BOOKPATHS

India

William Dalrymple writes about his “bizarre” book launching tour in India.

I am launching my new book with what must rank as one of publishing’s most bizarre tours. 'Nine Lives: in Search of the Sacred in Modern India' examines nine personal stories, each aiming to show how faith and tradition are surviving amid India’s commercial boom. In a moment of utter madness I decided I would bring all their diverse traditions together and put them on the stage. – from “My Week: William Dalrymple: My Magical Mystical Tour with Five Fakirs and  Living God,” The Times

Punjab, India

Geoffrey C. Ward travels to Punjab, where “a Sikh arthitect is helping to preserve cultural sites."

Two people who know the region well agreed to accompany me, the photographer Raghu Rai and his wife, Gurmeet, herself a Sikh and also a conservation architect consumed by a desire to help save all that she can of Punjab’s historical heritage.  They, too, are haunted by Partition. – from “Saving Punjab,” by Geoffrey C. Ward, Smithsonian (September 2009)

India

Damian Whitworth talks with Man Booker Prize winner Aravind Adiga, whose new book, Between the Assassinations, is “set in a fictional city in southwest India, very similar to his home town of Mangalore.”

Adiga is 34. When he was growing up, he says, it was easier to see that artists had a responsibility not to attack the flaws of a weak and vulnerable country. Now he sees it as a duty to sharpen his quill. He sees India as a mixture of a 21st-century country and one struggling with the same issues of industrialisation and migration to cities that Europe faced in the 19th century. ‘In the 19th century the great European writers, Dickens and Balzac and Flaubert, were savagely critical of the societies they lived in. One of the things the arts should do is slap the middle class in the face. This is essential as a country rises to great power status. It is not that you are deriding the country. It is part of being self-reflective as a society.’ – from “Damian Whitworth Interviews Aravind Adiga,” The Times

India

Charles Allen talks about his new “biographical study,” Kipling Sahib: India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling, 1865-1900, with Martin Rubin.

(Charles Allen) ‘India was where Rudyard Kipling was happiest, where he learned his craft, where he rediscovered himself through writing and came of age as a writer. India made him, charged his imagination, and after he left India in March 1889 at the age of twenty-three he was most completely himself as an artist when reinhabiting the two Indian worlds he had left behind. He lived thereafter on borrowed time, a state of higher creativity he was unable to maintain once he had exhausted his Indian memories with the writing of his masterwork Kim.’ -- from “The Saturday Read,” by Martin Rubin, Los Angeles Times

India

Boyd Tonkin detects “a few small signs of change” in the translations of “non-English masterworks from India.”

When the thin, elite crust of native English speakers in India throws up world-beating author after world-beating author, why bother to investigate the literary riches that may lurk among the nation's 22 other official languages, from Assamese to Urdu? Yet those treasures sparkle. An Indian novelist once, only half-jokingly, said to me that he had begun to write in English because the competition in Bengali was just too stiff. – from “Boyd Tonkin: A Glimpse of India’s Hidden Treasures,” The Independent

India

Stuart Jeffries talks with Vikas Swarup, whose novel, Q&A, with a name change and “extreme makeover,” became Slumdog Millionaire.

When they made a film of Vikas Swarup's bestseller, they gave it an extreme makeover. But can I get the author to say anything critical about Danny Boyle's hit adaptation of his debut novel, about a penniless orphan who wins India's Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Not a chance. Swarup, you see, is a diplomat. And not just any diplomat: his sumptuous business card, embossed with three golden lions, tells me he is minister and deputy high commissioner of India, based in Pretoria. – from “I’m the Luckiest Novelist in the World,” by Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian

India

Padma Viswanathan discusses her book, The Toss of a Lemon, on NPR’s “Book Tour.”

Padma Viswanathan says she enjoys long, intricately plotted historical novels, so perhaps it's perfectly natural for her to write one. The first-time author interviewed her grandmother repeatedly over the course of a year to research The Toss of a Lemon. The 600-page novel plunges readers into the vicissitudes of a Tamil Brahmin family over the course of a turbulent century. – NPR Website

Calcutta, India

“Swapan Chakravorty puts the case for Calcutta as the next city of literature.”

“… The core of Calcutta's claim is that its literatures fashioned protocols of literary commerce before most places in the world. The rudiments of its literary life are marked by cultural translation and exchange, with the literature in each language implicated in that of any other. It is in such mutual entailment that Calcutta finds its identity, its festive openness almost compensating for its admitted material failures. If other cities tend to define their literatures, Calcutta invents itself as a city only in its literatures.” -- Swapan Chakravorty, The Times

India

Stuart Jeffries talks with the newest Booker Prize winner Aravind Adiga.

“Guarded about his private life, he looks at me with tired eyes and says: ‘I don't think a novelist should just write about his own experiences. Yes, I am the son of a doctor, yes, I had a rigorous formal education, but for me the challenge of a novelist is to write about people who aren't anything like me.’" – from “Roars of Anger,” by Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian

Bombay, India

Shantaram, by Gregory David Roberts  (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004)

This big, beautifully written, perfect for winter nights, epic novel, pulls readers into the lives of its characters – Lin, Prabaker, Khader Khan, Karla, and so many others -- and the unforgettable “hidden” life of Bombay.  After reading 900+ pages you’ll still wish there was more.

The first thing I noticed about Bombay, on that first day, was the smell of the different air.  I could smell it before I saw or heard anything of India, even as I walked along the umbilical corridor that connected the plane to the airport.  I was excited and delighted by it, in that first Bombay minute, escaped from prison and new to the wide world, but I didn’t and couldn’t recognise it.  I know now that it’s the sweet, sweating smell of hope, which is the opposite of hate; and it’s the sour, stifled smell of greed, which is the opposite of love.  It’s the smell of gods, demons, empires, and civilizations in resurrection and decay.  It’s the blue skin-smell of the sea, no matter where you are in the Island City, and the blood-metal smell of machines.  It smells of the stir and sleep and waste of sixty million animals, more than half of them humans and rats.  It smells of heartbreak, and the struggle to live, and of the crucial failures and loves that produce our courage.  It smells of ten thousand restaurants, five thousand temples, shrines, churches, and mosques, and of a hundred bazaars devoted exclusively to perfumes, spices, incense, and freshly cut flowers.  Karla once called it the worst good smell in the world, and she was right, of course, in that way she had of being right about things.  But whenever I return to Bombay, now, it’s my first sense of the city – that smell, above all things – that welcomes me and tells me I’ve come home. – from Shantaram, by Gregory David Roberts

Related Websites

Publisher’s Website

Gregory David Roberts Website