Since my second trip to India (with Acumen Fund in the fall of 2024), I’ve been trying to learn more about the country and its history. It’s now the most populous country and the world’s largest democracy; thus, it seems important to understand more about it.

Indian literature: White Tiger, Aravind Adiga (Booker prize winner and now a Netflix movie), The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy (another Booker prize winner), Hungry Tide, Amitav Gosh, and The Glass Palace, Amitav Ghosh. If you’re up for it, the Salman Rushdie books The Satanic Verses, Midnight’s Children, and The Moor’s Last Sigh. You could take an entire class on each of these books (and in fact I have on one of them).

Indian non-fiction: Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Katherine Boo (a look at the communities of Mumbai), India after Gandhi, Ramachandra Guha (a modern history), The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Mahatma Gandhi (unabridged autobiography by Gandhi), and The Anarchy, William Dalrymple (a history of the East India Company). Lastly, Eknath Easwaran translations of the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, and the Dhammapada are basically the definitive english translations of the classics.

Ministry of the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson opens with a wrenching scene as a heatwave cuts across India. The book is science fiction, but if you want to understand the impacts of climate on countries like India (and how they might respond), it’s an excellent read. Ezra Klein called it the most important book he read that year.