The City of Love
by Rimi B. Chatterjee

Five hundred years ago, four people set out on individual journeys of discovery: In the quest for enlightenment and bags of gold, one travels to the end of the known world, another meddles with the fates of kings, a third loses all he had, and a fourth finds the City of Love.

Set in the half century after Vasco da Gama's historic landfall in India, this is the story of four intertwined lives: Fernando Almenara, a Castilian trader fleeing persecution in his native country; Daud Suleiman al-Basri, a Moorish pirate driven by his desire for wealth and power; Chandu, a Shaiva-Tantric novice in search of salvation that continues to elude him; and Bajja, a tribal girl determinedly seeking spiritual freedom.

As the scene shifts from Chittagong, foremost port of the East, to Gaur, the capital of sixteenth-century Bengal, Rimi B. Chatterjee recreates an incredible era in our history. It is a time of turmoil, when European battleships mark out territories in Indian waters and native rulers clash swords with the mighty Mughals. And as new religions invade the space of ancient faiths, ordinary people are compelled to question all that they believe in.

The City of Love is a fascinating tale of passion and high adventure in which truth, virtue and friendship make war upon the darkness of the human soul.

A Girl and a River
by Usha K. R.

It is the 1930s and the fire of the freedom movement from distant Bengal and Delhi is warming the languid bones of the small town in Mysore, where Kaveri and Setu grow up. Theirs is a liberal, prosperous household and the family takes its privileges for granted. Mylaraiah, their father, believes that they are twice protected from such delusions as 'swaraj'-once by the British and then by the Maharaja. While Setu absorbs their father's unquestioning veneration of the British, Kaveri, profoundly affected by Mahatma Gandhi's visit to their town, comes to recognize their attempts to be 'more English than the English' as rather shameful. In an attempt to follow her heart and take charge of her own future, Kaveri defies her father and participates in the Quit India march organized by Shyam, the hot-headed revolutionary she is attracted to. Angered and jealous, and loyal to his father, Setu is forced into betraying his sister. The small town is shaken into life quite brutally when it faces a police firing for the first time in its history. But Kaveri is safe and home, or so Setu thinks . . .

Fifty years later, Setu's daughter tries to unravel the circumstances of her uneasy upbringing, of the grit-in-the-eye feeling to her childhood; understand her cold father, her self-effacing mother and their refusal to talk about their past. Two books and a letter found in a tea tin in the attic lead her to Kaveri and it is Kaveri, whose fate remains shrouded in mystery, who has the answer to her questions. But even with all the pieces of the jigsaw in hand, the picture eludes her. She is forced to come to terms with the insidiousness of family bonds as she realizes that the truth, if it at all exists, is made of elisions and imperfections.

The Assassin's Song
by M.G. Vassanji

In February 2002, a group of Hindu demonstrators converged on the town of Ayodhya, India, to demand that a temple be built on the site of the Babri Masjid, a 16th Century mosque that had been destroyed a decade earlier. On their way back from the rally, their train stopped in the city of Godhra, in Gujarat state, where a group of Muslims standing on the platform allegedly heckled them. Part of the train carrying the Hindu demonstrators caught fire, and nearly 60 people were killed.

The deaths -- which new evidence suggests may have been caused by a cooking stove inside the train car -- led to months-long attacks on the state's entire Muslim minority. As many as 2,000 people were murdered. Muslim women were raped and burned alive, and their babies were torn from their wombs. Using voter lists, mobs targeted and looted Muslim businesses. By the time the killings stopped, 150,000 Muslims had been displaced.

The sheer viciousness and depressing regularity of communal riots in Gujarat make it an unlikely setting for a novel about a mystical saint who transcends religious identity, yet that is where M.G. Vassanji places the action in his new novel, "The Assassin's Song." Alternating chapters tell the stories of Karsan Dargawalla, an Indian college professor who returns home to Gujarat after having spent long years abroad, and Nur Fazal, a 13th Century Sufi Muslim who arrives in Gujarat seeking refuge with the Hindu king, Vishal Dev. Karsan is Nur's descendant, his successor -- and his avatar.

M.G. Vassanji's magnificent new novel provides further proof of his unique, wide ranging and profound genius. The Assassin's Song is a shining study of the conflict between ancient loyalties and modern desires, a conflict that creates turmoil the world over - and it is at once an intimate portrait of one man's painful struggle to hold the earthly and the spiritual in balance.

Filming
by Tabish Khair

Set primarily in India and spanning the 20th century, "Filming" tells a series of stories, including that of one-time prostitute, Durga, who is persuaded to give away her young son, Ashok, and that of Saleem, the son of a prostitute and two-times star of the silver screen. As these stories - narrated by a writer who relates the details of other people's lives but is evasive about his own, a daughter who has inherited her father's hand-me-down version of their family history, and a scholar who deals in words but learns to read between the lines - intertwine and overlap, they combine to create a novel that is simultaneously about the small details and the bigger picture. Weaving together major historical events - including Partition, the assassination of Gandhi, the rise of photography and the Bombay film industry, and the development of barbed wire - with the everyday moments that make up the main fabric of our lives, "Filming" is both ambitious in its scope and impressive in its execution; never less than cohesive, it is a novel that is always more than the sum of its parts.

Lunatic in My Head
by Anjum Hasan

The 1990s. It's raining in Shillong. Eight-year-old Sophie Das has just realised she is adopted, but there is also the baby kicking inside her mother's stomach whom she's dying to meet. IAS aspirant Aman Moondy is planning a first-of-its-kind Happening and praying the lovely Concordella will come. College lecturer Firdaus Ansari is going to finish her thesis, have a hard talk with her boyfriend, and then get out.

Poetic, funny, tender and reflective, Lunatic in my Head is a moving portrait of a small town undergoing big changes; and of three people joined to each other in an intricate web, determined to break out of their small town destinies.

"Anjum Hasan's novel is haunting, lyrical and daring, bringing fresh air into the stale confines of Indian writing. A deceptively quiet portrait of a hill town, it is one of the finest works to have come out of the forgotten territories of the North-East."
-Siddhartha Deb, author of Surface.

Home Products
by Amitava Kumar

A film director asks Binod, who is a journalist in Bombay, to produce a portrait of a murdered girl, a poet killed by a politician by whom she is pregnant. The director wants a script about small towns, desire, compromise and intrigue. Probably he wants masala. Subtle and articulate, his sensibility shaped by the classic films of a high-minded and austere boyhood, Binod undertakes to draught a Bollywood story. Unlike Binod is his cousin Rabinder, in Hajipur jail and full of plans. Arrested for turning his cybercafe into a porn parlour, Rabinder is a doer, with dreams of entering films.
Home Products is the story of Binod and Rabinder, brought up as brothers, one a man of hope, the other of appetite, whose ambitions unexpectedly intertwine. As it unfolds, a complex world comes to throbbing life, moving from Motihari where Binod was born, and George Orwell before him; to the Bombay of film, imitation and enterprise; via Delhi, its calm shattered by an assassination and riots.
In the broad sweep of this stunning first novel, acclaimed non-fiction writer Amitava Kumar charts a tale of sexual anxiety and anarchic impulses in a society steeped in crime. Detailing the search among its members for order and artistic brilliance, written with extraordinary inventiveness, Home Products brings aglow the struggle against small-town beginnings. It reminds us gently, and incisively, of our anxieties as middle-class individuals in a middle-class nation

Mohandas
by Rajmohan Gandhi

A candid recreation of one of the most influential lives of recent times, Mohandas finally answers questions long asked about the timid youth from India's west coast who became a century's conscience and led his nation to liberty: What was Gandhi like in his daily life and in his closest relationships? In his face-offs with an Empire, with his own bitterly divided people, with his adversaries, his family and-his greatest confrontation-with himself?

Answering these and other questions, and releasing the true Gandhi from his shroud of fame and myth, Mohandas, authored by a practised biographer who is also Gandhi's grandson, does more than tell a story.

'A more heroic tale has yet to be told . . . [Mohandas] is meticulously researched, written in felicitous prose and is a delight to read'-Khushwant Singh, Outlook

India after Gandhi
by Ramchandra Guha

Born against a background of privation and civil war, divided along lines of caste, class, language and religion, independent India emerged, somehow, as a united and democratic country. This remarkable book tells the full story-the pain and the struggle, the humiliations and the glories-of the world's largest and least likely democracy.

Ramachandra Guha writes compellingly of the myriad protests and conflicts that have peppered the history of free India. But he writes also of the factors and processes that have kept the country together (and kept it democratic), defying numerous prophets of doom who believed that its poverty and heterogeneity would force India to break up or come under autocratic rule. Once the Western world looked upon India with a mixture of pity and contempt; now it looks upon India with fear and admiration.

Moving between history and biography, this story of modern India is peopled with extraordinary characters. Guha gives fresh insights on the lives and public careers of those long-serving prime ministers Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi. There are vivid sketches of the major "provincial" leaders whose province was as large as a European country: the Kashmiri rebel turned ruler Sheikh Abdullah; the Tamil film actor turned politician M. G. Rama-chandran; the Naga secessionist leader Angami Zapu Phizo; the socialist activist Jayaprakash Narayan. But the book also writes with feeling and sensitivity about lesser known (though not necessarily less important) Indians-peasants, tribals, women, workers and musicians.

Massively researched and elegantly written, India After Gandhi is at once a magisterial account of India's rebirth and the work of a major scholar at the height of his powers.

The Last Mughal
by William Dalrymple

Bahadur Shah Zafar II, the last Mughal Emperor, was a mystic, a talented poet, and a skilled calligrapher, who, though deprived of real political power by the East India Company, succeeded in creating a court of great brilliance, and presided over one of the great cultural renaissances of Indian history. In 1857 it was Zafar's blessing to a rebellion among the Company's own Indian troops that transformed an army mutiny into the largest uprising the British Empire ever had to face.

The Last Mughal is a portrait of the dazzling Delhi Zafar personified, and the story of the last days of the great Mughal capital and its final destruction in the catastrophe of 1857. Shaped from groundbreaking material, William Dalrymple's powerful retelling of this fateful course of events is an extraordinary revisionist work with clear contemporary echoes. It is the first account to present the Indian perspective on the siege, and has at its heart the stories of the forgotten individuals tragically caught up in one of the bloodiest upheavals in history.

'Dazzling . . . unmatched . . . revolutionary . . . humane . . . No previous book has painted such a vivid portrait of the late Mughal court'-The Sunday Telegraph.

City of Fear
by Robin David

In two successive years Gujarat, and in particular Ahmedabad, was visited by two calamities, one natural and the other man-made. On 26 January 2001 an earthquake struck, killing thousands. A year later, Gujarat underwent a communal carnage that once more undermined all the certainties of life.

For Robin David, an assistant editor with the Times of India, the two events engendered a tectonic shift in his own life. The earthquake left huge cracks in his ancestral home. And the riots made the simple act of walking through a familiar neighbourhood dangerous-especially as his house was located on the dividing line between two communities.

Reluctantly, he and his mother decided to shift to another locality. The migration forced them to leave behind an entire lifestyle and an intriguing domestic history of stuffed animals with their glassy stares, family heirlooms and large stacks of receipts, bills and letters-a compendium of life's minutiae-that his grandfather had never been able to part with. As they destroyed history to start afresh, Robin and his mother discovered that making a new home was not as easy as they had imagined.

City of Fear is an extraordinary account of ordinary people in troubled times, detailed in its observation, universal in its appeal, by a writer who marks a fresh new voice on the Indian literary scene

The Music Room
by Namita Devidayal

When Namita is ten, her mother takes her to Kennedy Bridge, a seamy in Mumbai. There, in a cramped one room flat, lives Dhondutai. Despite her squalid surroundings, Dhondutai is special. For she is the only remaining student of the finest singers of the Jaipur gharana: the legendary Alladiya Khan and renowned songbird, Kesarbai Kerkar. Dhondutai is the keeper of the gharana's secrets and of their rarest compositions. And yet for all her devotion to music, Dhondutai herself has never achieved fame. Namita begins to learn singing from Dhondutai, at first reluctantly and then with growing passion. Dhondutai sees in her a second Kesar, but does Namita have the dedication? Or will there always be too many late nights and cigarettes?

The Music Room is the story of Namita and her teacher; of the charismatic Alladiya Khan; and of the foul-mouthed and bewitching Kesarbai. At its heart is Dhondutai, shy, diffident yet full of determination. Beautifully written, full of anecdotes, gossip and legend, it is a stunning book.

'Fantastic ! This book is a must for every musician and music lover!' - Pandit Ravi Shankar.

Govardhan's Travels: A Novel
by Anand C P Sachidanandan / Gita Krishnankutty

Halfway through his famous play on injustice, Andher Nagari Choupat Raja, Bharatendu Harishchandra stops: What is the duty of a writer-to depict reality as it exists or to project what it should actually be? Unable to decide, Bharatendu abandons the play and releases Govardhan, the main character who is unjustly condemned to death, from drama to real life.

The noose still hangs over Govardhan's head as he walks out of prison as a representative of all those who are victims of the ruthlessness and absurdity of justice. He questions everyone he encounters and raises a storm which gains momentum as he journeys through space and time. The lines between fact and fiction blur as a host of people from mythology, history and literature join him, some asking questions, like him, and others opposing them.

As we follow Govardhan's meanderings, we realize that his journey will never end, for with the passage of time he will find more places to visit and more people to meet, even as the ever-present noose tightens around his neck. Ultimately, there can be no escape for the Govardhans of this world.

Anand's imaginative recreation of Govardhan's life after his release from prison maintains the farcical nature of Bharatendu's work, although it moves away from the comfortable ending of Andher Nagari Choupat Raja. It provides a terrifying portrait of the cruelty and irrationality of the world which we contend as civilized

Chowringhee
by Sankar / Arunava Sinha

Set in 1950s Calcutta, Chowringhee is a sprawling saga of the intimate lives of managers, employees and guests at one of Calcutta's largest hotels, the Shahjahan. Shankar, the newest recruit, recounts the stories of several people whose lives come together in the suites, restaurants, bar and backrooms of the hotel. As both observer and participant in the events, he inadvertently peels off the layers of everyday existence to expose the seamy underbelly of unfulfilled desires, broken dreams, callous manipulation and unbidden tragedy. What unfolds is not just the story of individual lives but also the incredible chronicle of a metropolis.

Written by best-selling Bengali author Sankar, Chowringhee was published as a novel in 1962. Predating Arthur Hailey's Hotel by three years, it became an instant hit, spawning translations in major Indian languages, a film and a play. Its larger-than-life characters-the enigmatic manager Marco Polo, the debonair receptionist Sata Bose, the tragic hostess Karabi Guha, among others-soon attained cult status. With its thinly veiled accounts of the private lives of real-life celebrities, and its sympathetic narrative seamlessly weaving the past and the present, it immediately established itself as a popular classic. Available for the first time in English, Chowringhee is as much a dirge as it is homage to a city and its people.

Naalukettu: The House Around The Courtyard
by M. T. Vasudevan Nair / Gita Krishnankutty

Naalukettu (1958) is the story of a young boy, Appunni, set in a joint family (a tharavad) of the Nair caste in the author's native village, Kudallur. Growing up without a father and away from the prestige and protection of the matrilineal home to which he belongs, Appunni spends his childhood in extreme social misery.

Fascinated by accounts of the grand 'naalukettu tharavad' of which he should have been a part, Appunni visits the house only to be rejected by the head of the household. With vengeance boiling in his heart and the pain of disappointed love a lingering ache, Appunni claws his way up in life to finally buy the symbol of his youthful aspiration and anguish: the naalukettu tharavad of his ancestors. But victory-both financial and emotional-turns to ashes. Enemies are not worth conquering; his father's murderer turns out to be the only sympathetic adult in his lonely teenage, and Appunni eventually returns the favour.

Naalukettu sensitively captures the traumas and psychological graph of Appunni, caught as he is in the throes of a transitional period in Malabar, a phase marked by the gradual disintegration of the feudal structures of the matrilineal joint family system and the rise of the Nair's sense of personal identity. The novel, a fascinating read, and the perceptive introduction by the translator herself, will appeal to students and scholars of regional Indian literature in translation, comparative literature, sociology and cultural studies, as well as general readers.

The first novel of a writer who began publishing at 14, and who took charge of Malayalam literary fiction nearly half a century ago, Naalukettu (1958) is woven around both real-life legends of Kudallur village and M.T. Vasudevan Nair's personal history. Currently in its eighteenth reprint, the Malayalam original has sold half a million copies and has been translated into fourteen languages.

Alma Kabutari
by Maitreyi Pushpa / Raji Narasimhan

"Alma Kabutari" is an account of Alma, a young girl from the marginalized kabutara community. It is the story of her evolution from victim to survivor to a tenacious rebel. Identified as a criminal tribe during the colonial times, kabutaras have dealt with social and sexual subjugation by the upper caste. They are not only poor but do not possess any land or water resources, are roofless, and the society has completely shunned them.

Educated on her father's insistence, Alma finds that literacy brings her authority and confidence to sustain her through life's upheavals and tragedies. She is the nerve centre of her village. She leaves home and connects with society and creates an identity for herself.

Star Crossed
by Ashokamitran / V. Ramnarayan

Star-crossed is a novel about the world of Tamil cinema minus the glamour. It takes a keen look at the lives of filmmakers, technicians, producers and actors. Turning the spotlight on the fringes of the entertainment world, Ashokamitran exposes the daily trials and tribulations of a cast of character none too familiar to those who equate the world of celluloid with the proverbial dream factory.

The story revolves around the several minor cogs in the wheels that make film production in the studios of Madras go round. An elaborate, albeit chaotic, machinery consisting of people, services and equipment, goes into action everyday, based on a flimsy foundation of ad hoc financing and superstitions peculiar to the industry. The whole situation is a tragicomedy of people with dreams in their eyes and hearts, and their manipulation by the forces of commerce and greed.

The story abounds in action and we see people running about doing their jobs,. but, as the novel proceeds, we realise all the sound and fury signify nothing in the lives of so many that depend on the film industry for their livelihood. We move from one climax to the next, one anticlimax to another. To quote one of the characters in the novel, "There are no permanent or temporary jobs in cinema. Every job is permanent. And temporary!' The hype, the uncertainties and the personality cult that surround Indian cinema are brought to life in this realistic tale laced with humour and compassion.

The Ghosts of Arasur
by Era Murukan / Janaki Venkataraman

Set amid days long gone, the story centres around the Arasur family. Grown wealthy from the tobacco trade, the family earn the envy of the king. But are the two sons of the Arasur family worthy heirs of their father's mantle? Swaminathan, an erstwhile Vedic scholar loses his mind and has a sexual relationship with a woman who lived three hundred years before him, and Sankaran who looks after the family business battles his erotic urges. It is only in tragic circumstances that Fate reveals who will carry on the line…

Abounding in unforgettable characters such as Subbamma who echoes the disasters to come, Swaminathan's ghostly lover-a woman whose spirit wanders restlessly across time-Kitta Ayyan, who converts to Christianity, Vaithy who drowns his ego in onion sambar, his wife Gomati, the multi-talented Kottakudi dasi-The Ghosts of Arasur reminds us that reality is often stranger than fiction.