South Asia Reading Challenge

In the process of packing up my bags and home 2 weeks ago a tweet by @robcrilly caught my eye: read and review six books with a South Asian connection in 2011. This was right up my alley - now I have landed perhaps I should say gulli. I set to task, enthusiastically noting down titles for my shortlist that night. This brainstorm blizzard of 19 titles clearly left me far from 6! With bags to pack and key departure questions still outstanding, it was set to one side.

.

Since then I've made the plane - and flown from London, over (most notably) Afghanistan and Pakistan, which rewarded the most wow-ing views when I opened the window shutter mid-flight, to land on the banks of the Ganges in the holy city of Benaras (Varanasi).

.

When I opened the shutter in the flight... The view was breathtaking. It had been night until this point. The first pic is taken over Afghanistan, to the west-south-west of Kabul. In the second picture you can see the snowy mountains meeting their outwash plain and then the arrival of drier mountains (to the left), which would soon become west Pakistan.

And so it was this evening in Varanasi that I brought out my list and resolved to repack it more neatly. Sitting over a thali and chai along one of the many gullis that nudge against the famous ghats I came up with this:

1. The Immigrant, Manju Kapur (2010) - on the shortlist for the South Asian Literature Prize which will be announced at the Jaipur Literature Festival next week (21-15 Jan). Incidentally - my next destination!

2. Empires of the Indus, Alice Albinia (2009) - "Following the [Indus] River upstream and back in time... "

3. Maharanis, Lucy Moore (2004) - the lives of four influential women, each a princess of the royal courts of India, through the Raj era into independence.

4. The Wandering Faldon, Jamil Ahmad (2011) - Jamil Ahmad's short story in Granta 112: Pakistan ('The Sins of the Mother') was very powerful, and remarkable for its writing. It was here that I learned that at 77 he is about to publish his first work of fiction.

5. The Cloud Messanger, Aamer Hussain (2011) - Another Gulmohar Tree was a rare treat and I couldn't leave trying his next collection of short stories out of this.

6. Ghalib at Dusk, and other stories, Nighat M. Gandhi (2009) - the blurb says: "set in cities resonant with the subcontient's history - Karachi, Allahabad, Ahmedabad - Nighat Gandhi's stories are about alternative lives." The author was born in Bangladesh, lived in Pakistan in the 90s and is now settled in India, affording quite a rare perspective on the region.


On heading to the Jaipur Literature Festival this week I expect my reading shelf might get a little plumper! With full rights reserved to swap, add and junk titles, here we go....

First up is The Immigrant, which at 106 pages in I am loving.

Link: South Asia Reading Challenge