Friday, December 31, 2010

Reading about India

I have grown up in villages in coastal Andhra and worked in cities and abroad. I seem to know only a few strands of the complex country and have been trying to read books about India. Here is a list of books that I have recently read or still reading or still browsing which seem to give some glimpses of the country. Some of them are old and some new and suggestions are welcome.
Annie Zaidi's Known Turf
Pankaj Mishra's Butter Chicken in Ludhiana
William Darlymple's Nine Lives
Katherine Rich's Dreaming in Hindi
Namita Devidayal's The Music Room
Ramachandra Guha's India after Gandhi
V.S. Naipaul's A Million Mutinees Now
Sunil Khilnani's The Idea of India
Wendy Doniger's The Hindus
Rereading again off and on:
Nehru's The Discovery of India
Sheldon Pollock's The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India
Cynthia Talbot's Precolonial India in practice:society, region, and identity in medieval Andhra
Alice Albinia's Empires of the Indus: From Tibet to Pakistan - The Story of a River
John Keay's India: A History
The Bernard Cohn Omnibus

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