The Dreamers

Parmesh Shahani encounters some audacious voices of young Indians in a new book

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I simply couldn’t put down journalist Snigdha Poonam’s timely debut Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing Their World when I received a preview copy. I knew that I had to invite her to our Culture Lab for a conversation. As it panned out, we got to host the book’s official India launch.

I have been a huge fan of Indian non-fiction ever since I read Pankaj Mishra’s Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India in college His sardonic account of our newly post-liberalised country whetted my appetite for narratives that explored facets of modern India through the lives of its ordinary individuals.

I went on to devour books like William Dalrymple’s Nine Lives that explored religion and belief systems, Siddhartha Deb’s The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of The New India, with its banned chapter on Arindam Chaudhuri and his Great Gatsby-esque ambition, Shefalee Vasudev’s incisive Powder Room, and Sonia Faleiro’s gritty Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars, that detailed the lives of Mumbai’s bar dancers.

Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers lefta deep impression on me, with its intensely detailed account of the lives and hopes of the inhabitants of Annawadi, a slum located behind one of Mumbai’s suburban five-star hotels. My own book Gay Bombay, an ethnography, was a much more modest attempt to add to the rich body of Indian non-fiction, with its account of internet-mediated queer desire and identity in urban India.