Nilanjana S Roy: The DIY Indian Fiction Top 25

SPEAKING VOLUMES

There should be a book of book lists. In fact, there is one already that lists the best of fiction, the best love stories, the rarest books, the best works set in imaginary lands, the best books that feature two-headed monsters from space and other such trivia that the passionate bibliophile will devour greedily.

Elsewhere, book lists come out with a regularity that guarantees a backlash. You cannot publish a list of the great works of contemporary fiction, for example, without someone complaining that the list is too white or too self-consciously multicultural, too predictable or too esoteric, too male-centric or too determinedly feminist.

In the last three years, any popular vote for the Best Books Ever has been dominated by either J K Rowling or Dan Brown.

Very fine writers in their own way, no doubt, but you'd have to argue till the saints came marching in before you convinced me that Mr Brown and Ms Rowling actually produced better-crafted, more enduring and more lasting work than, say, Ms Gordimer or Mr Nabokov.

The three books on India that pop up most often on international lists are Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, E M Forster's A Passage to India and Rudyard Kipling's Kim.

This used to be disorienting, as though half the history of reading encoded in my memory before (and after) Rushdie had been deleted from the official record. Then last week, literary journalist and author Jerry Pinto gave a talk in Bombay on his personal selection of the 25 best books written in English.

It takes in about a century of Indian writing, it's nicely contentious and very individual, it can be used as it stands as a rough guide for the neophyte, and it serves as the foundation for a great party game.

I would have argued, for instance, that Nayantara Sahgal deserved to be in, as does Upamanyu Chatterji's English, August. A friend says that Indi Rana's book for children is great fun but points out that writers like Anjali Bannerjee (Maya Running), Paro Anand (No Guns At My Son's Funeral) and Vandana Singh (Younguncle Comes to Town) are pushing the boundaries.

Another pal thinks that some writers need to be twice-represented""Rushdie should be there for Haroun and the Sea of Stories as well as Midnight's Children, Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan is an odd omission.

Even though the list wasn't available online, we spent an entertaining weekend discussing it, which also helped to answer another friend's question: "Why are people in love with lists?"

Because they're fun""so long as they aren't done to excess. And because, if done well, they make you back up a bit and think. Jerry's list, for instance, includes the big guns""but he also includes writers who are rediscovered by each generation with fresh surprise (G V Desani, Kiran Nagarkar), and writers who are almost forgotten (Aubrey Menen).

Part of the fun we had this weekend involved rummaging the battered steel trunks of memory for our own personal lists of the great, the glorious, the unjustly remaindered.

Part of it involved re-examining books: would you really choose Mistry's short stories, Tales from Firozsha Baag, over the better-known Such a Long Journey? Or how would you weigh the respective merits of R K Narayan's Malgudi Days and The Guide versus Swami and Friends?

When you're done with party games, you might want to settle down with the books themselves. Several of the books on Pinto's lists are ones that I acknowledge, automatically, as classics""but that I haven't revisited since my college days.

So I went back to Kanthapura and discovered in that tale of a village in upheaval contemporary echoes, as though R Raja Rao was also speaking to Bama or P Sainath or M Mukundan from across the years.

Some books belong to the category of works you should re-read every decade, to see what has aged faster, the books or yourself: Midnight's Children, H Hatterr, The Shadow Lines.

And some books, unvisited for years, have remained as fresh as when they were written, like Swami and Friends and The Golden Gate. Most of all, what a good list does is to return you to the books and to reading. And if you disagree with Jerry's 25, no problem (he likes a good argument): get out paper and pen, and make your own list.

nilanjanasroy@gmail.com