The Granta Book of India

"The Granta Book of India" brings together evocative, personal and informative writings on modern India, drawn from the pages of the world's leading literary magazine. Here are eighteen contemporary voices sketching one of the world's most dynamic places in fiction, reportage and memoir.
Contributors include Suketu Mehta, on Mumbai, a city "with an identity crisis; " Chitrita Banerji, on "What Bengali Widows Cannot Eat"; Pankaj Mishra, on the making of jihadis in Pakistan and Afghanistan; and Rory Stewart, among the dervishes of Pakistan. Ramachandra Guha and Amit Chaudhuri remember cowboys and Indians and the dignity of American labor; Urvashi Butalia traces a family member through the political geography of India's Partition. Hanif Kureishi describes fundamentalist forces in Pakistani politics. And Nirad Chaudhuri writes on his 100th birthday. The collection includes a poem by Salman Rushdie about the fatwa, and fiction by R.K. Narayan, Amit Chaudhuri, and Nell Freudenberger.