15 Best Travel Books About India, Even If You Live Here

Mehta grew up in Bombay, left for New York at fourteen, and came back in his thirties with a family and a notebook. What he produced is a portrait of the city from inside its extremes: Shiv Sena rioters, a bar dancer's household accounts, an encounter cop who has shot dozens of men, a diamond family walking away from all of it to become monks. He does not visit these people, he stays until they get bored of performing for him. The book is thick and it never once slackens.

Dalrymple spent a year in Delhi in his twenties with a formidable landlady, a taxi driver named Balvinder Singh, and an obsession with how many times the city has been destroyed and rebuilt. He digs backwards: Partition refugees, then the British, then 1857, then the Sultanate, then the ruins under the golf course. Half the book is archive work and the other half is comedy about trying to live in Delhi with a broken geyser and no functioning phone. The combination has no business working as well as it does.

Choudhury grew up between New Jersey and Calcutta, took a Princeton degree, then moved back to Calcutta to work at a newspaper for a salary that made sense to nobody. The book is his account of the years after that: the para, the addas, the College Street bookshops, the dead industry, the ageing leftists, the people who stayed when everyone with options left. It is the least dramatic book on this list and one of the truest, because he is describing ordinary life instead of hunting for extremes.

Frater grew up in the New Hebrides listening to his father talk about the Indian monsoon, and as an adult he decided to follow it. He lands at Kovalam for the first burst at the end of May, then moves north with the rain through Goa, Bombay, Delhi and finally Cherrapunji, trying to arrive with it each time. The result is a travel book with a deadline and a plot, which is rarer than it sounds. Half of it is meteorologists and the other half is what happens to a whole country when the rain runs late.

Nine people who have given their lives to some form of religious practice: a Jain nun preparing to fast to death, a Theyyam dancer who digs wells for ten months and is a god for two, a devadasi, a Sufi, a maker of bronze idols whose son would rather write software. Dalrymple mostly gets out of the way and lets each of them talk. What comes through is how strange and specific Indian religious life actually is once you stop treating it as one single thing with one single name.

Subramanian goes around the Indian coast with fish as his pretext: the Hyderabad fish medicine given out for asthma, toddy shops in Kerala, a boat out of Mangalore, Bengali cooks arguing over hilsa, the shark fishery in Tamil Nadu. Each chapter is short and carries a real question inside it, usually about who is making a living and how that living is changing. Because he is a reporter first it never becomes a food-writing swoon, and because he is funny it never becomes a fisheries report either.

In the early nineties Mishra travelled through small-town India just as liberalisation started reaching it, and wrote down what he found: new money, video parlours, brand-name aspiration, cable television, and a great many young men with nothing to do. He is frequently unkind about the people he meets and the book was attacked for exactly that when it appeared. What holds up is the accuracy. Almost everything he describes as a fresh symptom in 1995 is now simply the default condition of urban India.

Naipaul's third book about India, and the one where he mostly stops lecturing and starts listening. It is built out of long interviews: a Shiv Sena man, a Dalit writer, a Sikh in the aftermath of 1984, a Brahmin who has lost his old position, a stockbroker. He lets each account run at length, and the argument that surfaces is that all the anger boiling around him is not the country breaking down but a sign of people finally claiming a voice they were never given.

In the seventies, Western seekers arrived in India in enormous numbers looking for enlightenment, and Mehta watched the entire transaction with a very dry eye. This is a short and brutal and funny book about what happens when a spiritual marketplace meets customers who cannot read the price tag: the gurus who happily obliged, the seekers who lost their minds in Benares, the families who came looking for them afterwards. It moves like a stand-up set with an unusually high body count, and it is short enough for one sitting.

Tully ran the BBC's Delhi bureau for more than twenty years, and this is the set of essays that came out of the end of that stretch: a Kumbh Mela, a Bihar village and its caste arithmetic, Calcutta communism, communal riots, and the news business itself. His argument, made repeatedly, is that Indian elites imported a Western frame that does not fit the country, and that villages are not sitting around waiting to be modernised into something else. You can disagree with all of it and still find the reporting excellent.

Naipaul arrived in India in 1962 as a Trinidadian of Indian descent expecting some version of a homecoming, and spent a year appalled instead: by the poverty, by the sanitation, by what he read as a national refusal to see itself. He also visited his ancestral village and could not make any connection with it. The prose is superb and the disgust is relentless, and the two are hard to separate. The book was banned in India after publication, which tells you accurately enough how it landed here.

Rajesh, born in Britain to Indian parents, spent four months covering forty thousand kilometres on eighty Indian trains, from the Himalayan toy trains to the Lifeline Express hospital train to the ordinary sleeper class most of the country actually travels in. It is companionable stuff, far more about the people in the compartment than about the destinations. Her position is the diaspora one: Indian enough that people speak to her freely, foreign enough that the whole system still strikes her as remarkable.

Ghosh had one very good idea: get off at the junctions where everybody changes trains and nobody ever leaves the platform. Mughalsarai, Itarsi, Jhansi, Arakkonam, Guntakal, Shoranur. He spends a few days in each, drinking tea and talking to hotel managers, rickshaw drivers and men in bars, and finds towns that exist for no reason except that a railway line crossed another one there. Not much happens, which is the point. These are places most Indians have technically been to and never once seen.

Theroux took trains from London to Tokyo and back in 1973 and produced the book that more or less invented the modern grumpy travel memoir. India is a long stretch in the middle: the Frontier Mail, the Grand Trunk Express, Madras, Simla. He is quick, funny and frequently unpleasant about the people he meets, and he is far more interested in what is happening inside the compartment than in the country outside the window. It is a book about travelling rather than a book about anywhere in particular.

Macdonald, an Australian radio journalist, followed her partner to Delhi and spent two years sampling religions: a vipassana course, Sikhism, Judaism, Parsi rituals, an ashram or two, and a serious illness in the middle of it all. It is written in a bright, joke-heavy style aimed squarely at readers who want India as an adventure with a spiritual souvenir at the end. She is honest about her own ignorance, which is easily the best thing in the book and the reason it is readable at all.