Books like 139 Vartao by Chandrakant Bakshi

Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie's 1981 Booker Prize‑winning novel, intertwines India’s journey from colonial rule to independence with the personal saga of Saleem Sinai in a tale of historical myth and magical realism.

A Fine Balance is Rohinton Mistry's critically acclaimed second novel, set in India in the mid-1970s and focusing on four unlikely individuals who come together in a city apartment during a state of emergency.

Set during the 1947 partition, Khushwant Singh’s classic follows the village of Mano Majra as it faces the horrors of communal violence and follows a Sikh boy and Muslim girl whose love transcends the conflict.

In Ruskin Bond’s lighthearted novella, Binya trades her lucky leopard’s claw pendant for a striking blue umbrella that becomes the talk of a Garhwali village.

Premchand’s 1928 novel Nirmala follows a young bride married to an elderly widower; her forbidden bond with a stepson leads to tragedy, jealousy, separation, and a lingering sense of guilt.

Set in a small-town frontier province in 1947, just before Partition, Tamas tells the story of a sweeper named Nathu who is bribed and deceived by a local Muslim politician to kill a pig, ostensibly for a veterinarian. The following morning, the carcass is discovered on the steps of the mosque and the town, already tension-ridden, erupts. Enraged Muslims massacre scores of Hindus and Sikhs, who, in turn, kill every Muslim they can find. Finally, the area's British administrators call out the army to prevent further violence. The killings stop but nothing can erase the awful memories from the minds of the survivors, nor will the various communities ever trust one another again. The events described in Tamas are based on true accounts of the riots of 1947 that Sahni was a witness to in Rawalpindi, and this new and sensitive translation by the author himself resurrects chilling memories of the consequences of communalism which are of immense relevance even today.