Where to start with Indian literature: twelve writers and a first book for each

Rabindranath Tagore (1861 to 1941) wrote poetry, songs, plays, novels and short stories in Bengali. He was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1913, for Gitanjali. For a first book, try his short stories, such as The Postmaster, or the novel The Home and the World (1916), which looks at nationalism and its costs.

Premchand (1880 to 1936) wrote in Urdu and Hindi about farmers, clerks and the poor of north India with unsparing sympathy. His novel Godaan (1936) is the classic, and his short story Kafan, from the same year, is an unforgettable one.

R. K. Narayan (1906 to 2001) made the small fictional south Indian town of Malgudi a place readers around the world know. Malgudi Days, a collection of stories, is a light and funny place to start, and Swami and Friends (1935), a novel about a schoolboy, is his first.

Ismat Chughtai (1915 to 1991) wrote in Urdu about women's lives with a frankness that scandalised readers. Her story Lihaf, The Quilt, in 1942, led to an obscenity trial in Lahore that she won. Amrita Pritam (1919 to 2005), who wrote in Punjabi, produced one of the best-known poems about Partition, and her novel Pinjar (1950) follows a woman abducted in the violence of 1947. Mahasweta Devi (1926 to 2016) wrote in Bengali about the tribal communities and the rural poor; Mother of 1084, from 1974, is a short novel set in the Naxalite years, and her short story Draupadi is widely taught.

Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981), a novel in which a boy born at the moment of independence is joined by the fate of his country, won the Booker Prize that year. Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (1997), set in Kerala and about a family and a forbidden love, won the Booker in 1997. Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy (1993), more than 1,300 pages about families and politics in the India of the early 1950s, is a book to settle down with. Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss (2006) won the Booker in 2006 and follows lives in the hills near Kalimpong and in New York. Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies (1999), a collection of stories about Indian families in India and America, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000.

In 2022, Tomb of Sand, Daisy Rockwell's translation of Geetanjali Shree's Hindi novel Ret Samadhi, became the first book translated from Hindi to win the International Booker Prize. It is playful and demanding, an elderly woman's journey from her bed to the border. Dalit writers have also given Indian literature some of its most powerful books of memory. Bama's Karukku (1992), written in Tamil, and Om Prakash Valmiki's Joothan (1997), written in Hindi, are autobiographies that describe what caste meant in a life, and both are available in English.

If you like short stories, start with Narayan, Chughtai or Lahiri. If you like big, immersive novels, try Seth or Rushdie. If you want writing about history and what it did to people, read Premchand, Pritam or Mahasweta Devi. And if you want to see what the best translations can do, begin with Geetanjali Shree or Bama.

Translations are published in India and abroad, and libraries and second-hand bookshops are good sources. Because a translation is an act of writing in its own right, it is worth noting the name of the translator, and trying more than one if a first attempt does not work for you.

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