The ETG Book Club . India

From the plantation to the breakfast table- the stimulating history of the world's obsession with tea from its first discovery in China to the present day. Moxham first became fascinated by the history of tea when he applied for a job to manage a plantation in Nyasaland, Africa. His book is a historical journey which includes all levels of society from the royal family to plantation slaves, revolution, and the afternoon ritual. The story he uncovered reveals a fascinating, and occasionally brutal, insight into the history of the British Empire.

Commonwealth Prize–winning author Rana Dasgupta examines one of the most important trends of our time: the growth of the global elite. Since the economic liberalisation of 1991, wealth has poured into India, and especially into Delhi. Capital bears witness to the extraordinary transmogrification of India’s capital city, charting its emergence from a rural backwater to the centre of the new Indian middle class. No other city on earth better embodies the breakneck, radically disruptive nature of the global economy’s growth over the past twenty years. Dasgupta reveals the attitudes, lives, hopes, and dreams of this new class in a series of extraordinary meetings with a fashion designer, a tech entrepreneur, a young CEO and a woman who has devoted her life to helping Delhi’s forgotten poor. 

From Bombay to the hippy beaches of Goa and on to the tropical tip of India, travelling by boat and bus, staying in fisherman's huts and no-star hotels, Dervla Murphy and her young daughter, Rachel, explored southern India in 1976. En route, they fell in love with the tiny mountain paradise of Coorg, whose landscapes and people form the focus of this diary.

A slow and gentle read; a delightful antidote to the "Do everything in 48 hours" type of travel book!

City of Djinns peels back the layers of Delhi's centuries-old history, revealing an extraordinary array of characters along the way - from eunuchs to descendants of great Moguls. With refreshingly open-minded curiosity, William Dalrymple explores the seven "dead" cities of Delhi as well as the eighth city - today's Delhi. Underlying his quest is the legend of the djinns, fire-formed spirits that are said to assure the city's Phoenix-like regeneration no matter how many times it is destroyed. Entertaining, fascinating, and informative, City of Djinns is an irresistible blend of research and adventure.  

The romantic and ultimately tragic tale of a passionate love affair that crossed and transcended all the cultural, religious and political boundaries of its time.  James Achilles Kirkpatrick was the British Resident at the court of Hyderabad when he met Khair un-Nissa – ‘Most Excellent among Women’ – the great-niece of the Prime Minister of Hyderabad. He fell in love with her and overcame many obstacles to marry her, converting to Islam and, according to Indian sources, becoming a double-agent working against the East India Company.

White Mughals possesses all the sweep and resonance of a great nineteenth-century novel, set against a background of shifting alliances and the manoeuvring of the great powers, the mercantile ambitions of the British and the imperial dreams of Napoleon.

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Narcopolis is a rich and hallucinatory novel set around a Bombay opium den, as the city transforms itself over three decades.

In Old Bombay, they say you introduce only your worst enemy to opium. But in Rashid's opium room on Shuklaji Street, the air is thick with voices and ghosts. A young woman holds a long-stemmed pipe over a flame, her hair falling across her eyes. Men sprawl and mutter in the gloom. And now there is an underworld whisper of a new terror: the Pathar Maar, the stone killer, whose victims are the nameless, invisible poor. In broken Bombay, there are too many to count. Stretching across three decades, with an interlude in Mao's China, Narcopolis portrays a city in collision with itself. With a cast of pimps, pushers, poets, gangsters and eunuchs, it is a journey into a sprawling underworld written in electric and utterly original prose. See also The Book of Chocolate Saints by the same author (published February 2019).

Chetan Bhagat is the author of eight blockbuster books about contemporary India and in particular the issues facing young Indians: two non-fiction titles (What Young India Wants and Making India Awesome) and six novels.  All the novels have or are in the process of being adapted into successful Bollywood films.

Chetan quit investment banking in 2009 for a career as a writer (he also writes columns for leading English and Hindi newspapers, focusing on youth and national development issues). The New York Times called him the ‘the biggest-selling English language novelist in India’s history’ and Time magazine has named him amongst the ‘100 most influential people in the world.’

In 2010, travel writer Monisha Rajesh left London for India and travelled the length and breadth of the country by train. As one of the largest civilian employers in the world, featuring luxury trains, toy trains, Mumbai's infamous commuter trains and even a hospital on wheels, Indian Railways had more than a few stories to tell. On the way, Monisha met a colourful cast of characters with epic stories of their own.

"For many, Indian Railways provides little more than a mode of transport: a cheap and convenient way to commute, visit relatives or simply while away the day. For others, it is a place of employment where generations have earned their livelihood. But after 80 journeys, 25,000 miles and a thousand cups of tea, I realised that it really is the bloodstream that keeps India’s heart beating." Monisha Rajesh

A fascinating tale, as well as a travel book and historical detective story, The Great Hedge of India, begins in a secondhand bookshop on Charing Cross Road. There Roy Moxham buys the memoir of a nineteenth-century British colonial administrative officer, who makes a passing reference to a giant hedge planted by the British across the Indian subcontinent. That hedge - which for 50 years had been manned and cared for by 12,000 men and had run a length of 2,500 miles - becomes what Moxham calls his "ridiculous obsession." Recounting a journey that takes him to exotic isolated villages deep in the interior of India, Moxham chronicles his efforts to confirm the existence of the extraordinary, impenetrable green wall that had virtually disappeared from two nations' memories. Not only does he discover the shameful role the hedge played in the exploitative Raj and the famines of the late nineteenth century, but he also uncovers what remains of this British grand folly and restores to history what must be counted one of the world's wonders - and a monument to one of the great injustices of Victorian imperialism. 

When Adela Quested and her elderly companion Mrs Moore arrive in the Indian town of Chandrapore, they quickly feel trapped by its insular and prejudiced 'Anglo-Indian' community. Determined to escape the parochial English enclave and explore the 'real India', they seek the guidance of the charming and mercurial Dr Aziz, a cultivated Indian Muslim. But a mysterious incident occurs while they are exploring the Marabar caves with Aziz, and the well-respected doctor soon finds himself at the centre of a scandal that rouses violent passions among both the British and their Indian subjects. A masterful portrait of a society in the grip of imperialism, A Passage to India compellingly depicts the fate of individuals caught between the great political and cultural conflicts of the modern world. 

With a compassionate realism and narrative sweep that recall the work of Charles Dickens, this magnificent novel captures all the cruelty and corruption, dignity and heroism, of India. 

The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency, in whose upheavals four strangers - a spirited widow, a young student uprooted from his idyllic hill station, and two tailors who have fled the caste violence of their native village - will be thrust together, forced to share one cramped apartment and an uncertain future. 

As the characters move from distrust to friendship and from friendship to love, A Fine Balance creates an enduring panorama of the human spirit in an inhuman state. 

The year is 1969. In the state of Kerala, on the southernmost tip of India, fraternal twins Esthappen and Rahel fashion a childhood for themselves in the shade of the wreck that is their family. Their lonely, lovely mother, Ammu, (who loves by night the man her children love by day), fled an abusive marriage to live with their blind grandmother, Mammachi (who plays Handel on her violin), their beloved uncle Chacko (Rhodes scholar, pickle baron, radical Marxist, bottom-pincher), and their enemy, Baby Kochamma (ex-nun and incumbent grandaunt). When Chacko's English ex-wife brings their daughter for a Christmas visit, the twins learn that things can change in a day, that lives can twist into new, ugly shapes, even cease forever, beside their river...

Saleem Sinai was born at midnight, the midnight of India's independence, and found himself mysteriously "handcuffed to history" by the coincidence. He is one of 1,001 children born at the midnight hour, each of them endowed with an extraordinary talent - and whose privilege and curse it is to be both master and victims of their times. Through Saleem's gifts - inner ear and wildly sensitive sense of smell - we are drawn into a fascinating family saga set against the vast, colourful background of the India of the 20th century. 

Tara was an elephant, and in Hindi her name means ‘star’. With the help of a Maratha nobleman, Mark Shand purchased Tara and rode her over 600 miles across India, from Konarak, on the Bay of Bengal, to the Sonepur Mela – the world’s oldest elephant market. Travels on My Elephant is the story of their epic journey across the dusty back roads of India and a memorable, touching account of Tara’s transformation from a sad, scrawny beggar elephant to the star attraction who became Mark Shand’s devoted loyal companion.

Fanny Parkes lived in India between 1822 and 1846. She was the ideal travel writer – courageous, indefatigably curious and determinedly independent. Her journals trace her transformation from a prim memsahib to an eccentric, sitar-playing Indophile, fluent in Urdu, critical of British rule and passionate in her appreciation of Indian culture.

Fanny is fascinated by the trial of thugs, the adorning of Hindu brides and swears by the efficacy of opium on headaches. To read her journals is to get as close as one can to a true picture of early colonial India – the sacred and the profane, the violent and the beautiful, the straight-laced sahibs and the ‘White Mughals’ who fell in love with India, married Indian wives and built bridges between the two cultures.

At the heart of this vibrant saga is a vast ship, the Ibis. Her destiny is a tumultuous voyage across the Indian Ocean shortly before the outbreak of the Opium Wars in China. In a time of colonial upheaval, fate has thrown together a diverse cast of Indians and Westerners on board, from a bankrupt raja to a widowed tribeswoman, from a mulatto American freedman to a free-spirited French orphan. As their old family ties are washed away, they, like their historical counterparts, come to view themselves as jahaj-bhais, or ship-brothers. The vast sweep of this historical adventure spans the lush poppy fields of the Ganges, the rolling high seas, and the exotic backstreets of Canton.  Sea of Poppies is the first volume in Ghosh's epic Ibis trilogy.

Abir Mukherjee is the bestselling British author of the Wyndham & Banerjee series of cleverly constructed crime novels set in Raj-era India. A Rising Man is his prize-winning debut (see also A Necessary Evil, Smoke and Ashes and Death is East) and introduces Captain Sam Wyndham as he arrives from Scotland Yard to take up an important post in Calcutta's police force in 1919. Described as “a good man upholding a corrupt system”, Wyndham is assisted by the equally conflicted Sgt Bannerjee, who is torn between his belief in British justice and the Empire’s repression of his own people.

'Mukherjee's descriptions of Calcutta under the Raj are vivid, while Wyndham's position as a newcomer with fresh eyes works brilliantly' - Sunday Times

The Anarchy tells the remarkable story of how one of the world's most magnificent empires disintegrated and came to be replaced by a dangerously unregulated private company, based thousands of miles overseas in one small office, five windows wide, and answerable only to its distant shareholders. In his most ambitious and riveting book to date, William Dalrymple tells the story of the East India Company as it has never been told before, unfolding a timely cautionary tale of the first global corporate power.