Things to Leave Behind

Kumaon, 1856: around the lake at Naini Tal, Europeans ride on the Upper Mall while Indians are kept to the Lower. Spanning the decades from the 1840s to the early 1900s, the novel follows a high-caste family in the hills as the revolt of 1857, missionaries, new schools and print unsettle old certainties. Tilottama Dutt, stubborn and unconventional, sees her uncle hanged for protesting British rule; Devi Dutt, a local pleader, learns to work within the colonial order; Jayesh, born high, converts to Christianity; his fair-skinned wife Deoki is drawn to a visiting American painter, while the missionary Rosemary founds an ashram by a lake. Mixing folklore, oral history and archival research, the story weighs what Indians, and Indian women above all, carry forward and what they leave behind.

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About the book

Form

Novel

Length

306 pages in the original

Genres

Historical, Family (assigned by AI)

Set in

India, 1840–1912

First published

2016 by Penguin Random House India

Author's age

60 when first published

ISBN

9780670088355 (Penguin Random House India, India)

9780143444596 (Penguin Random House India, India)

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