The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature

The thirty-eight authors collected by novelist Amit Chaudhuri write not only in English but also in Hindi, Bengali, and Urdu. They include Rabindranath Tagore, arguably the first international literary celebrity, chronicling the wistful relationship between a village postal inspector and a servant girl, and Bibhuti Bhushan Banerjee, represented by an excerpt from his classic novel about an impoverished Bengali childhood, Pather Panchali. Here, too, are selections from Nirad C. Chaudhuri'sAutobiography of an Unknown Indian, R. K. Narayan's The English Teacher, and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Childrenalongside a high-spirited nonsense tale, a drily funny account of a pre-Partition Muslim girlhood, and a Bombay policieras gripping as anything by Ed McBain. Never before has so much of the subcontinent's writing been made available in a single volume.