Some of them are even older figures, who can recall a pre-1947 India. But A Million Mutinies Now does an excellent job of describing the lives, the hopes and aspirations and frustrations of a diverse cast of Indians who have lived through the last 60 years.

No novel can really capture the different textures of life there. This difficulty is even more pronounced in India. There are many, many Americas and no novel can hope to capture them all. There’s this idea of the ‘Great American Novel’, which is deeply flawed because we know there isn’t one America. The book that comes closest to having the narrative energy of a work of fiction on my list is India: A Million Mutinies Now by V S Naipaul, which is why I chose it, in part. There’s no easy-to-read novel that springs to mind? These five books will require a lot from the reader: they really demand a serious commitment of intelligence and curiosity. You’re setting yourself a major intellectual challenge when you start reading about a place like that. Almost everyone there can legitimately claim to belong to a minority. India is just bafflingly, bafflingly varied.

China, of course, has a bigger population, but ethnically and linguistically it’s pretty homogenous, with a 90 per cent Han majority and a very small number of minorities. Indonesia comes close, in certain ways, in terms of its internal diversity. Not only guidebooks but also books of the kind that are increasingly written about India these days are of very little help in understanding it. To take an interest in India is really to take an interest in a vast and very complex country – more continent than country, in fact. None of them is particularly distinguished in terms of writing or perception.Īnd if you’ve never been to India before, would you get a good understanding of the country by reading these books you’ve picked? Guidebooks look pretty superfluous at this point. I haven’t looked at a guidebook for years and years because now, even if I’m travelling within India, I just go to the Internet for basic information about places. Is there a guidebook about India that you favour when travelling there?

Foreign Policy & International Relations.

The argumentative india