Pankaj Mishra started me off and believed in this book well before I did. Sanjay Reddy shared his knowledge and humanism with me while Hartosh Singh Bal shared, among many other things, his whisky. Chitra Padmanabhan shared, among many other things, the antidotes required after too much whisky.
I met many people in India for contacts and suggestions in the course of researching this book. Some of them provided me with far more than that, often hosting me in an old subcontinental spirit of generosity. For that, I would like to thank Samrat Chaudhury, Mary Therese Khurkalang, Anita Roy, Vivek Narayanan, Gautam Mody, Nilanjana Roy and Devangshu Datta, Alam Srinivas, Sanjoy Narayan, Jehangir Pocha, Umesh Anand and Jai Arjun Singh in Delhi; Sugata Raju, Anjum Hasan, Zac O’Yeah, U. Ananthamurthy, Arjun Jaydev, A. R. Vasavi, Roy Sinai, Aravind Adiga, Jeet Thayil and Achal Prabhala in Bangalore; Chinnaiah Jangam, Krishna Reddy, R. Limbadri, Ram Karan, N. Venugopal and Sridala Swami in Andhra Pradesh; and Jinendra Maibam and Kingson Shimray in Manipur.
For institutional support, I would like to thank the Society of Authors in the UK for a travel grant that came at a very early stage of research and helped get this book off the ground. I would also like to thank the Nation Institute in New York, especially Esther Kaplan, for a research grant that helped me finish some of the reporting. I am grateful to the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and in particular Judy Vichniac, for a year-long fellowship that allowed me to write this book. I am grateful to Barbara Grosz and Lindy Hess at the Radcliffe Institute, and to my superbly competent research assistant, Abigail Lind, for making my stay there such a productive experience. I am grateful to Eugene Lang College at the New School for providing me with an institutional base in New York, and to my colleagues and students there for providing a human superstructure to that base. I am especially grateful to Neil Gordon for bringing me to the New School and for believing that I had something special to contribute there.
Among editorial colleagues at magazines and newspapers, I would like to thank Katharine Viner and Helen Oldfield of the Guardian for starting me off with the call centre story. I am grateful to Sam Leith, Lindsay Duguid, Jennifer Szalai, John Palattella, Albert Mobilio, Jonathan Shainin, Peter Baker, Vinod Jose, and the team at n+1, especially Marco Roth, Benjamin Kunkel and Chad Harbach for editorial interventions — some of which, sometimes, took the form of cheques. I am grateful to David Miller at Rogers, Coleridge and White for doing the needful. I am in debt to Mary Mount for her early support for the book and for editing it with her usual clarity and confidence.
In the year that I spent in Cambridge writing this book, there were a select few who handled my obsessiveness with grace. I am grateful to Marlon Cummings for beer and laughter, to Ananya Vajpeyi for vegetarian dinners, to Russ Rymer for shared confidences, to Suneeta Gill for confident cooking and to Balraj Gill for camaraderie. I am grateful to Basharat Peer for the energy and enthusiasm he provided in New York and in New Delhi. I am grateful to Adam Shatz for his unwavering loyalty. I am grateful to Amy Rosenberg for, among other things, her decade-long perseverance and for being a superb mother to my son. I am more grateful than I can say to my mother, to whom this book is dedicated.
But above all, I am grateful to Ranen Lal Deb, for being there and for being himself.
A Note About the Author
Siddhartha Deb is a novelist who was born in north-eastern India in 1970. His first novel, The Point of Return, was a Notable Book of the Year in The New York Times, while his second novel, Surface, was a finalist for the Hutch Crossword Award in India and a book of the year in the Daily Telegraph. His journalism, essays and reviews have appeared in Harpers, the Guardian, the Observer, The New York Times Book Review, Columbia Journalism Review, Bookforum, the Daily Telegraph, the Nation, n+1, London Review of Books and The Times Literary Supplement. He is the recipient of grants from the Society of Authors and the Nation Institute, and has recently been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies at Harvard University.
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