Mapped
A Fine Balance
Rohinton Mistry
Mistry never names the city by the sea, but its stations, promenade and slums are unmistakably 1970s Bombay, today's Mumbai. Under the 1975-77 Emergency the map runs from a great railway terminus and a seafront drive out to the pavement stretches and the bulldozed slum colony where two tailors, fleeing caste violence in an inland village, try to hold a life together.
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A Passage to India
E. M. Forster
A young Englishwoman and an Indian doctor meet across the divide of the Raj, and a walk in the caves ends in an accusation that pulls the whole civil station apart. The invented city of Chandrapore is drawn from Bankipore, the British civil station beside Patna on the Ganges, where Forster stayed; the Marabar Caves are his version of the real Barabar Caves, the ancient rock-cut caves in the hills near Gaya that he visited. The final section moves west to the Hindu princely state of Mau, drawn from Dewas and Chhatarpur in Central India, where Forster served.
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Life of Pi
Yann Martel
Pi Patel grows up in the French-colonial town of Pondicherry, on India's south-eastern coast, where his father keeps a zoo set among the alleys and beds of the old Botanical Garden. When the family decides to emigrate they sail from Madras, and the story is later told to a visitor in Canada. The map anchors the Indian childhood: the garden, the White Town quarter and the port of departure.
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Midnight's Children
Salman Rushdie
Saleem Sinai's Bombay, from Independence in 1947 to the Emergency of the mid-1970s, seen mostly from the hillside villas of Methwold's Estate on the Warden Road rise. The map holds to the elite crescent of Malabar Hill, Breach Candy and Cumballa Hill, with the school in the Fort and the sea at Chowpatty; the family saga's far excursions to Kashmir, Delhi, Karachi and the Sundarbans sit outside this frame.
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Shantaram
Gregory David Roberts
The 1980s Bombay of an escaped Australian convict who remakes himself as 'Lin': a city of Colaba tourist cafes and Gateway crowds, of a sprawling seaside slum, the red-light lanes of Kamathipura and the underworld that runs beneath them. The map anchors in South Bombay around Colaba and reaches north to the prison on Arthur Road.
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The God of Small Things
Arundhati Roy
Roy's Kerala is a green, waterlogged world of rubber and pepper, of a pickle factory and a river that turns from playground to grave. The map gathers around Ayemenem, a real village on the Meenachal near Kottayam, then reaches west to the backwaters and north to Cochin, where the family's day at the cinema sets the tragedy moving.
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The Hungry Tide
Amitav Ghosh
In the Sundarbans, the vast tide country of mangrove islands where the Ganges meets the sea, an American cetologist, Piya, a Delhi translator, Kanai, and an illiterate fisherman, Fokir, are drawn together among the shifting channels, the tigers and the river dolphins. Ghosh maps the real delta: the railhead at Canning, the island settlement of Lusibari and its trust, the tidal creeks where the dolphins gather, and Morichjhanpi, where refugees were massacred in 1979.
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The Lowland
Jhumpa Lahiri
Two inseparable brothers grow up in the Tollygunge neighbourhood of Calcutta, until the younger, Udayan, is drawn into the Naxalite revolution and killed in the lowland behind their home, and the elder, Subhash, marries his widow and takes her to America. Lahiri roots it in real Calcutta: the Tollygunge family house, the low flooded ground and its two ponds where Udayan dies, and the walled Tolly Club that borders their world; across the ocean lies the Rhode Island life Subhash builds on that grief.
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The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
Arundhati Roy
Roy's sprawling novel gathers India's outcasts around Anjum, a hijra who leaves her communal household to make a home, and a guesthouse, in an Old Delhi graveyard, while the war in Kashmir sends its wounded into the story. Delhi is the heart: the House of Dreams in the old city, the graveyard where Anjum builds her Jannat Guest House, the protest ground of Jantar Mantar, and the great Jama Masjid; the Kashmir Valley runs alongside as the wound outside the setting.
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The Moor's Last Sigh
Salman Rushdie
Moraes 'Moor' Zogoiby narrates the fall of his family, the fabulously mixed da Gama-Zogoiby spice dynasty of Cochin, from the pepper warehouses and the old Jewish quarter of Mattancherry to the art and gangland of Bombay, and at last to an exile in Andalusia that rhymes with the fall of Moorish Granada. Rushdie roots the saga in a real south India: the spice trade of Cochin, the Paradesi synagogue, the harbour of Vasco da Gama's landfall, and the far cities to which the family's ruin carries the Moor.
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The Shadow Lines
Amitav Ghosh
Ghosh's narrator remembers a divided subcontinent from a house in south Calcutta, where the streets around Gole Park and the lake hold a family's ordinary life. Memory then jumps the borders the novel calls shadow lines, west to the Prices' London and east to a grandmother's Dhaka, where the 1964 riots turn distance into loss. The map is anchored here in Calcutta, with those two waypoints reaching beyond it.
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The White Tiger
Aravind Adiga
Adiga splits India in two: the Darkness of the rural Ganges plain, where a servant is born and stays a servant, and the Light of the boomtowns, where money and violence remake a man. The map follows a driver out of a poor Bihar village, past the coal roads of Dhanbad, into the malls and gated colonies of Delhi and Gurgaon, and on to Bangalore, where he becomes his own master.
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Train to Pakistan
Khushwant Singh
In the summer of 1947, the small Punjab border village of Mano Majra, where Sikhs and Muslims have always lived as neighbours, is torn apart by Partition when a ghost train of massacred Sikhs arrives from the new Pakistan. Singh's spare, unsparing novel is rooted in the real geography of the frontier: the mixed village by its railway station, the bridge over the Sutlej, the river swollen with the monsoon and the dead, and the trains that carry a people to safety or to slaughter.
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