100 books like Bhowani Junction

This first volume—with the other three—is, I think, the best book ever written about the British in India and their leaving of it. The whole story is rooted in a rape that happens to a young Englishwoman, whose lover is accused of the crime. I first read this when it came out in 1980, before the amazingly good TV series. There are so many unforgettable characters in it—the women, trying to survive with husbands and fathers away in the army, the missionaries and nuns, as well as the men. Scott does not in any way idealize the British—rather the opposite—and it is a feast of detail of the time and moving human stories. I have re-read it and will no doubt do so again. 

I love Rumer Godden’s novels, but I’m even fonder of her memoirs, especially this one. Writing with her sister, Jon, she describes life in Naryangang (then in British India, now in Bangla Desh) during and shortly after World War 1. The large household, the bazaar, the diversity of people, the bright sun and the monsoon rains, the wealth and the poverty, the danger of rabid dogs, the holidays in hill stations…I grew up in India forty years after Jon and Rumer Godden, but in many ways, their experiences bring back my own childhood.

I am a total tea-head, so any book about the history of how we all came to be addicts is a good start. This one is particularly gripping and reads like an adventure novel. Robert Fortune, a Scottish botanist, and industrial spy, was employed by the East India Company in 1848 to be smuggled into China and steal their tea-growing secrets. The book never flags, full of information about the opium wars, the Chelsea Physic garden and how the tea, later found to grow naturally in India, was made into a consumer product garnering enormous profits. As I grew up with a family member who disappeared to work in Assam tea gardens just before I was born, I have always been fascinated by this way of life.

M.M Kaye was best known for her blockbuster The Far Pavilions. This beautifully written book, however, is a first volume of memoir—another record of a European child in India. Having travelled there a lot myself and had a family relative close to me in age grew up in the tea gardens there, I have long wondered what that experience was like, quite apart from the politics of whether we should have been there or not. Kaye’s childhood eye describes her upbringing in Shimla in the Himalayan foothills as well as Delhi, before her inevitable banishment to cold England. The book has a sunlit feel to it and it full of vivid detail and fond memories of this childhood caught between two worlds. 

Another 13-year-old boy protagonist, Kimball O’Hara. No relation. 

I read parts of Kim to Lucian in the studio, he liked the epigraph at the beginning of chapter five: the prodigal son does not stay comfortably in his father’s forgiving embrace, but returns ‘to the styes afresh.’

Kim is a magnificent adventure: the orphan boy who belongs but does not belong to two nations, and a description of the peoples, the ways, the mountains, and the plains of India. 

A vicarious journey around a world of the past, and a particularly male world, which Kipling takes us to.

I love how this short story collection traverses time but not location—the setting is the northeastern state of Meghalaya while the stories span 150 years. In these fifteen tales, folklore mixes with modern life and myth is steeped in the mundane. The result? The reader journeys through a rich smorgasbord of a multi-faceted Meghalaya and its people. Given the tendency to clump the seven northeastern states together, this book helps us view one of those states distinctively.

A cracking, thorough portrait of contemporary Kolkata as the Bengali capital is now known, by an Indian author who grew up in New Jersey (very much the flipside to Calcutta) and who returns to the city of his ancestors to work for a newspaper. The book is well-written, crammed with interesting anecdotes and historic trivia. Past and present are held against the light and the results are often funny. It’s as good as a book by a privileged outsider who speaks the language is likely to be. Perhaps in another decade, a non-fiction chronicle will be written by a resident non-Brahmin writer. I have a feeling the city is waiting for it. In the meantime, Choudhury’s book serves as an excellent introduction to first-time visitors.

An exciting, richly layered adventure story of the "long learning of love" set against the backdrop of the rule of the British Raj and the first rumblings of the 1857 Indian Mutiny. I lent the book to a friend and thought I'd lost it forever until I discovered it in her spare bedroom! Our narrator, Laura, has to watch as her cousin marries Charles, the man Laura loves, and is then forced to accompany the young couple on their honeymoon. Not something to be recommended! Their destination is the Kingdom of Oudh and the vast Zemindari estate of Charles's unknown brother, Oliver Erskine. I don't recommend Zemindar because it has won a host of prestigious prizes but because it is a great read. 

It is hard to say whether the stories of Malgudi Days are for children or adults. R.K. Narayan, the pioneer of early Indian literature in English, has written a series of delightful books based upon a fictional village called Malgudi. This first one is a collection containing 32 short stories, a series of lovable characters. I especially love how he portrays the teen angst of characters like Iswaren, Ramu, and Sambu whose lives determined by passing exams, are so far from the lives of South Asian teens in the West. Unlike today’s stories with pacing and riveting plots, this one is a lesson in slowing down to take a deep and close examination of Indian rural life, particularly for these young adults in Malgudi.

Flashman does a thing I love, which is to tell the story of another book's least notable character.

Harry Flashman comes from Thomas Hughes's 1850 novel Tom Brown's School Days (the entire basis for the Harry Potter novels), where he's a sub-Draco Malfo figure, a useless bully.

Flashman tells the story of his later years as the Victorian Empire's most cowardly soldier, rattling around British colonies, stumbling through their various atrocities and debacles. I wish the book were even harsher on the Brits, but it's a deeply fun counter-text and a lovely bit of escapism nonetheless.