India is home to more than a billion people and several hundred languages, and so any list of books that attempt to describe it is bound to be incomplete. The ones I’ve chosen speak to some of the themes dominant in India these days – caste, propaganda, political prisoners, the weaponisation of state machinery, listless youth and nostalgia for gentler times. Some are recent and helped me understand the country as I wrote my own book, The New India; others, though older, stand out for their language and craft. All of them are worth your time.
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Gujarat Under Modi by Christophe Jaffrelot
Jaffrelot’s extraordinary book describes Narendra Modi’s centralised governance style before he was prime minister. It was written in 2013, the year before Modi’s national victory, and deemed too “high-risk” to publish for almost a decade. But 10 years later, the book could well be a record of Modi’s prime ministership. It’s a detailed study of how he outflanked rivals, thwarted investigations, reduced his dependency on the RSS – the organisation he rose from – and took his message directly to the people. Jaffrelot records how Modi tinkers with political systems and bureaucratic processes to make them align with his interests, and describes how these actions lend cover to Hindu nationalists as they embed themselves deeper into society, making their extrication increasingly difficult.
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The Incarcerations by Alpa Shah
In 2018, a day-long commemoration of a 200-year-old Dalit victory over an upper caste army ended in deadly violence. The police investigation that followed snares not the instigators of the unrest, but 16 human rights activists, journalists, and poets working toward Dalit solidarity. Shah uses these real events to tell the story of a country fighting to define itself. It unfolds gradually, drawing readers in with backstories of the arrested and their ambitions, and the alleged perpetrators and their links to the Hindu right. Shah pays special attention to the electronic evidence found on confiscated devices, including letters full of unbelievable plots and conspiracies. (Fittingly, the book was a finalist for the Orwell prize for political nonfiction this year.) She worries for the republic, but reminds us that “the seeds of democracy are preserved within fascism”.
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Curfewed Night by Basharat Peer
The journalist and author Peer wants to be an observer, not a voyeur, in this lament for the region of Kashmir. People tell him what they did and what was done to them between walnut and willow trees and fields covered in frost in this land of Indian army security checkpoints, forced disappearances and a population that longs for freedom. Peer is a hungry witness, and he not only excavates his subjects’ memories, but also his own memory of home in this work of narrative nonfiction. We see it all: what Kashmir was, what it is, what it could still be.
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Malevolent Republic by KS Komireddi
There has been no angrier book about India in recent years, no book that contains as sustained a primal scream. Komireddi’s rollicking reported polemic is a critique of modern India and the people whose missteps and disingenuousness led it to the brink of disaster. He spares no one – not Modi, not the Gandhi family, not broader Indian society.
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A Free Man by Aman Sethi
Because employment and the nature of work are political subjects, and because the vast majority of India’s labour force is informal, Sethi’s immense study of itinerant labourers, published the early 2010s, is a deeply political book. He smokes and gets drunk with his subjects, buys tools with them, watches how they find work and fall ill and die, identifies their dreams and records their disillusionments, and lists the scars they acquire from a lifetime of uncertainty. A work of incredible beauty.
The New India: The Unmaking of the World’s Largest Democracy by Rahul Bhatia is published by Abacus (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
