Recommendations from our site
“I love this book because it is a rather cynical, but wonderfully humorous, portrayal of life in an Indian village in Uttar Pradesh, around the time of independence and a bit later as well. I have been in many of these villages and written stories about villages myself, and I think that it is much the best book I have ever read about that sort of life in India. So many of the books that are highly praised about India are about the middle classes, or else they are about urban India and present a very bleak, black-with-no-white picture of it. This one has black, white and grey. It has enormous humour and is about rural, semi-rural and urbanising India. I find it absolutely fascinating and also a very good laugh.” Read more...
Mark Tully, Foreign Correspondent
“This is a book about a village in India in the 1960s and it’s about how everybody in that village is involved in the politics of that village, and it’s all to do with striving to become the dominant force, either in the agricultural co-operative or in the local college, and there are endless conflicts about who’s going to be elected and what’s going to happen. It’s all to do with influence in the village. When there is an impasse they all go and get stoned. They drink the cannabis actually, mixing it with yoghurt, which they call bhang lassi, and that seems to solve the problem. It would probably solve a lot of problems in politics in England too! It’s written as a satire but actually a lot of the things in this book, the violence and the criminals getting involved in politics have now overtaken these areas, particularly in Uttar Pradesh where this novel is set. So Sukla, who is still alive and was a government official himself, is now amazed by how real events have overtaken what he wrote as a satire.” Read more...
The best books on Indian Journeys
Roy Moxham, Historian
