About thirty years ago, I spent three months on an Indo-American Fellowship in Varanasi taking notes on daily life in this holy city where my novel Sister India is set. That winter felt like a separate life within my life, a bonus. Because all there was so new to me, and it was unmediated by cars, television, or computers, I felt while I was there so much more in touch with the physical world, what in any given moment I could see, hear, smell…. It was the way I had felt as a child, knowing close-up particular trees and shrubs, the pattern of cracks in a sidewalk.
A troubled young woman runs away from her American life to start anew in a Hindu holy city on the Ganges. She becomes Madame Natraja, a strange and reclusive innkeeper of the Saraswati Guest House on the bank of the holy river. (The New York Times calls her “mesmerizing.”) A series of Hindu-Muslim murders leads to a citywide curfew, and the travelers in the inn unwittingly become her captives. So begins a period of days blending into nights as Natraja and the Indian cook become entangled in a web of religious violence, and their guests fall under the spell of this ancient kingdom and the strange chemistry that develops from unexpected intimacies on foreign ground. Sister India is a rare sort of love story.
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The sensory quality of stories of India is inevitable because the country itself is so vividly alive to all the senses. And Hinduism, the predominant religion, is, more than other religions, expressed in physical images and rituals. Suri’s novel treats motherhood in particular in finely observed physical detail, conveying the emotions so well through the senses. A reader irresistibly immerses in the story.
A dark story about a corrupt man, An Obedient Father unfolds in a closely observed world. From page one: “It was morning. The sky was blue from edge to edge. I had just bathed and was on my balcony hanging a towel over the ledge. The May heat was so intense that as soon as I stepped out of the flat, worms of sweat appeared on my bald scalp.” The close sensory detail makes a dark story shockingly intimate.
Days and Nights in Calcutta is a fascinating dual view of the same time and place by a husband and wife, both highly esteemed writers. The couple has returned to her family home in the famously complex and crowded Indian city and this is the account-in-two-voices of their year there. His feels full of wonder and surprise; it has a sunlit quality. Hers feels full of intensity and concern; it is tightly wrought. The book shows me not just India, a place I love to see and feel, but the importance of everyone’s story and view.
More satiric than lyrical, this novel is the life of a man who came from the sweetmaker caste in a village to become a driver for a wealthy family in Bangalore and finally, circuitously, an entrepreneur. Sardonic, unsentimental, edgy, and yet, like other stories of India, vividly sensual. A scene of foot-washing on a rooftop has always stuck in my mind.
Another dual view of India, but this one is fiction and written by one author, novelist Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. It’s the story of two women at widely different times: Olivia of the British colonial period in the 1920s who, feeling suppressed by conventions of the time, becomes involved with an Indian prince, causing a great scandal, and her step-granddaughter who fifty years later tries to dig up Olivia’s story. Keyline in the novel; “India always changes people and I have been no exception.”
5,888 authors have recommended their favorite books and what they love about them. Browse their picks for the best books about India, poverty, and Kolkata.
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From Jeremy's list on the daily lives of poor people in India.
This great Hindi novel evokes the vast placid plains of North India, and the social and psychological violence that lies so close to the surface in the lives of the poor. It is the story of Hori Ram, to whom a neighbour gifts a cow, which his estranged brother poisons, thereby deepening the already impoverished family’s misery beneath the humiliations of caste and poverty, and it provided me with insights into the lives of poor people in India which volumes of academic work on poverty failed to do.
From Jeremy's list on the daily lives of poor people in India.
This book, part polemic, part reportage, is an account of Arundhati Roy’s journey into the forests of Chattisgarh, where groups of ‘Naxalites’ or Maoists have taken up arms against the Indian state, in defence of Adivasis, the indigenous inhabitants of India, for whom the forests, rivers, and hills are sacred. Unhappily these are cover vast deposits of minerals and precious resources required as ‘raw materials’ by a rapidly industrializing India. As a result, the State, which throughout the colonial period and in the early years of Independence, had, in turn, neglected and cheated the forest-dwellers, has now turned upon them with militaristic intensity to wrest resources from them. I found this narrative so powerful because Arundhati Roy makes us understand the violence of the despairing, without overtly supporting it.
From Leela's list on to understand inequality in a world in crisis.
It is often hard to get our minds around poverty and the scarcity of resources that affect people’s lives. This is especially true of rural life in the Global South. This is a highly accessible book written by an eminent journalist in India and is considered to be a classic text on rural poverty. It also illuminates the failures of governance including the programs and policies that seek to help poor and marginalized communities in countries like India.