Supplement: India in Literature [Pt. 2]

(Continued from Supplement: India in Literature [Pt. 1])

Featured Photo: “Self Portrait – Reflection with Red Sandstone”  Agra Fort, India—2011

Several of my recommended books about India delve into the painful reality of poverty and the lingering consequences of the country’s caste system, with unforgettable stories that are both realistic and compassionate.

Having enjoyed the award-winning movie Slumdog Millionaire, I was eager to read Q & A, Vikas Swarup’s spectacular debut novel, which was the inspiration for the film. It turned out I enjoyed the book even more than the movie! Although the basic plots are aligned, the specific events the protagonist experiences are quite different, as summarized by the book cover.

The story opens in a jail cell in Mumbai, India, where Ram Mohammad Thomas is being held after correctly answering all twelve questions on India’s biggest quiz show, ‘Who Will Win a Billion?’ It is hard to believe that a poor orphan who has never read a newspaper or gone to school could win such a contest. But through a series of exhilarating tales, Ram explains to his lawyer how episodes in his life gave him the answer to each question.

Ram takes us on an amazing review of his own history—from the day he was found as a baby in the clothes donation box of a Delhi church, to his employment by a faded Bollywood star, to his career as an overly creative tour guide at the Taj Mahal. Q & A is a charming blend of high comedy, drama, and romance that reveals how we know what we know—not just about trivia, but about life itself. Cutting across humanity in all its squalor and glory, the author presents a kaleidoscopic vision of the struggle between good and evil—and what happens when one boy has no other choice in life but to survive.

Compared favorably to the works of Faulkner and Dickens, Arundhati Roy’s debut novel, The God of Small Things, is a modern classic (and another winner of the Booker Prize) that has been read and loved worldwide. I found it to be a tender story exploring how small, seemingly insignificant occurrences, decisions, and experiences shape people’s behavior in deeply significant ways.

From the book cover: Equal parts powerful family saga, forbidden love story, and piercing political drama, it is the story of an affluent Indian family forever changed by one fateful day in 1969. The seven-year-old twins Estha and Rahel see their world shaken irrevocably by the arrival of their beautiful young cousin, Sophie. It is an event that will lead to an illicit liaison and tragedies accidental and intentional, exposing “big things [that] lurk unsaid” in a country drifting dangerously toward unrest. Lush, lyrical, and unnerving, The God of Small Things is an award-winning landmark that started for its author an esteemed career of fiction and political commentary that continues unabated.

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry was highly recommended on several lists from my Google search for “best Indian literature” (and I’m pleased to report was also a finalist for the Booker Prize.) Set in a time of political turmoil in India, the plot revolves around four diverse characters brought together by fate. Each of their individual stories is unforgettable, as is the unifying narrative of the interconnected lives they come to share. The book explores themes of caste, poverty, political corruption, and the human spirit’s resilience, offering a profound exploration of the delicate balance between hope and despair that sustains life amidst adversity.

From the book cover: This magnificent novel captures all the cruelty and corruption, dignity and heroism, of India. The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency, in whose upheavals four strangers—a spirited widow, a young student uprooted from his idyllic hill station, and two tailors who have fled the caste violence of their native village—will be thrust together, forced to share one cramped apartment and an uncertain future. As the characters move from distrust to friendship and from friendship to love, A Fine Balance creates an enduring panorama of the human spirit in an inhuman state.

Sitting at dinner in Dublin, Ireland with a work colleague and good friend, along with his wife, the conversation turned to our travels in India. As the three of us shared stories of where we’d been and what we’d seen, I talked about my experiences, describing the pain and confusion I’d felt in the face of the stark contrast between rich and poor. His wife asked if I’d read Behind the Beautiful Forevers, a work of non-fiction by Pulitzer Prize winner Katherine Boo. When I replied no, she kindly wrote down the title so I wouldn’t forget. With its subtitle: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, she said I might find it helpful in understanding how things are in contemporary India—in particular, the lives of the urban poor who dwell in the slums. And that was how I came to this wonderful book, which is perhaps the gentlest and most hopeful of my recommendations. As for the story line, I’ll let the cover speak for itself.

In this brilliant, breathtaking book, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human through the dramatic story of families striving toward a better life in Annawadi, a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport. As India starts to prosper, the residents of Annawadi are electric with hope. Abdul, an enterprising teenager, sees “a fortune beyond counting” in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Meanwhile Asha, a woman of formidable ambition, has identified a shadier route to the middle class. With a little luck, her beautiful daughter might become its first female college graduate. And even the poorest children, like the young thief Kalu, feel themselves inching closer to their dreams. But then Abdul is falsely accused in a shocking tragedy; terror and global recession rock the city; and suppressed tensions over religion, caste, sex, power, and economic envy turn brutal.

With intelligence, humor, and deep insight into what connects people to one another in an era of tumultuous change, Behind the Beautiful Forevers carries the reader headlong into one of the twenty-first century’s hidden worlds—and into the hearts of families impossible to forget.

My last recommendation is unique in that it is a work of narrative history written by an award-winning Scottish historian. You may recall in my posts on Agra, I wrote in some detail about the Mughal empire within the backdrop of its magnificent legacy at the Taj Mahal and the Agra Fort. I’d known nothing of the Mughals before traveling to India. When I mentioned this to my work colleague and host during my trips there, he enthusiastically recommended I read The Last Mughal by William Dalrymple. In this evocative study of the fall of the Mughal dynasty and the beginning of the British Raj, Dalrymple uses previously undiscovered sources to investigate a pivotal moment in history, as described on the book cover.

The last Mughal emperor, Zafar, came to the throne when the political power of the Mughals was already in steep decline. Nonetheless, Zafar—a mystic, poet, and calligrapher of great accomplishment—created a court of unparalleled brilliance, and gave rise to perhaps the greatest literary renaissance in modern Indian history. All the while, the British were progressively taking over the Emperor’s power. When, in May 1857, Zafar was declared the leader of an uprising against the British, he was powerless to resist though he strongly suspected that the action was doomed. Four months later, the British took Delhi, the capital, with catastrophic results. With an unsurpassed understanding of British and Indian history, Dalrymple crafts a provocative, revelatory account of one the bloodiest upheavals in history.

If my description of the powerful Mughal empire in India has whetted your appetite to learn more, I can highly recommend this book. And I’ll add that fans of the historical non-fiction works of Erik Larson and David McCullough will find much to enjoy in this remarkable story.

Wrap-Up

I hope this list of books about India holds something of interest for you. For now, I wish you happy reading and safe travels!

As for me, I’ll be taking another break to begin work on a new series of posts—possibly a recent trip to Chicago or perhaps an earlier trip to Japan. We’ll all have to wait and see. But if you are subscribed to my blog, you’ll receive an email notifying you when the next post is available. And thanks again for reading!