Like many upper-caste households in north India, my family possessed clothbound copies of a Hindi translation of the Mahabharata. As a child, I read the volumes cover to cover...
I was 16 or 17 when I read An Area of Darkness by VS Naipaul, and I still remember the intense feelings of shock and bewilderment that it provoked. I hadn't realised that you could write about your ancestral country and people with such raw honesty...
I was in my early 20s when over the course of a summer I read Eric Hobsbawm's four volumes of world history. Hobsbawm's books first alerted me to the ways in which the history of the modern world was one and indiv...
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