World Affairs
Understanding India: the books to read
Published 30 January 2006
The books that first made me want to see India were by E M Forster, Jan (then James) Morris, and V S Naipaul. I wish I could add Kipling to that list because so many people say Kim is a wonderful book, but there's something in Kipling's prose that I've never been able to get on with: not his imperialism, for which allowances can be made, but his sentences, the rhythm of them and the difficult words in them. He loved the exotic, the foreign and the technical. It seems to me that to relish Kipling - and one day I hope I shall - you need by your side a copy of Hobson-Jobson (the old Anglo-Indian dictionary) and an introduction to steam mechanics. Forster's Passage to India, Morris's Pax Britannica, Naipaul's An Area of Darkness - these books spoke directly to the modern age, even though Forster's was published in 1924 and Morris's (only partly about India) evoked the empire in 1898.
None were written by Indian citizens, though the Trinidadian Naipaul was of Indian ancestry. I chose out of ignorance, though I think I chose well: in their different ways, all three remain great books. I didn't know of Nirad Chaudhuri's wonderful Autobiography of an Unknown Indian and I hadn't read the wry, poker-faced novels of R K Narayan. By the 1970s many other Indian writers were of course writing in English, but their audience outside India was minute. That changed with the publication of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children in 1980. Today, if I'm asked to recommend a novel that might help the reader "understand" India, which is a big task for a novel and not one novels exist primarily to fulfil, I can think of a sheaf of good Indian names: Seth, Roy, Ghosh, Amit Chaudhuri, Mishra, Lahiri, Etc (Dev Prakash Etcetera, the well-known Bihari magical realist).
With non-fiction, this is much less easy. Western publishers tended to see India as an exploitable seam of novelists. The different work of social history and contemporary factual description remained until very recently largely in non-Indian hands, at least for the non-Indian audience. For a country which seemed almost static in terms of economic growth and social change, this was understandable. India (rather like Africa now) was usually seen as a problem and a mystery. Why did nothing work as it should? What could be done about corruption and poverty? How could the rise in its population be stopped? Bring in the writerly equivalent of an NGO.
These questions haven't vanished, but they now hide in the shade of a much larger one: how soon and how successfully will India join China and the USA to become one of three great global powers? The change in India since economic liberalisation in 1991 has been astonishing, and the pace of it picks up every day. Any visitor to India must ask how it came about and where it might lead. On a recent visit - after several years - I found a book which gave a vivid and persuasive explanation of the transformation all around me. India Unbound: from Independence to the global information age by Gurcharan Das (Anchor) is a mixture of memoir and social and economic inquiry, written with great energy, personal knowledge and clarity by a man who began his commercial career selling Vicks VapoRub to Indian villages (an excellent chapter). It isn't perfect - it has to my mind too much pro-market gusto in the analysis and a touch of Samuel Smiles in the story - but I would firmly recommend it to any visitor to India as a key guide to its recent past. Another to be taken in the hand luggage is Sunil Khilnani's The Idea of India (Penguin) which sets out the intellectual foundations of a state that is still less than 60 years old. Thirty years ago the talk was of whether such a variegated country in terms of language, caste and creed could survive as a united nation; the key phrases then were "the Hindu rate of growth" (low) and "fissiparous tendencies" (turbulent). Khilnani shows us what was politically supple and strong underneath - the form of governance that may in the end help India outdo its old rival China. Both these indispensable books are in paperback.
Ian Jack is the editor of Granta
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