when researching my book on india in 80 trains, one of the little joys of my four-month rail adventure was lounging on the platforms and rummaging through the iconic wheel stands for paperbacks to keep me company. I was sometimes fooled with pirated copies, greedily flipping through the last few pages only to discover that they were missing or that the final lines had slipped off the photocopied page. but most of my backpack was filled with stories that shaped the curves of my journey.
Tired of narratives that obsess over spices, colors and cows along the way, I have chosen books by Indian writers only; after all, who knows a country better than its own people? where authors have used ancient city names, I have too, to convey the duality of their nature: having spent a couple of years living in madras as a child, I know the familiar emotions and memories the name evokes, while chennai is a completely different city for me.
You are reading: Books set in india
little days and nightsby tishani doshi
“coming back is never the experience you expect,” doshi begins, setting the tone for the story of grace, a young woman who returns to madras after her mother’s death and discovers that she has inherited a pink house in the beach on the coast. – and a sister with down syndrome. Little Days and Nights is a compelling story about family, following Grace as she slips between madras, kodaikanal and paramankeni, her needs, desires and impulses changing with her surroundings as she tries to reconcile desire with love. have to. poet, dancer and novelist, doshi focuses the female body in all her work, and it is through the weight of grace’s legs, or the lightness of her bones that we too feel the effects of the “womb noise” of the sea in paramankeni, the lash of the kodaikanal rain that “smells of sex”, and the dreamy transition city of madras, where the trees look weak and hungover.
narcopolisby jeet thayil
With characteristic cheekiness, Thayil begins with a dedication to HCV, the hepatitis C virus he contracted while sharing needles and injecting government morphine in the 1980s. It is followed by a languid six-page sentence that unfolds like the smoke from a pipe: a prelude to a powerful novel about the old opium dens of bombay. built from brutality and grounded in beauty, narcopolis begins as a tribute to a city of harmony and acceptance, celebrating mumbai as the hero of the story, a sanctuary for hindus, muslims, buddhists, parsis and christians, and then becomes an epitaph for a city “that erased its own history by changing its name and surgically altering its face.”
Shortlisted for the 2012 booker award, thayil refuses to use “mumbai,” a name foisted on its residents by the far-right hindu shiv sena party, and his affection for his former home makes this a potent letter of congratulations. love. to the city island and its dead.
ships on land by janice pariat
Like a succession of quick slaps to the face, the opening lines of each story in this debut collection make you sit up and pay attention. Parachuting the reader straight through quilts of hanging clouds, Pariat drops us into the tea bushes in and around Shillong’s hill station, where it’s cold and damp and the mist swirls with the unearthly. here in the far reaches of northeastern india we learn about khasi politics and culture, but always with an uneasy feeling, where the night is “cut by lightning”, “slashed with light” and the sky “the color of razor blades.” Beginning with the days of British rule and extending to the marital infidelity of the present day, each of the 15 stories is written in flowing prose that doesn’t waver or waver through italics or apologetic explanations of bilati, doh thli, and jadoh, if you don’t know their meanings, it’s up to you to look them up.
the white tiger of aravind adiga
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adiga upset many middle class Indians when the white tiger hit their bookshelves like a sledgehammer, earning him the booker award. Written from the perspective of Balram, the son of a rickshaw puller, the book is a series of letters he feverishly writes, but never sends, to the soon-to-be-visiting Chinese premier, documenting his astute rise from tea boy to wealthy businessman. . Through his sharp, witty and frenetic descriptions, Adiga not only highlights the brutal injustices and corruption of Indian society, but slaps them across the page with broad, thick strokes. Although the book was published in 2008, one line stands out for its relevance today: “one fact about india is that you can take almost anything you hear about the country from the prime minister and turn it around and then you will have the truth about that thing .”
the far field by madhuri vijay
there aren’t many novels set in bangalore, the more moderate sibling of delhi, mumbai and kolkata. Yet here we meet Shalini, a 24-year-old lulled to sleep by the banality of her privileged life in the Garden City. Since her mother’s death three years earlier, she has lived in limbo, unable to commit to anything and haunted by a childhood memory of hers of a Kashmiri man who appeared twice at her garden gate. her. In a feverish moment he decides to leave home to find it, trading his weekend trips to Bali, and beer-filled house parties, for the blue-gray mountains of Kashmir, where the air is tinged with the “medicinal sharpness of the sap of Pine tree”. and the waterfalls turn into a “filigree white foam”.
vijay’s beautiful debut bounces back and forth as she shines a light on a politically fractious region from the perspective of a civilian, who is also a single woman wandering India alone in search of the unknown.
following the fish by samanth subramanian
The only nonfiction on this list, this collection brings together nine stories collected along the Indian coast, from Bengal to Gujarat. With fish as a starting point, Subramanian examines its role in food, medicine, culture, and religion by talking to everyone he meets on his random travels, from fishermen and priests in Goa to hotel chefs in Kolkata. and a family of healers in hyderabad. dense and rigorous journalism, the writing ignites as the author sits down to eat: whether he’s sampling raw fish podi made from powdered mackerel that “runs to the back of the throat and proceeds to set the tonsils on fire” , or sampling pondi-shop food that is normally “propelled into a high spice orbit,” it’s hard to resist the urge to follow in their footsteps.
the god of little things by arundhati roy
Roy, the first Indian woman to win the booker, caused a storm in the literary world when her lyrical debut was published in 1997, encouraging a number of authors who tried to emulate her style, while others condemned her success: the safe sign. of a good book.
Set in Kerala, known as God’s Own Country for its vast backwaters, bent palms, and cool greenery, the book opens in the bleak heat of May, when bananas ripen, jackfruit burst, and crows devour jackfruit. mangoes, before the monsoon arrives. , their tiny fish appear in puddles and “bullfrogs sail in search of mates.” Tragedy has destroyed a family, and after many years, a pair of estranged twins are reunited where it all began.
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scattering capital letters and tossing and playing with language, roy paints a vivid picture of Indian politics, caste cruelty, and the “little things” that keep us afloat.
sacred games of vikram chandra
A massive beast of a book, this delicious thriller dives deep into Bombay’s criminal underworld, as Sikh cop Sartaj Singh hunts down infamous gangster Ganesh Gaitonde. Packed with cops stroking their lavish mustaches, lapdogs thrown from balconies, and googly-eyed, bloodshot villains, Sacred Games is a brilliant exploration of politics, history, and corruption. For the unfamiliar, it’s also a quick education on the quirks of the city’s various districts, such as Bandra, Tardeo, and Dadar, offering a glimpse into the homes of Bombay’s wealthy, “30,000 square feet of Italian marble floors joined with intercoms,” and the poor, where residents have no choice but to “let their young daughters squat down to make a mess right where their children played.”
Published in 2006, the novel is now a very popular series on netflix.
the lives of others by neel mukherjee
Few novels begin with the sheer horror of this one: a horror that rises from the belly, making you gasp and catch your breath before you turn the page.
It’s Calcutta in the 1960s and the wealthy son of a paper mill owner has abandoned the Ghosh family to join a Maoist rebellion, helping the farmers fight their landlords while his Tolstoyan set of relatives faces its own multitude of tribulations. shortlisted for the booker prize in 2014, this is a tome of extraordinary scope and richness, written by an author whose gift lies not only in his ability to imagine the lives of others, but also to embody them: detailing how those who starve outside a luxury hotel you will search for a “banana piece” left in a peel, while in the prosperous world an entire family is “stuck in song and dance” in an attempt to get food for a picky child.
the legacy of loss by kiran desai
if we’re being technical, this 2006 booker award winner oscillates between the himalayan foothills of west bengal and the basement kitchens of new york city, following the lives of a judge, his granddaughter, his math tutor, his cook and his son. but the Indian background could be almost a sixth character, where the trees are “giants hanging from moss, bunions and misshapen”, and Mount Kanchenjunga appears with a “wizard’s phosphorescence”. desai goes to a gargantuan effort linking these seemingly disparate lives, but he does it with style while also being incredibly funny. she exposes a generation suffering from an identity crisis due to colonialism – judge jemubhai patel eating chapatis with a knife and fork – and another generation still looking west for a better future… as they take turns sharing a bed .
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