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Category: Books

  • Train to Pakistan

    Mano Majra is a small village on the Sutlej, with a railway bridge and a station whose train timings organise the day. Sikh farmers and Muslim tenants have lived together for generations, largely untouched by the politics of Partition. Then, in the summer of 1947, a ghost train arrives from Pakistan carrying the bodies of murdered Sikhs and Hindus.

    Khushwant Singh moves between a handful of characters: Juggut Singh, a hulking local thug in love with a Muslim weaver's daughter; Iqbal, an English-educated activist sent to rouse the peasants; and Hukum Chand, the district magistrate, a weary, compromised man who tries to manipulate events from his rest house. As refugees and armed groups arrive, the village is pushed toward retaliation.

    Written with unsentimental directness and dark humour, the novel was one of the first major works of fiction about Partition violence. Its manuscript won the Grove Press India Fiction Prize, and it was filmed by Pamela Rooks in 1998. It is brief enough to read in a sitting but lingers long afterwards.

    Book details

    AuthorKhushwant Singh
    First published1956
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreHistorical fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)181
    SettingMano Majra, a village on the India-Pakistan border in Punjab, summer 1947
    AwardsGrove Press India Fiction Prize 1954

    Themes

    • Partition
    • Communal violence
    • Love across religion
    • Moral responsibility
    • Village life

    Who should read it

    Anyone wanting a short, unflinching novel about how Partition reached ordinary villages.

  • Delhi: A Novel

    The present-day narrator is a cynical, womanising Sikh journalist and tour guide who loves Delhi the way he loves Bhagmati, a hijra he met near a mosque: helplessly and against all advice. His episodes, set in the 1970s and 1980s, are earthy and comic, full of the city's ruins, bureaucrats and visiting foreigners.

    Between them, Khushwant Singh hands the stage to people from Delhi's past: a Hindu cast out by his community in the 13th century, the poet Amir Khusrau, Timur, the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, the Urdu poet Mir Taqi Mir, an Englishman and others caught in the 1857 uprising, a man present at the building of New Delhi, and finally participants in Partition and the 1984 anti-Sikh riots.

    The book took Singh about twenty-five years to write and reflects his love of history and his irreverence. Its frank sexuality divided reviewers, but its scope makes it a lively, if unorthodox, biography of a city repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt. Readers who prefer restraint may find it excessive, but it is never dull.

    Book details

    AuthorKhushwant Singh
    First published1990
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreHistorical fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)391
    SettingDelhi across six centuries, from the Delhi Sultanate to 1984

    Themes

    • History of delhi
    • Power and conquest
    • Desire
    • Religious conflict
    • The city as character

    Who should read it

    Readers who enjoy irreverent historical fiction and want a tour of Delhi through the centuries.

  • The Room on the Roof

    Rusty is a sixteen-year-old Anglo-Indian boy living in the European enclave of Dehra under the strict guardianship of Mr John Harrison, who forbids him to mix with Indians. Curiosity draws him into the bazaar, where he meets Somi, Ranbir and Suri, and discovers chaat, Holi colours and the warmth of friendship.

    After a final quarrel with his guardian, Rusty leaves home and is offered a room on the roof of the Kapoor family's house in exchange for teaching English to their son Kishen. There he falls in love with Kishen's lonely young mother, Meena, and has to learn what independence truly costs.

    Ruskin Bond wrote the novel at seventeen, partly from his own adolescence, and it won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Its simple, evocative prose and its picture of 1950s Dehra Dun introduced the Rusty stories that Bond would return to for decades, and it was adapted for Doordarshan as Ek Tha Rusty.

    Book details

    AuthorRuskin Bond
    First published1956
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    SettingDehra (Dehradun), early 1950s
    AwardsJohn Llewellyn Rhys Prize 1957

    Themes

    • Coming of age
    • Belonging
    • Friendship
    • First love
    • Anglo-indian identity

    Who should read it

    Teenagers and adults who enjoy gentle coming-of-age stories set in the hills of India.

  • The Blue Umbrella

    Binya lives with her mother and brother in a small village in the Garhwal hills, where she grazes the family's two cows. One day a group of picnickers from the plains admire her lucky leopard-claw pendant, and she exchanges it for a frilly blue umbrella that becomes the most admired object in the valley.

    Ram Bharosa, the elderly owner of the village tea shop, cannot stop thinking about the umbrella. When Binya refuses to sell it, his envy pushes him into scheming, and the consequences ripple through the small community, testing ideas of fairness, pride and forgiveness. Children in the village take sides as the rivalry grows.

    This novella is one of Ruskin Bond's best-known stories for children, told with simple, clear prose and a sharp sense of mountain life: weather, wildflowers and village gossip. Vishal Bhardwaj adapted it into a National Award-winning Hindi film in 2005, with Pankaj Kapur as the shopkeeper.

    Book details

    AuthorRuskin Bond
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreChildren's
    TypeFiction
    SettingA village in the Garhwal hills, Uttarakhand

    Themes

    • Envy and greed
    • Forgiveness
    • Village community
    • Childhood

    Who should read it

    Children aged eight and up, and parents looking for a short read-aloud with a gentle moral.

  • Rusty, the Boy from the Hills

    This collection gathers the early Rusty stories, in which Ruskin Bond fictionalises his own boyhood. Rusty spends his days in his grandparents' bungalow in Dehra, where his grandfather keeps an ever-growing menagerie that includes a python, a monkey and other unlikely pets, and his grandmother keeps the household from total chaos.

    Much of the comedy comes from Uncle Ken, a charming idler who drifts from one doomed scheme to another, and from the animals' escapes, which cause havoc among the neighbours. Other stories capture quieter moments: long walks, monsoon afternoons and explorations of the jungle on the edge of town.

    Written for younger readers, the book is light, funny and nostalgic, offering a view of a now-vanished Dehra Dun of tall trees and quiet lanes. It works as a prequel to The Room on the Roof and a gentle introduction to Bond's long-running alter ego.

    Book details

    AuthorRuskin Bond
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreChildren's
    TypeFiction
    SettingDehra (Dehradun), 1940s

    Themes

    • Childhood
    • Family
    • Animals
    • Nostalgia

    Who should read it

    Young readers who like funny animal stories and anyone nostalgic for small-town India.

  • Kanthapura

    Kanthapura is a hillside village in the Kara district of South India, close to a British-owned coffee estate. Its story is told by Achakka, an elderly Brahmin widow, in the manner of a sthala-purana, the traditional legend of a place, so village gods, gossip and politics flow together in one breathless voice.

    The change begins when Moorthy, a young Brahmin who has returned from the city as a follower of Gandhi, starts spinning khadi, mixing with Pariahs and urging the villagers to join the non-cooperation movement. Opposition comes from the orthodox priest, the British-backed police and the estate's managers, and the women of the village, led by the widow Rangamma, become central to the resistance.

    Published in 1938, Raja Rao's first novel is famous for its preface, which argued that Indians must write English in a rhythm of their own. Its long, comma-strung sentences imitate oral storytelling, and it remains a key novel of the freedom struggle seen from below.

    Book details

    AuthorRaja Rao
    First published1938
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)240
    SettingKanthapura, a village in Karnataka (Mysore region), early 1930s

    Themes

    • Gandhian movement
    • Caste reform
    • Women's resistance
    • Village life
    • Colonial oppression

    Who should read it

    Readers interested in how the freedom movement transformed rural India, told in a distinctive oral style.

  • Such a Long Journey

    Gustad Noble is a decent, proud bank clerk living with his wife Dilnavaz and three children in the Khodadad Building, a Parsi apartment block in Bombay. In 1971 a letter arrives from Major Jimmy Bilimoria, a friend who vanished years earlier, asking Gustad to deposit a large sum of money on behalf of a secret government operation linked to the coming war over East Pakistan.

    As Gustad tries to do his duty, his household is fraying: his eldest son Sohrab refuses the IIT place his father dreamed of, his daughter falls ill, and Dilnavaz turns to a neighbour's spells for help. Around them the building's eccentrics, including a pavement artist who paints gods on a wall, give the novel warmth and comedy.

    Mistry's first novel draws on the real Nagarwala bank fraud case and is affectionate about Parsi Bombay while sceptical of power. It won the Governor General's Award and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize Best Book and was shortlisted for the Booker; a film version appeared in 1998.

    Book details

    AuthorRohinton Mistry
    First published1991
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)339
    SettingKhodadad Building, Bombay, 1971
    AwardsGovernor General's Award 1991, Commonwealth Writers' Prize 1992

    Themes

    • Fathers and sons
    • Friendship and betrayal
    • Political corruption
    • Parsi community
    • Faith

    Who should read it

    Readers who enjoy warm, character-rich domestic novels with a political mystery underneath.

  • Family Matters

    Nariman Vakeel, a retired English professor of seventy-nine, lives in a large flat in Chateau Felicity with his two middle-aged stepchildren, Coomy and Jal. After he breaks his ankle on an evening walk, Coomy contrives to move him to the two-room flat of his daughter Roxana, her husband Yezad and their two sons in Pleasant Villa.

    The burden of nursing an invalid, and the cost of his medicines, pushes Yezad, an assistant in a sports shop, towards a reckless plan involving his employer and the Shiv Sena's hold on the city. Flashbacks show the forbidden love affair that Nariman was made to give up in his youth, a wound that still shapes every relationship in the family.

    Mistry writes about old age, duty and the slow business of caring with patience and gentle comedy, especially through Roxana's young son Jehangir. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2002, it is also a portrait of 1990s Bombay and of a Parsi community worried about its own survival.

    Book details

    AuthorRohinton Mistry
    First published2002
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)487
    SettingBombay, mid-1990s, with flashbacks to the 1940s and 1950s

    Themes

    • Caring for the elderly
    • Family obligation
    • Religious orthodoxy
    • Communal politics
    • Regret

    Who should read it

    Anyone who has looked after an ageing parent, or who loves quiet, tender family novels.

  • Malgudi Days

    R. K. Narayan's best-loved collection brings together short stories set in Malgudi, a small invented town on the banks of the Sarayu river in South India. Its streets, markets and railway station are populated by ordinary people: a pavement astrologer who survives on shrewd guesses, a postman who delays a letter out of affection, a vendor of fried snacks, a retired man who cannot stop talking.

    The stories are short, often only a few pages, and turn on small reversals of fortune, misunderstandings and quiet moments of self-recognition. Narayan's humour is affectionate rather than mocking, and his characters' foibles, vanity, thrift, superstition and pride, are treated with patience. Many end with a gentle twist that recasts what came before.

    First published in 1943 and later expanded in a Penguin edition in 1982, the book became a fixture of Indian childhood after Shankar Nag's 1986 Doordarshan television series. It offers an easy entry point into Narayan's world, written in simple, transparent English that hides considerable craft.

    Book details

    AuthorR. K. Narayan
    First published1943
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)256
    SettingMalgudi, a fictional town in South India, mid-20th century

    Themes

    • Small-town life
    • Human folly
    • Fate and luck
    • Everyday dignity

    Who should read it

    Readers of any age who want gentle, humorous stories that capture small-town India.

  • Swami and Friends

    Swaminathan is a ten-year-old schoolboy at the Albert Mission School in Malgudi, more interested in his friends than his arithmetic. His circle includes Mani, the class bully with a heavy club, and Rajam, the polished son of the police superintendent, whose arrival sets off rivalries and loyalties that matter enormously to the boys.

    Over a school year Swami avoids his father's lectures, listens to his grandmother's stories, gets caught up in a protest against British rule without quite understanding it, and helps found the Malgudi Cricket Club with grand plans to rival the MCC. Small disasters pile up, and adult authority looms in the background like weather.

    Published in 1935 with Graham Greene's help in finding a London publisher, the novel introduced Malgudi to the world. Its humour comes from seeing grown-up concerns through a child's priorities, and it remains one of the most affectionate portraits of boyhood in Indian writing. Its episodes are short enough to read aloud.

    Book details

    AuthorR. K. Narayan
    First published1935
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)184
    SettingMalgudi, a fictional South Indian town, 1930

    Themes

    • Childhood
    • Friendship
    • School life
    • Colonial india

    Who should read it

    Young readers and adults alike who enjoy funny, nostalgic stories about schoolboy friendships.