Books and Movies

Books

Nonfiction

The best general surveys of Indian history are John Keay's recently updated India: A History and Stanley Wolpert's New History of India (6th ed.), with Keay focusing more on antiquity. Three sparkling introductions to the modern nation are India: From Midnight to the Millennium, by Shashi Tharoor; India Unbound: From Independence to the Global Information Age, by Gurcharan Das; and The Idea of India, by Sunil Khilnani.

Mark Tully's books, including No Full Stops in India and India in Slow Motion (with Gillian Wright), combine travel with social analysis. William Dalrymple's The Age of Kaliis a collection of incisive essays on aspects of the modern subcontinent, as are Gita Mehta's Snakes and Ladders and Octavio Paz's In Light of India, by the Nobel Laureate and former Mexican ambassador. Elisabeth Bumiller's May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons is an American reporter's take on the varied lives of Indian women. Santosh Desai’s Mother Pious Lady deals with some of the numerous facets of modern Indian life through a series of witty yet poignant vignettes. Urban subculture is explored narrowly but amusingly in Palash Krishna Mehrotra’s The Butterfly Generation. Freedom at Midnight, by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, is a spellbinding account of India's break from Britain; City of Joy, by the same authors, is a powerful portrait of Calcutta. Nirad Chaudhuri's classic Autobiography of an Unknown Indian recounts the Bengali author's youth in colonial India, with insightful descriptions of Indian customs, castes, and relations with the British. James Cameron's An Indian Summer is a glib but loving memoir by a British journalist who lived in India during and after the Raj. Sudha Koul's The Tiger Ladies recalls life in beautiful Kashmir before it became a war zone in the late 1980s. While not his best writing, India: A Million Mutinies Now is the most optimistic of Nobel Laureate V.S. Naipaul's three books on India.

The classic works on early India are A.L. Basham's The Wonder That Was India and Romila Thapar's History of India, Volume I. India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was a peerless writer and left some inspiring works including his autobiography and The Discovery of India, a unique rendition of the country's history. William Dalrymple's White Mughals illuminates the bicultural lives of British traders in Hyderabad during the 18th century. Among the great Sanskrit texts, the best translations of the Bhagavad-Gita are Barbara Stoler Miller's and Eknath Easwaran's; Easwaran has also translated the sacred Upanishads. The epics known as the Mahabharata and Ramayana are available in countless translations, the most popular of which are Krishna Dharma's and Eknath Easwaran's. Classical Hindu myths are retold in prose form in Gods, Demons, and Others, by the master writer R. K. Narayan, and more recently in Ka, by Roberto Calasso. Diana Eck's Banaras: City of Light is an engaging profile of the holy city.

Stuart Cary Welch's India: Art and Culture, 1300–1900 is a lavishly illustrated catalog by a great connoisseur, while Vidya Dehejia's Indian Art is a good textual survey. Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization, by Heinrich Zimmer (edited by Joseph Campbell) is helpful to the art or mythology buff. The famously erotic Kama Sutra has been freshly translated by A.N.D. Haksar. The colorful minibook India and the Mughal Dynasty, by Valérie Berinstain, makes a great pocket companion in much of North India, and William Dalrymple's City of Djinns brings Mughal Delhi to life. Royina Grewal's In Rajasthan is an excellent travelogue by an Indian. For ravishing photographs, see A Day in the Life of India, people going about their business; Living Faith, Dinesh Khanna's renditions of sacred spaces and scenes; India Modern, a contemporary treatment of traditional buildings and crafts; and any of several collections by Raghubir Singh, Raghu Rai, and Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Fiction

Indian novelists took the literary world by storm in the 1980s and '90s, and the flood has not abated. Vikram Seth's mesmerizing A Suitable Boy portrays middle-class life in the 1950s through a timeless story of young love. Rohinton Mistry's novels center on the Parsi community of Bombay; his masterpiece, A Fine Balance, is an extraordinary study of the human condition as experienced by a motley group in the 1970s, and Family Matters and Such a Long Journey weave poignant tales of family ties and personal misfortune. Another fine Bombay novel, Manil Suri's The Death of Vishnu, features an old homeless man whose neighbors squabble over the best way to deal with him. Love and Longing in Bombay, by Vikram Chandra, is a collection of short stories with a single narrator. Aravind Adiga’s Booker Prize-winning The White Tiger addresses social divisions in modern India with a rags-to-riches tale from the perspective of a hired chauffeur from a small town who wants to make it big in the city.

Midnight's Children, by Salman Rushdie, is the epic tale of a boy who was born the moment India gained independence. Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh, narrated by a young man of mixed heritage, paints incomparably sensual portraits of Bombay and Cochin. Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, set in 1960s Kerala, tells a disturbing story of brother-and-sister twins raised by a divorced mother. Roy has since become a political activist in New Delhi. David Davidar's The House of Blue Mangoes is a South Indian family saga.

Amit Chaudhuri's short novel A Strange and Sublime Address (published in the United States with Chaudhuri's Freedom Song) is a gorgeous story of a 10-year-old boy's stay with relatives in Calcutta. Anita Desai's Fasting, Feasting concerns an Indian family whose son goes off to college in the United States. Khushwant Singh's Delhi is a bawdy but ultimately moving romp through Delhi's tumultuous history. The Impressionist, a picaresque novel by Hari Kunzru, shows the adventures of a half-English, half-Indian boy in both countries in the early 20th century. Upamanyu Chatterjee's English, August is a funny account of a rookie in the Indian Civil Service. The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri is the story of two brothers from Kolkata, one of whom moves to the U.S. while the other joins India’s Maoist Naxalite movement.

Bengali poet and Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore wrote some enduring novels including Gora and Home and the World; to read his poetry in translation, look for Gitanjali. Rudyard Kipling's Kim is still one of the most intimate works of Western fiction on India; in E. M. Forster's A Passage to India the conflict between Indians and their British rulers is played out in the story of a man accused of rape. Ahmed Ali's 1940 novel Twilight in Delhi gives a poignant account of 19th-century urban Muslim society. The 19 short stories that make up R.K. Narayan’s Malgudi Days are some of the most celebrated tales in India, and were turned into a popular TV series in the 1980s.

Not all good Indian writing has been published in the West. In India you'll find plenty of English-language fiction and nonfiction on the issues of the day. Janice Pariat’s Boats on Land is a collection of short stories that provide a glimpse into India’s little talked-about Northeastern states. Reading fiction from other languages is another way to penetrate India's regional cultures; top writers available in translation include Sunil Gangopadhyay (Bengali), Nirmal Verma (Hindi), Intizar Husain and Ismat Chugtai (Urdu), U. R. Ananthamurty (Kannada), Vaasanthi and Ambai (Tamil), and Paul Zacharia (Malayalam).

Films

Indian films can be roughly divided into Bollywood fare—musical romances from Bombay's prolific industry—and independent art films. A prime example of classic costume melodrama is Aan (1952), directed by Mehboob, a story of royalty tamed by peasants. The late Satyajit Ray adapted and directed the internationally known Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajito (1956), and The World of Apu (1959), a breathtaking trilogy depicting poverty and tragedy in the life of a Bengali boy. Salaam Bombay (1988), directed by Mira Nair, is a heartbreaking fictionalized exposé of Bombay's homeless and slum children. Roland Joffe's City of Joy (1992), starring Patrick Swayze, is based on Dominique Lapierre's book about Calcutta. Deepa Mehta's best-known films are Fire (1996), in which two beautiful but neglected sisters-in-law turn to each other for love, and Earth (1999), an adaptation of Bapsi Sidhwa's novel on the partition of India and Pakistan, Cracking India. Another Mira Nair film, Monsoon Wedding (2001), takes on several contemporary issues in the context of a high-class Punjabi wedding. Although not set in India, Gurinder Chadha's Bend It Like Beckham (2002) is worth watching for its funny, life-affirming portrait of a soccer-loving Punjabi girl in London. Aparna Sen's Mr. and Mrs. Iyer (2002) won accolades for its sensitive treatment of interfaith relations.

Bollywood's exuberant musicals are now widely available on DVD. Blockbusters include Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995), a love story set in London and Switzerland and one of the most successful Bollywood films of the modern era, Kal Ho Naa Ho (2003), which places a fetching Bollywood cast in photogenic New York; Dil Chahta Hai (2001), a romantic comedy set in Bombay; and Lagaan (2001), featuring a 19th-century cricket match with the British. Although not a huge success in India, Dil Se (1998) went on to become one of the most popular Bollywood films in the United States and United Kingdom; the film’s song Chaiyya Chaiyya went on to become one of the most popular Bollywood tunes of all time.

Films set in India by Western directors are numerous. The excellent Shakespeare Wallah (1965), written by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and James Ivory and directed by Ivory, fictionalizes the experience of the Kendal family's traveling theater troupe. Ivory's Heat and Dust (1982), an adaptation of Jhabvala's novel, re-creates the past through a young woman's discovery of a series of her grandmother's letters. Phantom India (1969), directed by Louis Malle, is an epic documentary of Indian life. Richard Attenborough's Gandhi (1982) traces the adult life of the leader of India's independence movement. A Passage to India (1984), based on E. M. Forster's novel, was directed by David Lean. The Jewel in the Crown (1984), an epic TV series based on part of Paul Scott's Raj Quartet, features a romance between a British woman and an Indian man in the waning years of British rule. The multiple Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire (2008), directed by Danny Boyle, is an adaptation of Vikas Swarup's novel, Q & A, which explores the life of a Mumbai youth and his success on a TV quiz show. Most recently, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012) tells the story of a few British retirees who move to a retirement hotel in India.