Books: Best Desi Reads of 2024: New & Old
Imagine sitting in front of a fireplace on a chilly, rainy night, wrapped in a blanket, your favorite tune playing, a cup of hot chai by your side. You reach for a book, ready to lose yourself in another realm. What will it be? Yet another blockbuster about India? The latest craze by a desi author? A highly touted Indian classic? We asked some voracious readers, including accomplished authors. Keep reading for their suggestions.
Pico Iyer: An acclaimed essayist, travel writer, and novelist, Iyer’s numerous books have been translated into 23 languages. His Aflame: Learning from Silence will be released in January.
“If I had to select several books I’d urge on any reader, the first that comes to mind is A Fine Balance, by Rohinton Mistry,” Iyer notes. “I shall never forget reading it in one great gulp just before it came out in 1996, so caught up in the drama of its four central characters that I could hardly breathe. By the time I turned the final page, I was close to tears, thanks to Mistry’s compendious, compassionate inhabiting of his hometown, in all its corners, and of his rending protagonists. It seemed to me a feat worthy of Hardy or Balzac. No reader should ever overlook, or underrate, Midnight’s Children, in which the young Salman Rushdie opened an entire new chapter in English literature, not only with his mongrel language but with his entire vision of a world of crisscrossing cultures. It’s hard to register now just how much Rushdie laid the foundations for a fresh and revolutionary kind of writing decades before most others, in his essays in Imaginary Homelands as well as in his early novels.”
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni: A creative writing professor and the author of 18 books, Divakaruni’s novels include The Forest of Enchantments, The Last Queen, and Independence.
“I recommend Tasha Suri’s The Jasmine Throne, a fantasy novel inspired by the world of South Asian epics and mythology but set in an imagined locale,” says Divakaruni. “The novel is about the adventures of Malini, a princess imprisoned by her brother, and Priya, a maidservant who has, for complicated reasons, hidden her magical powers, as they battle to right the wrongs to which they have been subjected. I appreciated the fact that the two main characters are both of South Asian heritage, that they come from very different socio-economic backgrounds and face different challenges, and that they are able to forge a bond of friendship/love in spite of these differences. The writer is exploring the relatively untraveled realm of South Asian lesbian romance, as an unlikely love will bloom between our two heroines. The romance is presented with depth, but the author stays away from graphic description. The entire world is very well imagined. In reading this book, I learned much that I believe will help me as I write my own upcoming speculative novel. The Jasmine Throne won a World Fantasy Award.”
Raj Oza: Oza’s debut novel, Double Play on the Red Line (Third World Press), sits at the intersection of baseball, riding the L, wrongful convictions, immigration, and friendship.
Oza, who highly recommends Paul Theroux’s Burma Sahib, a biographical novel published this year, says: “Fictionalizing the life of young George Orwell—just leaving his teenage years behind, stationed in Burma as part of the Indian Imperial Police, and still known as Eric Blair—this novel takes us into the heart and head of the lanky, awkward young man who would eventually write masterpieces such as 1984 and Animal Farm.” In every chapter, as Oza points out, readers hear Blair’s self-talk about his ambivalence, unease, and outright hatred of British imperialism. Blair oversees the hanging of an innocent Burmese man who was a coolie. Theroux’s treatment of the hanging is a brilliant re-imagining of what Blair might have experienced in Burma before defiantly writing his famous essay, “A Hanging,” which was widely used as an argument against capital punishment.
Vijay Balan: Balan’s debut novel, The Swaraj Spy, was inspired by his granduncle. Atlanta-based Balan worked as an aerospace scientist, and he has held leadership positions in the technology sector.
“Not many authors can make nonfiction jump off the page and capture a reader’s imagination; Dr. Shashi Tharoor is one who can,” Balan notes. “An Era of Darkness chronicles the momentous years when India was bled by the East India Company’s rapacious mercantilism. From accounting for 23 percent of world GDP at the tailend of the Mughal empire, India was left with a share of just 3 percent when the British left India. He takes the reader through a meticulously researched accounting of loot, draconian laws, unbridled racism, and the sad loss of millions of lives through famines brought upon by crop policies and taxation. The book strikes a stark contrast between the darkness descending upon the subcontinent, while the sun shone on Britain as shareholders and employees of the Company amassed vast personal wealth, and the massive transfer of wealth fueled the Industrial Revolution. An Era of Darkness belies Dr. Tharoor’s reputation for difficult words and opaque language. Not only is it eminently readable, but it is a valuable counterpoint to the whitewashed versions of a benign Raj that have permeated the discourse. As he aptly puts it, ‘We can forgive, but not forget.’”
Girija Sankar: Sankar, who works in global health, is also a freelance writer based in Atlanta. A long-time contributor to Khabar, she’s an ardent reader and a frequent book reviewer.
“I picked up Cobalt Red, by Siddharth Kara, who was the 2024 Pulitzer Prize finalist in general nonfiction,” says Sankar. “This is because of my work in global health, particularly supporting large scale public health campaigns in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives is a thoroughly researched and deeply troubling account of how the mining for cobalt in the Congo has a devastating impact on its communities. The book gave me a deeper perspective on the link between resource extraction and the health, rights, and lives of local communities. The book is a stark, powerful exposé of modern slavery, and what makes it stand out for me is the way Kara brings these distant realities into sharp, undeniable focus. His strength lies in his ability to blend investigative journalism with personal, emotional storytelling—giving a voice to the people trapped in this brutal cycle. I hadn’t read Kara before, but his writing style hooked me instantly. It’s not just the facts, but the empathy and urgency he brings to the subject that make this book so compelling.”
Bharti Kirchner: I never expected to find a book like The Bengalis, by Sudeep Chakravarti. It is a collective portrait of a community, the third largest ethnicity in the world after the Chinese and the Arabs. As a Bengali, I enjoyed the book immensely, although non- Bengalis could appreciate it as well. It can be a difficult read, however. Bengalis are often held in high esteem for having produced poets, scientists, Nobel laureates, and esteemed political leaders, but they are often an enigma to others. This book, which deals with the history, culture, literature, cinema, cuisine, and revolutionary spirit gives the reader a “grand sense of the Bengali self.” To produce such a well-researched, keenly observed, and skillfully written, 457-page book must have been a monumental task, and the author should be commended for it. Yet another plus: the author doesn’t shy away from showing the darker side of this community.
Bharti Kirchner is the author of nine novels and four cookbooks and hundreds of short pieces for magazines and newspapers. Her latest title is Murder at Jaipur: A Maya Mallick Mystery. She lives in the Pacific Northwest.
Enjoyed reading Khabar magazine? Subscribe to Khabar and get a full digital copy of this Indian-American community magazine.
