100 books like Teatime for the Firefly

Forster’s novel showed me the majesty and mystery of India at the height of British occupation. In delineating a complex friendship between an Englishman (Fielding) and an Indian (Aziz), it illustrated for me the difficulties of interracial relations at that time, even with the best of intentions. I love that the novel centers around a dramatic event in the Malabar Hills, a mystery that kept me guessing as to what really happened.

The Far Pavilions is one of the most beautiful, culturally aware, historically accurate, and vivid books I’ve ever read, and I re-read it every few years.

I’ve loaned this book and not gotten it back so many times that I’m sure it’s still in print because of the number of copies I’ve had to buy to replace it. Based on the history of British direct rule in India, it tells the story of a young British boy raised as Indian by the nanny who saves his life during the Sepoy uprisings.

He struggles with having a foot in two worlds and not really belonging to either, and the author does a fantastic job of illustrating this. India truly comes alive.

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. 

As this novel is set in 1970s Islamabad, Pakistan and the ex-pats are mainly American, it’s technically not about the British in India. But the ex-colonial legacy is there to see: Pakistan was a creation of independence from British rule and is still being affected by geo-politics. I was gripped by the description of life in the Pakistani capital; an area where my grandparents had lived and worked and through which I had travelled in the ’70s. This coming-of-age story is told by teenager Aliya, (half-Pakistani and half-Dutch) who attends the American school. Not only are the tensions of identity well portrayed but also the growing unease between the communities after a traffic accident leaves a young boy dead and world events ignite further unrest. Fascinating and unusual historical fiction.

Today, so many works on Indigenous history celebrate their subjects as heroes who appeal to our modern sensibilities, but Jackson lets the Mizo people of over a hundred years ago be themselves—not as ciphers for theory, but as actual humans with their own outlooks.

This is the first book that made an Indigenous worldview come alive for me... and still be Indigenous. I found myself fully immersed in a truly human world that makes sense on its own terms, thanks to the author’s careful research, engaging humour, and inspired and sympathetic interpretations. Discovery offered me an opportunity to confront my own assumptions.

I thought I had read enough about Queen Victoria to last a lifetime, but I was wrong! This amazing book offers a new perspective on Queen Victoria as “an Indian Maharani” as well as  “British monarch,”  and explores not just what India meant to the queen, but what the queen meant to Indians.

What if you wanted to practice law in India in 1922?

Women weren't allowed in court, but Perveen Mistry becomes a solicitor instead, working behind the scenes on wills and estate files. Perveen's gender becomes an asset when she can speak to women in purdah, a practice where women seclude themselves from men in some Muslim or Hindu communities.

I liked the first book, The Widows of Malabar Hill, but truly enjoyed The Satapur Moonstone, where Perveen heads out to the Sahyadri mountains to help a royal family after the maharaja has died and the crown prince is too young to rule.

In addition to the mystery, and learning about the history of India, I could hear the buzz of mosquitoes, the tree frogs peeping, and the hooting of owls, as well as imagine the tigers and leopards in the jungle.

It is all too easy to forget that when Britain went to war in 1939, it did so as the world’s largest imperial power. Khan’s book is a rich social history of India at war, telling us the stories of not only the soldiers, but the business owners, the peasants, the refugees, and the political activists whose lives were shaped by war in the Indian subcontinent. The flawed political settlement that brought independence and partition to India and Pakistan was born out of the Raj’s experience of war, and this book gives voice to those who experienced this most turbulent time in the region’s recent history.

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.”

This book is among the most informative and inspiring books ever. The subject treats–the Indian subcontinent’s experience (comparable to that of Ireland) of profit-seeking ‘entrepreneurs’ [especially the predatory East India Company] backed by British governments and opportunistic Western/Christian evangelical forces [giving ‘religious/moral’ ‘justification’ to foreign invasion, occupation and related apartheid type instituted rule–provides need to know detail for those in the West [UK] in an age where those wilfully or through ignorance of the facts are attached to supremacist nostalgic ‘Brexit’ views of yesteryear colonialism as benign, are still poorly challenged.

I am honored to be recognized as a member of the decolonization movement. This book is compelling and deserves mandatory inclusion in world history curricula.