An Indian Reading List by Alana Hunt.

City of Djinns: a year in Delhi by William Dalrymple

City of Djinns has become an iconic book on Delhi – both for foreigners and Delhites. And rightly so! This book won’t give you the best places to eat and shop in Delhi or an accommodation list ordered by price – but it will give you an observant and intimate image of present day Delhi that explores the streets, the people, and the culture in an effort to unstitch its past and understand the unique nature of the city’s repeated re-constructions over time. For Dalrymple the allure of Delhi, today, lies in the way different millennia co-exist side by side – almost arm in arm – and this is what his writing brings alive. As he describes in the book, Minds set in different ages walked the same pavement, drank the same water and returned to the same dust. Loaded with historical information conveyed through an explorers vivacity City of Djinns is a pleasure to read. For the newly arrived and the long inhabiting this book opens up new ways of ‘reading’ Delhi so that the layers of its cultural history are understood in relation to the present.

Twilight in Delhi by Ahmed Ali

The only Indian novel to call for the end of British rule in India, Twilight in Delhi (1940) is a compelling and highly crafted tale, situated in Delhi, that follows the life of one Muslim family under British India, a colonial rule whose greatest fear in the sub-continent was the strength of the Muslims whose empire they had previously deposed. The novel is significant in that it brings into being Islamic life and culture in Delhi while also illustrating the tragic path of its demise during this period. Woven within the narrative of love and loss, youth and age is a striking critique of the injustices of colonial powers and the tragically, all too often, repeated story of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which saw entire cultures displaced and lost through the multiple experiences of colonisation. After writing one of the centuries most important novels on Delhi the author himself, Ahmed Ali, was forced to Pakistan after India’s Partition where he passed away in 1994. In City of Djinns William Dalrymple ventures to Pakistan to meet with Ali and their encounter makes for a very good read. Ahmed Ali, and the story of his life, is incredibly fascinating and well worth looking into further, particularly through his other writings, if you become so intrigued – but Twilight in Delhi is by far the best place to start!

Essays on India by Carlo Levi

This is a wonderful, and easy to read, collection of essays written by the Italian Carlo Levi in 1957, ten years after India’s Independence from colonial rule, for the Italian paper La Stampa. The majority of the writing takes place in Delhi and its surrounding localities, while also venturing to Calcutta and Banaras (Varanasi) among other places. Reflecting Levi’s work as a doctor, painter, and later politician the writing is visually evocative, almost as though he were painting images with words, while also astutely capturing the intricacies of the social and political atmosphere of the time. Levi’s writing on the whole far surpasses the small taints of orientalism that intermittently colour the text. What I really enjoyed about this book was relating someone’s reflections and experiences of India in 1957 to my own in the present day. Surprisingly the points of commonality far out weighed any differences, particularly in terms of people and street descriptions, but what did stand out was the Socialist ambitions of India in 1957 compared to the globalised neo-liberalism of the present. For a really unique tour of northern India I would map out a journey that coincides with Levi’s and read his essays as company along the way.

Black Margins by Sa’adat Hasan Manto

The introduction to Black Margins, a broad collection of Manto’s short stories translated from their original Urdu into English, opens with a quote from the author in which he says, ‘If you are not familiar with the age in which we live, read my stories. If you cannot endure my stories, it means this age is unbearable.’ As the title suggests Manto’s tales look at the margins of the Indian sub-continent, at what is, more than often, left at the periphery when one attempts to make records of human experience. His characters thus occupy a sort of no mans land; whether it be a dog skirting between the newly constructed borders of Partition, the illegitimate life of a prostitute, or the self-reflexive experience of Manto’s personal encounter with a man tied up in his own twisting delusions. While each tale provides an insight into the experiences of the Partition between the two newly emerged nations of India and Pakistan they also resound, in their exploration of the inhumane, with a strong sense of humanity. And it is largely for this reason that some of Manto’s characters have become almost mythic figures in the sub-continent’s popular literary consciousness. The writing is raw, brutal, honest, at times frightening but always somehow beautiful.

Short Shorts and Long Shots by Uday Prakash

The majority of Uday Prakash’s writing remains in Hindi untranslated and scattered in various publications, literary magazines and on his own website/blog. After reading the gems I found in English – I was left yearning for more translations, and became increasingly frustrated with my own inability to get a grasp of Devanagari (Hindi script). Uday Prakash is a contemporary Hindi writer, now based in Delhi and circulating largely throughout India and internationally. Moving across both fiction and non-fiction, from colonial times in Warren Hastings and His Bull to the present in Paul Gomra’s Scooter, his writing, sometimes long sometimes short, personally unravels the experiences of life in India, in a way that places, or perhaps rather re-discovers, magic, mystery and insight in the everyday. But that said his writing is in no way a washy overly dramatised or for that matter sanitised image of contemporary India – like a diamond in the rough – it is undercut with an inherent anger against corruption and a healthy scepticism towards modernity that somehow continually brings a smile to the face. Regardless of what you do in India – search high and low for his writing! (English translations include the titles Rage, Revelry and Romance and Short Shorts and Long Shots).

The Algebra of Infinite Justice by Arundhati Roy

The Algebra of Infinite Justice is a collection of essays by writer Arundhati Roy, who captivated readers back in 1997 with her Booker winning debut novel The God of Small Things. With the same poetic compassion that characterised her previous novel, in this collection of essays Roy delves into issues of the political and the contemporary in a way that deconstructs, in an accessible language, the otherwise overwhelming complexities of the social and political environment of contemporary India and moreover the state of world affairs post-September 11. Two good introductions to the Indian milieu are the end of imagination, which deals with India’s 1998 detonation of the country’s first nuclear bomb, and the greater common good a critical and heartfelt look at the damage that has and continues to be wreaked by India’s massive dam projects, in particular the Sardar Sarovar dam on the Narmada River. What shines through in these finely researched essays is Roy’s personal and passionate convictions that have been formulated not through reading the writings of others from behind a computer screen but through her own first hand experiences at the front line of many such struggles. Today it is refreshing, inspiring and much needed to see political writing with such a lyrical personality, reminding us of just how personal the political really is.