AMITAV GHOSH

As a child I loved the stories of the Bengali writer Sharadindu Bandopadhyay, whose most enduring creation perhaps is the detective Byomkesh Bakshi. Thanks to film and television, Byomkesh Bakshi has had a remarkable after-life. But Sharadindu wrote a great variety of stories-romances, detective stories, historical fiction, ghost stories and so on-and these too deserve wider attention.



AMITAV GHOSH AMITAV GHOSH

The tales I liked best were about a character called Sadashiv, a Maratha boy-soldier in Chhatrapati Shivaji's army (although Sharadindu wrote in Bangla, he lived most of his life in Pune). Fortunately there are now some good English translations of Sharadindu's work, for example the story collections Band of Soldiers and The Menagerie and Other Byomkesh Bakshi Mysteries and the novel By the Tungabhadra.

ANUJA CHAUHAN

ANUJA CHAUHAN ANUJA CHAUHAN

I am reading Amitav Ghosh's Flood of Fire, Amish Tripathi's Scion of Ikshvaku and re-reading Joseph Heller's Catch-22.

PARVATI SHARMA

PARVATI SHARMA PARVATI SHARMA

The muggy pre-monsoon weeks in Delhi were not the best for reading. It was too hot to focus. Which is one reason, I think, that I recently failed (a second time) to get through Wolf Hall, and so I was very happy to find a book by Hilary Mantel that I did enjoy: her collection of brilliantly precise, unsettling short stories, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. Another super collection I've just started is 14 Stories That Inspired Satyajit Ray, edited and beautifully translated by Bhaskar Chattopadhyay. A book I just finished is The Great Moghuls by Bamber Gascoigne. If you can get your hands on the large-format, Technicolor edition, please do. As it rains in Delhi, I'm booking myself a cool damp afternoon with chai, namkeen and The House that BJ Built. I'm also looking forward to Raghu Karnad's Farthest Field. And finally, a book I'm always awaiting the right time to sink into, maybe this monsoon will be it: The Mirror of Beauty by Shamsur Rahman Faruqi.

NEEL MUKHERJEE

NEEL MUKHERJEE NEEL MUKHERJEE

I shall be re-reading Kaiser Haq's The Triumph of the Snake Goddess, his brilliant composite edition and translation of five different manuscripts of 'Manasamangal', the narrative verse celebrating Manasa, the snake goddess who is worshipped in Bengali cultures. I intend to read Nick Sousanis's astonishing graphic novel, Unflattening, a non-narrative book of big ideas that explores the inextricability of the visual and the linguistic in human thought. B.N. Goswamy's The Spirit of Indian Painting has been a source of unending revelation and joy; that will continue. I have discovered the Easy Rawlins novels of Walter Mosley. I'm devouring them one after the other. He is the greatest crime writer after Raymond Chandler.

AATISH TASEER

AATISH TASEER AATISH TASEER

It's already been a wonderful summer of connected reading. Henrik Ibsen first, plays I didn't know. The Wild Duck, Brand, Peer Gynt. Then, by pure accident, Richard Ellmann's biography of James Joyce. Stupendous! Ibsen, it turns out, was a big writer for Joyce. So now, biographies of both men, plus a determination to return after more than a decade to Ulysses. In addition: Michael Hofmann's excellent book of essays Where Have You Been? and Meghaduta in Sanskrit, exactly right for megha-covered skies in New York; in Hindi, Sara Aakash by Rajendra Yadav.

ANEES SALIM

ANEES SALIM ANEES SALIM

When the monsoon started in Kerala, I was reading The Scatter Here Is Too Great by Bilal Tanweer. It is a slim book, but I took more than a week to complete it because it is the kind of book you don't want to finish and put away. Then I picked up Thomas Keneally's The People's Train, a fictionalised account of Artem Samsurov, a Russian exile and a protg of Lenin living in Australia. It makes you want to read more books on the Russian Revolution and the tsars. My reading list for the rest of the season is long. Shovon Chowdhury's Murder with Bengali Characteristics, Mirza Waheed's The Book of Gold Leaves, Amitav Ghosh's Flood of Fire, Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See. I would also love to re-read my all-time favourites: The Mimic Men by V.S. Naipaul, Travels with My Aunt by Graham Greene, Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle, The Dean's December by Saul Bellow.

CHRISTOPHE JAFFRELOT

CHRISTOPHE JAFFRELOT CHRISTOPHE JAFFRELOT

I always read fiction and non-fiction simultaneously. At the moment I'm reading the French translation of Vanity Bagh, Anees Salim's poignant study of a Muslim neighbourhood somewhere in India, and Tariq Thachil's Elite Parties, Poor Voters, a fascinating explanation of why the poor support the BJP, sometimes. Then, I'll read The Folded Earth by Anuradha Roy, whose previous novel I loved so much, and Steven Wilkinson's book on the Indian Army, Army and Nation. And then Saba Imtiaz's Karachi, You're Killing Me!

SHOVON CHOWDHURY SHOVON CHOWDHURY

In an attempt to gain sweeping historical knowledge, I'm reading Eric Hobsbawm's The Age of Capital and The Age of Empire, and John Galbraith's The Age of Uncertainty. I like 'Ages'. Sanjay Suri's 1984 is on my list, along with R.C. Majumdar's Ancient India. Raghu Karnad's Farthest Field on World War II sounds very interesting. I'm also trying to write something for children, so I'll be reading lots of Doctor Seuss.

JANICE PARIAT JANICE PARIAT

I'm reading Ali Akbar Natiq's collection of stories What Will You Give For This Beauty?. They offer slivers of life in rural Punjab, written in unsentimental prose. Natiq has a wonderfully sharp eye, drawing an array of characters, mostly oddballs and outcasts, who suffer the caprice of nature and the cruel violence of others more powerful than them. In their small struggles lie the epic

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