skopia
Serious photography meant black and white when Singh shot India in color, insisting a country this saturated demanded it. He packs pilgrims, monsoon light, and painted walls into frames borrowed from Indian painting.
A widow takes in two tailors fleeing caste violence and a student, and under Indira Gandhi's Emergency the four become a family. Mistry lets you love them before the sterilization camps arrive.
Besieged by rebels in 1857 India, British colonials run out of shot and fire the head of a Shakespeare bust from a cannon. Farrell lets their faith in progress starve alongside them.
In a decaying Old Delhi house, two sisters reopen everything the family did to each other in 1947, the year of Partition. Desai makes still summer afternoons unbearable.
One day in the life of Bakha, who cleans latrines in a small Indian town and is slapped for brushing against a high-caste man. Anand renders caste from its lowest rung.
Guha carries India from independence in 1947 to the present and asks why it never broke apart, given partition, famine and insurgency. He calls it an unnatural nation and an unlikely democracy.
Raised by wolves and schooled by a bear and a black panther, Mowgli lives hunted by the tiger Shere Khan. Kipling's Law of the Jungle went into English as a phrase everyone uses.
Rama accepts fourteen years of exile to keep his father's promise, and the demon king of Lanka carries off his wife. Indian towns still act the story out in the streets each autumn.
Boo spent three years in Annawadi, a slum beside the Mumbai airport, following a teenage garbage trader, a woman scheming her way to power, and the neighbor whose self-immolation puts them on trial.
Twin brother and sister in Kerala watch their divorced mother fall in love with Velutha, a carpenter of the untouchable caste. Roy hands you the catastrophe first and then makes you understand it.
The method that would break an empire took shape over twenty years in South Africa, and Gandhi sets it down beside his vows, his diets, and his failures, with disarming candor.
King Dushyanta secretly marries a girl raised in a forest hermitage, then a curse erases her from his memory. Kalidasa writes the forest so beautifully that Goethe borrowed the play's prologue for Faust.
You are that, an Indian sage tells his son: the self inside you and the power holding up the universe are one thing. Elsewhere a boy corners Death and demands answers.
Five brothers gamble away a kingdom and their wife, then return from exile to a war that swallows their world. Carole Satyamurti's English verse holds the whole Sanskrit epic, Krishna's counsel included.
Facing his cousins across a battlefield, Arjuna drops his bow. Krishna tells him to act without grasping at results, then takes a form of countless mouths with the worlds burning inside.
Something happens in the dark of the Marabar Caves, and an Englishwoman accuses the Indian doctor who brought her there. Forster watches a colonial society close ranks and goodwill count for nothing.
Saleem Sinai is born at the exact midnight India becomes independent, which gives him telepathy and welds his life to the country's. Sixty years of history arrive as one unreliable, delighted confession.