After some more digging I found the book “A Fine Balance” I read about India and Indira Gandhi. It’s part of a trilogy and not for the faint hearted. Given its unrelenting vision, I cannot fully recommend it but Rohinton Mistry’s characters, narrative lines, and passion are vivid. Here it is listed amongst other famed Indian contemporary novels (an easier list to digest then my last one)…

Best of Contemporary Indian novels (English) (Feb 2006)

Chaudhuri, Amit
— Afternoon Raag
— A New World
Desai, Anita
— Clear Light of Day
— Fasting, Feasting
Ghosh, Amitay
— In an Antique Land
Kureishi, Hanif
— The Buddha of Suburbia
— Gabriel’s Gift
— Intimacy
Mistry, Rohinton
— A Fine Balance
— Family Matters
— Such a Long Journey
Mukherjee, Bharati
— Desirable Daughters
— Jasmine
Naipaul, V.S.
— A House for Mr. Biswas
— The Enigma of Arrival
Ondaatje, Michael
— Anil’s Ghost
— The English Patient
Roy, Arundhati.
— The God of Small Things
Rushdie, Salman
— Haroun and the Sea of Stories
— Midnight’s Children
— The Moor’s Last Sigh
— The Satanic Verses
— Shame
Seth, Vikram
— An Equal Music
— The Golden Gate
Suri, Manil
— The Death of Vishnu

I read a great Indian novel (in English not Hindi) several years ago when I was living in India. It also tracked another history of poverty in the despotic reign of Indira Gandhi. It’s images and narrative still stay with me. But of course I can recall neither title nor author.

So I dug around the internet and found this interesting who’s who amongst Indian writers on the web. It reminds me that I could do a little more reading. India is an amazing country given its history, its people, and its culture all multiplied by its experience with the English language. Of course reading this quote, I still recongize almost none of the names…

So here’s the quote:

“Ask your friends to name the twenty greatest Indian novelists of the last two centuries. I tried this a few weeks ago with a group of people who were in general both far brighter and far better-read than me. All of us could name the small but growing pantheon of those who write in English, from Mulk Raj Anand to Kamala Markandeya, Nayantara Sahgal to Salman Rushdie, Pankaj Mishra to Amitav Ghosh. After that, the lists divided sharply on regional lines. Few of us could do more than name a handful of great names who wrote outside the comfort zone of the languages we were born to and spoke at home.

Collectively, we came up with a respectable list. To quote it in full would be tedious, but this might give you a rough sense of the size and capacity of the category we call Indian literature. It would include Saadat Hasan Manto’s short stories, the novels of Rabindranath Tagore and Sharatchandra, plays by Girish Karnad and Vijay Tendulkar, stories by Ismat Chugtai, Qurrutulain Haider’s Aag ki Dariya, novels by C V Raman Pillai and short stories by Vaikom Mohammad Basheer, Srilal Shukla’s Raag Darbari, Rahi Masoom Raza’s A Village Dividied, Premchand’s entire oeuvre, Mahasweta Debi’s selected short stories, Ashapurna Debi’s work, U R Ananthamurthy’s writings. As you can see, this is by no means exhaustive or even more than mildly indicative, but even this brief list compares with the best of European writing.”

Cousin Chris