Sideways on a Scooter (51 page)

A fascinating popular history of Hinduism by one of the world’s foremost scholars of the religion.

Ghosh, Amitav.
The Hungry Tide
. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005.

A luscious novel set in a far corner of India, where the mangrove forests and Bengal tigers teach us something of the consequences of globalization.

——.
Sea of Poppies
. New York: Picador, 2008.

An adventure story set in nineteenth-century Kolkata.

Guha, Ramachandra.
India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy
. New York: HarperCollins, 2007.

An intensely engaged, highly readable survey of a fascinating period in India’s history, as it grows into the proud, independent nation we know today.

Ilaiah, Kancha.
Why I Am Not a Hindu
. Kolkata: Samya, 1996.

A manifesto of the Dalit caste, this book is laced with fury and sarcasm.

Jadhav, Narendra.
Untouchables: My Family’s Triumphant Journey Out of the Caste System in Modern India
. New York: Scribner, 2005.

The searing tale of a Dalit family determined to escape the rigid confines of the bottom of the caste system.

Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer.
Out of India: Selected Stories
. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint Perseus, 2000 (first published in 1957).

A fascinating collection of stories by a German writer who spent most of her life in India.

Kakar, Sudhir.
Indian Identity
. New Delhi: Viking Penguin, 1996.

Three deeply revealing studies from India’s best-known psychoanalyst.

Khilnani, Sunil.
The Idea of India
. New Delhi: Penguin India, 1997.

Trying to make sense of India’s founding principles in light of its fast-changing attitudes.

Kipling, Rudyard.
Kim
. London: Macmillan, 1901.

A novel written from the center of the British Raj in India.

Lahiri, Jhumpa.
The Namesake
. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003.

A tale of the struggle to belong, told through a family of Indian immigrants to the United States.

Luce, Edward.
In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India
. New York: Doubleday, 2007.

A careful look at the contradictions of a fast-globalizing India from a
Financial Times
correspondent.

Mayo, Katherine.
Mother India: Selections from the Controversial 1927 Text, Edited and with an Introduction by Mrinali Sinha
. University of Michigan Press, 2000.

A furious and well-considered rebuttal to the controversial book
Mother India
, which was written in 1927 by an American journalist to attack the idea of Indian self-rule.

Mishra, Pankaj.
Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond
. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006.

Essays on topics as diverse as jihad and Bollywood by one of India’s most interesting contemporary writers.

Mistry, Rohinton.
Family Matters
. London: Faber and Faber, 2002.

An illuminating novel set inside a love-torn Mumbai family.

Naipaul, V. S.
India: A Million Mutinies Now
. London: William Heinemann, 1990.

The final volume of Naipaul’s brilliant trilogy of nonfiction travelogues exploring the land of his ancestry.

Nilekani, Nandan.
Imagining India: The Idea of a Renewed Nation
. New York: Penguin, 2009.

An argument for the policies needed to help India continue its remarkable growth story.

Omvedt, Gail.
Dalits and the Democratic Revolution: Dr. Ambedkar and the Dalit Movement in Colonial India
. New Delhi: Sage, 1994.

A history of the untouchable leader and lead author of India’s constitution.

Peer, Basharat.
Curfewed Night: One Kashmiri Journalist’s Frontline Account of Life, Love, and War in His Homeland
. New York: Scribner, 2010.

A heartbreaking account of one of the world’s least-chronicled conflicts.

Roberts, Gregory David.
Shantaram
. Melbourne: Scribe, 2003.

A sprawling novel that makes its declaration of love for India from inside the country’s slums, drug gangs, and jails.

Rushdie, Salman.
Midnight’s Children
. London: Jonathan Cape, 1981.

A way to experience viscerally the history of the subcontinent.

Sen, Amartya.
The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture, and Identity
. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.

An erudite exploration of India from a winner of the Nobel prize in economics.

Sharma, R. N.
Manusmrti
. New Delhi: Chaukhamba Sanskrit Pratishthan, 1998.

A translation of the Sanskrit text of the first recorded Hindu law book,
The Laws of Manu
.

Srinivas, M. N.
Social Change in Modern India
. Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1966.

A groundbreaking text about the rules that guide India.

For five years, M
IRANDA
K
ENNEDY
reported from across South Asia for National Public Radio and American Public Media’s
Marketplace
. From her base in New Delhi, she covered the conflicts in Afghanistan and Pakistan and other major stories across Asia. She wrote extensively about women, caste, and globalization in India, and her stories have appeared in publications like
The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Nation
, and Slate. Before she moved to India, Miranda was a magazine editor and public radio reporter in New York, where she covered the September 11 attacks. On returning to the States, she moved to Washington, D.C., to work as an editor at National Public Radio’s
Morning Edition
.