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Tag: Indian author

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • The Guide

    Raju, recently released from prison, takes shelter in a ruined temple by a river near a village called Mangala. When a villager mistakes him for a sage, Raju finds it easier to accept the role than to explain himself, and soon people bring him food, problems and reverence. The novel alternates between this present and Raju's account of how he got here.

    Years earlier Raju ran a shop at Malgudi railway station and became a popular guide for tourists. One of his clients was Marco, a cold archaeologist, and his wife Rosie, a gifted dancer whose husband despises her art. Raju's involvement with Rosie, and his management of her career as a star performer named Nalini, led him into vanity, debt and eventually crime.

    Narayan writes with typical lightness, but the book poses serious questions about sincerity, performance and whether a role played long enough becomes real. It won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1960, the first for an English-language novel, and inspired the 1965 Dev Anand film Guide.

    Book details

    AuthorR. K. Narayan
    First published1958
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)220
    SettingMalgudi and the village of Mangala, South India, mid-20th century
    AwardsSahitya Akademi Award 1960

    Themes

    • Identity and performance
    • Redemption
    • Art and marriage
    • Faith
    • Self-deception

    Who should read it

    Readers who like gently ironic stories about reinvention and the line between faith and fraud.

  • The English Teacher

    Krishna teaches English literature at the Albert Mission College in Malgudi and lives a comfortable but dissatisfied bachelor life in the hostel. When his wife Susila and their baby daughter Leela come to join him, he rents a house and discovers the pleasures of domestic life: house-hunting, small quarrels, shared reading and the ordinary rituals of a young family.

    A sudden illness changes everything, and the second half of the novel follows Krishna as he struggles with loss, raises his daughter and becomes involved with a medium who claims to pass on messages. He also grows close to an unconventional headmaster running a school for small children, which makes him question the colonial English education he has spent his life delivering.

    The novel is Narayan's most personal, drawing on the death of his own wife Rajam in 1939. It completes a loose trilogy with Swami and Friends and The Bachelor of Arts, and is notable for the tenderness with which it treats marriage and mourning. Its closing chapters are unusually spiritual for Narayan.

    Book details

    AuthorR. K. Narayan
    First published1945
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)184
    SettingMalgudi, South India, 1930s

    Themes

    • Grief
    • Marriage
    • Education
    • Spiritualism
    • Self-discovery

    Who should read it

    Readers looking for a quiet, moving novel about love, loss and starting again.

  • Untouchable

    Bakha is a young sweeper who cleans the public latrines of a town in colonial Punjab. He is strong, proud of his work and fascinated by the clothes and manners of the British soldiers in the nearby barracks. The novel follows him through a single day, from waking in his father's mud house in the outcastes' colony to nightfall.

    Over those hours Bakha is slapped for accidentally touching a caste Hindu, sees his sister harassed by a priest, is thrown scraps of food and listens to a Christian missionary's offer of salvation. Late in the day he hears Gandhi speak and encounters a poet who argues that the flush toilet could end the work of scavengers, offering three very different answers to his condition.

    Mulk Raj Anand's first novel, with a preface by E. M. Forster, was rejected by many publishers before appearing in 1935. Short and direct, it was one of the first English novels to give an untouchable protagonist an inner life, and it remains a key text on caste.

    Book details

    AuthorMulk Raj Anand
    First published1935
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)157
    SettingBulashah, a cantonment town in colonial Punjab, 1930s

    Themes

    • Untouchability
    • Caste discrimination
    • Dignity of labour
    • Gandhism
    • Social reform

    Who should read it

    Readers who want a short, powerful introduction to caste through the eyes of those who suffer it.

  • Gun Island

    Deen Datta, a middle-aged Bengali dealer in rare books who divides his time between Brooklyn and Calcutta, hears on a visit home about a shrine in the Sundarbans tied to the legend of the Gun Merchant, a trader who tried to escape the wrath of Manasa Devi, goddess of snakes. A skeptic by temperament, he agrees to visit, and an unsettling encounter there starts a chain of coincidences.

    His search takes him to wildfire-threatened Los Angeles and to Venice, where Bangladeshi migrants work in the tourist trade. Along the way he meets Piya Roy from The Hungry Tide, a young Sundarbans boy named Tipu, a Venetian historian called Cinta, and a migrant named Rafi, and he begins to see the old myth as an account of displacement driven by a changing climate.

    The novel deliberately strains realism, turning to the uncanny to talk about a world where extreme weather seems to follow its own plot. It complements Ghosh's nonfiction book The Great Derangement, which argued that fiction has largely failed to confront climate change. Its mix of travelogue and parable may frustrate readers who want tight realism.

    Book details

    AuthorAmitav Ghosh
    First published2019
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)312
    SettingCalcutta, the Sundarbans, Los Angeles and Venice, late 2010s

    Themes

    • Climate change
    • Migration
    • Myth and modernity
    • Coincidence
    • Human trafficking

    Who should read it

    Readers looking for climate fiction that blends folklore, travel and the refugee crisis.