Reading list: Eight novels that tell us how Indian fiction looks at Indian politics

The Runaway Boy, Manoranjan Byapari, translated from the Bengali by V Ramaswamy

The first part of Byapari’s semi-autobiographical trilogy of novels begins in erstwhile East Pakistan. We follow little Jibon who arrives at a refugee camp in West Bengal as an infant with his Dalit parents after escaping from the Muslim-majority nation. The lives of the dispossessed are deplorable and Jibon remains perpetually hungry for rice.

Soon he runs away to Calcutta – after all, money flies in the big city. Or so he has heard. His wildly innocent imaginations make him believe that if he works hard, he can buy food for his starving family. Through the travels of this starving, bewildered, but gritty boy, we witness a newly independent India as it struggles with communalism and grave injustices of all kinds.

In this deeply moving novel, we see a Namasudra boy trying to survive despite the insurmountable odds stacked against him. Byapari’s own experiences as an immigrant Dalit in Calcutta remind us that caste hierarchies continue to be an affliction, even many years since India achieved independence.

Prelude to a Riot, Annie Zaidi

In a peaceful southern town, amidst lush spice plantations, there’s a whiff of trouble. The town had been shared equally, between three generations of two families, one Hindu and the other Muslim. Until now – before their lives are changed forever by impending violence.

At risk are Dada, the ageing grandfather whose friends are all the plants on his estate; his strong-willed grandchildren, Abu and Fareeda; the newly married Devaki, who cannot believe that her husband and her father tend such fanaticism; Mariam, the gifted masseuse; and Garuda, the school teacher who, in his own desperate way, is trying to teach his uninterested students the ways of truth and tolerance.

Quietly but surely, the spectre of religious intolerance looms over the once peaceful community in the guise of the Self-Respect Forum whose mission is to divide the town and sow the seeds of hatred in its residents. Written with sensitivity and restraint, Prelude to a Riot is a forewarning of how quickly the delicate balance of ordinary lives is overturned.

Leila, Prayaag Akbar

Sometime in the near future in a digitised city, an obsession with purity grips its residents. Walls are erected to divide and confine communities. Behind these walls high civic order prevails. In the forgotten spaces between these walls, where garbage gathers and disease live together, Shalini sets out to search for Leila – the daughter she tragically lost sixteen years ago.

Circumventing surveillance systems and brutish guardians, Shalini – once wealthy but now a misfit pushed to the margins – must do whatever it takes to find her daughter. Leila is a story of longing, faith, and loss. It is also a disquieting observation of class, privilege, and arrogant propaganda of eugenics.

The Association of Small Bombs, Karan Mahajan

The year is 1996. Two schoolboys, Tushar and Nakul Khurana, are sent to pick up their family’s television set at a repair shop with their friend Mansoor Ahmed. But not all of them will survive this ordinary trip. Disaster strikes without warning when a bomb – one of the many “small” bombs that go off unexpectedly across the world – detonates in the Delhi marketplace. The Khurana boys are killed instantly. Mansoor survives, bearing the physical and psychological effects of the bomb.

After a brief stint at university in America, Mansoor returns to Delhi, where he becomes entangled with the mysterious and charismatic young activist, Ayub. His allegiances and beliefs are more malleable than Mansoor could imagine. Woven with the story of the Khuranas and the Ahmeds is the tale of Shockie, a Kashmiri bomb maker who has forsaken his own life for the independence of his homeland.

When the Moon Shines By Day, Nayantara Sahgal

India has changed. Rehana realises that her father’s books on medieval history have ‘‘disappeared’’ from bookstores and libraries. Her young domestic help, Abdul, discovers it is safer to be called Morari Lal in the street. But Abdul’s Dalit friend, Suraj, is not safe from vigilante fury. Kamlesh, a diplomat and writer, faces official wrath for his anti-war stance. A bomb goes off at Cyrus Batliwala’s gallery on the opening day of an art show. The one orchestrating this new world is the Director of Cultural Transformation, whose smiling affability hides the relentless agenda to create a Hindu master race.

In these circumstances, Rehana and her friends, Nandini, Aruna and Lily, meet every week to discuss a book one of them has chosen – a recluse from the harsh reality – even as Rehana’s German friend, haunted by his country’s Nazi past, warns her of what is to come. Can India, despite its quick descent into fanaticism, avoid the fate of Nazi Germany?

Half the Night is Gone, Amitabha Bagchi

The celebrated Hindi novelist Vishwanath is devastated by the death of his son in an accident. The tragedy spurs him to write a novel set in the household of Lala Motichand. It follows the lives of the wealthy Lala and his three sons: self-confident Dinanath, the true heir to Motichand’s mercantile temperament; Lonely Diwanchand, uninterested in business and steeped in poetry; and illegitimate Makhan Lal, a Marx-loving schoolteacher who occupies only the periphery of his father’s life.

In an illuminating act of self-reflection, Vishwanath also tells the story of Lala’s personal servant, Mange Ram and his son, Parsadi. Fatherhood, brotherhood, love, and loyalty will be questioned as sons and servants await Lala’s death. By writing about mortality and family, Vishwanath confronts the wreckage of his own life and makes sense of the new India that came into being after independence.

Half The Night is Gone probes questions of religion, literature, and society that emerge from fractured times.

Sunlight on a Broken Column, Attia Hosain

Laila, orphaned daughter of a distinguished Muslim family, is brought up in her grandfather’s house by aunts who insist on purdah. At fifteen, she moves to the home of a “liberal” but autocratic uncle in Lucknow. In the 1930s, as the struggle for Indian independence intensifies, Laila is surrounded by relatives and university friends who are caught in its frenzies.

But she is unable to commit herself to any cause – her own fight for independence is a struggle against the traditional way of life, from which she can only break away when she falls in love with a man whom her family disapproves of. Sunlight on a Broken Column is a beautiful evocation of India and an unsentimental peek into the human heart.

Pages Stained With Blood, Indira Goswami, translated from the Assamese by Pradip Acharya

Set against the Anti-Sikh pogrom of 1984 that followed the assassination of the Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, this is a bloody account of the events that follow. The novel traces the life of a young professor at Delhi University who witnesses the pogrom first-hand.

Pages Stained With Blood evokes one of the bloodiest years in Delhi’s history, in a way that is hard to forget yet rarely seen in popular narrative. In the middle of this chaos, there is a love story that reminds us that affections bloom even in the darkest of times.