A detached account of intellectual life in Delhi and a young woman's journey to the Maha Kumbh in order to discover the truth about her past are two novels by scribe Sagarika Ghosh have been relaunched with brand new covers.
Ghose's book, "The Gin Drinkers" first published in the year 2000, has been described as a tragicomedy of sorts, and acts as a mirror to the class and caste conflicts that describe modern India.
Her second book, "Blind Faith" published in 2006, also a work of fiction like the previous book, is a young woman's journey to the Maha Kumbh in order to discover the truth about mysteries shrouding her past. Both the books were relaunched by publisher Harper Collins here recently.
"My second book grew out of my reporting of the Maha Kumbh. Going to the Kumbh Mela was like a voyage of discovery. There is so much I didn't know. It is about clash of religious India versus the social aristocracy. I started reading more about Hinduism then, and I started learning a lot more about it," says Ghosh.
"Increasingly, the tenor of the times is that there is a gulf between traditions and the so called westernised elite who are detached from these traditions, who are called 'siculars' or the pseudo 'siculars' as opposed to the routed real Indians," says Ghose.
British historian Thomas Babington Macaulay had made a specific comment in his speech to the Parliament in 1833, to create a class of people who may be Indian in blood and colour, but are English in taste, opinions, in morals and in intellect.
The 'Macaulay Putras', a reflection of Babington's comment has a fundamental part in Ghose's books. She says she portrays then as "an urban, 'elite' class of people who are comfortable with English as primary medium of communication, representing an apparent social aristocracy."
V K Karthika, the editor at Harper Collins says, "These books talk about how a certain kind of social aristocracy has come to an end, how things are changing in this country, how things are giving way to this whole new social order.
"And I'm thinking I'm in 2014 or is it really 2000. Maybe it is that fiction shows you a mirror to a world that actually keeps on going round and round, and we never quite realise it.
