The Fascination and Frustration of India: Five Insightful Books
For many investors, no market in the world holds more fascination or frustration than India. In 2013, among the BRIC and other Asian countries, only China added more new dollar millionaires than India. Yet by some accounts India remains home to an estimated one-third of the world’s poverty and one-fourth of the world’s hunger.
India is acknowledged as a global leader in technology and related services, yet despite gains in the past decade, literacy rates in India are substantially below the global average, especially for women. India retains its long tradition of public religion and private spirituality, but Transparency International ranks India no better than 94th of 177 countries on its Corruption Perception Index and only in the 36th percentile of countries on control of corruption. The World Bank projects India’s economic growth at 6% in 2014–2015, while progress on critically needed infrastructure projects — roads, bridges, airports, rail modernization — is often measured in years if not decades. So the challenge is to find information, insights beyond mere data, that can help us make sense of these contradictions.
There is no substitute for spending time “on the ground” there, as I have been fortunate to do many times over the past 10 years; a week or even a day in any one of India’s great cities will impart equal measures of understanding and mystery. But absent or in addition to actual experience, I have found five books to be particularly helpful in imparting deep insights into Indian history, culture, and everyday life. Included are two novels, testament to my belief that we can learn much about “real life” in a place through imaginative fiction that springs from an author’s intimate experiences in that place.
The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian Culture, History and Identity, by Amartya Sen
Amartya Sen is a Harvard professor who won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998 and whose books have been translated into more than 30 languages. In The Argumentative Indian, Sen focuses on the long history of the argumentative tradition in India as a lens through which to better understand contemporary India and its culture, politics, and religion. Essays such as “India: Large and Small,” “Indian Traditions and the Western Imagination,” “China and India,” and “Class in India” hint at the breadth of Sen’s intellect and coverage. It’s not always an easy read, but it is always illuminating and valuable.
In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India by Edward Luce
Edward Luce was the South Asia bureau chief for the Financial Times during the early 2000s and is a noted journalist who married into an Indian family. Though Luce admits a deep affection for and fascination with India, his opening preface states, “This book is not about a love affair with the culture and antiquities of India.” Luce tackles the legacies of Ghandi, Ambedkar, and Nehru; the schizophrenic nature of India’s economy; the specter of Hindu nationalism; the reach of the Indian state; and the always intense influence of religion and spirituality. Luce is passionate in his writing, often opinionated, and occasionally very critical, but it’s a lively and informative read.
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Live, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo
Katherine Boo is a staff writer for the New Yorker who has received a MacArthur Foundation grant and the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. Her book documents a 40 month slice of life in the Annawadi slum, which adjoins the Mumbai airport and is encircled by five high-end hotels. In the words of one of the slum dwellers, “Everything around us is roses. And we’re the shit in between.” The principal residents that Boo follows are the families of trash sorters and sellers, trying to make a hopeful life in the face of unimaginable squalor. In such a place, Boo says, “it is blisteringly hard to be good. The astonishment is that some people are good, and that many people try to be.”
Last Man in Tower by Aravind Adiga
Aravind Adiga is best known for his novel White Tiger, which won the 2008 Man Booker Prize. He is a former Time magazine correspondent and has written for numerous publications. He is native to and lives in India. The “tower” in the book’s title is Tower A of Vishram Society, a run-down apartment building that was once prosperously middle class but is now slated for demolition to make way for a new luxury complex. The “last man” is a retired schoolteacher who is the only resident to refuse the developer’s compensation offer to move from the building. As Adiga tells the story of the battle of wills between the developer who will not be denied and the schoolteacher who will not move, he shows us daily life in Mumbai, business and legal practices, and through the two men, the conflicts between old and new India.
Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts
This book not only makes my list of top books on India, but is easily on my “top five best novels ever” list. Gregory David Roberts escaped from an Australian prison and was exiled in India for 10 years before being recaptured in Germany and completing his prison term. Shantaram, though a novel, turns out to be a thinly disguised narrative of Roberts’ own life in Bombay (it is not Mumbai for him), through slums and prisons, from the underworld to the upper crust of society. I was hooked in the first few pages, when Roberts writes in such detail about the first things he noticed upon his first arrival in Bombay — the worst good smell in the world, the heat that makes each breath an angry little victory, the Bombay millions of every color and face and form. The story only gets richer and more captivating, and darker, from there.
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