The best books on South Asia and East Africa that will keep you awake at night because you can't put them down

During my student days in the early 1970s, I travelled throughout North India by train and country bus, often staying in the countryside in former colonial rest houses from days of British rule in India. I tried to imagine what it was like for the British East India Company officials before 1857, and then for the British colonial officials who replaced the company officers after the Indian Sepoy Mutiny. The Siege of Krishnapur vividly recreates the 1857 mutiny from the perspective of British company officials and their families trapped by the local soldiers they had employed. 

Farrell used a diary and letters from those besieged in the real city of Lucknow to illustrate the horrors of hunger, impending rape, torture, and eventual death that many of the British faced. The scenes are graphic, and the portrayals of the relationships among those trapped have stayed with me for years. The novel received the Booker Prize in the U.K. and is considered one of the finest British novels of the twentieth century. To me, the novel helps me appreciate the drama of India, from its colonial days to the present.  

A close friend in Karachi, Pakistan, called to tell me a few years ago that she had attended a fascinating talk at the Sindh Club by William Dalrymple, a Scottish historian who had just published a definitive history of the East India Company from its founding in 1600 through its conquering of almost all of India as the Mogul Dynasty collapsed in the next two centuries. The history reads more like a novel, with graphic details of Indian and British personalities and the battles they fought for control of the subcontinent with its untold riches at stake. One will never think about the British Empire, or India, in the same light after reading this acclaimed history. The battlefields, the Indian forts, and the Mogul palaces scattered throughout North India are places I have visited, and because Dalrymple is such a skilled raconteur, I feel I have been with him in the battles he described in that exotic and blood-soaked country.

In the early 1980s, when I lived in Lahore, Pakistan, and served on the board of the Lahore American School—an institution that catered to rich Pakistanis and expats whose commercial companies paid the high tuition—I talked to a fourth-grade class whose Pakistani teacher was a close friend. She alerted me twenty years later that one of those students had just published his first novel, describing the fast life of the affluent and often decadent Pakistanis who lived in mansions, partied till dawn, drank heavily, and engaged, it was rumored, in romantic liaisons with each other’s spouses.

Moth Smoke describes this life, with a main character who falls in love with a friend’s wife while losing his job and turning to the sale of heroin and hashish to survive.  Mohsin takes the reader through a bittersweet recounting of life in the fast lane in modern Pakistan, a life I observed for three years while living in Lahore. The New York Times selected Moshin’s debut novel as a Notable Book of the Year in 2000; it is a good read and valuable as a window into one facet of modern, upper-class Pakistani life.

Kenya was an exotic territory for British colonial interests in the late 19th century. For reasons almost impossible to understand today, the British decided to build a railroad from Mombasa, the seaport on the Indian Ocean, through the Kenyan savannah, to Kampala, a city of some riches in the far interior of what is now Uganda. The story of the building of the railroad at the end of the 19th century is hair-raising, thanks to Miller’s classic history, as imported Indian workers had to endure predatory lions, harsh climates, and raging rivers to forge across the frontier. That the railroad to nowhere was completed is a tribute to those Indian workers and their intrepid British overseers.

Today, one can take the train from Mombasa to Nairobi, some three hundred miles distant, either in the daylight, hoping to spy some wildlife, or in a sleeping berth at night. I have taken that train many times between the two cities in the years I lived in Mombasa. Modern-day Kenya is a beautiful country but a dangerous one also, not from lions but from its citizens who are not always kind to outsiders who try to understand the country.

In the 1920s and 30s, there were a few adventurous colonials who catered to wealthy tourists who wanted to go on safaris to shoot big game. Among them were Theodore Roosevelt and Ernest Hemingway. The guides they used were white Kenyans, British mostly, who knew the country; one of those was also a glamorous young female aviator, Beryl Markham, who scouted by flying her plane ahead of those on safari, and who delivered mail around the Kenyan colony.  She was fearless, loved by many men, but known well by only a few. Beryl once flew across Africa to Britain, and then on a dare, flew alone across the Atlantic, becoming the first person to make the crossing east to west. Beryl continued to California, lived among celebrities in Hollywood, and eventually wrote a haunting novel of her life in East Africa. Earnest Hemingway praised that novel, West with the Night, as more a poem than a narrative book.

While I lived in Mombasa, I befriended a British resident who was completing a biography of Beryl Markham. My friend uncovered evidence that a Hollywood writer with whom Beryl lived in Hollywood wrote the book from the stories Beryl told him. It doesn’t matter who penned it; the book is guaranteed to awaken the romantic impulse many have to explore Kenya and learn about its colorful colonial history.