They write, but they also read furiously and eclectically — and here they pick their 2009 favourites.
Gurcharan Das
The Difficulty of Being Good
My choice would be the battle books — books six to nine — of the Mahabharata in the recent, beautiful, parallel texts in English and Sanskrit published by the Clay Sanskrit Series/New York University Press (2005-2008).
Ten volumes of the epic have appeared in this series. Like the Book of Bhishma preceding them, the battle books are named after the successive leaders of Duryodhana’s army. Notable for its poetic rendering is Drona by Vaughan Pilikian but Adam Bowles’s Karna and Justin Meiland’s Shalya are also impressive. Some of the verses from Pilikian’s translation seem to jump off the page. I only wish that Clay had employed the Sanskrit Critical Edition, compiled painstakingly over half a century by comparing several hundred versions from across India and beyond.
Clay follows the ‘vulgate Mahabharata’ of the 17th-century scholar, Pandit Nilakantha Chaturdhara (Kinjawadekar R, The Mahabharatam with the commentary Bharata Bhawadeepa of Nilakantha, 2nd ed. 6 vols, New Delhi: Oriental Books Reprint Corp, 1979.) Hence, its numbering of chapters and verses is different.
William Dalrymple
Nine Lives
More From This Section
Sam Miller’s Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity teems with strange stories and bizarre quiddities, rich discoveries and unexpected diversions that will delight Delhi lovers and baffle and amaze those who have so far remained oblivious to its erratic charms.
Doggedly pursuing his subject through the meandering back lanes of the old city, its spiralling markets and its gleaming new highways, Miller has created a book that is both a quest and a love letter, and one which is as pleasingly eccentric and anarchic as its subject.
No less eccentric is Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History. I loved its brave and even reckless quirkiness and thought it an earthy, revelatory and brilliant book by one of the world’s greatest Sanskrit scholars, and certainly its most unpredictable. It’s a model of how scholars can make their work accessible to a general audience without any way losing their authority.
For me, though, this was the year of Cormac McCarthy. There is no question in my mind he is one of the two or three greatest living novelists writing in English today, and The Road is for my money the great dark masterpiece of this decade.
Alice Albinia
Empires of the Indus
There’s been something interminable — literally — about previous translations of the Mahabharata. Bookness does not become this epic-poem-genealogy-story, and there’s no reason why it should.
Indian audiences have generally absorbed it as a recital or performance; previous translations into English have been cursed by its extraordinary length; so this abridged version by John D. Smith is a feat.
The summaries and abridgements aid the flow, bringing out the operatic, or sometimes even soap-operatic, quality of people telling, and re-telling stories to each other. It’s always pleasing to have one’s prejudices about a book confounded. Last night I read Summertime by J M Coetzee, expecting to find it self-referential and dull. But I liked it. I liked the “dour comedy”, and the teasing overlap between memoir and fiction, and the questions it poses about politics and truth. It’s good.
Sam Miller
Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity
My favourite book of the year is, without question, The Running Sky by Tim Dee. It’s a remarkable memoir by a man who is obsessed with birds — and always has been. It’s a graphically unsentimental book about a subject which, hitherto, was of no interest to me. Dee writes beautiful prose which never collapses into the breathless, saccharine hyperbole of so much “nature writing”.
My other book of the year is about Delhi, and no it’s not mine, but a gorgeously produced, weighty volume called New Delhi: Making of a Capital by Malvika Singh and Rudrangshu Mukherjee.
The text is an excellent introduction to the building of New Delhi and the photographs are extraordinary. They include superb images of the blasting of Raisina Hill to create the plateau on which Rashtrapati Bhavan was built, and another that shows the Indian Parliament, mid-construction, looking like a bomb-site.
Aravind Adiga
The White Tiger
Thomas Pynchon is becoming unfashionable, but his latest novel, Inherent Vice, a detective story set at the end of the psychedelic ’60s, reminds us why he is worth reading. If you can put up with the bad puns and the sometimes heavy-handed caricature, you’ll find an edgy, energetic, and often very disturbing book.
In Soumya Bhattacharya’s If I Could Tell You, a man who has always wanted to make it as a writer tells his daughter his life’s story. Opening with quiet, precise strokes, Bhattacharya’s new novel builds up to a terrifying — and ambiguous — crescendo.
Namita Devidayal
The Music Room
Iloved Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road. After it won the Oscar in 2009, I decided to read the book instead of watching the film, and loved how it unravelled the dark side in a seemingly normal family. I found it particularly inspiring because I am working on a similar kind of novel — about a big happy Indian family and the duplicity that takes place...how things get pushed under the carpet only to pop up later in a dream or through a child. For, the past is the present.
I also loved Tarquin Hall’s The Case of the Missing Servant, where a marriage-broker turned “most private investigator” tracks down a missing maidservant in Delhi — it was light and funny and perceptive!
Ruchir Joshi
Electric Feather: The Tranquebar Anthology of Erotic Stories
I’ve been reading Anthony Beevor’s books on the Second World War. I started with Stalingrad and then, having begun Berlin — The Downfall, I made a detour into D-Day: The Battle for Normandy, just to get the chronology right.
In the first book, you can see and understand the sweep of large history as the German army rumbles across the steppe, almost unopposed; you can feel the baffled frustration of the star generals of the Wehrmacht as their collective greatcoat catches on the large, rusty nail of Stalingrad; you shiver with the young Soviet Frontnik as he attacks the Panzers with rationed ammunition, the SS facing him and the NKVD waiting behind to shoot him if he tries to retreat.
Moving west, in D-Day, you witness the gargantuan logistical madness as Operation Overlord goes into first gear, participate in the gamble with the weather which could have meant thousands of lives lost and the war prolonged by months, suffer with the Americans stuck on their landing boat, suspended between the roiling sea and the toilet chute of their British transport, cursing and shouting as the oblivious Royal Navy sailors empty their bowels on the GIs’ heads and heavy combat gear.
Finally and most importantly, because of Beevor’s subtle rigour and supple story-telling skills, you understand how the British Empire ended, why the Cold War began, why the post-war United States behaved as it did, and how, in the short span of those five years was compacted the course of the next 70.