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By Root 2001 0

where Salman Rushdie grew up, and the city is one of the backdrops of his Booker prize-winning (and Booker of Bookers-winning), Midnight’s Children (Vintage), which tells of two babies swapped at birth, one Hindu and one Muslim, one rich and one poor, both born on the stroke of midnight at India’s independence. Mumbai is also the backdrop for his more notorious The Satanic Verses (Viking). Rushdie’s style of magic realism laced with Mumbai’s street lingo was anticipated in G. V. Dessani’s single brilliant novel, All About H Hatterr (Penguin India).

Kolkata has inspired a plethora of books, including Amit Chaudhuri’s plangent tale of growing up in A Strange and Sublime Address (Vintage) and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (Houghton Mifflin), which takes off from the 300-year-old city and stirs up sediment of language and memory in the distributaries of the Ganga, in the Sundarbans. Delhi has an eponymous novel, Delhi (Viking India), by one of India’s most widely read writers, Khushwant Singh; the book deftly mixes history with contemporary life. (Singh’s Train to Pakistan [Penguin India] should be read alongside Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas [Penguin India] to understand the complicated ambivalence of India’s relationship with its Islamic neighbor, Pakistan.) But if you’re looking for a light, highly readable introduction to India’s myriad religious and spiritual paths, pick up a copy of the wholly delightful Holy Cow (Bantam Books), written by another Australian, Sarah Macdonald. It’s a witty autobiographical account of the author’s life as an expat living in Delhi and traveling around the subcontinent in various hysterical attempts to get to grips with a very different culture. Chennai has been well-captured in C. S. Lakshmi’s collection of short stories, A Purple Sea (University of Nebraska Press).

Another novel to sample is Vikram Seth’s compendious look at arranged marriage, A Suitable Boy (HarperCollins). This enjoyable novel is set in several cities. If you drive from Varanasi to Agra, you will pass by the scene, described by Seth, of a disaster that befell pilgrims there in the 1980s. (You may also find yourself incorporating the phrase “a tight slap” into your speech; don’t ask—just read.) Other novels of repute include Rohinton Mistry’s charming stories of the minuscule Parsi community in Such a Long Journey (Random House) and A Fine Balance (Faber & Faber), with its unforgettable characters, set during 1975’s State of Emergency; I. Allan Sealey’s fictionalization of the life of the adventurer Claude Martin in The Trotternama; and Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay, which takes a compassionate but clear-eyed look at German Jews, refugees from the Holocaust, who stayed on after the British left.

NONFICTION A good way to start a hot debate (as if an excuse were needed) is to be seen reading V. S. Naipaul’s India: A Million Mutinies Now (Vintage). Many Western readers respond to the mixture of fear and fascination with which Naipaul considers the subcontinent. A far more contemporary and intriguing account of the nation-state that has remained a democracy for most of its 50-year history is offered by Sunil Khilnani’s The Idea of India (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).

Don’t pass up William Dalrymple’s wonderful journalistic prose in either The Age of Kali or City of Djinns. The former looks at some of the pressingly negative issues that affect the people of India. The latter gives a refreshing account of life in modern Delhi while touching on poignant moments in the city’s fascinating history.

Journalist P. Sainath’s Everybody Loves a Good Drought (Penguin India) has won 13 international awards at last count for his account of the country’s poorest districts and the ways in which development schemes almost never help the ostensible beneficiaries. Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City (Viking) captures the frenetic mood of living in Mumbai when the author moves back here, and offers a fascinating scrutiny of the city’s underbelly. Read it in association with Bombay, Meri Jaan (Penguin India; edited by Jerry Pinto and Naresh Fernandes),