A Fine Balance
by Rohinton Mistry
Set in 1975 in an unnamed Indian "city by the sea," this tender novel follows the intermingled fortunes of a Parsi widow, her boarder and two tailors. A Booker Prize finalist.
Capital, The Eruption of Delhi
by Rana Dasgupta
A fascinating look at sweeping economic changes in Delhi. Dasgupta examines how the influx of wealth into the city has spawned excess and gangsterism.
Culture Smart! India
by Becky Stephen
A concise, well-illustrated guide to both social and business customs in India.
Darsan, Seeing the Divine Image in India
by Diana L. Eck
Tremendously useful for the traveler, this rigorous guide explains the significance and meaning of Hindu temples, festivals and ritual. Darsan, which translates as "seeing," reveals religious expression in India.
Eyewitness Guide Delhi, Agra and Jaipur
by Eyewitness Guides
With chapters on the Taj Mahal, Amber Fort Palace, Keoladeo Ghana National Park, the Red Fort and dozens of other highlights for the traveler, this compact, gorgeously illustrated guide to Delhi and its environs features 900 color photographs, maps and site plans.
Gandhi
by Film
Gandhi is a 1982 epic biographical film based on the life of Mahatma Gandhi, a major leader in the Indian independence movement against the British Empire.
Gandhi, An Autobiography, or the Story of My Experiments with Truth
by Mohandas K. Gandhi
There is no substitute for reading Gandhi in his own simple, direct prose. A highly recommended glimpse into the personality and life of this remarkable figure.
Incarnations, A History of India in Fifty Lives
by Sunil Khilnani
This sophisticated and entertaining collection of bite-sized biographies move well beyond Mahatma Gandhi to the warriors and film stars, entrepreneurs and corporate titans who have made India extraordinary.
India, A Traveler's Literary Companion
by Chandrahas Choudhury (Editor)
Each of these 14 stories evokes place and landscape, providing an excellent introduction both to contemporary writers and to India's diverse cultures and history.
India, Land of Tigers and Temples
by Axel Gomille
In his book of photographs, acclaimed wildlife photographer Axel Gomille brings readers up-close and personal with the exotic world of the Indian subcontinent. His simple, yet intriguing, collection includes tigers, sloth bears and elephants as well as holy sites and scenes of everyday life around the subcontinent.
Lion
by Movie
Five year old Saroo gets lost on a train which takes him thousands of miles across India, away from home and family. Saroo must learn to survive alone in Kolkata, before ultimately being adopted by an Australian couple. Twenty-five years later, armed with only a handful of memories, his unwavering determination, and a revolutionary technology known as Google Earth, he sets out to find his lost family and finally return to his first home.
May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons, A Journey Among the Women of India
by Elisabeth Bumiller
A wonderfully written and fascinating portrayal of Indian women from Bollywood stars to Indira Gandhi to prostitutes. It's an insightful portrait of the country as seen through the eyes of its women.
Midnight's Children
by Salman Rushdie
Crowned Best of the Booker in 2008, Rushdie's greatest novel is a madcap, comic take on the birth of modern India in all its splendid and unexpected manifestations.
Mughal India, Splendours of the Peacock Throne
by Valerie Berinstain, Paul Bahn (Translator)
This illustrated pocket guide presents the history, culture and splendor of the Mughal court and its celebrated architecture in hundreds of archival photographs and drawings.
Mumbai Fables
by Gyan Prakash
Mumbai Fables explores the mythic inner life of this legendary city as seen by its inhabitants, journalists, planners, writers, artists, filmmakers, and political activists.
Nine Lives, In Search of the Sacred in Modern India
by William Dalrymple
From Sufi dervish and Buddhist monk to outcast and temple worshiper: nine people, nine lives, all captured by Dalrymple as he journeys throughout India in search of remarkable individuals transformed by religion. At turns bemusing, dazzling and heart-wrenching, this is his first travel book in 15 years.
Opium City: The Making of Early Victorian Bombay
by Amar Farooqui
Opium linked Bombay to the international capitalist economy and the western Indian hinterland in the nineteenth century. The essays in this book explore the linkages between the opium enterprise of western India and the creation of early Victorian Bombay.
Shantaram
by Gregory David Roberts
A semi-autobiographical adventure based on the author's own life as a fugitive who flees to 1980's Bombay, becomes entangled in the city's underworld, and finds redemption.
Taj Mahal
by Giles Tillotson, Mary Beard (Editor)
An enlightening pocket guide to the myth, meaning and legends of the celebrated tomb, "the queen of architecture."
The Lunchbox
by Movie
A 2013 romantic comedy of a young housewife and a lonely widower that begin an unlikely correspondence when Mumbai's eerily reliable lunchbox delivery service makes a mistake.
The White Tiger, A Novel
by Aravind Adiga
Mordant, funny, angry, horrifying, this Booker Prize-winning tale of a village pauper turned success (and murderer) skewers the ambition, inequity and corruption of 21st-century India.