarkar

An extremely funny novel about two larger-than-life heroes and their bawdy, Rabelaisian adventures in post-colonial urban India. Ravan and Eddie remain one of the finest books written with Mumbai as a backdrop. It’s uproariously funny, outrageously irreverent … [and] reveals the city as a character, an actor, a living being.

The Extras by  Kiran Nagarkar 

Ravan and Eddie are back! They’ve been mortal enemies since birth because of a bizarre family feud. But now Ravan and Eddie’s lives converge as they share an obsession: having grown up in Bombay, the city of dancing movie stars and glitzy glamour, both dream of strutting down the road to superstardom. Can Ravan (a lowly taxi driver) and Eddie (a bouncer-cum-bartender at a speakeasy) rise from their dusty CWD chawls to the glittering heights of international fame?

Home Boy by  H.M. Naqvi 

Rollicking, bittersweet and sharply observed, Home Boy is at once an immigrant’s tale, a mystery, a story of love and loss as well as a unique meditation on Americana and notions of collective identity. It announces the debut of an original, electrifying voice in contemporary fiction.

Girl in White Cotton by   Avni Doshi 

Antara has never understood her mother Tara’s decisions – walking out on her marriage to follow a guru, living on the streets like a beggar, shacking up with an unknown artist, rebelling against society’s expectations … But when Tara starts losing her memory, Antara searches for a way to make peace with their shared past, a past that haunts them both.

As she relives her childhood in Pune in the eighties, the time she spent at a Catholic boarding school in the hills of Maharashtra, and her years as a young artist in Bombay, Antara comes up against her own fears and neuroses, realizing she might not be so different from Tara after all.

The Last Queen by  Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni 

The latest from the bestselling author of The Forest of Enchantments …

While we have all heard tales of Rani Lakshmi Bai and Padmavati, not many of us are familiar with another Indian queen.

Daughter of the royal kennel keeper, the beautiful Jindan Kaur went on to become Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s youngest and last queen; his favorite. She became regent when her son Dalip, barely six years old, unexpectedly inherited the throne. Sharp-eyed, stubborn, passionate, and dedicated to protecting her son’s heritage, Jindan distrusted the British and fought hard to keep them from annexing Punjab. Defying tradition, she stepped out of the zenana, cast aside the veil, and conducted state business in public. Addressing her Khalsa troops herself, she inspired her men in two wars against the ‘firangs’. Her power and influence were so formidable that the British, fearing an uprising, robbed the rebel queen of everything she had, including her son. She was imprisoned and exiled. But that did not crush her indomitable will.

The Householder by Amitabha Bagchi

With uncommon acuity, Amitabha Bagchi writes of a world where favours are currency, where access to power sometimes feels like a prerequisite for survival, where power can be both total and ephemeral. The Householder is a view from within this world, an examination of the moral condition of our times.

Above Average by  Amitabh Bagchi 

Lyrical, spare, and charmingly self-deprecatory Amitabha Bagchi’s debut novel is a deeply funny account of growing up intelligent, sensitive, ambitious, and confused.

What Maya Saw: A Tale of Shadows, Secrets, Clues by  Shabnam Minwalla 

Almost from the moment, Maya steps into St Paul’s College, she is afraid. Everywhere she goes, she encounters questions and secrets. Not to mention the Shadows – a bunch of drop-dead gorgeous students who she realizes will do anything to keep their youth and beauty. Even kill. Maya wants no part in this sinister adventure. She would much rather be shopping for shoes, munching brownies and shedding her geeky image. But the teenager soon finds that she doesn’t have a choice. Only Maya can see the Shadows for what they really are. Only she can unravel the trail of clues laid long ago by a dead priest. This is why both the forces of good and evil need her so badly. Unsure about whom she can trust and believe, Maya launches into a clue hunt across Mumbai – and in the process, learns about love, friendship and growing up.

The Mountain of Light  by  Indu Sundaresan 

Battle For Bittora by  Anuja Chauhan 

Twenty-five-year-old Jinni lives in Mumbai, works in a hip animation studio and is perfectly happy with her carefree life. Until her bossy grandmother shows up and announces that it is Jinni’s ‘duty’ to drop everything and come and contest the upcoming Lok Sabha elections from their sleepy hometown, Bittora. Jinni swears she won’t but she soon ends up swathed in cotton saris and frumpy blouses, battling prickly heat, corruption and accusations of nymphomania as candidate Sarojini Pande, a daughter of the illustrious Pande dynasty of Pavit Pradesh. And if life isn’t fun enough already, her main opposition turns out to be Bittora ex-royal, Zain Altaf Khan – an irritatingly idealistic though undeniably lustworthy individual with whom Jinni shares a complicated history.

A Feast Of Roses by  Indu Sundaresan

In this lush and romantic sequel to The Twentieth Wife , Mehrunnisa, the first woman Jahangir marries for love, is now Empress Nur Jahan. As a mark of his love, he transfers his powers of sovereignty to her. This is the story of the strength of character and cunning one woman has to demonstrate to get what she wants, sometimes at great personal cost, even almost losing her daughter’s love. But she never loses the love of the man who bestows this power upon her: Emperor Jahangir.

Shadow Princess by  Indu Sundaresan 

The Mughal Empire is crumbling. With the death of his beloved queen Mumtaz, Emperor Shah Jahan slowly loses interest in everything, while his sons conspire and scheme to gain control of the empire. Princess Jahanara is only seventeen when the weight of the imperial zenana is thrust upon her. Shah Jahan’s favorite daughter is the most important woman in the harem and is forced to remain at the Mughal court all her life, caught up in the intrigues and power politics of her siblings, sacrificing her own desires for the sake of her father.

Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by   Balli Kaur Jaswal 

Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club Pick! Balli Kaur Jaswal’s sexy, lively book is a thought-provoking East-meets-West story about community, friendship, and women’s lives at all ages—a spicy and alluring mix of  Together Tea  and  Calendar Girls.

The Glass Palace by  Amitav Ghosh 

The Hungry Tide by  Amitav Ghosh 

From the author of The Glass Palace and Jungle Nama , the widely-acclaimed bestseller. The Hungry Tide is a rich, exotic saga set in Calcutta and in the vast archipelago of islands in the Bay of Bengal.

Cut Like Wound by  Anita Nair

Chain of Custody by  Anita Nair

Alphabet Soup for Lovers by  Anita Nair 

Idris: Keeper of the Light by  Anita Nair

The year is 1659. Idris, a Somalian trader, is in Kerala to attend the Mamangam festivities. By a strange twist of fate, he meets his nine-year-old son whose existence he had been unaware of. In an attempt to keep his son close to him, Idris embarks with him on a voyage that ends in the diamond mines of Golconda. Packed with passion, adventure, and fascinating aspects of life in the seventeenth century in southern India, Idris is a page-turner that will intrigue and excite readers everywhere.

The Liberation of Sita by  Volga 

Valmiki’s Ramayana is the story of Rama’s exile and returns to Ayodhya, of a triumphant king who will always do right by his subjects. In Volga’s retelling, it is Sita who, after being abandoned by Purushottam Rama, embarks on an arduous journey towards self-realization. Along the way, she meets extraordinary women who have broken free from all that held them back: husbands, sons, and their notions of desire, beauty, and chastity. The minor women characters of the epic as we know it — Surpanakha, Renuka, Urmila, and Ahalya — steer Sita towards an unexpected resolution. Meanwhile, Rama too must reconsider and weigh his roles as the king of Ayodhya and as a man deeply in love with his wife.

Red Maize by  Danesh Rana

The Golden Pigeon by  Shahid Siddiqui 

The Sibius Knot by  Amrita Tripathi 

The Second Coming by  Shubha Menon 

Mad Girl’s Love Song by   Rukumini Bhaya Nair

The Namesake by  Jhumpa Lahiri 

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri 

A couple exchange unprecedented confessions during nightly blackouts in their Boston apartment as they struggle to cope with a heartbreaking loss; a student arrives in new lodgings in a mystifying new land and, while he awaits the arrival of his arranged marriage wife from Bengal, he finds his first bearings with the aid of the curious evening rituals that his centenarian landlady orchestrates; a schoolboy looks on while his childminder finds that the smallest dislocation can unbalance her new American life all too easily and send her spiraling into nostalgia for her homeland…

Anita and Me by  Meera Syal 

It’s 1972. Meena is nine years old and lives in the village of Tollington, ‘the jewel of the Black Country’. She is the daughter of Indian parents who have come to England to give her a better life. As one of the few Punjabi inhabitants of her village, her daily struggle for independence is different from most. She wants fishfingers and chips, not chapati and dhal; she wants an English Christmas, not the usual interminable Punjabi festivities – but more than anything, she wants to roam the backyards of working-class Tollington with feisty Anita Rutter and her gang.

Blonde, cool, aloof, outrageous and sassy, Anita is everything Meena thinks she wants to be. Meena wheedles her way into Anita’s life, but the arrival of a baby brother, teenage hormones, impending entrance exams for the posh grammar school and a motorcycling rebel without a future, threaten to turn Anita’s salad days sour.

The Wounds of the Dead by  Vikram Paralkar 

A surgeon working in a dilapidated clinic in the hinterland is visited in the dead of night by a family – a man, his pregnant wife and their eight-year-old son. Victims of a senseless attack, they reveal to the surgeon wounds that they could not possibly have survived. In a narrative that blends medicine and metaphysics, the surgeon is then issued a preposterous task: to mend the wounds of the dead before sunrise so that the family can return to life. But this is not the only challenge laid before him, and it is only as the night unfolds and morning dawns that the surgeon realizes just how intricately his future is tied to that of the dead.

Moustache by  S. Hareesh

No Presents Please: Mumbai Stories   by  Jayant Kaikini

One Point Two Billion by  Mahesh Rao

Ice Boys In Bell Bottoms by  Krishna Shastri Devulapalli 

A Southern Music by  T.M. Krishna

Farthest Field by  Raghu Karnad 

The photographs of three young men had stood in his grandmother’s house for as long as he could remember, beheld but never fully noticed. They had all fought in the Second World War, a fact that surprised him. Indians had never figured in his idea of the war, nor the war in his idea of India. One of them, Bobby, even looked a bit like him, but Raghu Karnad had not noticed until he was the same age as they were in their photo frames. Then he learned about the Parsi boy from the sleepy south Indian coast, so eager to follow his brothers-in-law into the colonial forces and onto the front line. Manek, dashing and confident, was a pilot with India’s fledgling air force; gentle Ganny became an army doctor in the arid North-West Frontier. Bobby’s pursuit would carry him as far as the deserts of Iraq and the green hell of the Burma battlefront.

The Henna Artist by  Alka Joshi

Think Like a Monk by  Jay Shetty 

In this inspiring, empowering book, Shetty draws on his time as a monk in the Vedic tradition to show us how we can clear the roadblocks to our potential and power. Drawing on ancient wisdom and his own rich experiences in the ashram, “ Think Like a Monk ” reveals how to overcome negative thoughts and habits, and access the calm and purpose that lie within all of us.

The lessons monks learn are profound but often abstract. Shetty transforms them into advice and exercises we can all apply to reduce stress, improve focus, improve relationships, identify our hidden abilities, increase self-discipline and give the gifts we find in ourselves to the world. Shetty proves that everyone can – and should – think like a monk.

Things No One Else Can Teach Us by  Humble the Poet 

Hit Refresh: A Memoir by Microsoft’s CEO   by  Satya Nadella 

Unlearn: 101 Simple Truths for a Better Life by  Humble the Poet 

Inferior by  Angela Saini 

From intelligence to emotion, for centuries science has told us that men and women are fundamentally different. But this is not the whole story.

Shedding light on controversial research and investigating the ferocious gender wars in biology, psychology and anthropology, Angela Saini takes readers on an eye-opening journey to uncover how women are being rediscovered. She explores what these revelations mean for us as individuals and as a society, revealing an alternative view of science in which women are included, rather than excluded.

Quantum Marketing by  Raja Rajamannar

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13 Best Indian Authors: Discover Your Next Favorite Novel Today!

The best Indian authors include poets from the nineteen hundreds to today’s contemporary writers; discover our guide and begin your next novel today!

People from India have a long history of storytelling, dating back to 1500 BCE. The oldest Indian literature was developed in Sanskrit. Over time, Indian literature was passed down and recorded in many languages, including Kannada, Hindi, Telugu, Odia, Bengali, Maithili, Assamese, Urdu, and more.

As Indian literature evolved, stylistic changes occurred. The Old Era of Indian literature gave way to couplets and ushered in the country’s renaissance movement. The New Era welcomed the Romantic and Progressive movements, further changing fiction and prose in India. The country’s religious diversity—including many people of the Hindu, Islamic, and Christian faiths—provides an exciting landscape for literature.

India has 22 official languages, and literature was recorded in varied forms. Some Indian literature, however, was recorded in languages not deemed official Indian languages by the government. Some Indian literature was recorded in Persian, while other works were recorded in English (mainly works from North East India). You might also be interested in our round-up of the best Indonesian authors of all time .

Best Indian Authors Ranked

1. salman rushdie, 1947 –, 2. arundhati roy, 1961 – , 3. jhumpa lahiri, 1967 – , 4. anita desai, 1937 –, 5. chitra benerjee divakaruni, 1956 – , 6. kiran desai, 1971 – , 7. vikram seth, 1952 –, 8. aravind adiga, 1974 –, 9. shashi tharoor, 1956 –, 10. r. k. narayan, 1906 – 2001, 11. amitav ghosh, 1956 –, 12. rabindranath tagore, 1861 – 1941, 13. khushwant singh, 1915 – 2014, what is the most popular book by an indian author, what is the best indian author’s most famous book, what are the best indian novels.

Perhaps one of the most famous Indian authors, Salman Rushdie, has commercial and critical acclaim. In 1981, his novel Midnight’s Children won the coveted Booker Prize, and on the 25th and 40th anniversary of the prize, it was named the best of all the Booker winners. Currently, the Booker Prize is open to any English-language novel, but originally, this prize was only available to writers from Ireland, South Africa, and the Commonwealth, which includes Canadian, New Zealand, and Australian authors , as well as writers from the United Kingdom.  

Like most of Rushdie’s other novels, Midnight’s Children blends historical writing and magical realism. With magical realism, magical events are woven into reality. A master of this style, Rushdie is one of the best Indian authors because of his compelling characters, rich allegory, and often hysterical take on modern and historical tales.  

“What’s real and what’s true aren’t necessarily the same.” Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

• Amazon Kindle Edition
• Rushdie, Salman (Author)
• English (Publication Language)
• 674 Pages - 07/23/2010 (Publication Date) - Random House (Publisher)

Arundhati Roy’s debut novel, The God of Small Things , catapulted her to international fame in 1997. Like Midnight’s Children , the novel’s protagonists are also twins. However, while Midnight’s Children focuses on the Pakistan-Indian division, The God of Small Things looks at the impact of caste discrimination. 

Although Roy has only published one novel since then, she merits a place on the list of the best Indian authors because of the sheer brilliance of her debut novel. The God of Small Things is a heart-wrenching story wrapped in beautiful poetry. It earned her the Booker Prize, became a New York Times best-seller, and drew positive reviews from critics worldwide. Published 20 years later, her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, maintains Roy’s poetic writing style while looking at some of the most violent episodes in Indian history. 

“And the air was full of Thoughts and Things to Say. But at times like these, only the small things are ever said. Big things lurk unsaid inside.” Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

• Arundhati Roy (Author)
• 01/01/1998 (Publication Date) - Paperback (Publisher)

Jhumpa Lahiri is a best-selling, critically acclaimed author and a beloved creative writing instructor at Princeton. Raised in multiple worlds, Lahiri was born to Bengali parents in London and has spent most of her life in the United States. The themes of grappling with identity while living in the margins have dominated most of her stories. 

She won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction when she published a collection of short stories entitled The Interpreter of Maladies . Since then, she has published the novel The Namesake , another collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth , and The Lowland . All of these books reached wide audiences and won the respect of critics. 

Lahiri fell in love with an Italian person. She wrote and published a novel in Italian, which she eventually translated into English and published under the title Whereabouts . Although she wrote this novel in another language and centered it around a protagonist who had lived in the same city her entire life, Lahiri still focused on becoming yourself when you feel like an outsider. 

“Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.” Jhumpa Lahiri, The Interpreter of Maladies

• Lahiri, Jhumpa (Author)
• 209 Pages - 05/22/2000 (Publication Date) - Mariner Books Classics (Publisher)

Caption: Image of Clear Light of Day book cover.

Anita Desai was born in 1937 in Mussoorie, India, the daughter of a Bengali father and a German mother. A polyglot who spoke multiple languages at a very young age, Desai embraced English as her “literary language” during her childhood and published her first story at age nine.

In 1963, she published her first novel Cry, the Peacock , and she has published over a dozen novels since then, earning her countless awards, including being shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times. Like many of the best Indian authors, Desia’s writing is poetic, and her stories are rich with symbolism, flashbacks, and a hint of the magical. 

In addition to her writing work, Desai is also a highly respected educator. She has taught at many higher learning institutions, including Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, and Baruch College. The author is also the Emerita John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at MIT.

“India is a curious place that still preserves the past, religions, and its history. No matter how modern India becomes, it is still very much an old country.” Anita Desai, Cry, the Peacock

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Born in India, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is now a writing professor in Houston, Texas. She has penned over 20 books that focus on universal themes rooted in stories of American and Indian women. Weaving together history, myth, and magical realism. Her stories explore the experiences of women and immigrants, and her best-selling books have been translated into over 29 languages. 

Her novels The Mistress of Spices and Sister of My Heart were turned into movies, while her short story The Word Love inspired an award-winning short film. Her books have also been adapted into stage plays, and over 35 cities have used her novel One Amazing Thing as their one-read selection. 

“Each spice has a special day to it. For turmeric it is Sunday, when light drips fat and butter-colored into the bins to be soaked up glowing, when you pray to the nine planets for love and luck.” Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress of Spices

Named one of the 20 most influential Indian women by the Economic Times in 2015, Kiran Desai became the youngest winner of the Booker Prize with her second novel, The Inheritance of Loss , published in 2008 when she was 35. The novel focuses on joy and despair through a story about the immigrant experience. 

The daughter of writer Anita Desai, Kiran left India as a teenager and spent most of her life in the United States. Although she has not published anything since 2008, she has told interviewers that she’s spent more than a decade working on her next novel, which explores the theme of power. 

“Could fulfillment ever be felt as deeply as loss? Romantically she decided that love must surely reside in the gap between desire and fulfillment, in the lack, not the contentment. Love was the ache, the anticipation, the retreat, everything around it but the emotion itself.” Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss

• Desai, Kiran (Author)
• 442 Pages - 12/01/2007 (Publication Date) - Grove Press (Publisher)

Author and poet Vikram Seth is a celebrated novelist who won several awards for his work, including the Sahitya Academy Award, the WH Smith Literary Award, and the Padma Shri. Born in Calcutta, Seth attended The Doon School, an all-boys school where he served as editor of The Doon School Weekly . After completing his studies at Doon, he moved to Tonbridge School in England. Later, he began working on his Ph.D. at Stanford but never completed the degree.

Seth has published many books of poetry, as well as three novels. Seth’s first novel, A Suitable Boy, pushed him to the forefront of the Indian literary scene. The story was made into a BBC TV miniseries in 2020. Beastly Tales from Here and There and Mappings are two of Seth’s other well-known works of poetry.

Seth has won several awards, including the Thomas Cook Book Award for From Haven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet (1983), the Commonwealth Writers Prize for A Suitable Boy (1994), the Crossword Book Award for An Equal Music (1999), and the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman (2005).

“Every object strives for its proper place. A book seeks to be near its truest admirer. Just as this helpless moth seeks to be near the candle that infatuates him.” Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy

• Seth, Vikram (Author)
• 1553 Pages - 11/11/2020 (Publication Date)

Caption: Image of The White Tiger book cover.

Aravind Adiga became the public eye when his debut novel The White Tiger became a Booker Prize winner, a best-seller, and a Netflix original movie. The novel explores the tension of a character from a poor rural area of India when the country was becoming a part of the global economy. Drawing inspiration from some of the best French authors , such as Flaubert and Balzac, and the English writer Dickens, Adiga said that he wanted to criticize the injustices of India to inspire improvement.

Adiga started as a finance writer and eventually began working as a correspondent for Time magazine before he began freelance writing full-time. Adiga has also published Between the Assassinations, Last Man in Tower, Selection Day, and Amnesty .

“See, the poor dream all their lives of getting enough to eat and looking like the rich. And what do the rich dream of?? Losing weight and looking like the poor.” Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

Not just a writer, Shashi Tharoor has also been a civil servant, diplomat, and politician. He has served as a member of Parliament in Kerala since 2008, and although he was born in London and earned a doctorate at Tufts University, he spent most of his life in India. Tharoor, a famous columnist who has written extensively for all of India’s three largest newspapers, has also penned columns for Newsweek , Washington Post, New York Times, and countless other renowned publications. 

His first story was published when he was only ten, and his first novel, Operation Bellows, about a WWII pilot, followed the next year. Since then, he has published several notable novels, including The Great Indian Novel, and over a dozen non-fiction books focused on Indian history, colonialism, nationalism, and other themes. 

“Twilight never lasts long in India, but its advent was like opening time at the pubs our rulers had left behind. The shadows fell and spirits rose; the sharp odour of quinine tonic, invented by lonely planters to drown and justify their solitary gins, mingled with the scent of frangipani from their leafy, insect-ridden gardens, and the soothing clink of ice against glass was only disturbed by the occasional slap of a frustrated palm against a reddening spot just vacated by an anglovorous mosquito.” Shashi Tharoor, The Great Indian Novel

• Used Book in Good Condition
• Hardcover Book
• Tharoor, Shashi (Author)
• 423 Pages - 04/18/1991 (Publication Date) - Arcade Pub (Publisher)

R. K. Narayan lived from 1906 to 2001. It wasn’t until Narayan was over 40 that British rule ended, and India became independent. That means he also lived through the partition of India and Pakistan, marked by severe bloodshed and thousands of deaths. Although he lived through political unrest, his writing embraces a simple style and focuses on ordinary people.

Many of his stories take place in the small town of Malgudi, and they explore the inhabitants’ daily lives, superstitions, and traditions. His writing has been compared to greats such as Checkov, Flannery O’Connor, and William Faulkner, as it captures the humor and beauty of life, even when writing about tragedy. He wrote at least 15 novels plus short story collections and non-fiction works. The options are endless with this writer, but Swami and Friends is an excellent novel if you want to check out his works.

“Did our Jesus go gadding about with dancing girls like your Krishna? Did our Jesus go about stealing butter like your arch-scoundrel Krishna?” R.K. Narayan, Swami, and Friends

• R.K. Narayan (Author)
• 04/18/2024 (Publication Date) - Indian Thought Publications (Publisher)

Amitav Ghosh is a Kolkata-born writer known for writing English-language historical fiction that delves into people’s lives in Southeast Asia. In addition to his historical fiction works, Ghosh is known for his writing on climate change, colonialism, and other social and environmental issues.

Like many other renowned Indian writers, Ghosh started studying at The Doon School and eventually earned his Ph.D. at the University of Oxford. He worked for periodical publications and higher education institutions before focusing solely on writing. His debut novel was The Circle of Reason , followed by his fiction books, including the Ibis trilogy, The Shadow Lines , and The Glass Palace .

“Rules, rules, she said softly. All you ever talk about is rules. That’s how you and your kind have destroyed everything—science, religion, socialism—with your rules and your orthodoxies. That’s the difference between us: you worry about rules and I worry about being human.” Amitav Ghosh, The Circle of Reason

• Audible Audiobook
• Amitav Ghosh (Author) - Simon Vance (Narrator)
• 02/15/2011 (Publication Date) - Brilliance Audio (Publisher)

Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913 for his collection of poems, Gitanjali , and was the first non-European to claim the honor. His novels, stories, poems, essays, and other works explored personal and political topics in lyrical language. 

He was among the first Indian writers to escape from classical forms and traditional poetic structures. He had vocally opposed the Raj for over a half-century before India gained independence. His work continues to inspire the best Indian authors as well as writers from around the rest of the world. It has been translated into multiple languages, and his writing influenced countless writers, including Pablo Neruda and Octavio Paz.

“Give me the strength lightly to bear my joys and sorrows. Give me the strength to make my love fruitful in service. Give me the strength never to disown the poor or bend my knees before insolent might. Give me the strength to raise my mind high above daily trifles.” Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali

• Rabindranath Tagore (Author) - Clay Lomakayu (Narrator)
• 01/02/2019 (Publication Date) - Medicine of One (Publisher)

In addition to being an author, Pakistan-born Khushwant Singh was a diplomat, lawyer, and politician. Singh was born in Punjab and studied at the British King’s College London. After many years working as a lawyer and in the radio industry, he felt inspired to pursue a literary career. Singh was also a respected member of the upper house of the Indian Parliament.

Singh was known for his sarcasm, humor, and comparisons of Indian and Western behavior. Singh is well-known for his 1956 novel Train to Pakistan , which was made into a movie in 1998. Train to Pakistan was based on the writer’s experience with the Partition of India 1947. While the novel and film are technically classified as fiction, Singh kept the book as realistic as possible. As an infallible believer in human goodness, Singh’s stories are known for taking a realistic yet optimistic view of human nature, helping readers see the lighter and brighter sides to complex parts of the human experience.

Singh was known for his outspoken agnosticism, evidenced by his 2011 book Agnostic Khushwant: There is No God . Singh heavily criticized organized religion. The author’s final book, The Good, The Bad, and The Ridiculous , published in 2013, continued his critique of clergy members and priesthood in India.

“The last to learn of gossip are the parties concerned” Khushwant Singh, Train to Pakistan

• Singh, Khuswant (Author)
• 181 Pages - 11/06/2015 (Publication Date) - Normanby Press (Publisher)

FAQs About The Best Indian Authors

The Interpreter of Maladies , a collection of short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri, has sold over 15 million copies. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, and The Story of My Experiments with Truth, the autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi, are also big sellers.

Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children is his most famous book, and it’s considered the best book published by any writer from The Commonwealth in the last half-century.

The best Indian novels include Midnight’s Children, The God of Small Things, and The Inheritance of Loss . These books explore stories unique to India, focusing on universal themes such as love, loss, self-reflection, and the desire for inclusion.

Looking for more? Check out our round-up of the best books by Barbara Cartland !

Meet Rachael, the editor at Become a Writer Today. With years of experience in the field, she is passionate about language and dedicated to producing high-quality content that engages and informs readers. When she's not editing or writing, you can find her exploring the great outdoors, finding inspiration for her next project.

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The Best Fiction Books » The Best Novels

The best indian novels, recommended by radhika jha.

Lanterns on Their Horns by Radhika Jha

Like all great books, India's best novels are worth reading not just because of what they show about India, but what they reveal about the human condition. Here Radhika Jha , author of four critically acclaimed books, talks us through five important Indian novels and novelists and explains why it's so important that fiction isn't just about personal experience.

Interview by Sophie Roell , Editor

The Mahabharata by Anonymous & J.A.B. Van Buitenen (translator and editor)

Godaan by Premchand Munshi

The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth

Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh

The Sari Shop by Rupa Bajwa

1 The Mahabharata by Anonymous & J.A.B. Van Buitenen (translator and editor)

2 godaan by premchand munshi, 3 the golden gate by vikram seth, 4 sea of poppies by amitav ghosh, 5 the sari shop by rupa bajwa.

W e’re talking about your choice of the best Indian novels. In a country with so many different languages and cultures it may be hard to generalize, but do you think there is anything that stands out about Indian literature and makes it distinctive?

I would also say Indian novelists use language very sensually. Every country has its own way of using language which comes out of the land they live in I think, and the climate. The fruits, the vegetables, the colors—their particularities will creep into the language. The green, if you’re talking about England, is going to be described differently from the way green is described in India or in Colombia, because they are different. If you’re describing a colorful people, then your language becomes colorful. In India, everything assaults the senses, and it’s kind of over the top — the smells, the colors that people wear, the colors of nature.

Yes, and you’ve chosen an epic as one of the books for this list, which seems like a good place to start. Let’s turn to the  Mahabharata . Is it the key epic for India?

Everyone has a different idea of what the key epic of a place is, but I would say yes. For me, it is more important than the  Ramayana because the philosophical questions it asks are more complex and because in spite of its complexity and the sheer number of Gods and humans involved, everybody in India knows the story, or parts of it, usually, because they’ve heard them being told by an aunt or grandmother.

The Mahabharat is interesting for me because cause and consequence is very, very clearly established in the many intertwining stories of the different characters. I think that’s something you find in a novel too. One of the reasons why we enjoy reading novels is because you want to be able to follow that thread of how one event leads to another — how a chance encounter or a missed opportunity can lead to a war. The Mahabharata is not about gods and heroes. In the end, it is about this. For example, the story of the hero Karna. Kunti, his mother, falls in love with Surya, the sun god, has his child out of wedlock, and then puts the child into a little rush basket. Karna then ends up fighting his own half-brothers and when he finds out who he is, he orchestrates his own death at the hands of his brothers. What can be more heart-rending and relatable than this?

Then there are the backstories and the backstories of backstories. The Mahabharata becomes this fantastic forest of stories that you can dip in and out of forever, each time coming up with a new philosophical problem to ponder.

For those of us who haven’t read it, could you maybe take a step back and explain what The Mahabharata is about and what happens in it?

It’s a story about a war. In that sense, it is like the Iliad . It’s a story about a very, very long war that’s fought between the Kauravas and the Pandavas, cousins all, over a kingdom that was divided into two equal parts and given to the two groups. The Kauravas invite the Pandavas over for a game of dice and in that game, the Pandavas lose their kingdom and everything they own, including Draupadi, their wife. What the Pandavas don’t know is that the dice were magic, made from the bones of Shakuni’s father, the great dice player from the Kaurav side, who had been wronged by the Pandavas.

Again, there’s this fantastic chain of causality. It’s always very interesting and complicated and goes through generations and comes into the present. The past is very much there in the present, in the form of the magic dice made from the father’s bones. I love all these details and there is so much to think about in these stories.

The Mahabharata can also be seen as a war which starts off as a war about justice because the Pandavs are trying to get their kingdom, which was wrongfully taken from them in this game of dice, back. Then, as things go on, there is no good side and no bad side, because to win this very long and sad war, everybody compromises their morals, their humanity – everybody cheats. As the number of the dead mount, the pain and the anger, and then the thirst for revenge, grow. You start the story and then, as you go on and on through it, you see how all the elements of what we think of as a civilized life, of family, of mercy, of protection, start falling away. In the end, there is just one thing, and that is the need to win — which destroys pretty much everything. I find it eternally relevant, this idea of the fragility of morality.

The Mahabharat was written more than 2,000 years ago in Sanskrit. What’s the best way to approach it? Is there a translation that you think is good or a particular edition?

There are many ways to approach it. There are the literal translations of the Sanskrit text. The one that I have and always use is the J.A.B. van Buitenen. It’s a three-volume translation of the  Mahabharat and it’s wonderful. I studied it in college, in a class by Wendy Doniger. But that isn’t the only way to approach the text. You can approach it through film, (there was a great serial made by Doordarshan about 25 years ago) through theatre (Peter Brook’s adaptation of it), through dance, through contemporary novelists’ retellings, or just ask some Indian to tell you the story.

Why the Mahabharata is important to the art of storytelling as it developed in India and why mythology is so important to us is explained in the Upanishads which say that complex philosophical ideas are best explained to laymen through a story. This can clearly be seen in the many stories in the Mahabharata. There is always a philosophical idea and the story is built around it to give it flesh.

Do you have a favorite among them?

Let’s move on to the next book you’re recommending, which was published a couple of millennia later in Hindi. This is Godaan by Munshi Premchand. Tell me about it and why you think this is such a good Indian novel.

Godaan was first published in 1936, before India’s independence. It was a time of a lot of rethinking, of political and cultural turmoil – but it was also a relatively prosperous time. Munshi Premchand was a schoolteacher most of his life and he was extremely poor. But he had the heart of a revolutionary. He married a widow after his first marriage failed. He gave up his government job in the Quit India Movement.

I like Godaan mainly because it was my grandfather’s favorite book. Like Premchand, my grandfather grew up in a poor village in Bihar. When he first went to town, he went to Patna to study for college and he slept in a little room behind a temple. He would study on the street, under the streetlights, because that was the only lighting that there was. So, for him, Premchand’s India was the India he carried around in his bones even after he became an ambassador and was posted to New York and Paris. I adored my grandfather but for me, growing up in Bombay and Delhi, I had no connection with Premchand’s world.

But I loved the stories that my grandfather told me of his childhood in the village, about stealing mangoes from other people’s orchards, wrestling and of course he loved telling ghost stories. I ended up reading Godaan because he said, ‘Read Premchand if you want to improve your Hindi. He is the greatest storyteller in India.’ I was struggling with my Hindi because I came out of Bombay and in Delhi the Hindi level was much higher. My grandfather said, ‘Your Hindi is hilarious, it’s Bombay Hindi. You really need to get to know real Hindi because this is our language. Language is one of the roots of our culture.’ At first, I complained, and then finally I started to read it. It was tough going to begin with, but he used to read to me as well. That was the other beautiful thing: he would read to me and edit it a little bit as he read. Through Godaan, the Indian village really came alive for me. I felt I was there.

I was rereading Godaan again yesterday and thinking how it reminded me of Flaubert. It’s the descriptions and this very leisurely pace, the slow unfolding of time. Not that much happens, but things happen at a very deep level. One gets drawn inside the characters; one understands them. And one understands what poverty really feels like.

It’s a very simple story about a very poor farmer, who is in a fairly good position in terms of caste. The village in India is not really one village where everybody lives together, it’s more like little hamlets which have relationships with each other. Each hamlet is fairly independent and most of the people in the hamlet are from the same caste and are interconnected through family or other relationships—but not through marriage. You always get married to somebody from a village away just to avoid the consanguinity problem.

“For me, a story, a novel, is the ultimate way of passing on knowledge and memory”

This farmer has worked really, really hard to get his brothers started in life because his parents died young. He got them maybe not much education—a little bit of primary school, that’s what everyone did in those days—but he looked after them and brought them up. Then he gets them married, which is expensive, and he has to take on debt.

It’s a novel about the life of the Indian farmer, and how they live with these crippling amounts of debt, which always happen either because of sickness, or because someone has to get married. It’s the kind of debt that they are then never able to pay off. If they’re lucky, they can keep their land for more than a couple of generations. If you’re a poor, marginal farmer, if you can keep it for even a lifetime, or for two generations, you’re already doing fantastically. It really describes the precarity of that life and that world.

Because of that underlying tension and the lack of money and just the sheer hard work of survival, the wife and husband end up in fights. This farmer, after bringing up his brothers, finds they’re really quite useless and rather spoiled and their wives are just as bad. Two of the brothers don’t want to live under the same roof so they move away and live separately. So this man goes from being semi-marginal to being totally marginal because he only has a tiny piece of land and three kids and a wife to look after. They survive but the book starts off with a fight between the husband and wife which is fantastic. It’s also an amazing book because you see a relationship between a husband and a wife who adore each other and yet they fight all the time. She is not at all a submissive wife but cares deeply about her husband.

The man desperately wants to have a cow because it’s one step away from total precarity, from not knowing whether tomorrow you’re going to be left with no house or no food, to being able to hold your head up in society. That is what a cow means. It means that if your child is sick, you have that little bit of milk to give them a little bit of energy when they need it. If you have a little bit of extra milk, you can sell it to a neighbor for one or two rupees.

The book really shows you what poverty is. It shows you not just what life in India was and what poverty was, but what poverty still is in the village, and the curse that is rural indebtedness. And you learn it in a beautiful way. I studied anthropology and politics and I had to read all these heavy tomes on the same subject. There was The Indian Village by M.N. Srinivas, and umpteen books about the caste system. They were great books, but they’re a lot of effort. Not everybody can make it. You can bypass all that and just read this novel and you will understand — because you are there. You are living it. That’s the thing. For me, a story, a novel, is the ultimate way of passing on knowledge, and memory. That’s the way it’s always been. That’s why we always end up reading novels. I don’t think novels can die because this is a way of passing on deep knowledge in a totally painless way.

Godaan has a beautiful, beautiful ending. If you don’t cry in it, then you’re a tough person. But what truly distinguishes Munshi Premchand’s work is his understanding of India — about the relationships that bind people in the village, in marriage, in the family. His description of the village, how everyone’s always listening to each other, how rumors circulate, and how people living beside each other in conditions of utter precarity can be at one moment incredibly cruel and at others very kind to each other. Premchand also shows the nature of the caste, how it really works.

You put cows at the heart of your second novel, Lanterns on Their Horns , which is also set in an Indian village. Can you tell me a bit about how that came about?

Lanterns on Their Horns started off in a very odd way. I was at a cousin’s wedding, feeling very awkward as the oldest unmarried woman there. So I tried to hide in a dark corner but found it occupied by a Brahmin priest in a white dhoti. We nodded to each other and began to talk and after a moment I realized I was talking to the father of the bride, a part-time priest and full-time professor of Sanskrit at the Sanskrit university. Rather awed and feeling very inadequate and ignorant, I asked him a question which had always intrigued me, which is ‘Why is the cow sacred?’ He gave me a fascinating and totally different explanation from the one that you usually get, that the cow is sacred because it gives milk etc. He gave me a Sanskrit scholar’s explanation, deeply philosophical.

He told me that gau , the word for cow, has the same root in Sanskrit as the very first ray of light that touches the Earth in the morning. That’s an invisible light but it is the most energizing and nourishing thing in the universe, it is life itself. That’s why yoga and all these things in India are supposed to be done very early. This light is like Prasad , the food that you give to the gods in the temple, divine food. This light is gau . It is what starts the circle of life, because that light is absorbed by all living things and goes into the Earth. Then living things die, and their bodies, their remains, go into the Earth, and then back up into the ether, however you want to see it. I thought that was a fascinating idea. It’s beautiful, poetic and it rang true somehow.

I thought to myself, ‘I’d like to write about gau’ and about a cow like the cow in Godaan . I want to write about village India.’ We all carry a village inside us. But at that time, the early 2000s, India was just taking off economically. There was double-digit growth and all that, and the newspapers were full of how India was going to be the next Asian tiger. The newspapers had forgotten the villages. No one was writing about rural indebtedness and farmers’ suicides except for one lone journalist called P. Sainath. He was a total outlier.

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Godaan was in the 1930s and my novel starts in 1969, which was the year I was born. It’s also the year a man walked on the moon. That’s why I set it in that year. You have people going to the moon and then, in this village, you had the first roads arriving. My grandfather told me how he remembered when in the villages they had radios for the first time. They would sit around the radio and say, ‘What?!? Someone’s gone to the moon?!? Is that even possible?’ I tried to imagine what it must have been like to sit on a charpoy in a village drinking tea and listening to the radio, hearing that a man had made it to the moon. It was fun.

Let’s go on to the third novel you’ve chosen, which is The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth. I actually haven’t read this one, though I’ve read two of his other novels. I like long novels and I read A Suitable Boy when it first came out. I loved it, though I remember a couple of Indian friends were a bit sniffy about it, saying talented poets shouldn’t be wasting their time on this kind of novel.

Yes, I read it at that time and I was a bit sniffy too because I felt it had a very middle-class view of India. Then I reread it during the Pandemic, and I realized that I had misunderstood it and that it was totally making fun of the Indian middle class, and I found it hysterically funny. But it didn’t surprise me as The Golden Gate did and it didn’t touch me as much.

The Golden Gate is written in verse and it’s beautiful verse but that’s not why I chose it. I chose it for two important reasons. First, it was the first book that I read, written by an Indian, that wasn’t about India or Indian people. It’s about San Francisco and Americans. Secondly, it was a deeply empathetic book and for me personally, I love writers who show empathy for their characters and don’t make fun of them but give them dignity. I think it is human nature when confronted by something very different — and America must have been very different for Vikram Seth when he got to Stanford after England and India — to want to ridicule it so that what is alien and different becomes less threatening. But Vikram Seth didn’t do that. He wrote about the loneliness of Americans and the fragility of relationships in a city like San Fransisco with great sympathy and understanding.

Too many non-Western writers get stuck in an ‘ethnic’ trap. Look at Vikram Seth. He wrote The Golden Gate . What does he do next? He writes a novel about India, A Suitable Boy, which makes him famous. Whereas for me, I thought his really great achievement is the way that he writes about the world. Writers and books are universal, they belong to everyone. I love to read not to learn about other cultures, but to feel what it means to be human. When I read Vikram Seth I feel very human, not Indian. For me, I read Vikram Seth the way I read Marquez  or anyone else. Because he speaks about the truths of the human heart.

What happens in the book?

It’s about a group of young people post-college, dealing with loneliness, living, and finding love. John and Phil are college friends. Phil and Ed are lovers but not openly. Jan, the artist, is a free spirit. She is both friend and sometime lover of John who still needs life to fall into categories. While he is attracted to her, he also finds her too much to handle. It’s a book about friendship and love, and how these two are so complicated and difficult to untangle. It’s not a remarkable story, but it’s a universal story of people in their twenties and early thirties. It captures that period of life when you are free and adult but freedom can feel very heavy and frightening, that moment when you are still innocent and vulnerable, open to the world and quite alone as well. You’re also trying to discover yourself and who you are. It’s a kind of fuzzy moment, when you’re anything and everything and nothing at the same time. It’s a very confusing moment. Seth captures that confusion and a certain loneliness of the soul which is why we search for love, beautifully. That is the genius of the book – its universality.

When I read it I was 15 and in a little boarding school in the Himalayas. My father gave me the book and told me I should read it. I had no idea that men could love men. And here was this Indian writing about San Francisco and complicated things like sexuality in a totally familiar way. He made me empathize with Phil and John and Jan, I felt like I knew them.

You also like writing novels that are not about India , including one set in Japan. Where else have your novels been set?

My first novel Smell was set in Nairobi, Kenya, and in France. In my collection of novellas , though most of the stories are about India, I have one story, “The Cook,” which is about a Swiss cook set around Lake Annecy. I have set two books in Tokyo, Japan — My Beautiful Shadow , about a married woman who is a shopping addict among other things, and The Hidden Forest, which has yet to come out. At present, I am working on something that takes place in Beijing. These are all places I have lived in and where I speak the language (rather badly but enough to be able to understand other people’s conversations). When I married my diplomat husband and we moved to Tokyo I asked myself  – could I still be a writer? And if so, what kind of a writer? It is very difficult to write about a culture that is not your own, even if you have been living there for some years. But it’s important to make that attempt because the whole point is that reading novels creates empathy with people who are very different from you. Judge a book and an author on how well or badly the book creates this empathy in you, but don’t condemn it for trying.

While it may be a challenge to be empathetic towards someone who is very different from you, I think it’s one of the most important things in life, and the more we try for empathy with those who are different, the more we suspend judgement, the more we learn what it is to be truly human.

Maybe you have more perspective if you’re not from the place you’re writing about?

Or you have a different perspective, let’s put it that way. The point is that, in the end, you’re not going to just read Vikram Seth, you’re probably going to read lots of other books about San Francisco . Then you have this way of being able to compare. You learn one thing from one book and another thing from another book, and that’s great. In the end, these are stories about people and it’s lovely to be able to get to know the people who live in far-off places, though what’s far now? Google has us all mapped and under surveillance.

I used to see a bit of Vikram Seth in the 1990s in London. He speaks excellent Chinese.

Next up of the Indian novels you’re recommending is The Opium Trilogy by Amitav Ghosh , which is a set of historical novels . Tell me more.

This book tells a story that we don’t often hear, which is about the opium trade and what it did to India, notably to the part of India I come from, Bihar. Why was India even important to the British or the East India Company ? It was because of the opium more than anything else. It profoundly changed India, reaching deep into the economy of rural India. Till opium became their biggest trading item, the British didn’t really touch rural India. I learnt this thanks to Amitav Ghosh.

The trilogy is about a group of people who have become indentured laborers on an opium ship. The three books follow loosely the lives of about five or six of the characters on that ship. Again, I go back to the  Mahabharat , because you have this wonderful thing of the backstory, and the consequences, and how things develop. The trilogy has that same kind of epic sweep.

It’s difficult to say what is the best thing about these three books. First, it’s the attention to historic detail. Second, the characters, and third, the attention to language and how it has morphed and died through time – Chinese-English, Laskari, colonial English.

“I love to read not to learn about other cultures, but to feel what it means to be human”

There are times in the book when your blood boils at the horrors of colonialism. And there are other times when you just think, ‘The human spirit is unbelievable, that people could survive such cruelty and exploitation and still come out on top with their humanity intact.’

It’s also a very exciting read. Again, I love it because it shows you the world, the interconnections between cultures and peoples. You realize that colonialism was an encounter between not just two cultures but several. Which is something we often forget. The trilogy made me understand and feel very sympathetic to China, it made me feel shame too for the part we played in its subjugation at the time. Reading a book is a journey. When I think of reading I always think of the word gam, which in Sanskrit means to go. Part of being human is to move, I think. Humans have always moved around, we don’t like to stay in one place too long. In the trilogy, Amitav Ghosh really brings that theme alive as well — how people move and adapt and accept very difficult circumstances and remake their lives. It’s also wonderful how Amitav Ghosh weaves history into the novel without overwhelming the characters and turning them into cardboard figures.

There are terrible injustices, but he maintains his sense of humour: it is quite funny at times.

Yes, absolutely, he has a sense of perspective. There are moments which are really quite terrible, but there’s every emotion under the sun in those books. I love it because you don’t just see India. That’s also something which is very special. You see it through an Indian lens, but you see the world. My favorite in the whole collection was River of Smoke , the second one, which is based mainly in China.

I found the language in the book incredible. What are they speaking?

Apparently, that was a language that was created on those boats and in Shanghai and Hongkong. Because of the incredible mix of people from different places: Malays, Indians, etc. they created this language. Amitav Ghosh found a dictionary of this language — I believe in the New York Public Library. He spends a lot of time doing his research and it’s worth looking at the bibliography at the back of each book.

You don’t see the immense research that must have gone into it. You were talking earlier about transmitting knowledge painlessly — this is another good example. It’s a very engaging and entertaining read.

Let’s look at the final Indian novel you’ve recommended, which is The Sari Shop . This was published in 2004.

The Sari Shop is written by Rupa Bajwa and is nowhere near as well known as the other books I have chosen. Most people in India haven’t even heard of it. But it is a great book and puts you in touch with something that’s very Indian and very universal at the same time. This is the story of a poor young man, a sari shop assistant in a big Indian city, who spends his days unfolding and folding saris for his boss. He has his hopes and dreams and longings and these give color to his life. They are not realized and yet he survives the destruction of his dreams.

The Sari Shop follows in the footsteps of Godaan in the way that it reveals certain truths about India. It makes you understand what it means to be poor and without prospects in a city. It’s about not having a future, and the desires and the longings of being without a future. And yet it is a profoundly hopeful book even though there are some moments where it’s very cruel.

But unlike Godaan, it is written in English. It is about urban India but not about middle-class English-speaking or bilingual India — and that is very difficult to do in English. I tried it in a story called “Hope” which is based on the true stories of five people that I met on the streets of Delhi. I know just how difficult it is to find the right words in English for something that happens or is told to you in Hindi. But Rupa Bajwa pulls it off brilliantly and you forget that you are reading something that is not happening in English. She goes beyond translation and that’s a real achievement.

April 26, 2023

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Radhika Jha

Radhika Jha was born in Delhi, got her BA in Anthropology at Amherst College, and her Master's in Political Science at the University of Chicago. She is the author of four critically acclaimed books – Lanterns on their Horns (2009), Smell (2001, winner of the Prix Guerlain), The Elephant & The Maruti (2004), and My Beautiful Shadow (2014). Her books have been translated into 24 languages. As a journalist, she worked for The Hindustan Times and Business World magazine. As a social worker, she has worked for the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation, where she started “Project Interact” – a project for the education of the children of victims of terrorism in India. She has lived in Tokyo, Beijing, Athens and New York. She speaks Chinese, Japanese, French and some Italian and Greek. Her mother tongues are Hindi and English. She is also an acclaimed Indian classical dancer.

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Indian Writers on 75 Years of Independence and Partition

Featuring anita desai, hari kunzru, salman rushdie, and more.

Three-quarters of a century has passed now since India broke free from British rule, but there is just as much to criticize as to celebrate. Below, some of India’s finest contemporary writers warn us about their own country’s dire reflection of current global trends of democratic backsliding and the rise of the far-right, and how India can—and should—fight for a future for all its people.

Excerpted from a larger feature presented by PEN America .

Suketu Mehta

I am writing this as an act of love. I was born in India, and I love India with all my being. But this country that I love is facing the gravest threat to its democracy since its founding.

Indian democracy is one of the 20th century’s greatest achievements. Over 75 years, we built, against great odds, a nation that for the first time in its 5000-year history empowered women and the Dalits, people formerly known as untouchables. We largely abolished famine. We kept the army out of politics. After independence, many people predicted that we would become Balkanized. Yugoslavia became Balkanized, but India stayed together. No small feat.

But I write this today to tell you: things in India are more dire than you realize. India is a country that is majority Hindu, but it is not officially a Hindu state. The people who are in power in India today want to change this. They want India to be a Hindu ethnocratic state, where all other religions live by Hindu sufferance. This has practical consequences: people of other religions are actively harassed, even lynched on the streets; their freedom to practice their religion in their own way is circumscribed. And when they protest, they are jailed and their houses bulldozed. Most worrying, much of the judiciary seems to be sympathetic to the Hindu nationalist agenda, and issues its verdicts accordingly.

There is also sustained and systematic harassment of writers, journalists, artists, activists, religious figures—anyone who questions the official narrative. We who have attached our names here are taking great personal risk in writing this: our citizenship of India could be revoked, we could be banned from the country, our property in India seized, our relatives harassed. There are many others who think like we do but have told us they can’t speak out, for fear of the consequences. I never thought I’d use the word ‘dissident’ in describing myself and my friends who’ve compiled this document; I thought that word only applied to the Soviet Union, North Korea, China.

It is crucial that India remains a democracy for all its citizens. India is not Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan. Not yet. A lot of India’s standing in the world—the reason we’re included in the respectable nations, the reason our people and our tech companies are welcome all over the world—is that we’re seen, unlike, say, China, as being a multiethnic democracy that protects its minorities.

With over 200 million Indian Muslims, India is the third largest Muslim country in the world. There are 30 million Indian Christians. There are Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Zoroastrians, Atheists. They are as Indian as I am—a Hindu who’s proud of being a Hindu, but not a Hindu as Narendra Modi and the BJP seek to define me.

When countries safeguard the rights of their minorities, they also safeguard, as a happy side effect, the rights and wellbeing of their majorities. If a judiciary forbids discrimination against, say, Muslims, it is also much more likely to forbid discrimination against, say, LGBT people. The obverse is also true: when they don’t safeguard the rights of their minorities, every other citizen’s rights are in peril.

The alienation of Indian Muslims would be catastrophic, for India and the world. They are being told: you are invaders, this is not your country, go back to where you came from. But Indian Muslims did not come from elsewhere; they were in the country all along, and chose which God to worship. After the Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, they voted with their feet; they chose to stay, and build a nation.

The challenges facing India in the next 75 years are colossal, perhaps even greater than the first 75 years. This year, northern India saw the hottest temperatures in history, reaching 49 degrees Celsius (120F). Next year looks to be even hotter. By the middle of the century, New Delhi could become uninhabitable.

The country also has an enormous, restive, and largely unemployed youth population—half of its population is under 25. But only 36% of the working-age population has a job. To meet these challenges, it is crucial that the country stay united, and not fracture along religious lines, spend its energies building a brighter future instead of darkly contemplating past invasions.

In this time when country after country is turning its back on democracy, India has to be an example to countries around the world, this beautiful dream of nationhood expressed in the Hindu scriptures as “Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam”—the whole earth is a family. We should all be rooting for this incredible experiment in multiplicity to work. As goes India, so goes democracy.

Suketu Mehta is the author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, a Pulitzer Prize Finalist, and This Land is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto. He teaches journalism at New York University.

Amitava Kumar

On February 23, 2020, riots erupted in Delhi. The homes and shops owned by Muslims in northeast Delhi went up in flames after a ruling party politician, irked by those protesting discriminatory citizenship laws, whipped fanatical fury among his followers. There is a story that I wrote down in my notebook from one of the news-reports I had read: “A Muslim resident of Shiv Vihar kept pet pigeons. The mob burned down his home and then killed the pigeons by wringing their necks.” Were they Muslim pigeons?

There is another brief, heartbreaking detail that I recorded in my notebook: “A man returned to a street corner to sift with his hands through a pile of black and gray ash searching for his brother’s bones. He had seen his brother on fire as he tried to flee the mob. He found charred bits that he was going to bury in a cemetery when peace returned.”

I believe we should remember what was done by our fellow human beings. We ought to fight for justice on behalf of those so grievously wronged. What is the central conceit of art? That someone reading you will be moved, that your work will leave someone altered or changed. I cannot say I have bought into that worldview completely. But I do want to remember, and my words or art to keep alive a memory. Many lovers of Urdu poetry remember Bashir Badr’s lines: “Log toot jaate hain ek ghar banane mein / Tum taras nahin khaate bastiyan jalaane mein.” (People go broke in building a home / And you remain unmoved as you burn down whole neighborhoods.) The poet was speaking from experience. His own home in Meerut was gutted and reduced to rubble in the Hindu-Muslim riots in 1987. Like Bashir Badr, I am saying that I remember, I remember.

Amitava Kumar is a writer and journalist. He is the author of several works of fiction and non- fiction, and, most recently, a book of drawings. Kumar was born in Ara, Bihar, and teaches at Vassar College in the United States.

Anita Desai

Our Old Delhi garden was once a pleasant place to sleep on summer nights, but the summer I was ten years old was different: we could see the smoke and flames of fires burning in the Old City; our parents and neighbors awake and watchful. When school reopened, the classrooms were half empty, so many students had “crossed the borders,” we were told. Refugee camps teemed everywhere.

Yet out of that nightmare, the flag of an independent India was raised, a new constitution written that was fair and free of the sectarianism that had caused the agitation and its violence, a testament to the survival of the people’s hopes and idealism. Briefly, we held our heads high.

Seventy five years on, what do we see? All the riches of the many cultures we had inherited coldly and deliberately destroyed, so many vibrant and valuable voices silenced, even the natural world of forests, rivers and wildlife desecrated, leaving us with the dust and ashes of hate and falsehoods.

Anita Desa i is the author of 18 works of fiction including In Custody and Clear Light of Day. She is a professor emerita at MIT, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Among her honors are a Padma Bhushan.

Hari Kunzru

I only met my great grand uncle, Pandit Hridaynath Kunzru, in the last year of his life. By that time he was completely blind, and I, a child of eight, was brought to him so he could “see” me, which he did by brushing his fingers, very gently, all over my face.

Later, I discovered that this former freedom fighter with the fluttering papery touch had, as a member of the Constituent Assembly, been one of the framers of the Indian constitution. He believed in an India that was tolerant, pluralist, and ruthlessly committed to the freedom of its citizens. He built civil society organizations because in a democracy there should be a counterweight to government power. He declined the Bharat Ratna because he thought such honors had no place in a Republic. On this seventy-fifth anniversary of Independence, I honor his principles, and his memory.

Hari Kunzru was born in London and lives in New York. His latest novel is Red Pill.

Jhumpa Lahiri

Because I was born and raised outside of India, India, in its absence, took on even greater significance in my mind. I grew up with parents who, in missing India, sought out other Indians, and so my notion of an Indian community was always diverse.

When they invited other Indian families to our home, in the small Rhode Island town where I was raised, I realized that India was an elastic container of individuals who spoke, ate, dressed, and prayed in different ways. These differences did not “enrich” an otherwise homogeneous India; they were India.

In that sense, India seemed light years ahead of the United States, which was a melting pot in name but alienating and provincial in practice, at least from my perspective. Visits to Kolkata, a city that, as my mother liked to point out, welcomed all of India’s populations, only confirmed my perception that India’s relationship with The Other was built into its very fabric. The plurilingual aspect of India, in particular, both inspired and consoled me, for it insisted on the need for ongoing communication and translation.

The co-existence of more than one language generates curiosity, calls for interpretation, and subverts any notion of absolute power. Unravel certain threads, or snip some strands away, and the conversation is lost; we are left with a frayed society, with imposed silence, with banal and baleful notions of nationhood.

Jhumpa Lahiri was born in London and grew up in the United States to Bengali parents. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her debut short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, and is the author of three novels, including, most recently , Whereabouts, and two collections of short stories. She writes in English and Italian.

Karan Mahajan

On India’s 75th, I find myself worried for my country. The fascist takeover of all aspects of public life is well-documented; but what is even more disheartening is the complicity of the majority. India is fast becoming a country of people who shout about their nation’s greatness even as it is laid to waste by pollution, corruption, disease, environmental degradation, overcrowding, violence. To wake to reality is too painful; it is far easier to lash out at minorities. On India’s 75th, I wish the people of India a clearer vision, and a sense of what they will lose if they refuse to see.

Karan Mahajan is the author of Family Planning, a finalist for the International Dylan Thomas Prize, and The Association of Small Bombs , which was shortlisted for the National Book Award, won the Muse India Young Writer Award, and was named one of the New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2016. Raised in New Delhi, Mahajan is an associate professor in Literary Arts at Brown University.

My ancestors came from Baluchistan to settle in Chennai and Vellore. During Partition, my mother’s family moved to the kingdom of Hyderabad and my father’s family went to Karachi. I was born in England and raised in Canada. Is a human a fixed point in time and space? Are we never meant to move? Or grow?

Anyhow, I am Indian, influenced by its culture, language, and spiritual systems. How did I, as a Muslim, choose to study yoga and Vedanta so deeply? Yoga has always been transnational and cosmopolitan: its origins are ancient, but its flowering came in 14th century Kashmir, when the Shaivite sages were engaged in deep interchange with the Persian and Arab world. Ideas from Islam and Vedanta cross-pollinated. Dara Shikoh, son of Shah Jahan, had the ancient yogic texts translated into Persian and Arabic and distributed across the Muslim world. Lal Ded and Kabir, one of them Hindu (itself a Persian word) and the other claimed by both Muslim and Hindu communities, wrote a poetry of spiritual humanism equally influenced by philosophies of both religions.

Did the poses of the surya namaskar come from the poses of the salaat or was it the other way around? Did the devotional kirtan transform into qawwali or did qawwali give shape to the musical elements of Vedic chanting? Does it matter?

What matters is that these spiritual practices and these peoples have been bound together and have been feeding one another for countless generations, bound together by language, by culture, by belief, and by blood.

Kazim Ali was born in the UK to Indian parents and lives in San Diego. He has published six volumes of verse and five works of fiction, besides non-fiction, translations, and edited an anthology. His new and selected poems will be released in the US and Canada in 2023.

“My parents called me their good luck baby,” my mother tells me. She was born in May of 1947, passed from person to person in the triumphant march toward Chowpatty that August. The rest of the details—the thousands of shining faces, the singing, her fat body buoyed by so many strangers—are not as much memories as her inheritance of a dream, one she folded into neat squares and brought to America. But now. But now.

“What is happening?” she whispers. We feel it rising through the silences on the phone calls back home, the panic tucked into banalities. But what else can they say? What can any of us say? We look outside and find the dark and rising tide our own horizon. Our questions come with it, urgent and useless. Where is the safer ground? What turns a dream back into the body’s memory? What else will it take for us to remember how to cradle each other’s children, to carry them toward a brighter future?

Mira Jacob is a bestselling author, illustrator and cultural critic. Her memoir, Good Talk was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle award, longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award, and named a New York Times Notable Book. Her novel, The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing, was a finalist for India’s Tata First Literature Award.

Salman Rushdie

Then, in the First Age of Hindustan Hamara, our India, we celebrated one another’s festivals, and believed, or almost believed, that all of the land’s multifariousness belonged to all of us. Now that dream of fellowship and liberty is dead, or close to death. A shadow lies upon the country we loved so deeply. Hindustan isn’t hamara any more. The Ruling Ring—one might say—has been forged in the fire of an Indian Mount Doom. Can any new fellowship be created to stand against it?

Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay and lives in New York. He is the author of 20 books, including Midnight’s Children. His many international honors include the Booker Prize, the Best of Booker Prize, Companion of honor (UK), PEN Pinter Prize, PEN/Allen Lifetime Achievement Award, US), and EU’s Aristeion Prize, among others.

Siddhartha Deb

I am not allowed to say the name of the person who told me, years ago: “India is not a nation. It is a prisonhouse of all possible nations.” Now this person is incarcerated, but I can’t describe the specifics of their suffering. What if these words are read somewhere in the command tower of that vast, subcontinent-sized prisonhouse also known as India, and orders are then passed demanding more suffering. As Colonel Joll puts it in J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians , “First I get lies, you see…first lies, then pressure, then more lies, then more pressure, then the break, then more pressure, then the truth.”

That is the sort of truth that has led to thousands in Indian prisons at the same time as India supposedly celebrates 75 years of freedom. “Ignorance is Strength.” “War is Peace.” And, of course, “Freedom is Slavery.” But still there are some names that can be said, should be said, in case we forget these prisoner citizens whose crimes include being opposed to Hindu majoritarianism and to capitalism and wanting justice for the most immiserated, marginalized sections of India’s vastly unequal society.

I can say the name of Stan Swamy, incarcerated and, eventually, killed by the Indian state on July 5, 2021. I can say his name because his life, if not his memory, is beyond the reach of the prisonhouse. Father Stan, dead at 84 because those running India are terrified of a Jesuit priest whose life was dedicated to working with indigenous people brutalized by Hindutva, the state, and the market. Father Stan, suffering from Parkinson’s, but denied bail by “His honor The Special Judge Dinesh E. Kothalikar,” who called it an “alleged sickness.” Say Father Stan’s name. Say it.

I can say the name of Arun Ferreira, who writes about his incarceration in his memoir, Colors of the Cage: A Memoir of an Indian Prison and who was back behind bars before I had time to write the foreword to the American edition of his book. Say his name. Say it.

And say the names of Umar Khaled and Rona Wilson. Say the names of Anand Teltumbde and Surendra Gadling, of Sudhir Dhawale and Shoma Sen, of Mahesh Raut and Jyoti Jagtap, of Gautam Navlakha and Hany Babu and Sagar Gorkhe and Ramesh Gaichor.

Say the names, known, unknown, of thousands of political detainees in India’s prison system. Say the names of the people of Kashmir.

Say the names of the half a million people in prison for non-political crimes, among which being poor, being Dalit, and being Muslim rank the highest. Even if we don’t know the names, say them all.

Say the names of those not yet in prison but on this list or that list, those in the cross-wires of the National Investigative Agency, the Central Bureau of Investigation, and the Uttar Pradesh police, those who give the political leaders of the Hindu right indigestion and bad dreams.

Finally, say your own name because you sometimes worry that one day they will come for you as well. Say your name because you think, late at night, that you might be reported for what you wrote, for what you said, for what you thought. Say your name because you can’t help wondering if they will come for you, if they will stop you from flying out, or if they will stop you when you are coming in. This is how you know that you may be against prisonhouses posing as nations, but that you are always on the side of the many worlds that are possible.

Siddhartha Deb was born in Northeast India and lives in Harlem. He is the author of two novels and one work of nonfiction.

Zia Jaffrey

Memory, Delhi, 2014:

We were on the lawn. It was warm, though winter. You turned, in your light blue sari, and said, All the trouble in the world today has been started by Muslims, hadn’t I noticed? And then: We just want them to sign a piece of paper to say they will abide by our laws—this is a Hindu country—we are the majority—and if they don’t, they can leave.

How could you utter such words so casually? In front of your grandchildren, who are part Muslim? In broad daylight. When you know my last name. Do you not see that I am shaking now? I am so terrified, I cannot speak. Do you even believe these words? Or are they the words of a Mrs. Jones, the Joneses, said almost amiably, without consequence? Are we in Rwanda? When did it become permissible to speak this way? I must say something. But where are my words? I cannot find them. It’s an old position from childhood. That is not true, I say, feebly. I am still shaking. I don’t hear what she says next…In this moment, though I identify with my mother’s side of the family, culturally, which is Hindu, I am Muslim. I am Muslim.

The lawn, the light, the people—they feel sinister now. I seek out a familiar face. Or perhaps his eyes find mine. Her in-law. It feels conspiratorial. What’s wrong? he says. I explain. How do you stand it? I ask. He shakes his head softly. We just agree to disagree. We try not to speak of such things at family gatherings.

In the car, I cannot stop speaking. Someone says, she means, those other Muslims. The religious ones.

Who is “our”? Who is “they”? Who is “we”?

I am reminded that in Rwanda, people were “primed” for genocide. There were phases, over the years, in which it became possible to kill. The radio, the media, helped. Will today be my day to die? So that when it came, the negotiation was not about the fact, but about the manner of death. How well will you kill me? Will you kill me well?

Zia Jaffrey is the author of The Invisibles, a book about the hijras of India. She has written cover stories, fe atures, and reviews for many publications. Her work has most recently been anthologized in Toni Morrison: The Last Interview. She has covered Israel/Palestine, South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, and AIDS. She is writing a book about Palestinian-Americans. She teaches in The New School’s MFA program.

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Best New Books Released in 2022 by Indian Authors

I feel proud to share that Indian Literature is growing by leaps and bounds and there have been some really great releases this year as well. Although I haven’t read all of the books mentioned below, let me assure you I have picked them based on reviews from my other blogger friends, the themes covered, the author and the general popularity of the books pre and post release. So you will be recommended only the best.

Books that did not make it to the list aren’t necessarily bad books, it’s just that they haven’t caught my eye yet and I hope to get to them very soon and come up with an ever bigger list of Indian Books released in 2022, by the end of the year.

I wrote a similar post for the best new books released in 202 1 by Indian authors and it had an overwhelming response, so I decided to write this post in 2 parts for 2022 and I will make this a yearly post on my blog.

On the personal front I have to share I am in my last trimester with my second kid and late August to late September I might be a little invisible on the blog owing to new mommy duties. But I hope to be back soon with some new and exciting recommendations.

Until then stay tuned, keep safe and keep reading!

Here are some more lists you might enjoy!

100 Best Indian Books To Read

The jcb prize for indian literature 2021 - short list, 18 best books by indian authors below 200 pages, unique book recommendations to help you find your next read.

*As an Amazon Affiliate I earn from qualifying purchases

Best New Releases in January 2022 by Indian Authors

In An Ideal World By Kunal Basu

GENRE : FICTION

Altaf Hussein, a youthful Muslim pupil, has been abducted from his council hotel. The authorities have washed their hands off the matter and the police are indicted for a cover-up. Rumors claim he has gone to fight the jihad in Iraq. Further minatory rumors have him tortured and boggled for opposing the Nationalist scholars who are in a rage to produce a Hindu motherland in India, driving out Liberal sympathizers like Altaf and their decadent ideals.

The peak between Liberals and Chauvinists invades the Sengupta ménage in Kolkata when Joy, a bank director, and Rohini, his teacher woman - both compassionate humanists- learn the shocking news that their only son Bobby has come to a leader of the Nationalist scholars and is intertwined in Altaf's exposure.

Unbelief turns to anguish when they encounter his truculent testament and his not- too satisfying denial of his part in the Altaf affair. Out to break the riddle of Altaf, Joy and Rohini discover conspiracy and hate, interdicted love and exceptional courage, and come face to face with a world caught between the real and the ideal. But will they succeed in exonerating their son of the heinous crime?

Will Altaf be set up after all? Or will they, and this splintered nation, pay the ultimate price for harboring a cracked heart?

Another work of genius from the author of numerous critically respected novels. A veritably applicable and contemporary book on the state of twenty-first-century India.

Adam By S. Hareesh

GENRE : Fiction - Translation from Malayalam

Four Belgian Malinois puppies, raised by an ex-serviceman, who ends up in four different life situations; two men who play a game made out of death notices cropped from journals; a man who exploits his friend's disability to satisfy his brutish requirements; a government hand who's intoxicated by the taste of wild meat and sinks deeper and deeper into the poisonous world of stalking; two buffaloes who break away from their botcher, leading an entire will to chase after them; an old man who rejoices in the death of a sworn adversary who was formerly his friend.

Hareesh's Adam explores the more delicate of mortal feelings- lust, wrathfulness, covetousness, revenge, and capacity. Restated from Malayalam, the collection presents nine unusual stories about ordinary people, their heartstrings, and their different fates in a world where humans, creatures, and nature collide. Hareesh's unique style of liar, which mixes canny social observation with an impious and sardonic tone, makes these stories amping, and pushes the craft of the short story to new and stimulating realms.

Restatement of brilliant stories by S. Hareesh who won the JCB Prize for Literature in 2020 for his debut new Moustache.

Best New Releases in February 2022 by Indian Authors

Suit By Samarth

GENRE : GRAPHIC NOVEL

S uit is set in a Mumbai of the near future, when Safai Karamcharis have been handed safety outfits, including a full-body safety suit which gives them the moniker of Suitwalas. The story explores smirch, social change, and mobility through the eyes of Vikas, a youthful" Suitwala", as we follow him through a day in his life, darting between incidents at work, moments he catches with his family, and recollections of his father.

The suit is hailed as a great vault in the right direction for the safety and quality of Safai Karamcharis; still, has anything changed in reality, or is the suit just a cover? The book speculates what change could look like in a profession so steeped in exploitation and rejection, where the patient smirch infuses every step towards betterment with a bitter shadow.

Sin: Stories By Wajida Tabassum

GENRE : Fiction - TRANSLATION

Set in Hyderabad's old-world aristocratic society of the 1950s, this astral collection of stories resurrects and explores the work of Wajida Tabassum, one of the most prominent names in Urdu literature, a heretic and non-conformist frequently appertained to as the' womanish Manto'. In her continuance, Tabassum's intrepid depiction of the realities of the society she lived in met with severe review from the so-called custodians of the culture of the time, and she was reviled to the point that mobs set out to arsonist her publishers' services.

Sin showcases Tabassum's boldest short stories, alongside the story of her own life, restated for the first time in English, in which she captures, in engaging prose, the diapason of depravity among Hyderabad's elite, middle-class forces in the mid-twentieth century, and blurred lines of decency and form.

Featuring lascivious nawabs, lecherous begums, cunning retainers, and unfulfilled marriages marked by peculiar rituals and customs, this volume will surprise, intrigue, and entertain compendiums in equal measure.

Best New Releases in March 2022 by Indian Authors

To Hell And Back: Humans Of Covid by Barkha Dutt

GENRE : NON-FICTION

Since 2020, our world has battled a single adversary. In dealing with the epidemic, India has seen its challenges and special tragedies. Two times the epidemic may have formerly claimed anywhere between 3 and 5 million Indian lives.

The lockdown of the first surge caused unknown desolation. And in 2022, Omicron has trigged a new challenge. When India’s lockdown was first blazoned in March 2020, acclaimed intelligencer Barkha Dutt started an extraordinary series of road passages, recording the mortal story of the epidemic, one which she continues indeed moment as we scuffle with the contagion’s rearmost icon.

In this book, she tells India’s epidemic story through the stories of the people she covered – the migratory workers and politicians, businessmen and functionaries, croakers and nursers, plant workers and growers, preceptors and scholars, misters and women, parents and children. And through these accounts, she draws an astounding picture not just of our pest times but the veritable nature of our country with its deep- confirmed inequalities across class, estate, and gender.

Moving, gripping and pictorial, To Hell and Back, is an outstanding work by one of our foremost intelligencers.

The classic book on two times of India’s Covid epidemic.

A Book of New Beginnings By Jerry Pinto

GENRE : SELF-HELP

This shining florilegium is a treasure of contemplations, cheers, and alleviations from a range of voices through history Rabi’ah, Rumi, Tukaram, Emily Dickinson, Tagore, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Muktabai, Martin Luther King, the Dalai Lama, Alice Munro, Shailendra and obscure, everyday people with an extraordinary gift for stopgap, compassion, courage, and perseverance.

Edited and introduced by one of India’s finest and most admired pens, and beautifully designed and produced, this is a dateless book to retain and to gift.

A shining knockout of contemplations, cheers, and alleviations from a range of voices through history.

Best New Releases in April 2022 by Indian Authors

Tomb of Sand (International Booker Prize Winner 2022) by Geetanjali Shree

TRANSLATED BY : Daisy Rockwell

GENRE : Fiction - Translation, Hindi to English

In northern India, an eighty-year-old woman slips into a deep depression after the death of her hubby and also resurfaces to gain a new parcel of life. Her determination to fly in the face of convention- including striking up a fellowship with a bisexual person- confuses her bohemian son, who's used to thinking of herself as the further' ultramodern' of the two.

To her family's consternation, Ma insists on traveling to Pakistan, contemporaneously defying the undetermined trauma of her teenage gests of Partition, and re-evaluating what it means to be a mama, a son, a woman, a positivist.

Rather than respond to tragedy with soberness, Geetanjali Shree's playful tone and buoyant wordplay results in a book that's engaging, funny, and hugely original, at the same time as being a critical and timely kick against the destructive impact of borders and boundaries, whether between persuasions, countries, or genders.

Winner of THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2022.

Inquilab Zindabad: A Graphic Biography Of Bhagat Singh by Ikroop Sandhu

Far from the gun-carrying, swaggering youthful man represented in pop culture, Bhagat Singh was an intrepid pupil leader who spent his time reading, jotting, debating, strategizing, and executing plans while working alongside his comrades. Detailing the life of a public icon, Inquilab Zindabad maps Bhagat Singh’s trip toward revolutionizing the Indian freedom struggle and the people and events that told this hunt.

While Inquilab Zindabad sheds light on his family members, musketeers, comrades, and secret donors, extracts from Bhagat Singh’s revolutionary jottings on religion, estate and freedom are also present throughout the book. Informing the anthology of his canny compliances on politics and revolutionary life, the assignments from his life and jottings are more applicable moment than ever ahead.

Inquilab Zindabad maps Bhagat Singh’s trip toward revolutionizing the Indian freedom struggle and the people and events that told this hunt.

Best New Releases in May 2022 by Indian Authors

The Living Mountain by Amitav Ghosh

GENRE : Fiction

The Living Mountain is an exemplary tale of how we've totally exploited nature, leading to an environmental collapse.

reported as a dream, this is a fable about Mahaparbat, the Living Mountain; the indigenous vale residers who live and prosper in its sanctum; the assault on the mountain for marketable benefit by the Anthropoi, humans whose sole end is to reap the bounty of nature; and the disaster that unfolds as a result.

The Living Mountain is an especially applicable moment when we've been battling an epidemic and are facing a climate catastrophe both of which are products of our inadequate understanding of humanity’s relationship with nature, and our sustained appropriation and abuse of natural coffers. This is a book of our times, for our times, and it'll reverberate explosively with compendiums of all periods.

In The Language Of Remembering: The Inheritance Of Partition by Aanchal Malhotra

GENRE : Non-Fiction

The Language of Flashing back reveals how Partition isn't yet an event in history and its heritage is threaded into the diurnal lives of posterior generations. Bringing together exchanges recorded numerous times with generations of Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, and their separate diaspora, it looks at how Partition memory is saved and willed, its consequences circulated and manifested within family, community, and nation. With the oldest pollsters in their nineties and the youthful just teenagers, the voices in this living library privately and unfeignedly answer questions similar to Is Partition applicable? Should we still talk about it? Does it define our connections? Does it make our characteristics or compound our fears, without us indeed realizing it?

As the key marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of Partition, In the Language of Flashing back will most importantly serve as a memorial of the price this land formerly paid for not guarding against collaborative strife- and what could be formerly again should we ever choose division over addition.

Best New Releases in June 2022 by Indian Authors

The Wait And Other Stories by Damodar Mauzo

TRANSLATED BY: Xavier Cota from Konkani

GENRE : Fiction - Translation, Konkani to English

A hack automobilist, who assumes the identity of whoever his guests want him to be, finds himself in a tricky situation with a passenger. A late-night call leads a croaker down a path of lust and desire, but with unexpected results. A pen acquaints himself with a stealer who had broken into his house. A migrant worker falls in love but wonders how he can present himself as a suitor. An immature man, having lost the love of his life, takes it upon himself to resolve another couple's dilemmas.

Konkani pen Damodar Mauzo's sometimes crazy, sometimes tender stories, set largely in Goa, produce a world far removed from the sun and sand and the holiday resorts. also, you find townies facing moral choices, children waking up to the realities of adult lives, men who dwell on guilt, women who live a life of guilt, and communities whose bonds are growing tenuous in an age of religious polarization. Probing the deepest corners of the mortal psyche with lingo- in- impertinence humor, Mauzo's stories reveal the multitudinous vestments that connect us to others and the ease with which they can be broken. Written in simple prose and yet concentrated in nuances, The stay is a collection that brings to the Anglophone world one of the doyens of Konkani literature.

" Damodar Mauzo's stories present us with pictorial casts of the richly different, smart reality of contemporary Goa. In these perceptive, keenly observed stories Hindus, Catholics, and Muslims all find ways to co-occur, in defiance of partisanship."

Hope On – an anthology of comics by various authors

EDITED BY : Nithin Mathew and Sanid Asif Ali

GENRE : Graphic Novel

QUICK TAKE:

A feel-good, anthology of comics celebrating the lives of women who overcome trying times to find hope. This collection is bound to bring a smile to your face.

Created by 15 independent artists in the middle of a pandemic.

This post contains affiliate links.  Read my Disclosure Policy .

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18 Must-Read Indian Novels in English

By: Author Aakanksha Singh

Posted on Last updated: 8th April 2024

Some of the best-loved works of literature in the 20th century came from a post-independence India. Works by Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy are synonymous with great modern literature, but there are many more Indian novels in English for you to discover. And here are just a few of the best.

Indian Literature in English: A History

The history of Indian writing in English is interlinked with the British rule in India. Its seeds were possibly sown when Lord Macaulay in his Minute on Education, 1835 , decided that the East India Company should establish an education system whose medium of instruction would be English. 

After Independence (1947), there were heated debates about the official language to use in India and whether to express one’s creativity in English. English was deemed an alien and colonial language. Writing and speaking it meant that one is still under the colonial rule. Nonetheless, English was perceived as a unifying common language in India where thousands of dialects were spoken across the country. 

Today, more than 70 years later, English is as frequently used in India as other languages. English has made its home here and in the increasingly globalised world, it has become a necessity.  The literature written in English flourished even during pre Independence. But it slowly came into its own once the writers found their own voice and style rather than blindly imitating British literary standards in their works. 

The most important result of finding unique styles was the representation of the colonised by its own people. A true ‘Empire Writes Back’ moment where ideas, thoughts, emotions and traditions are not depicted merely as the Oriental Other but as a living breathing and evolving phenomenon. 

As a result, Indian literature in English has scaled great heights by presenting stories of the many ‘Indias’ and its myriad experiences. Curiously and paradoxically, English translations have also created more awareness about vernacular writing in India ( update: some of those Indian novels in translation can be found on this list).

Unmissable Indian Novels in English

Here are the finest must-read Indian novels (and stories) in English. Please note that this list is only a small example and not an exhaustive one. There is so much more to explore and this is just the tip of the iceberg, when it comes to the exciting wealth of Indian novels in English, and Indian novels in translation.

Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara

Longlisted for the Women’s Prize 2020, Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line is an emotional ball of yarn; it tangles and twists tone and theme, keeping the reader confused and engaged from beginning to end. One of the most exciting and celebrated modern Indian novels.

Inspired by the darkest real-life issues of modern-day India, Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line tells the story of Jai, a young boy who lives with his family in a ramshackle tin home. Jai has aspirations of being a cop, and confidence to spare.

Jai is spurned into action when a boy from school goes missing. Believing he has learned all the skills he needs from watching episodes of Police Patrol, he recruits his friends — the booksmart Pari and the streetsmart Faiz — to solve the case of the missing boy.

The bright and hopeful innocence of our protagonists is brilliantly offset by our own grim knowledge of the real world. We remain hopeful and we enjoy the journey they go on, but we must also pray for the souls of these slum children.

The Story of a Goat by Perumal Murugan

Translated by N Kalyan Raman

One of India’s most celebrated and cherished novelists, Perumal Murugan is famed for his willingness to depict rural village life in his literature. He explores the lives, traditions, habits, and behaviours of India’s out-of-the-way communities.

His novel, The Story of a Goat , begins with an old man sitting on a hill. He is approached by a giant man, described as looking like Bakasura (a man-eater from the Mahabharata epic). The giant is carrying a small, black goat kid and he is looking to find her a home. The old man accepts her and the giant leaves.

From here we are gifted a story of two emotional arcs: one of love and empathy, and another of fear and frustration. The Story of a Goat rails against bureaucracy and government interference while also offering us a simple, charming tale of love between people and their animals in a rural community of kind people.

The Story of a Goat reminds us of the importance of our relationship, as people, with the natural world: our pets, our farm animals, and our wilderness. It builds bridges and shows us the pain causes when those bridges are threatened with fire and violence.

Similarly to Japanese novel The Guest Cat by Takashi Hiraide, The Story of a Goat is written and translated with an almost childish simplicity, in a style reminiscent of fables and fairy tales. That simplicity allows its emotional knocks to hit harder and resonate for longer. This is a marvel amongst modern Indian novels, and a reminder of the magic of Perumal Murugan’s writing.

One Part Woman by Perumal Murugan

Translated by Aniruddhan Vasudevan

Perumal Murugan’s most celebrated and controversial novel (and thus one of the most popular modern Indian novels) considers the dangerous and illusory sway that invented superstitions and traditions can have over a community or an individual. And the madness it might bring.

One Part Woman is a novel so penetrating and forceful that putting it down or looking away comes to feel like a daring and unsafe decision.

The story of One Part Woman concerns a married couple in a rural Indian village. They are happy together – so happy in fact that the wife, Ponna, remarks often on how wonderful her husband is, and what she wouldn’t do for him.

The black mark on their life being that they cannot conceive a child together. And what, for them, is a tragic disappointment becomes something wholly blown up within their two families and their community. Whispers and gossip spread like wildfire, and it in fact goes beyond pressure and guilt for them as they gently become pawns in their families’ games of conception.

By the book’s halfway point, no longer is it their choice how they conceive, but rather something that their brothers and parents must play at, as though Ponna and her husband Kali are their chess pieces, and the upcoming Chariot Festival their game board .

What’s so successful about One Part Woman ’s exploration of this is how it subtly twists its supporting cast from people ignorant to their own actions into people who know what they are doing and couldn’t care less. Ritual and tradition are at once exciting fascinations and terrifying, dangerous creatures in the world of this novel — something to admire and fear.

Read our full review of One Part Woman here!

The Yogini by by Saṅgītā Bandyopādhyāẏa

Translated by Arunava Sinha

Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay has made an incredible name for herself as an author of outstanding Indian novels,, both in her native India and in translation thanks to Arunava Sinha and Tilted Axis, as a true force of feminism in modern literature. Though her approach is freshly surrealist, it is also entirely grounded, relatable, challenging, and punk.

Her previous novels in English, also published by Tilted Axis — Abandon and Panty — both share the same vigorous distrust for, and aggression against, patriarchal standards, and cultural norms and expectations, which we see here in The Yogini : a novel in which the woman protagonist challenges the rules set out by fate itself.

Our protagonist, Homi, is a newly married woman approaching her one-year anniversary, and she works as a TV journalist.

The novel opens with a thrilling and terrifying horror scene, as we find Homi trapped on a train, standing in the open air and preparing to jump in a desperate attempt to escape her pursuer. But before she takes the leap, she is stopped by the very thing she is running from: a haggard-looking male stalker.

From here we rewind to before she first encounters the yogi stalker, and then move gradually forward through weeks of pressure, confusion, and trepidation as Homi questions the state of her life.

After spying the yogi on a street one night, she soon comes to understand that she is being relentlessly chased by him. He is not threatening her; in fact, eventually she even starts to get used to his presence. Homi becomes convinced that he is a manifestation of fate itself.

Homi is chased to the edge of madness by a manifestation of fate – a man, no less. She is vulnerable, too afraid to ask for help, for all the good it would do. This is a book of heavy themes presented perfectly through the lens of off-kilter terror and unravelling family drama.

The Yogini is powerful; it gets under your skin and it stays there, nailing us to the book’s pages as fate nails Homi to the tracks she can’t derail from.

Read our full review of The Yogini here!

Seeking Fortune Elsewhere by Sindya Bhanoo

This is a collection of eight staggering short stories that centre around distance: geographic, familial, and emotional. In Seeking Fortune Elsewhere , veteran journalist Sindya Bhanoo explores the connections between lovers, parents and their children, people and their jobs, and even nations and cultures.

The book’s first story focusses on an elderly upper-middle-class woman who has found herself in a retirement village, courtesy of her daughter who now lives and works in the US. She and the other residents form a hierarchy based on what country their children immigrated to.

In its second, story, an Indian professor at a US university has come under fire by the press after years of treating his Indian students like family. Some have claimed he took advantage of their closeness, getting them to do free labour for him.

This is a collection of tales that are all united by themes of distance and connection, but they demonstrate an enormous variety of emotion as people struggle with losing their parents and their children, their homes and their jobs.

Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai

The novel is paradoxically about the loss of identity but also about a steadfast desire to erase that loss and belong somewhere. The three main characters include Sai who lives with her grandfather in Kalimpong in the Indian state of West Bengal; Sai’s tutor, Gyan, who gets caught up in the Gorkhaland movement; and Biju who lives illegally in United States.

Inheritance of Loss won the Man Booker Prize in 2006 and is a must read for its sensitive depiction of the effects of nationalism and globalisation on identity.

Read More : 12 Amazing Novels to Read from Bhutan

Malgudi Days by R.K. Narayan

R.K. Narayan’s Malgudi Days has cult status among most readers in India. If they haven’t read the book, they have seen the 1980s’ TV show based on it.

Malgudi Days is a collection of 32 short stories about the adventures of Swamy and his friends in the fictional South Indian town of Malgudi. Through the children’s innocent fun and frolic, the stories capture a quintessential simple way of life in the India of the past. 

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

The God of Small Things is one of the most famous and celebrated Indian novels in existence. A Booker Prize winner and celebrated novel that is held in highest regard, deservedly so. This sprawling novel is set in the southern Indian state of Kerala. It is a story about one family’s history and its many layered and complicated relationships. 

The story focuses on the life of the fraternal twins Rahel and Estha and their mother, Ammu’s relationship with Velutha. With this focus, Roy brings out the taboos of caste and gender that colour Indian perspectives.

No Presents Please by Jayant Kaikini

Translated by Tejaswini Niranjana

Not actually a novel but, rather a collection of Indian short stories all set around the city of Mumbai, the tales in No Presents Please take the ordinary, mundane lives of normal people — young couples, lonely bachelors, struggling workers, winners and losers, invisible people — and shine a quiet spotlight on them.

These wonderful little tales ask us to stop and wonder about the guy in the flat above us whom we’ve never talked about, or the bus driver we see every morning but treat like he’s part of the bus, or the angry family next door who are always fighting but we don’t know why.

No Presents Please is set in Mumbai; every person in every story has made this city a part of them; it has raised them, and they are a part of it. They keep its lights on. It’s through them that we get to understand the city from so many different angles.

The variety on offer in No Presents Please is extraordinary. The variety of places, jobs, ages, situations, emotions, and backgrounds. This book is a full tapestry of Mumbai life; it’s glistening and dirty all at once. It’s exciting and heartbreaking. It’s fast and slow, frightening and gripping.

This book, like the city in which it’s set, is humming with the lives and loves and losses of ordinary, fascinating, terrible, wonderful people.

Read our full review of No Presents Please here!

Untouchable by Mulk Raj Anand

It was published in 1935 and was one of the few fictional books by an Indian writer that spoke on the topic of caste. Untouchable follows a day in the life of Bakha who is a sweeper. Bakha is considered an ‘untouchable’ or someone who belongs to a low caste in the Hindu religious system . He is not allowed to and consequently does not mingle freely with others because of his caste.

He is ostracised by mainstream society and lives on its margins. His caste decides his occupation at the time of his birth. Untouchable remains an insightful and painfully relevant novel till today.

Pinjar by Amrita Pritam

The Partition of India is a horrific legacy that occurred on the eve of India’s Independence. British India was divided into two: India and Pakistan based on religious lines although India chose to remain a secular country rather than a religious one.

Partition has been widely represented in Indian literature.  It is an event that has shaped India’s future as well as the histories of countless Indians. Pinjar , originally written in Punjabi by Amrita Pritam, dared to write about a love that rose above the very religious divide that tore the country apart.

The novel, translated into English as Skeleton by Khushwant Singh, revolves around Puro’s abduction by Rashid during the Partition.

The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh

While most people would be aware of the Partition of the British Indian region of Punjab in the north, most are unaware that British Indian state of Bengal was also divided into India and East Pakistan, which is today, Bangladesh.

The Shadow Lines , set in Calcutta, Dhaka and London, touches upon this other Partition. But its main backdrop is the brewing communalism of the 1960s’ in Dhaka and Calcutta leading to the main incident of the story which the narrator tries to come to terms with. The Shadow Lines is a study in non linearity, point of view and the notion of memory in shaping identities. One of the most powerful and affecting Indian novels on the shelves.

The Hangwoman by K.R. Meera

Translated by J. Devika

This contemporary masterpiece shatters and shocks all the myths that uphold patriarchy. The Hangwoman explores the debate in India around capital punishment. It is one of the most impactful Indian novels in translation that you can find.

Originally written in Malayalam (the language spoken in Kerala) and translated into English by J. Devika, The Hangwoman is about the burden that falls on Chetna to become a hang woman to assist her father, Phani. Phani grudgingly gives Chetna this role because his sons are physically incapable of assisting him. Chetna is haunted both by her role in giving life or death and the thorny crown of female empowerment the media has foisted on her.

Em and the Big Hoom by Jerry Pinto

Reading Em and the Big Hoom is bound to be deeply and frighteningly emotional because it frankly uncovers a family’s role in simultaneosly nurturing both burden and love. Set in the city of Mumbai and partly semi autobiographical, Jerry Pinto’s debut novel delves into the challenging relationship between the protagonist, his mother and father, who he calls as Em and Big Hoom respectively.

Em suffers from bipolar disorder around which Hoom’s and the narrator’s entire schedules and lives revolve. Celebrated by renowned author Salman Rushdie, this is one of the quintessential must-read modern Indian novels.

The Night Train at Deoli and Other Stories by Ruskin Bond

There would hardly be any child in India who has not read at least one story by Ruskin Bond. He is a beloved Anglo-Indian author ever since he published his first semi-autobiographical novel, The Room on the Roof . The novel is about Rusty’s adventures in Mussoorie, a hill town in India, and beyond. After that, Ruskin Bond penned several short stories and novellas. It is difficult to pick one when his oeuvre spans a wide range.

Night Train at Deoli and Other Stories is a collection of 30 odd stories that portray love, pain and struggle of common people living in mountainous region of Garwhal in the North Indian state of Uttarakhand. As always, Bond’s words hold magic. They make the mountains and their beauty come alive. 

Lifting The Veil by Ismat Chughtai

Translated from Urdu to English, Lifting the Veil brings together Chugtai’s fiction and nonfiction pieces. Chughtai did not shy away from depicting reality as it is, without sugarcoating it. The 21 vignettes in this collection ‘lift the veil’ of society’s façade of decency imposed predominantly on women through a complicated crisscrossing of traditional values and beliefs.

In Chughtai’s stories, female characters take centre stage and unabashedly question society’s norms around female desires and sexuality.

Selected Poems by Kamala Das

While this is primarily a list of Indian novels, it was important to acknowledge and give love to a poetry collection of this magnitude. Kamala Das wrote in both Malayalam and English but she wrote poems only in English. Her poems are direct and straightforward, portraying the everyday lives of women encumbered by patriarchy.

She wrote from her own experiences of being married early, being tied to her marriage and about the need to explore her own desires and inner world rather than merely playing the role of a wife.

In her poems, Kamala Das also voiced her various identities and heritages of being from a landed family in Kerala and being married into a Bengali family. Her poems imitate the confessional style of writing, allowing for an intimate personal glimpse into the poet herself.

Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

Midnight’s Children is hailed as a quintessential post colonial, post Independence novel. It is another one of the great Indian novels, hailed as a modern classic by readers the world over. Midnight’s Children chronicles Saleem Sinai and his family’s life in 20 th century India. Saleem Sinai is special.

He was born at the stroke of midnight on 15 th August 1947 when India gained Independence. Because of the time of his birth, Saleem is magically connected to the country’s progress and to all others born at that midnight hour. Rushdie’s rich narrative in Midnight’s Children runs parallel to the violent birth of a nation and weaves Sinai’s life with important events that shaped 20 th century India. 

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The Top 10 Book Bloggers in India

By The Rise Insight

Reading is always beneficial for both professional and personal growth. Focus, confidence, memory, knowledge, and clearly communication abilities are all improved. As a voracious reader, you always look for suggestions for the best books to read. For authors, doing a self-analysis involves getting the book reviewed by a reputable critic. These book reviewers in India suggest books in every genre and are voracious readers. In this article we are going to talk about The Top 10 Book bloggers In India who have emerged as best book reviewers so far.

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Book Bloggers in India

The quantity of books from the last few years has significantly grown. We must thank the self publishing companies in India for providing aspiring authors an opportunity. However, this made it difficult for readers to determine which book, given their preferences for genre, was the ideal one to read. The good news is that there are large number of book bloggers in India who publish honest book reviews on their websites and have a strong presence in the literary world.

Based on their review quality and popularity, here are the Top 10 Book Bloggers in India:

1. Vidhya Thakkar

A girl whose eyes crave for magnification of dreams, a soul with never stopping goal. Reader_viddh is one of the leading book blogs since 2017. Vidhya Thakkar is a Book Influencer and a Social Media Strategist. She is listed amongst Top Book Bloggers in India.  She has worked with more than 700 Authors, Brands and India’s listed Publisher’s in regards with Marketing and Promotions.

• Website: https://vidhyathakkar.com/
• Contact Email: [email protected]

2. Kevein Books and Reviews

Started in 2014 by Kevin Mallik, this group is focused on book review, book promotion & marketing. They accept all genres in English and Hindi languages. As per their website’s info, they have more than 5000 visitors per month.

• Website: www.keveinbooksnreviews.in
• Contact Email: [email protected]

3. Akhila Saroha

Akhila started reviewing books since 2015 and as of now she stands among top book bloggers in India. She is known for her in depth review of books and authors love to be interviewed by her. Many of her reviews are published on news portals like Zee5, ANI News, The Print, The Asian Chronicle, The Literature Times etc. Being from literature and educated from the most prestigious institutions of India, her flair of writing developed in experienced hands and she emerged with her multi talents in no time.

• Contact Email: [email protected]

4. Anuradha Goyal

A book blog featuring books reviews, author interviews, excerpts, and all other activities related to books and publishing. Anuradha is an Author, Columnist, Blogger, and public speaker who works on multiple dimensions of three spaces – Business Innovation, Travel, and Books.

• Website: https://www.anuradhagoyal.com/
• Contact Email: [email protected]

5. Bohemian Bibliophile

Founded by Ritu, a businesswoman, a design professional, an avid reader, and a complete foodie. After over two decades of assisting companies to launch and market their brands and services, she finally took the plunge into the world of blogging. She is one of leading book bloggers in India.

• Website: https://bohemianbibliophile.com/

6. Ibooksta -Isha Singh

Isha Singh’s dedicated book review blog, a platform that is devoted to sharing insightful book reviews, conducting engaging blog tours, hosting captivating author interviews, and providing the latest news coverage on books. As a passionate book enthusiast hailing from Mumbai, Isha has an unwavering love for reading and a keen eye for critically analyzing and evaluating literary works. Her book review blog is a testament to her commitment to sharing her love for books with the world and helping readers discover their next favorite read.

• Website: https://ibooksta.com/

7. Asha Seth

An award-winning book blogger, Asha is one among top 10 book bloggers in India. She has read and reviewed 700+ books so far and has been blogging since 12 years. She is a Book Influencer with 12k followers on Instagram and 15k followers on her blog. A copywriter by profession, she offers services such as book reviews, book editing, beta reading, ghost writing, author interviews, digital book promotions, advertising campaigns, blog articles, copywriting, etc. Her debut novel is coming out soon. She is based out of Mumbai. Also, a poet, youtuber, and traveller.

• Website: https://missbookthief.com
• Email: [email protected]

8. Swapna Peri

Swapna Peri, a native of Hyderabad, is the next name on our list. She has been writing book reviews for over ten years. She does book reviews for her personal blog as well as for other websites like   www.storizen.com , www.theliteraturetimes.com etc.

• Contact Email: [email protected]

9. Sohinee Dey

Sohinee Dey runs a blog called Sohinee Reads & Reviews on which she reviews books and does author interviews. She began in 2018 and has already established a solid name in the literary world. Through giveaways, cover reveal parties, posting book excerpts, etc., she also supports book marketing.

• Website: https://poesyinchrysalis.wordpress.com/
• Contact Email: [email protected]

10. Khyati Gautam

One of India’s leading book blogger is Khyati Gautam. She publishes a lot of literary stuff on her site Bookish Fame, which receives a lot of traffic. Additionally, she has a significant social media following on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. She began reviewing in 2016 and currently has more than 15,000 Instagram followers.

• Website: https://khyatigautam.wordpress.com/
• Contact Email: [email protected]

Hope this article will help you to find the best reviewer for your book. The most important thing is that you are here to learn about the top book critics in India right now and where you can discover advice on where to acquire the greatest books, whether they are written by Indian writers or not. And we provide you the same thing here in our list. Such lists will continue to be provided by us in the future. Drop a comment if you have any suggestions on the article. Please note that our article is not a ranking based article. We’ve listed the reviewers randomly. Authors are requested to check in their individual websites for complete information.

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The untouched development in delhi: conditions of village rani khera and mukundpur.

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For Caleb Carr, Salvation Arrived on Little Cat’s Feet

As he struggled with writing and illness, the “Alienist” author found comfort in the feline companions he recalls in a new memoir, “My Beloved Monster.”

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By Alexandra Jacobs

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MY BELOVED MONSTER: Masha, the Half-Wild Rescue Cat Who Rescued Me, by Caleb Carr

J. Alfred Prufrock measured his life out in coffee spoons . Caleb Carr has done so in cats.

Carr is best known for his 1994 best-selling novel “ The Alienist ,” about the search for a serial killer of boy prostitutes, and his work as a military historian. You have to prod the old brain folds a little more to remember that he is the middle son of Lucien Carr , the Beat Generation figure convicted of manslaughter as a 19-year-old Columbia student after stabbing his infatuated former Boy Scout leader and rolling the body into the Hudson.

This crime is only fleetingly alluded to in “My Beloved Monster,” which tracks Carr’s intimate relationship with a blond Siberian feline he names Masha — but his father haunts the book, as fathers will, more sinisterly than most.

After a short prison term, Lucien went on to become a respectable longtime editor for United Press International. He was a drunk — no surprise there, with famous dissolute-author pals like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg hanging around the house. But that he regularly beat Caleb and threw him down flights of stairs, causing not just psychological but physical injuries that persist into adult life, adds further dark shadings to this particular chapter of literary history.

In a boyhood marred by abuse, neglect and the upheaval of his parents’ divorce, cats were there to comfort and commune with Caleb. Indeed, he long believed he was one in a previous life, “ imperfectly or incompletely reincarnated ” as human, he writes.

Before you summon Shirley MacLaine to convene 2024’s weirdest author panel, consider the new ground “My Beloved Monster” breaks just by existing. Even leaving aside the countless novels about them, dogs have long been thought valid subjects for book-length treatment, from Virginia Woolf’s “ Flush ,” about Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel, to John Grogan’s “ Marley and Me .” Meow-moirs are thinner on the ground.

It’s taken a younger generation of feminists, and probably the boredom and anxiety of quarantine, to destigmatize (and in some cases monetize ) being owned by a cat. Male cat fanciers, however, have long been stereotyped as epicene or eccentric, though their number has included such national pillars of machismo as Ernest Hemingway and Marlon Brando . When one male lawyer accidentally showed up to a civil forfeiture hearing behind a kitten filter on Zoom in 2021, America went wild with the incongruity.

Carr, though he’s a big one for research, doesn’t waste much time, as I just have, throat-clearing about cats’ perch in the culture. He’s suffered from one painful illness after another — neuropathy, pancreatitis, peritonitis, Covid or something Covid-like, cancer; and endured multiple treatments and surgeries, some “botched” — and his writing has the forthrightness and gravity of someone who wants to maximize his remaining time on Earth.

He capitalizes not only Earth, but the Sun, the Moon and the roles played by various important anonymous humans in his life, which gives his story a sometimes ponderous mythic tone: there’s the Mentor, the Lady Vet (a homage to Preston Sturges’ “The Lady Eve”; Carr is a classic movie buff), the Spinal Guru and so forth.

Names are reserved for a succession of cats, who have seemingly been as important to Carr as lovers or human friends, if not more so. (At least one ex felt shortchanged by comparison.) Masha is his spirit animal, a feminine counterpart better than any you could find in the old New York Review of Books personals . She eats, he notes admiringly, “like a barbarian queen”; she enjoys the music of Mahler, Sibelius, Rachmaninoff and Wagner (“nothing — and I’ll include catnip in this statement,” he writes, “made her as visibly overjoyed as the Prelude from ‘Das Rheingold’”); she has a really great set of whiskers.

Before Masha there was Suki, blond as well, but a bewitching emerald-eyed shorthair who chomped delicately around rodents’ organs and disappeared one night. Suki was preceded by Echo, a part-Abyssinian with an adorable-sounding penchant for sticking his head in Carr’s shirtfront pocket. Echo was preceded by Chimene, a tabby-splotched white tomcat the adolescent Caleb nurses miraculously through distemper. Chimene was preceded by Ching-ling, whose third litter of kittens suffer a deeply upsetting fate. And before Ching-ling there was Zorro, a white-socked “superlative mouser” who once stole an entire roast chicken from the top of the Carr family’s refrigerator.

To put it mildly, “My Beloved Monster” is no Fancy Feast commercial. All of the cats in it, city and country — Carr has lived in both, though the action is centered at his house on a foothill of Misery Mountain in Rensselaer County, N.Y— are semi-feral creatures themselves at constant risk of gruesome predation. Masha, rescued from a shelter, had also been likely abused, at the very least abandoned in a locked apartment, and Carr is immediately, keenly attuned to her need for wandering free.

This, of course, will put her at risk. The tension between keeping her safe and allowing her to roam, out there with bears, coyotes and fearsome-sounding creatures called fisher weasels, is the central vein of “My Beloved Monster,” and the foreboding is as thick as her triple-layered fur coat. More so when you learn Carr keeps a hunting rifle by one of his easy chairs.

But the book is also about Carr’s devotion to a line of work he likens to “professional gambling.” Despite his best sellers, Hollywood commissions and conscious decision not to have children to stop the “cycle of abuse,” Carr has faced money troubles. The I.R.S. comes to tape a placard to his door and he’s forced to sell vintage guitars to afford Masha’s medications, for she has begun in eerie parallel to develop ailments of her own.

“My Beloved Monster’ is a loving and lovely, lay-it-all-on-the-line explication of one man’s fierce attachment. If you love cats and feel slightly sheepish about it, it’s a sturdy defense weapon. If you hate them, well, there’s no hope for you.

MY BELOVED MONSTER : Masha, the Half-Wild Rescue Cat Who Rescued Me | By Caleb Carr | Little, Brown | 352 pp. | $32

Alexandra Jacobs is a Times book critic and occasional features writer. She joined The Times in 2010. More about Alexandra Jacobs

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Want to know what Harappans ate? Read ‘A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India’

The book by Upinder Singh is now in its second edition

Most history buffs have been mystified by the Harappans' script, their coinage, their state system—all of which we know little of. At the same time, we know a lot about their bricks, buildings, streets, products, exports and, of course, their sewage system. But what did the Harappans eat?

Few have asked that question, and fewer still have sought to answer it. This book, by one of India’s finest historians, asks the question and seeks to answer it. Upinder Singh says the Harappans ate wheat, millets, pulses, meat and dairy.

The dietary habits of the Harappans are only a small episode in this book, which is actually an exploration of Indian history until the late 12th century. The book delves into the rich tapestry of ancient and early medieval India, offering a comprehensive examination of its social, political, economic and cultural aspects. The author navigates through the complexities of the era, providing readers with a nuanced understanding of the historical landscape. The good thing is that she has presented these in a well-organised, chronological manner. In short, it is not a boring sociological account of the past, but a depiction of ancient India’s human drama.

The book stands out for its ability to strike a balance between being comprehensive while maintaining a level of intricacy. The inclusion of fresh research, notable sites, credible sources and thought-provoking theories further enriches the overall reading experience.

The original edition of the book had garnered praise from history enthusiasts, educators, scholars and students alike. The second edition includes the latest findings and advancements. The author also emphasises the significance of modern technology in archaeology. Through such discussions, the author gives deep insights into the significance of Attirampakkam (Tamil Nadu) in pushing the date of Stone Age of India earlier than 1.3 million years ago. She also vividly describes the amazing commercial network maintained by the Harappans that procured and distributed raw materials for their craft. This description is backed by provenance analyses of minerals, the discovery of megafauna like rhinoceros existing in the western part of India during 3rd millennium BCE, which are depicted in Harappan seals. You also get to know of the dates of earliest rice cultivation at Lahuradeva (Uttar Pradesh) touching 7th millennium BCE, as also about the exciting excavations of Ai-Khanoum in Afghanistan (which Sylvain Levy believed was the Alaknanda of ancient Indians), which revealed connections of post Mauryan India with parts of Afghanistan and so on.

In this edition, the author also gives a renewed focus to the eastern region, delving into its early history, empires and state formations. She also explores Neolithic traditions, such as megalithism, which have endured to this day in the region.

There is also much discussion on the science and mathematics found in ancient texts, which have become topics of great interest these days. The book broadens its scope to encompass various regions of south Asia, going beyond India and giving insightful sections on Buddhism in the Maldives and the Mesolithic era in Sri Lanka.

Overall, the book effortlessly guides readers through the complex historical landscape while refraining from oversimplification. The reader's comprehension is enriched by the inclusion of visual elements like maps, illustrations and timelines, along with fresh visuals and an updated design. Singh provides a comprehensive and nuanced exploration of India's history, presenting a well-rounded perspective that incorporates a diverse range of sources.

A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India: From the Stone Age to the 12th Century (second edition) By Upinder Singh Published by Pearson, 2024 Price Rs1,999 (hardbound); pages 817

Libraries are full of books about great cats. This one is special.

Caleb carr’s memoir, ‘my beloved monster,’ is a heart-rending tale of human-feline connection.

Over the years, my wife and I have been blessed with 15 cats, three rescued from the streets of Brooklyn, three from barns near our home in Vermont, one from a Canadian resort and the others from the nearby shelter, where my wife has volunteered as a “cat whisperer” for the most emotionally scarred of its feline inhabitants for years. Twelve of our beloved pets have died (usually in our arms), and we could lose any of our current three cats — whose combined age is roughly 52 — any day now. So, I am either the best person to offer an opinion on Caleb Carr’s memoir, “ My Beloved Monster ,” or the worst.

For the many who have read Carr’s 1994 novel, “The Alienist,” an atmospheric crime story set in 19th-century New York, or watched the Netflix series it inspired, Carr’s new book might come as something of a surprise. “My Beloved Monster” is a warm, wrenching love story about Carr and his cat, a half-wild rescue named Masha who, according to the subtitle of his book, in fact rescued Carr. The author is, by his own admission, a curmudgeon, scarred by childhood abuse, living alone and watching his health and his career go the way of all flesh.

What makes the book so moving is that it is not merely the saga of a great cat. Libraries are filled with books like that, some better than others. It’s the 17-year chronicle of Carr and Masha aging together, and the bond they forged in decline. (As Philip Roth observed, “Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre.”) He chronicles their lives, beginning with the moment the animal shelter begs Carr to bring the young lioness home because the creature is so ferocious she unnerves the staff — “You have to take that cat!” one implores.

Interspersed throughout Carr’s account of his years with Masha are his recollections of all the other cats he has had in his life, going back to his youth in Manhattan. And there are a lot. Cats often provided him comfort after yet another torment his father, the writer Lucien Carr , and stepfather visited upon him. Moreover, Carr identifies so deeply with the species that as a small child he drew a self-portrait of a boy with a cat’s head. He knows a great deal about cats and is eager to share his knowledge, for instance about the Jacobson’s organ in the roof of their mouths that helps them decide if another creature is predator or prey. His observations are always astute: “Dogs tend to trust blindly, unless and until abuse teaches them discretion. … Cats, conversely, trust conditionally from the start.”

Carr, now 68, was a much younger man when he adopted Masha. Soon, however, they were joined at the hip. As the two of them bonded, the writer found himself marveling at what he believed were their shared childhood traumas, which move between horrifying and, in Carr’s hands, morbidly hilarious: “I began to accept my father’s behavior in the spirit with which he intended it … he was trying to kill me.” Man and cat shared the same physical ailments, including arthritis and neuropathy, possibly caused by physical violence in both cases. Carr allowed Masha, a Siberian forest cat, to go outside, a decision many cat owners may decry, but he defends it: “Masha was an entirely different kind of feline,” and keeping her inside “would have killed her just as certainly as any bear or dog.” Indeed, Masha took on fishers and bears (yes, bears!) on Carr’s wooded property in Upstate New York.

But bears and dogs are humdrum fare compared with cancer and old age, which come for both the novelist and his cat. Carr’s diagnosis came first, and his first concern was whether he would outlive Masha. (The existence of the book gives us the answer he didn’t have at the time.) Illness adds new intensity to the human-feline connection: “Coming back from a hospital or a medical facility to Masha was always particularly heartening,” Carr writes, “not just because she’d been worried and was glad to see me, but because she seemed to know exactly what had been going on … and also because she was so anxious to show that she hadn’t been scared, that she’d held the fort bravely.”

Sometimes, perhaps, Carr anthropomorphizes too much and exaggerates Masha’s language comprehension, or gives her more human emotion than she had. But maybe not. Heaven knows, I see a lot behind my own cats’ eyes. Moreover, it’s hard to argue with a passage as beautiful as this: “In each other’s company, nothing seemed insurmountable. We were left with outward scars. … But the only wounds that really mattered to either of us were the psychic wounds caused by the occasional possibility of losing each other; and those did heal, always, blending and dissolving back into joy.”

Like all good memoirs — and this is an excellent one — “My Beloved Monster” is not always for the faint of heart. Because life is not for the faint of heart. But it is worth the emotional investment, and the tissues you will need by the end, to spend time with a writer and cat duo as extraordinary as Masha and Carr.

Chris Bohjalian is the best-selling author of 24 books. His most recent novel, “The Princess of Las Vegas,” was published last month.

My Beloved Monster

Masha, the Half-Wild Rescue Cat Who Rescued Me

By Caleb Carr

Little, Brown. 435 pp. $29

We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.

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‘I’m not afraid of anybody now’: the woman who revealed links between National Trust houses and slavery – and was vilified

Prof Corinne Fowler’s report into colonial history sparked a furore about ‘wokeness’ and heritage. We join her on one of the routes from her new book of rural walks that highlight how all our lives – hers included – are entwined with colonialism

S tanding outside Dove Cottage in Grasmere in the drizzle, Prof Corinne Fowler seems a very unlikely looking fire starter. But that is exactly how anonymously apoplectic defenders of crown and country have tended to view her. Fowler was, in 2020, the co-author of a report into the colonial history of properties belonging to the National Trust . After which, as they say in the tabloids, all hell broke loose.

At the moment her report was published, culture war arguments about the country’s past were already primed. The statue of the slave-trading philanthropist Edward Colston had lately been toppled into Bristol harbour; Black Lives Matter marches had brought an end to lockdown; footballers were taking the knee. For some on the right, Fowler’s report became (yet another) lightning rod for their anger.

Most of the academic research in that report was already in the peer-reviewed public domain. Still, the professor was characterised in the Telegraph as being “at war with the past”. Nigel Farage accused her of “trashing” our nation (his own special subject). A group of 59 Conservative MPs and peers calling themselves, without any apparent irony, the “Common Sense Group” declared a “battle for Britain” against “subversives fuelled by ignorance and an arrogant determination to erase the past and rewrite the future”. Sir John Hayes, the group’s chair – and occupant of one of the safest Tory seats in England, South Holland and The Deepings in rural Lincolnshire – condemned Fowler’s report as “unpatriotic”. “History,” he wrote, “must neither be sanitised nor rewritten to suit ‘snowflake’ preoccupations.” (Preoccupations, I guess, such as recorded fact and evidential truth.)

The vitriol was only part of it. As a result of the report, two incendiary parliamentary debates were held about the purpose of the National Trust. A vocal pressure group with opaque funding, Restore Trust , was formed to attempt a takeover of the charity’s board in order to denounce “wokery” – in other words, any reference to the ways in which Downton Abbey fantasies may have been funded by violent colonial exploitation. Country house scones were monitored for signs of sedition – replacing English butter with continental margarine – and found wanting.

To begin with, Fowler admits, she was, understandably, somewhat unnerved by all this outrage. Particularly as the comments sections of national newspaper websites were populated with suggestions about how she should be harmed – the words “woman” and “professor” in the same sentence seemed a particular problem for many of her trolls. For a while she was unable to leave home unaccompanied and was in regular dialogue with the police about threats to her safety.

Eventually, however, and against most advice, she decided to do the most courageous thing: she started to answer her hate mail with courtesy, asking people exactly what upset or angered them and discussing in detail her own research and the historical evidence that supported her findings. Almost always, she says, these exchanges eventually ended cordially, with her correspondents wishing her well (one persistent offender even invited her and her son to visit his private wood in Norfolk). As a result, she came to the conclusion – much needed across all our public life – that “dialogue and openness are always the best antidotes to culture war”.

It was with this belief in mind that Fowler embarked on her follow-up to that report: a dozen walks in rural Britain that are intended to open up a deeper sense of the history that her National Trust project research explored – in particular, the fact that just about every big house and surrounding village in our green and pleasant land “speaks volumes about colonialism’s distinctive phases, dimensions and impacts”. As Salman Rushdie once observed: “The trouble with the English is that their history happened overseas, so they don’t know what it means.” Fowler’s terrific, thoughtful, conversational book based on her walks, Our Island Stories , brings a lot of that understanding back home. “British colonial history,” she says, “requires emotionally intelligent approaches. It triggers everything from ancestral trauma to actual denial… for this reason knowledge is not something to be weaponised, but to be shared.”

Her walks have taken her from the Hebridean whisky isles, Jura and Islay (unearthing the ways they were shaped by the historical links with the Jamaican sugar, tobacco and slave trades), down through the Cotswolds (a landscape that reveals close ties to the East India Company) to the forgotten histories of Cornwall’s tin mines and their relationship to west Africa and the West Indies.

I’m meeting Fowler at Grasmere to retrace the Lake District leg of her journey. She has bought a pack of gingerbread from the tiny shop beside St Oswald’s churchyard where the Wordsworths are buried. The gingerbread has been made and sold here to a “secret recipe” since 1854 – the rum for its butter and the ginger itself were shipped into Whitehaven port from Jamaica by Wordsworth’s patrons, the Lowther family, who had made a large part of their fortune in the slave trade. As we set off to walk around Grasmere and Rydal Water, between the houses in which the poet lived, Fowler cheerfully recounts relevant parts of that history.

I happen to know a fair bit about Wordsworth’s life – I wrote a university dissertation on his revolutionary ideas about rural poverty – so am therefore doubly fascinated to discover the full story of his associations with colonial trade, which hardly figures in any of the literary histories.

There are two strands to Fowler’s telling of it. The first involves Wordsworth’s younger brother John, who was a ship’s captain for the East India Company, with frequent lucrative voyages to China and the subcontinent, which helped to fund William’s early vocation (and supply drugs for friends including Coleridge and De Quincey). In 1805 John Wordsworth set sail for India and China, intending to secure his fortune by illicitly trading opium, on the company’s largest ship, the Abergavenny. But just off the coast of Weymouth, in a storm, the ship foundered on rocks and John and most of his crew drowned. The news came as a huge blow to William, not least because he was left with diminished means to support his sister, Dorothy, and his growing family. The poet replaced the funds he had hoped to receive from John’s colonial adventures with patronage from Sir William Lowther, a former Tory MP and major landowner, whose fortune also relied on colonial trade. The political compromises Wordsworth was required to make – to support life at the bigger house at Rydal Mount – not only in espousing the increasingly conservative views of his patron, but also, as Fowler reveals, trying to secure “Mississippi bonds” in cotton plantations for his daughter, fatally damaged his reputation as a radical (“Just for a handful of silver he left us,” Browning wrote in his poem The Lost Leader, “just for a riband to stick in his coat…”).

Walking through John’s Grove, where William and Dorothy used to lie in the shade and look out over the lake to mourn their brother, Fowler reflects on the ways that in scholarly English departments “the writer’s precarious relationship to money is too often overlooked”. And if you follow that money in the 18th and 19th centuries, as she has done (not only for Wordsworth, but also – pearl-clutchers look away – for Jane Austen), it invariably leads back to the great engine of British capital from the 17th century on, the trade in tobacco and cotton and sugar – and in enslaved people.

For her original walks Fowler chose companions with ancestral connections to empire, who helped her to see the villages, hills and fields in a new light. Her companion in the Lakes was the photographer and artist Ingrid Pollard . Back in the 1980s Pollard, a lover of the Lakes, had became increasingly frustrated at the absence of faces like hers in any of the postcards or depictions of the region. She created Pastoral Interlude , a photographic sequence featuring people of colour in the countryside. “I wandered lonely as a Black face in a sea of white”, one image is captioned.

Pollard and Fowler became friends when they worked together on Fowler’s Colonial Countryside initiative, which brought kids from inner-city schools to country houses and asked them to examine their own biographies in relation to what they found there. “I loved,” Fowler says, “how Ingrid never walks in a straight line. She is always stopping to look at something in a hedge or by the side of the road. She’s a true photographer; she sees everything.”

Colonial Countryside, funded by the Arts Council and the National Lottery, ran from 2018 until 2020. “For me, there is nothing better than hearing a range of British kids talking about what history means to them,” Fowler says. “All these different perspectives, and real hearts and minds stuff.”

She remembers a trip to the Eastern Museum at Kedleston Hall, the collection of treasures that George Curzon, the former viceroy of India, had brought back from his travels. A young girl on her project from Derby walked in and immediately pointed to one of these objects and said “that’s lapis lazuli”. Fowler asked her how she knew. She said: “Well my grandma is from Afghanistan and she brought some pieces with her.”

As part of Colonial Countryside, Fowler invited some of the children’s parents to the National Trust properties. “One or two, of south Asian heritage, cried when they saw some of the items and read what was written about them,” she says. “Several of the volunteers at the properties, who had been there for decades, said to me afterwards: ‘It made me realise for the first time that what we have here is actually more relevant to these people’s history than to ours.’”

The Colonial Countryside work led directly to Fowler being commissioned to do a full audit of the history of National Trust houses. Of course, some of the truths she uncovered were not welcomed by some of the current beneficiaries of those estates. One or two got in touch demanding changes. One woman asked her to remove a whole section about her ancestral pile. Fowler laughs. “It was a strange argument. She did not dispute the fact that her family had indeed invested in a company which traded in enslaved people – by buying South Sea Company shares – but the fact was, the woman said, they had ended up losing out on that investment, so it wasn’t fair to say they had profited from slavery.”

Fowler had to tell the woman that the aim of the report was not to inflict reputational damage on inherited fortunes, but to present a deeper understanding of the facts. As the historian David Olusoga pointed out, “History doesn’t care very much about our feelings… country houses are not a soft play area.”

Walking through the landscape, she says, rather than sitting in an archive describing it, is a good way of bringing these stories to full life. It also offers the kind of built-in natural therapy that Wordsworth would have recognised. “Some of what I have been writing about is quite hard to think about – but the context should make it a gentle book,” she says, “though I suppose I know in practice it will upset some people.”

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F owler has been a rambler since childhood. She grew up in Birmingham, where she still lives – she’s a professor at Leicester University – and both of her parents were keen walkers. Her mother, like her, started out as a teacher, before going on to train courtroom interpreters. Her father was a legal aid lawyer in criminal practice. She has a twin sister who is a campaigning podcaster for the Tax Justice Network. They used to walk as a family in town and on trips to Shropshire and Wales. As a student Fowler walked from Land’s End to John o’Groats. On our circumnavigation of the lakes, she sets a fair pace. “Since I turned 50,” she says, “I’ve made more effort to be fit.” I wish, as our walk proceeds, I could say the same. She’s run a few 10ks and is working up to a half marathon.

As part of her research, Fowler felt duty bound, with the help of a cousin, to look into her own family’s history. Her mother’s family is French. She was shocked to discover that her ancestors on that side included enslavers on the Caribbean island of Haiti. “One of them, it turned out, was actually the governor of Haiti just before the slave rebellion led by Toussaint L’Ouverture [strangely the subject of a Wordsworth poem ].” She had no idea. “Perhaps,” she says, with a smile, “I had some unconscious need to work all this history out.” She balances out that knowledge with the fact that her son, through his Venezuelan father, “is descended from Africans who were transported from Benin and the Congo by European slave traders”. The stories prove her point that our island history involves, because of the nature of 300 years of empire, all of the world’s histories, for better and worse.

As we circle past Rydal Mount, and down to the shoreline of Rydal Water, the clouds reflecting in the surface of the lake, we talk about the effect of all the hate mail that Fowler was subjected to. “The lucky thing in a way,” she says, “was that it was lockdown, so they couldn’t easily physically get to me,” though the threats felt real enough.

“It all seems a long way off now – but I do think I will probably get a bit more of it with this book. The thing is, though, I’m not afraid of anybody now. When that many powerful people are that angry with you, after a while you start to think: this can’t be about me personally, it’s about what I represent to them. That knowledge cured me of previous worries. And that’s amazing, because I now feel I can say what I want to say.”

She doesn’t dwell too much on the psychology or politics of those who would rather she kept quiet about some of the more disturbing realities of the history she is uncovering. “It doesn’t need to be a threat to them. It is just adding a layer of information and knowledge. And you have to remember it’s one thing for those people to say that I am spoiling their enjoyment of the past or whatever. What about people of colour having to look at paintings of enslaved people in chains, of which there are more than 300 in British country houses?”

Her research opens up questions of what to do with such artworks and sculptures, the debates currently going on in museums and galleries up and down the land. Where does she stand, I wonder, on the question of whether the statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College, Oxford, should come down?

“To be honest,” she says. “I’m not sure. Removing statues and putting them somewhere else can be very powerful. But I don’t think it is for me to decide. We should be listening more carefully to the people who were most affected by that history. One idea I heard was to leave him up but face him to the wall.”

The revisionist history is only beginning, she believes, and rightly so. It’s not a phase or a fad. “The younger generation are far less precious about British history,” she says. “They are instinctively inclusive; they have to be.”

One of Fowler’s heroes is the classical historian Mary Beard, whom she recently heard give a lecture, “Who Owns the Past?” at the Royal Society. “It was very funny. She started off talking about an Alan Bennett play [ People ], a spoof of the National Trust in which a character finds these 18th-century chamber pots with 18th-century urine still in them – and there is a debate about whether it should be preserved.”

Beard insisted that far from being a recent fracture, the institutional history of the National Trust had always had an enormous amount of internal conflict. Beard’s own campaign would be to see fewer red ropes and thistles on chairs; let the houses live. Her lecture referred to a National Trust visit at which she insisted on sitting with her hosts around an “off-limits” dining table to chat, pointing out to them: “That is what these places should be: a starting point for conversations.”

That is very much Fowler’s perspective. “I wrote this current book partly in response to those people who said: ‘Rather than empire, why don’t you write about the working class in this country, the labourers and servants, why not concentrate on them?’”

She makes the argument that the lives of those ordinary British people were inevitably as intertwined with the subjects of empire, and its commercial imperatives and greed, as those of the big landowners. “The deeper I went into the countryside, the more I found,” she says. One of the telling themes of her book is the way that the practice of land-grabs and subjugation of people abroad was mirrored at home. The big plantation owners abroad were also the plutocrats who walled off common land, under successive acts of enclosure, and shaped the countryside we know today. “It’s funny,” Fowler says, as we approach Wordsworth’s home at Allan Bank, “The other day I was in Suffolk, working with Suffolk museums on some of that history. All the archivist did was put “Jamaica” into the search engine and she wheeled out a huge trolley of documents, amazing stories about the buying and selling of plantations, all belonging to the families from the big local houses.”

As her book shows, the Tories were not known as the landed interest for nothing, and you find their heirs, politically and in some cases physically, in the louder voices of the Common Sense Group and Restore Trust. As Fowler’s work implies, whenever anyone gets irrationally irate about which history is remembered and which forgotten, it’s always worth following the money and seeing who might benefit from the selective amnesia.

“Once you start looking,” she says, “you see these stories everywhere. I could easily do another book with 10 or 20 walks.”

By now, on this particular walk, we are back near where we began, happy to have beaten a forecast storm. I leave Fowler to catch a bus to Windermere and have a wander among the daffodils in St Oswald’s churchyard. The Wordsworth grave plot is where I remember it, but I examine the memorials for William and Dorothy and John with a new layer of complicated understanding. That is the power of history; it is, despite what the “patriots” might argue, never set in stone.

Our Island Stories by Corinne Fowler is published by Allen Lane (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply

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