India (Frommer's, 4th Edition) (18 page)

SALADS
The practice of eating Western-style salads (except raw onion) is not very common, but most restaurants do have them on the menu. Beware that it is only advisable to eat these in top-end restaurants, and make sure that the vegetables have been freshly cut and washed in boiled water.

STREET FOOD
Even in smaller cities like Indore and Jaipur, street food has a fantastic tradition and following.
Samosas, vadas, bhelpuri, sev, bhajias,
and a host of deep-fried foods are all delicious, and you should try them on your trip. It’s not easy for the first-time visitor to figure out which street foods are safe to eat, however—best to look for an outlet where loads of people are lined up; this means that neither the food nor the oil have been around long. Alternatively, ask your hotel for suggestions.

6 Reading India

by Jerry Pinto

Author, journalist, and poet

More than almost any other destination, India demands that you immerse yourself in the local culture to make sense of all you see and experience. And wherever you’re headed in India, there’s probably a novel you can read to explore the ways people are shaped by the landscape and history around them.

LITERATURE
The late R. K. Narayan, one of the grand old men of Indian letters, offers a panoramic view of village life in India. He focuses on a gentle prelapsarian village in
Malgudi Days
(Penguin), a good introduction to his work. For a more politicized investigation of the caste system, you might want to read U. R. Ananthamurthy’s
Samskara
(Oxford University Press, translated from Kannada), which deals with a dilemma that convulses a village after the death of an unclean Brahmin; or Raja Rao’s
Kanthapura
(New Directions), set in a village in South India that has to face the storms of Mahatma Gandhi’s civil disobedience movement.

Small-town India is well represented in Arundhati Roy’s Booker Prize–winning novel,
The God of Small Things
(HarperCollins), which will make you want to travel the waterways of Kerala to see the village life she describes so vividly. And then there’s Bhalchandra Nemade’s
Cocoon
(National Book Trust), often referred to as India’s
Catcher in the Rye.

Each of the big cities has at least one big novel. Mumbai’s industrial past is presented in a charming story of two boys who grow up in a tenement in Kiran Nagarkar’s
Raavan and Eddie
(Penguin India), but if you’re looking for a page-turner, one of the most compelling books you’re likely to read this year is the thrilling and enlightening
Shantaram
(Abacus; St. Martin’s Griffin), written by Australian Gregory David Roberts and set in a Mumbai that really comes alive. Roberts potently describes the pulsating rhythm of one of the world’s headiest cities, penetrating its nefarious underground crime syndicates and getting deep inside the soul of the city’s shantytowns. The book has not only taken the world by storm, but is phenomenally popular in Mumbai itself, particularly as the city anxiously awaits its turn as the central location for a big-budget movie based on the book with Johnny Depp in the titular role. Equally captivating, and also an international bestseller, is Vikram Chandra’s
Sacred Games
(HarperCollins), a beautifully narrated and utterly gripping account of Mumbai’s criminal underworld, seen through the eyes of its most wanted gangster and down-to-earth detective. You might also want to whip through
Q&A
(Simon & Schuster), the totally absorbing novel by Vikas Swarup; the book, incidentally, presents some controversial details of the hero’s life that are omitted from
Slumdog Millionaire,
the Oscar-winning film based on the book.

Mumbai is also where Salman Rushdie grew up, and the city is one of the backdrops of his Booker prize-winning (and Booker of Bookers-winning),
Midnight’s Children
(Vintage), which tells of two babies swapped at birth, one Hindu and one Muslim, one rich and one poor, both born on the stroke of midnight at India’s independence. Mumbai is also the backdrop for his more notorious
The Satanic Verses
(Viking). Rushdie’s style of magic realism laced with Mumbai’s street lingo was anticipated in G. V. Dessani’s single brilliant novel,
All About H Hatterr
(Penguin India).

Kolkata has inspired a plethora of books, including Amit Chaudhuri’s plangent tale of growing up in
A Strange and Sublime Address
(Vintage) and Amitav Ghosh’s
The Hungry Tide
(Houghton Mifflin),
which takes off from the 300-year-old city and stirs up sediment of language and memory in the distributaries of the Ganga, in the Sundarbans. Delhi has an eponymous novel,
Delhi
(Viking India), by one of India’s most widely read writers, Khushwant Singh; the book deftly mixes history with contemporary life. (Singh’s
Train to Pakistan
[Penguin India] should be read alongside Bhisham Sahni’s
Tamas
[Penguin India] to understand the complicated ambivalence of India’s relationship with its Islamic neighbor, Pakistan.) But if you’re looking for a light, highly readable introduction to India’s myriad religious and spiritual paths, pick up a copy of the wholly delightful
Holy Cow
(Bantam Books), written by another Australian, Sarah Macdonald. It’s a witty autobiographical account of the author’s life as an expat living in Delhi and traveling around the subcontinent in various hysterical attempts to get to grips with a very different culture. Chennai has been well-captured in C. S. Lakshmi’s collection of short stories,
A Purple Sea
(University of Nebraska Press).

Another novel to sample is Vikram Seth’s compendious look at arranged marriage,
A Suitable Boy
(HarperCollins). This enjoyable novel is set in several cities. If you drive from Varanasi to Agra, you will pass by the scene, described by Seth, of a disaster that befell pilgrims there in the 1980s. (You may also find yourself incorporating the phrase “a tight slap” into your speech; don’t ask—just read.) Other novels of repute include Rohinton Mistry’s charming stories of the minuscule Parsi community in
Such a Long Journey
(Random House) and
A Fine Balance
(Faber & Faber), with its unforgettable characters, set during 1975’s State of Emergency; I. Allan Sealey’s fictionalization of the life of the adventurer Claude Martin in
The Trotternama;
and Anita Desai’s
Baumgartner’s Bombay,
which takes a compassionate but clear-eyed look at German Jews, refugees from the Holocaust, who stayed on after the British left.

NONFICTION
A good way to start a hot debate (as if an excuse were needed) is to be seen reading V. S. Naipaul’s
India: A Million Mutinies Now
(Vintage). Many Western readers respond to the mixture of fear and fascination with which Naipaul considers the subcontinent. A far more contemporary and intriguing account of the nation-state that has remained a democracy for most of its 50-year history is offered by Sunil Khilnani’s
The Idea of India
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux).

Don’t pass up William Dalrymple’s wonderful journalistic prose in either
The Age of Kali
or
City of Djinns.
The former looks at some of the pressingly negative issues that affect the people of India. The latter gives a refreshing account of life in modern Delhi while touching on poignant moments in the city’s fascinating history.

Journalist P. Sainath’s
Everybody Loves a Good Drought
(Penguin India) has won 13 international awards at last count for his account of the country’s poorest districts and the ways in which development schemes almost never help the ostensible beneficiaries. Suketu Mehta’s
Maximum City
(Viking) captures the frenetic mood of living in Mumbai when the author moves back here, and offers a fascinating scrutiny of the city’s underbelly. Read it in association with
Bombay, Meri Jaan
(Penguin India; edited by Jerry Pinto and Naresh Fernandes), an anthology of writings about the city that includes names as varied as Andre Gidé and Duke Ellington. Gita Mehta’s
Karma Cola
(Vintage)
is an acerbic and witty investigation into the way in which unscrupulous gurus marketed Indian spirituality to credulous Westerners in search of “enlightenment.”

Those interested in Indian spirituality will uncover a wealth of material. Besides picking up the lighthearted
Holy Cow
(above), you should find a copy of Kamala Subramaniam’s
The Mahabharata
(Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan), the great epic tale of the war between two clans related by the ties of kinship.
The Mahabharata
also contains the
Bhagavad Gita
or “The Celestial Song,” which is often seen as the core of Hindu beliefs.
The Ramayana
(Penguin) by R. K. Narayan offers a good introduction to the epic of Rama, who is exiled and whose wife, Sita, is abducted by the demon king Ravana. Penguin India also does a compact series that includes
The Book of Krishna
by Pavan K. Varma,
The Book of the Buddha
by Arundhathi Subramaniam, and
The Book of the Devi
by Bulbul Sharma.

For a more academic approach to Indian history, try the somewhat pedantic
Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy,
by Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal (Routledge);
A History of India,
by Peter Robb (Palgrave); or
A Concise History of India
by Barbara Metcalf and Thomas Metcalf (Cambridge University Press). And to learn more about the man at the heart of 20th-century India, take a look at
The Life of Mahatma Gandhi
by Louis Fischer (Easton Press).

Finally, if you’re looking for a light read that gives some insight into India today, pick up a copy of Shobhaa Dé’s
Superstar India—From Incredible to Unstoppable
(Penguin) in which the author discusses her very personal views on the highs and lows of her country’s social, economic, and cultural values.

This is just a start. But be warned—the writing on India is as seductive as the place it describes. Once hooked, you’ll want more.

7 Bollywood & Beyond: India on the Big Screen

by Jerry Pinto & Keith Bain

Mumbai’s Hindi film industry, popularly known as Bollywood, is the biggest producer of films in the world, churning out hundreds of movies annually, all of which feature superkitschy images of buxom, bee-stung-lipped heroines gyrating to high-pitched melodies while strapping studs thrust their groins in time to lip-synched banal-and-breezy lyrics. These are wonderful, predictable melodramas in which the hero is always valiant and virile, the woman always voluptuous and virtuous. The battle between good and evil (a bankable hero and a recognizably nasty villain) must be intense, long-winded, and ultimately unsurprising—audiences do not pay good money to be challenged, but to be entertained.

Before you choose to spend a hot subtropical afternoon watching a Hindi film, know that these films are long, averaging about 3 hours. This is because they are constructed more like Elizabethan plays or old operas. Their audiences do not come for tragedies or for comedies but for full-scale performances that give them everything: the chance to laugh and cry, to bemoan the violence done unto the hero, and the opportunity to cheer as justice is done. These films are also made in defiance of the Aristotelian requirements of unity in time and space, and require from you a willing suspension of disbelief. And though the genre film has just begun—a few historicals such as
Devdas
(nine different versions) and
Parineeta
(The Espoused; 2005); some horror films like
Kaal
(Time; 2005) and
Darna Mana Hai
(Fear is Forbidden; 2003); some war films, including
Lakshya
(Goal; 2004)
and
Mission Kashmir
(2000); thrillers, such as
Jism
(Body; 2003); and even political dramas like the post-9/11
New York
(2009)—most Hindi films still work on this principle.