From 'The Guide' to 'Midnight's Children', Indian books featured in Queen Elizabeth's jubilee booklist

An expert panel comprising of librarians, academics, and booksellers has selected 70 books from the Commonwealth (a political association of 54 member states, almost all of which are former territories of the British Empire) to mark the seven decades of Queen Elizabeth II's reign - the longest in British royal history. The list includes novels, short story anthologies, and poetry collections. Ten books for each of the seven decades of the Queen’s reign were selected by the panel from readers’ recommendations spanning 31 countries. The Big Jubilee Read includes "brilliant, beautiful and thrilling writing" in novels, anthologies of short stories, and poetry published since 1952, said BBC Arts, who collaborated with The Reading Agency for the compilation. They were "shared stories that define our social and cultural heritage". In light of this recent development, here's a look at the books by Indian authors on the big jubilee booklist.

The 1958 novel is based on Malgudi, a fictional town in South India. It describes the transformation of the protagonist, Raju, from a tour guide to a spiritual guide and then one of the greatest holy men of India. The novel brought Narayan the 1960 Sahitya Akademi Award for English.

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Published in 1961, the novel, mainly set in Lucknow, is an autobiographical account by a fictional character called Laila, who is a 15-year-old orphaned daughter of a rich Muslim family of Taluqdars. It is a novel by a Muslim lady on the theme of Partition of India. With its beautiful evocation of India, its political insight, and unsentimental understanding of the human heart, the novel is a classic of Muslim life.

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The 1972 novel is a tragedy of alienation, centered on the racism experienced by an elderly Brahmin, Srinivas, who has lived in London for decades. Srinivas is an elderly spice importer who has lived in South London for almost 50 years, surviving his wife and one of his two sons. In the Britain of 1968, he now faces intensifying racism, reminding him of the slights he had once experienced as a university student in colonial India. As Srinivas slides into depression, the novel captures the cultural separation between first and second-generation immigrant generations.

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Set primarily in Old Delhi, the story describes the tensions in a post-partition Indian family, starting with the characters as adults and moving back into their lives throughout the novel. While the primary theme is the importance of family, other predominant themes include the importance of forgiveness, the power of childhood, and the status of women, particularly their role as mothers and caretakers, in modern-day India.

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The Booker Prize-winning novel portrays India's transition from the British colonial rule to the independence and the partition of India. It is considered an example of postcolonial, postmodern, and magical realist literature. The story is told by its chief protagonist, Saleem Sinai, and is set in the context of actual historical events. The style of preserving history with fictional accounts is self-reflexive.

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It is a story about the childhood experiences of fraternal twins whose lives are destroyed by the "Love Laws" prevalent in 1960s Kerala. The novel explores how small, seemingly insignificant things shape people's behavior and their lives. The novel also explores the lingering effects of casteism in India. It won the Booker Prize in 1997.

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The novel is a highly original treatment of a familiar subject, the long-lasting effects of childhood abuse, and a familiar set of characters, an abusive father and the wife and children who are his victims.

"In a house on a Calcutta street, lit by the half-light of a yellow street lamp, lies a baby, one day old, wrapped in its hospital towel. In the next room sits a man, all alone, writing. Who is this man, at once frightened and determined? What is he writing? Where has the baby come from and where will it go? Tonight, these questions will be answered when the man unravels the dark secrets he has carried all his life," reads the book's blurb.

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