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Recommended Reading
- Colonial literature includes Rudyard Kipling's Kim
and Plain Tales from the Hills, and EM Forster's A
Passage to India.
- The post-colonial Indian novel par excellence is Salman Rushdie's
Midnight's Children, though Vikram Seth's suitcase-sized
A Suitable Boy runs a close second. In the past decade,
a swag of Indian authors writing in English have achieved international
recognition. They include Rohinton Mistry, Shashi Tharoor and
Arundhati Roy. The delightful novels of RK Narayan are evidence
that Indian literary talent in English is nothing particularly
new.
- Worthy travelogues include Paul Theroux's The Great Railway
Bazaar and Alexander Frater's delightful Chasing the
Monsoon. William Dalrymple explored Delhi in City of
Djinns and Geoffrey Moorhouse took the plunge in Kolkata
in Calcutta - A City Revealed.
- Commentaries on India almost form a publishing sub-genre of
their own, and provide travellers with some of the best insights.
They include VS Naipaul's acerbic An Area of Darkness
and India - A Wounded Civilisation and the more mature
A Million Mutinies Now; James Cameron's insightful An
Indian Summer; Mark Tully's No Full Stops In India;
and John Keay's Into India.
- The two-volume Pelican History of India is a dry but
comprehensive historical treatment. More readable accounts of
specific chapters of Indian history include Christopher Hibbert's
The Great Mutiny - India 1857, Plain Tales from the
Raj edited by Charles Allen, Tariq Ali's The Nehrus &
the Gandhis and the sensationalist potboiler Freedom
at Midnight by Larry Collins & Dominique Lapierre.
- The Hindu holy books, The Upanishads and The Bhagavad
Gita are available in English translations. Hinduism
by KM Sen is a blissfully brief and to-the-point introduction
to India's major religion. A Classical Dictionary of Hindu
Mythology & Religion will help unravel who's who in
the Hindu cosmology. Anyone tempted to don a dhoti and go looking
for spiritual salvation will save themselves a lot of heartache
by reading Gita Mehta's witty Karma Kola.
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