If you had told me ten years ago that I would become the first non-white Chair of the UK Crime Writers’ Association in its 70-year history, I would have laughed (maniacally, as befitting a crime fiction villain). That I have now taken the hot seat feels a bit like being tasered, without my fizzing limbs involuntarily doing the robot dance.

As I write these words I’m somewhere over the Atlantic, halfway to Canada, to speak at the Motive festival in Toronto.  Next week I’m speaking in Somerset, and then I’m at the British Library chairing an eclectic panel discussing Agatha Christie’s influence around the world, featuring, among others, a famous Bollywood film director known for his Hindi-language Shakespearean adaptations. In between, I’ll probably play a game of cricket, get out for another low score, make the walk of shame back to the changing room, and hurl my bat at an unsuspecting bin. All while resolutely ignoring the writing deadline hanging over my head like a giant guillotine.

Photograph: Charlotte Graham/Shutterstock

This piece isn’t about how honoured I am to follow in the illustrious footsteps of former Chairs such as Ian Rankin and Peter James (of course, I am) or my vision for the CWA (I’ve set that out elsewhere). Rather, these are my thoughts on what the CWA is for and what you might do with it if you decide that you want to be a part of it. 

The CWA has been around a long time. It is the UK’s largest association of crime writers and was originally set up with a specific purpose – to further the interests of crime writing and crime writers. Many writers have happily called the CWA home for decades. Others have felt that, in recent years, it hasn’t lived up to its original mandate.

I am a realist by nature. I prefer to present the unvarnished truth because that allows us to deal with things, rather than stick our fingers in our ears, close our eyes, and sing la la la in a very loud voice. In a former life, I was a management consultant where I’d often have to smack people around the face with the proverbial wet fish to get them to wake up and see what was under their noses. Old habits die hard.

Here’s what I think the CWA is and – perhaps, more importantly – is not.

The CWA is not a yellow brick road to literary success – yet it is true to say that it is home to writers straddling the spectrum of success, both those who probably don’t need the CWA anymore and those for whom the CWA can provide inspiration as they begin their writing journey. The CWA is not a panacea for the many ills plaguing the publishing industry – yet it is true to say that the CWA aims constantly to further the interests of writers, even if it doesn’t always have the clout or financial muscle to force through change. The CWA is not an all singing all dancing members club – yet is true to say that, in our own small way, we seek to connect our members, if not always physically, then through a shared vision of what we’re all trying to achieve, namely, success – both individually and collectively – for our crime writing.

The CWA has never had more members than it does now. Many have been stalwarts for a very long time – please know that your commitment is valued. It’s also wonderful to see so many new faces joining and equally heartening to see many others returning to the fold. I’m not going to pretend that those returning writers – many of them household names in crime fiction – didn’t leave without good reason. The fact that they are back is a fillip to both the CWA as an organisation, but also, I hope, to the wider membership. Inspiration comes in many guises. Sometimes, it comes from simply knowing that you’re a part of an organisation that houses the great and the good in your industry, those who have made their mark and now want to offer encouragement to those who follow, even if only by their presence. 

I’ve said this elsewhere, but I’ll say it again. When I came into this industry, almost a decade ago, I didn’t know anyone. I was told by my agent to join the CWA and I found some friends here, and suddenly I felt less alone in an industry that can be truly frightening and confusing, especially for newbies. If I’ve had any writing success today it’s because I’ve had the support of friends and well-wishers. That’s what I want I the CWA to be.

The CWA has its shortcomings, of course it does. Sometimes, it makes mistakes. Maybe you won’t always get a welcome pack on time or an email you were expecting. Remember that we are a board of volunteers, together with a handful of part-time paid staff, trying to juggle fifty plates in the air apiece. If we had greater resources I’d promise you the earth and the moon – and chuck in Mars for good measure. But we don’t. All I can do is ask humbly for your patience and understanding and to not hunt me down and beat me like a piñata when things go wrong. 

Having said this, I believe there are many things the CWA gets right. 

Through the Daggers, the CWA recognises excellence and can help to elevate writers to greater success. Through the events that we run, we connect writers and allow friendships to bloom. I know, from personal experience, that those friendships are sometimes the only thing that sustains you when you’re in the trenches and feel like the industry is shelling you with mortar bombs. Such are the vicissitudes of the writing life.

The CWA’s new look board is more diverse than it has ever been. With new co-vice-chairs William Shaw and Sarah Ward, and new board members, Nadine Matheson, Stella Oni and Morgen Witzel – adding to a great existing team – my hope is that we now represent a very wide range of communities and backgrounds, reflecting the broad church that crime writing itself represents. That has to be to the good of us all, doesn’t it?

The desire to belong to something greater than ourselves is hardwired into us. In spite of the occasional misanthropic tendency – who among us hasn’t wanted to axe murder one of our nearest and dearest from time to time? – most members of the human race are gregarious by nature. We are at our best when engaged in collective endeavour – building pyramids, designing washing machines that aren’t magic portals aimed at turning a pair of socks into a single sock, etc. Being a part of the CWA is to be involved in such an endeavour, something greater than the sum of its parts. If I might be permitted to go all JFK on you for a moment, sometimes it’s about asking what you can do for the CWA (to help further crime writing’s interests as a whole, I mean), rather than what the CWA can do for you. That’s not to abrogate the CWA’s responsibilities to our members, but merely to encourage us all to think about how much we could achieve simply by being a mass of writers unified by a common vision – to take crime writing to ever greater heights.

Here’s what I’d like to see. If you’ve previously felt the CWA wasn’t for you, now might be the time to think again. If you’re a publisher/editor/agent etc involved in crime fiction, think of joining as corporate/associate members. We can always use the support and the money. And if you don’t think it’s for you, that’s also cool. We wish you well anyway. Crime writing is more than the CWA; and that’s exactly how it should be.

What you do with your membership depends on what you expect from it. Muck in if you want to. Or enjoy lurking quietly in the wings, silently cheering on the cause. Whatever suits your temperament. I make no demands other than one: treat each other with respect. No amount of success – or lack of it – entitles any of us to look down on or upset anyone else. 

On this flight I’m watching the recent Oscar-winning film Everything Everywhere All At Once. The film is about parallel dimensions and how “every tiny decision creates another branching universe”. So, in another universe, I did not become the CWA Chair. In another universe, I remained unpublished, but kept on writing, purely for myself, until I popped my clogs and ended up in the great writers’ association in the sky. And if that’s your story, that’s OK too. Because none of us started writing in the belief that we would find fame and riches. We write because it speaks to a meaningful part of ourselves. We write because it is our secret joy, our tempestuous passion, the one thing no one can take from us, regardless of how great or humble our achievements.

To quote from Everything Everywhere All At Once: “Even in a stupid, stupid universe there is always something to love.” I love reading. I love crime fiction. I love literature. If you share those passions – no matter how stupid you think the writing universe can sometimes be – then perhaps the CWA is for you.

Vaseem Khan

London, 31 May 2023

This article is one of a series of 50. Together they explore the history and culture of India from her most ancient civilisations to the nation’s ambitious space programme. All 50 articles will be collected into a digital book and published in due course. To receive a FREE copy of the book, simply register for my newsletter here.

In the early hours of September 7th 2019, millions of Indians tuned in to watch, with baited breath, as the Vikram Moon lander attempted to descend to the surface of the moon. The lander, part of the Chandrayaan-2 mission, represented the first attempt by India to land a module on the lunar surface, at its south pole, in a spot where no other landing had ever been attempted. Bear in mind that this is a region where an earlier mission – the Chandrayaan-1 – had detected the presence of water, in the form of ice. 

The odds of a successful landing were intimidating. A soft landing on another planetary body has only been achieved by three other nations – the US, Russia, and China. India was aiming to be the fourth.

Picture credit: Nesnad, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons. Image is an artist’s rendering of the ISRO Mars Orbiter.

This new mission represented more than just another visit to the moon – it was India’s way of signalling to the world its ambitions in both the global race to achieve low-cost space exploration, and its wider ambitions as a genuine superpower.

Alas, on this occasion, the mission was to prove unsuccessful, at least in its final stage.

Approximately two kilometres from the surface, mission control lost communication with the lander. It was later discovered to have crash landed. 

Nevertheless, ISRO – the Indian Space Research Organisation – declared the mission 98% successful – because it fulfilled the majority of the goals the agency had set itself, including lift-off, reaching the moon, lunar-orbit insertion, and lander-orbiter separation. The mission proved that India now had the technology and the capability to achieve interplanetary spaceflight.

The mission also represented the culmination of more than fifty years of slow but steady progress in achieving Indian ambitions in the space arena. 

The Indian space program officially began in 1962 with the establishment, by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, of the Indian National Committee for Space Research. Seven years later, the committee was superseded by ISRO, headquartered at Bangalore (now Bengaluru). 

In 1975, ISRO launched India’s first satellite, Aryabhata, and officially entered the space age. (Aryabhata was named after one of the earliest mathematician-astronomers from India’s classical age of scientific advancement. Among his many achievements, Aryabhata is believed to have advocated an astronomical model in which the Earth turns on its own axis. Today, a lunar crater is named in his honour.)

Almost four decades later, in 2014, India launched an unmanned mission to Mars – the Mars Orbiter Mission – named Mangalyaan. 

On September 24, 2014, the spacecraft entered Mars orbit, making India the first Asian nation to have achieved the feat. The mission was notable because it established India’s reputation for pioneering affordable satellite launches and space missions – the Mars mission cost just $74m, less than the budget of many Hollywood space blockbusters – for instance, the Sandra Bullock and George Clooney starrer Gravity.

India has set itself several new targets in the field of space exploration, including putting the first Indian astronauts into space using homegrown technology. Astronauts are already undergoing training for what has been named the Gaganyaan mission. (The COVID pandemic delayed the mission, but ISRO has set a revised target date of late 2024.)

As for Chandrayaan-2, India has put the failure behind her – a new mission, Chandrayaan-3, has already been sanctioned and will consist of a lander and a rover, but not an orbiter. There are high hopes that this time the mission will achieve its ultimate goal of placing a rover on the moon.

Why does any of this matter? 

You only have to look at the rhetoric coming from official channels, and the millions of eyeballs glued to the attempted Vikram landing, to understand that India’s space programme is an important aspect of how the nation sees itself on the world stage. Successful achievements in space allow India to place herself on a par with other global superpowers, signalling that the country has the scientific capability, the resources, and the will to succeed in any endeavour it turns its hand to. 

There is already talk of India aiming to land a human on Mars before any of the other major powers. 

Who is to say that she won’t achieve that? 

My latest novel, The Lost Man of Bombay, is set in India, in the 1950s, and features India’s first female police detective, Persis Wadia, as she investigates the body of a white man found frozen in the foothills of the Himalayas with only a small notebook containing cryptic clues. Soon, more bodies begin to pile up in Bombay, India’s city of dreams … Available from bookshops big and small and online. To see buying options please click here.  

This article is one of a series of 50 that I will be publishing on my website. Together these pieces explore the history and culture of India from her most ancient civilisations to the nation’s ambitious space programme. You can read all 50 pieces here.

All 50 articles will be collected into a digital book and published in due course. To receive a FREE copy of the book, simply register for my newsletter here. The newsletter goes out every three months and contains updates on book releases, articles, competitions, giveaways, and lots of other interesting stuff. 

This article is one of a series of 50. Together they explore the history and culture of India from her most ancient civilisations to the nation’s ambitious space programme. All 50 articles will be collected into a digital book and published in due course. To receive a FREE copy of the book, simply register for my newsletter here.

It is, perhaps, unsurprising that a culture that is thousands of years old, that houses one and a half billion individuals, and that has seen numerous waves of immigration and invasion over the millennia should represent one of the world’s most diverse melting pots. But just how diverse is India?

It’s been said that India is like a mini-continent, a collection of cultures and societal groupings rubbing along in relative harmony, with only the occasional conflagration of violence. Such violence, when it has occurred, has largely run along communal lines, unsurprising in a nation where all of the world’s major religions – to a greater or lesser extent – are present – or have been present in the past. India is a place where it is impossible to throw a stick without hitting a priest, pandit, swami, imam, or other religious personage. The population, is, of course, primarily Hindu, but if you stop to consider that there are some two hundred million Muslims in India – one of the largest Muslim populations in the world – you can see that sheer weight of numbers ensures that even small percentages translate into numerous adherents. 

The situation is further complicated by India’s caste system – particular to the Hindu religion. The system organises Hindus into four major castes, and then those who exist outside of the caste system – namely, the Dalits. This caste system is one of the world’s oldest systems of social stratification, one that serves to create yet another textured layer of diversity in the country. 

What of language, often a key barometer of diversity? India recognises several ‘official’ languages and an almost incomprehensibly large number of regional dialects – three thousand, at last count. The national language – Hindi – is spoken by only forty percent of the population. English serves as a vehicle of commerce and administration – but this is only because it was brought to the country by India’s erstwhile colonisers and then imposed upon the local populace in order to grease the wheels of the monolithic bureaucracy established to enable British rule.

Travelling around the subcontinent, regional differences become visibly apparent.

From cuisine to cinema, from cultural myths to local beverages, the country and its citizens exhibit striking differences as one ventures north to south, east to west. These differences extend even to appearance. Compare the Indians of the far north-east state of Assam to the citizens of Maharashtra on the western coast; the northern Punjabis to the southern Tamils.

In recent centuries, the country has seen the Mughal and British empires leave their mark. The effect of these foreign assimilations is evident when taking a simple walk around cities such as Mumbai and Kolkata – once Bombay and Calcutta. The diversity of architecture – with mosques, temples and Victorian-era edifices standing shoulder-to-shoulder – is mirrored in the diversity of the cities’ denizens.

In modern India, a land that has undergone a superheated economic transformation over the past three decades, yet another layer of stratification has become apparent, one that many western nations are familiar with – the gap between rich and poor. And the rich, in this context, are not the maharajahs and nizams of old, but the vast, newly-affluent middle class, the beneficiaries of India’s headlong assault on the world superpower rankings.

As wealth has accreted in the cities, so have migrants poured into the great metropolises of the subcontinent, creating vast slums in the process. Hundreds of thousands of villages still dot the Indian interior, but increasingly – as climate change (namely in the form of drought) and economic factors work against them – are finding it harder to survive in the new reality.

For many, India’s incredible diversity underpins the country’s identity.

As the nation continues to grow and evolve, it becomes even more imperative that this diversity is not relinquished. India’s creed, enacted at the moment of its independence, encompasses the nation’s pluralism and finds expression in the first Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s words: To the people of India, whose representatives we are, we make an appeal to join us with faith and confidence in this great adventure. This is no time for petty and destructive criticism, no time for ill- will or blaming others. We have to build the noble mansion of free India where all her children may dwell.

My latest novel, The Lost Man of Bombay, is set in India, in the 1950s, and features India’s first female police detective, Persis Wadia, as she investigates the body of a white man found frozen in the foothills of the Himalayas with only a small notebook containing cryptic clues. Soon, more bodies begin to pile up in Bombay, India’s city of dreams … Available from bookshops big and small and online. To see buying options please click here.  

This article is one of a series of 50 that I will be publishing on my website. Together these pieces explore the history and culture of India from her most ancient civilisations to the nation’s ambitious space programme. You can read all 50 pieces here.

All 50 articles will be collected into a digital book and published in due course. To receive a FREE copy of the book, simply register for my newsletter here. The newsletter goes out every three months and contains updates on book releases, articles, competitions, giveaways, and lots of other interesting stuff. 

This article is one of a series of 50. Together they explore the history and culture of India from her most ancient civilisations to the nation’s ambitious space programme. All 50 articles will be collected into a digital book and published in due course. To receive a FREE copy of the book, simply register for my newsletter here.

Joseph Stalin once mused on a question that has occupied the minds of many, both during, and after, the British Raj in India – how did so few Brits maintain rule over a country of three hundred million? The answer is not simply through force of arms or even the machinations of divide et impera. Instead, the real answer lies in the monolithic bureaucracy established by the British, once known as the Imperial Civil Service, and then the Indian Civil Service – the legendary ICS.

Image credit: Anjaneyadas CC 4.0

Given the moniker the “steel frame” – i.e. the frame underpinning Britain’s colonial enterprise – the ICS personified the Raj for millions of Indians. It was the administrative arm by which Britain governed its colony, managed by a tiny cadre of trained individuals spread sparsely throughout the vastness of the subcontinent, yet somehow managing to strangle the country by means of a regulatory morass incomprehensible to all but the most masochistic bureaucrat.

The ICS was founded when the British government took over responsibility for governing India from the East India Company following the Indian Uprising of 1857. Prior to that the East India Company’s version of a civil service had been a loosely-regulated band of merchant-statesmen, ably assisted by private armies and cannon, and operating primarily for the gain of the Company, though ostensibly representing the interests of the British government.

The East India Company first came to India in the early 1600s, pursuing the lucrative oriental spice-and-silk trade, inveigling their way into the courts of successive Mughal emperors with heady promises of mutual enrichment and brandied tales of British kings and queens. These initial traders – who, by and large, operated in good faith – gave way to the likes of Clive Plassey, buccaneering chancers willing to employ violence and ruthless cunning to acquire political power that could be parlayed directly into obscene wealth. Finally, with the crushing of the uprising of 1857, came the martinets of the Raj, establishing an administrative structure – the aforementioned Indian Civil Service – that gradually strangled the remaining sparks of rebellion out of the country. What cannons and navies couldn’t quite achieve, a system of chits and registers managed in a few short decades. If there was one thing the British had learned, it was how to suck the fight out of a local populace by the simple expedient of blinding them with paperwork.

For the greater part of its existence, the ICS was run by white men, lured to the subcontinent and its manifest perils with outrageous salaries and the heady promise of power. The natives were relegated to the lowest ranks, little better than pen-pushing coolies. But, with the advent of the independence movement, this make-up slowly shifted to favour more Indians – often Oxbridge-educated – in the middle ranks. When the Raj ended, the majority of Brits departed, leaving a void quickly filled by those Indians already barnacled to the system.

Even at its heyday, the British members of the ICS rarely numbered more than a few thousand, recruited by competitive examination held, initially, in London, and led by officers who oversaw all government activity in the two hundred and fifty districts that comprised British India, routinely interfering in the courtly workings of local nawabs, nizams, and maharajahs, who were bullied or bribed into cooperation. The ICS cadre answered to the Viceroy of India, who, by virtue of the subcontinent’s vast wealth, wielded power akin to the most influential men in the world.

And what of the ICS today?

When India became independent in 1947, the ICS was re-badged as the Indian Administrative Service. (In the newly-created country of Pakistan, it became the Civil Service of Pakistan). Nearly all of its British officers returned to their homeland, though a handful stayed on.

In the seventy-five plus years since, the IAS has grown in line with India’s population, now numbering 1.4 billion. It is one of the world’s largest bureaucracies and suffers from the challenges of administering to such an enormous populace, across a large and varied landmass. In 2012, the consultancy company Political and Economic Risk Consultancy ranked bureaucracies across Asia on a scale from one to 10, with 10 being the worst possible score. They scored India at 9.21.

Nevertheless, the country continues to grow as a global economic powerhouse, and in part this is due to the sterling work carried out by its monolithic civil service arm, in the face of criticism and considerable political and financial hurdles.

For most Indians, an India without the ICS would be unimaginable.

My latest novel, The Lost Man of Bombay, is set in India, in the 1950s, and features India’s first female police detective, Persis Wadia, as she investigates the body of a white man found frozen in the foothills of the Himalayas with only a small notebook containing cryptic clues. Soon, more bodies begin to pile up in Bombay, India’s city of dreams … Available from bookshops big and small and online. To see buying options please click here.  

This article is one of a series of 50 that I will be publishing on my website. Together these pieces explore the history and culture of India from her most ancient civilisations to the nation’s ambitious space programme. You can read all 50 pieces here.

All 50 articles will be collected into a digital book and published in due course. To receive a FREE copy of the book, simply register for my newsletter here. The newsletter goes out every three months and contains updates on book releases, articles, competitions, giveaways, and lots of other interesting stuff. 

This article is one of a series of 50. Together they explore the history and culture of India from her most ancient civilisations to the nation’s ambitious space programme. All 50 articles will be collected into a digital book and published in due course. To receive a FREE copy of the book, simply register for my newsletter here.

It’s often said that cricket is a religion on the subcontinent, alluding to the fact that the sport incites passion akin to religious fervour. There is little doubt that, with a billion and a half individuals obsessed by the game and the sport now awash with celebrities and sponsorship from the biggest corporate houses, it has become a juggernaut, emblematic, in India’s case, at least, of the country’s rise to global prominence.

Image credit: Abhijit Sen CC 3.0

And yet this is a game transplanted to the subcontinent by the British, a relic of the days of Empire.

Why has cricket survived when so many of the structures of the Raj have been dismantled and thrown on the scrapheap?

One answer lies in the evolution of the game on the subcontinent, and the manner in which locals have made it their own.

Cricket was introduced to the subcontinent by European merchant sailors in the eighteenth century. The earliest match was played in the 1720s, and the first local cricket club was established in 1792. In 1848, Bombay’s Parsee community formed the Oriental Cricket Club, the first to be established by Indians. But it wasn’t until 1911 that a truly national Indian cricket team – comprised of natives – took to the field.

That team began as a glimmer in the mind of one of the subcontinent’s most famous cricketers, a prince named Ranjitsinhji – Ranji for short – whose batting had impressed even the British, so much so that he played for the English team on numerous occasion. Ranji’s attempt to establish a national native team, alas, fell upon rocky shores when bickering broke out among Hindus, Muslims, and Parsees. The bone of contention was the exact makeup of the proposed team.

And there the idea might have died were it not for the fact that, around this time, revolutionary fervour was beginning to make itself felt around the country. Several nawabs, princes and public officials felt that by creating a national team and sending it to England, much needed goodwill might be won back with the ‘head office’.

Choosing the captain of such a team proved a political nightmare.

Ultimately, the powers that be opted for the nineteen-year-old maharajah of Patiala, Bhupinder Singh, a portly young man already gaining a reputation for hedonism. The remainder of the team was selected on the basis of religion: six Parsees, five Hindus and three Muslims. Astonishingly – for the period – the team included two Dalits – the Untouchables, as they were once called. Baloo Palwankar, one of the two men in question, went on to become a Dalit hero and an inspiration for others of his community, such as Dr B.R. Ambedkar, the man who later fought for Dalit rights alongside Gandhi, and penned India’s constitution.

That first tour of Great Britain (and Northern Ireland) was aimed at promoting the notion that India was still a loyal part of the Empire – 1911 was the same year George V was formally crowned king-emperor in London. (Later that year, he travelled to India for the Delhi Durbar.) The tour was only a moderate success, the team played only against English county teams and not the national English team. Back home, its mission was seen by some as one of appeasement at a time when many were beginning to think seriously about a patriotic struggle against the colonisers.

An Indian national team did not play its first Test match until 25 June 1932 – at Lord’s – becoming the sixth team to be granted Test cricket status. By then the Independence struggle was well underway, Gandhi’s legendary Salt March having made a global splash just two years earlier.

Two decades later, India won her first Test match, but it wasn’t until the Seventies that the country became a truly competitive force.

A world cup win in 1983, in the one-day format of the game, led by Kapil Dev, Indian cricket’s original superstar, inspired a generation of icons, such as Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid, who not only became global names, but fabulously wealthy through corporate sponsorship and the growing popularity of the game.

Today, India is the most powerful country in world cricket, one of the most powerful in any sport you might care to name.

In terms of viewership, sponsorship, money flowing through the game, and the world’s most popular short form (known as T20) competition (the Indian Premier League), India has no equal.

This extraordinary passion for the sport has translated into success on the field – India is consistently one of the best sides in the world.

There is little doubt, that, with a massive and young population, with enormous wealth and status to be earned, and with a nationwide obsession bordering on mania, India will continue to dominate the global cricketing landscape for many years to come.

 My latest novel, The Lost Man of Bombay, is set in India, in the 1950s, and features India’s first female police detective, Persis Wadia, as she investigates the body of a white man found frozen in the foothills of the Himalayas with only a small notebook containing cryptic clues. Soon, more bodies begin to pile up in Bombay, India’s city of dreams … Available from bookshops big and small and online. To see buying options please click here.  

This article is one of a series of 50 that I will be publishing on my website. Together these pieces explore the history and culture of India from her most ancient civilisations to the nation’s ambitious space programme. You can read all 50 pieces here.

All 50 articles will be collected into a digital book and published in due course. To receive a FREE copy of the book, simply register for my newsletter here. The newsletter goes out every three months and contains updates on book releases, articles, competitions, giveaways, and lots of other interesting stuff. 

This article is one of a series of 50. Together they explore the history and culture of India from her most ancient civilisations to the nation’s ambitious space programme. All 50 articles will be collected into a digital book and published in due course. To receive a FREE copy of the book, simply register for my newsletter here.

In 2004, the then most expensive wedding in history (outside of royalty) took place in France.

Yet the couple getting hitched were not French. They were Indians.

The bride was Vanisha Mittal, daughter of one of the world’s richest men, steel billionaire, Lakshmi Mittal. The wedding was held at the historic 17th century Chateau Veaux le Vicomte near Paris with the engagement having taken place at the Palace of Versailles. Kylie Minogue was flown in and paid more than $300,000 to perform for just half an hour. Barely enough time for the pop princess to gyrate her way through a handful of her most well-known hits.

In total the wedding cost $66 million, twice what it cost Prince William and Kate Middleton to marry several years later.

Image credit. Shankar S. CC 2.0

Asian weddings have gained worldwide notoriety for their colour, pageantry, and lavishness. The subcontinental wedding industry is huge business, but at its heart lurks a sinister social dilemma: in countries where the average income is still close to poverty levels, how do these communities justify such extravagance?

The answer lies in the perception that weddings have in these regions. They are far more than the coming together of two individuals to share vows and begin a life together. In fact, it might be argued that the bride and groom are the least important people at their own wedding.

Asian weddings are, primarily, about the families, and the signals they are broadcasting to the community within which they are entrenched. Wedding expenditure is proof of the socioeconomic status of a family. As such, upper-middle-class families spend a small fortune on their offsprings’ weddings, with parents beginning planning years in advance. No expense is spared: lavish venues, tailored costumes, eye-wateringly expensive bridal jewellery, banquets to shame a king’s table, entertainment schedules to rival major pop concerts, herds of caparisoned horses, camels, elephants… If you can think of it, some Asian family has probably spent a fortune on it.

Unsurprisingly, this frenzied Keeping up with the Patels and the Khans has bankrupted many – all to impress friends and family.

Yet, for those who are not steel billionaires, for those at the lowest levels of society, this type of social pressure can lead to ruin.

Poor families often end up borrowing from moneylenders, at extortionate rates of interest, to finance their children’s marriages, with the result that they themselves end up as little more than bonded labour.

This is particularly the case for the bride’s parents. Though the 1961 Dowry Prohibition Act in India ostensibly outlawed the practice of dowry, it continues to persist. These days, instead of asking for an out and out cash payment, grooms’ families often demand expensive wedding gifts or the wedding costs to be borne by the bride’s parents. In such circumstances, the pressure to spend on a wedding can lead to truly terrible consequences for those bearing the brunt of the expenditure.

Bollywood and social media have exacerbated the problem, peddling images of the ‘big fat Indian wedding’ that feed into the cycle of aspirational competitiveness that has infected the new, educated, middle-class. (Indeed, one of the biggest Bollywood hits of all time was basically one very long wedding video.) Hiring wedding planners has now become commonplace, as well as the fusing of western and Indian traditions. Foreign destination weddings are on the rise – for those that can afford them.

Yet, social conservatism remains at the heart of the Asian marriage.

Asians, no matter how westernised in their thinking, wouldn’t dream of a simple beach wedding, the bride and groom dressed in Hawaiian outfits, with just a handful of their best friends in attendance. Parents and families continue to exercise control over almost every aspect of the process – using family networks and hiring marriage brokers to ensure good matches (for instance, the right caste or community and social standing), and ensuring that nothing is left to chance on the big day.

The mythology of the Big Fat Asian Wedding has seeped into every aspect of culture in countries such as India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.

Until the level of social importance attached to such occasions diminishes, there will be little curbing of the vast excesses that have caused both delight and heartache for so many.

My latest novel, The Lost Man of Bombay, is set in India, in the 1950s, and features India’s first female police detective, Persis Wadia, as she investigates the body of a white man found frozen in the foothills of the Himalayas with only a small notebook containing cryptic clues. Soon, more bodies begin to pile up in Bombay, India’s city of dreams … Available from bookshops big and small and online. To see buying options please click here.  

This article is one of a series of 50 that I will be publishing on my website. Together these pieces explore the history and culture of India from her most ancient civilisations to the nation’s ambitious space programme. You can read all 50 pieces here.

All 50 articles will be collected into a digital book and published in due course. To receive a FREE copy of the book, simply register for my newsletter here. The newsletter goes out every three months and contains updates on book releases, articles, competitions, giveaways, and lots of other interesting stuff. 

If you would like more from the Writer Whisperer … my quarterly newsletter contains articles, competitions, giveaways, short stories, book news, and recommendations. Simply register here. 

Authors suffer from a unique set of anxieties. Those anxieties evolve over time, depending on where you are on the author life-cycle, but they never go away. I’m not a worrier, not by nature, anyway – I was once described as being more laidback than a surfboard smoking a doobie – but a recent chat with some writer friends about anxiety got me to reflecting on this important issue. The result is this piece, the first in a series on off-beat topics about writing and the publishing industry. If you want writing advice about plot, pace, characterisation, etc… go somewhere else. The Writer Whisperer has bigger fish to fry.

Image credit: The Noun Project CC 4.0

Mental health is big at the moment. Everyone’s banging on about it, from self-help gurus, to doctors, to rent-a-celebs whose fifteen minutes of fame died with their exit from that reality show where orange people do really stupid things to other orange people. Of course mental health is important, and doubly so in an industry where luck and subjectivity can so often mean the difference between success and failure; indeed, where even the terms success and failure can mean so many different things to different people.

An author’s lifelong relationship with anxiety begins early on. You start as a shiny-eyed novice, bashing out that first novel, riding high on adrenalin as words pour from your fingers like lightning bolts. Who said this writing lark was difficult? You’re a literary god, the heir to Hemingway, a blazing star streaking across the literary firmament. Clearly, all those jaded hacks complaining about how hard writing is don’t have The Gift. Not everyone can be touched in the way you are.

You finish. You pull out your Writers & Artists Yearbook. You send your submission off to a few handpicked and very lucky agents, together with a covering letter infused with your winning personality and a cute little photo of you that you think will look great on the book jacket. You reward yourself with an indulgent bottle of Prosecco and a Chinese takeaway. A sort of pre-celebration. You coyly tell your Facebook friends you’ll soon have BIG NEWS on the literary front.

And then your first rejection letter arrives. Surely this has to be a mistake? Who is this hack? Have they lost their mind? You dismiss the letter as an aberration, an agent who clearly didn’t read the book, an agent with no taste or discernment. Probably a tax dodger, too.

But then another letter arrives; then another, each one a stake hammered through your gonads. By the end, the Olympian self-confidence you began your writing journey with is in more pieces than your heart was the last time you were dumped. You feel as if you’ve been mugged by a gang of Hell’s Angel bikers; and then run over by each and every one of their bikes.

You want to stay calm, but it’s hard to stay zen when all you really want to do is drag those cockeyed gatekeepers into a wrestling ring and pile-drive them into the canvas, followed by a flying elbow smash to the face. (It goes without saying that I’m not actually advocating violence. In reality, agents are hardworking, much put-upon individuals with the thankless task of sifting through mountains of sub-par submissions searching for that nugget of gold, the type you’d definitely invite over to have tea with your gran. But this sort of mental exercise is quite common following rejection, as an aid to dealing with pent-up frustration. Or so I’ve been told.)

Suddenly, you’re avoiding the eyes of anyone you’ve ever told about that damned novel. You evade questions about the book like a politician greased in baby oil. Your own mother keeps wondering, archly, when “Tolstoy is going to be joining us for dinner”. Your humiliation is complete.

They say the average person spends eight months stuck in traffic during their lifetime. Well, the average author spends at least ten years in a state of abject self-doubt, and maybe a year as a drooling puddle of angst. Authors need a thick skin, none more so than during those years when you are first trying to get published. I’ve been there. I wrote (and submitted) seven novels across 23 years – beginning at age 17 – before being published at age 40. I know the soul-crushing feeling of rejection, the horror of being thrown off the horse and head-first into a pile of dung.

The best advice I can offer is this: wallow in misery. You heard me. Let it all out. Weep, wail, thump your chest, rend the air with your laments. Wander around like a ghoul, complaining to anyone who will listen – your mum, your friends, the postman, the guy with the glass eye at your local off license – that the system is rigged, that the industry has its head up its arse, that they don’t deserve you. Get it all out of your system. And, once you’re done, you’ll be ready to start again.

I studied economics in university. Here I encountered Maslow’s ‘hierarchy of needs’, a theory of human decision-making that suggests we all pursue a hierarchy of psychological and physical needs. Authors have a similar hierarchy, in roughly the following order: finish a novel, find an agent, find a publisher, get some sales, get some decent reviews, get invited to events, get on the awards ladder, get a bestseller tag, get your contract renewed, repeat.

And therein lies the difference between theory and reality.

Getting onto the ladder of success is no guarantee that you will stay on it or continue in a smooth upwards trajectory. Disappointment lurks around every corner waiting to beat you to death with your own shoes. Your first book (or second, or third) might not sell as many copies as your publisher had hoped. You might be deluged with negative reviews lashing your back like Jesus during The Passion. You might fall out with your agent/editor, burning your bridges by insulting their literary taste and/or choice of tea coasters. You might not get the newspaper spot you felt you deserved or that longed-for awards longlisting because some other completely undeserving writer got it. A new contract becomes an unlikely proposition – suddenly you’re about as welcome at your publisher’s offices as a turd bobbing around in the water cooler. You feel as if you’ve been cast adrift in a rowboat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. You’re clinging to the side of a cliff while a jackbooted industry avatar stamps on your fingers.

It doesn’t take much imagination to realise that these are all situations that can create incredible stress and concomitant levels of anxiety.

So what do you do? That’s the wrong question. The right question is: what can you do?

Well, option one is to crawl under a blanket, curl into a ball, and suck your thumb. This is a perfectly valid strategy. We all need time out now and again. In fact, stepping away from it all might give you the space you need to find clarity and chart a new path. A new idea that re-energises you. A new genre. Perhaps time enough to get over writer’s block and the feelings of abject failure churning around your insides like last night’s curry-tuna-pasta fusion.

A second option is to redirect your rage into risk-taking behaviour. Maybe you could take up stick-fighting like Rambo did in Thailand to overcome his demons; or maybe you’ll want to join a crotchet circle. Again, it’s about temporarily re-channelling your energies so that you can shed the negativity. Sometimes focusing on something other than writing can be highly therapeutic. I play cricket. Badly. (And if you don’t think cricket is risky just because we seem to be standing around in a field all day not really moving … think again. A saggy cucumber sandwich during the tea break can be mentally devastating.)

A third option is to sit back and review your successes to help re-inflate your ego. Celebrate small successes too.  That great review from your mum’s best friend. The weird smile on that guy’s face who bought a book at one of your signings and who definitely wasn’t a stalker. The fact that your agent still answers your emails instead of leaving a message with his secretary to tell you that he’s left the profession and moved to Guatemala to take up missionary work.

A fourth option is to seek the counsel of other people, a sympathetic ear, a pep talk, words of wisdom from those who’ve been there. Nothing wrong with that – unless, of course, you hate other people. There’s no shame in being a misanthrope. Many writers are. They’d rather shoot themselves in the face than have to make friends with other writers.

Seeking advice after things have gone wrong is particularly difficult. It’s hard not to feel as if you’ve failed, no matter the previous successes you may have had. You’re only human.

Here’s the good news. Most authors are more than happy to offer a shoulder to cry on, or a slap in the face as a means of bringing you to your senses. After all, we’ve all been there. We know what you’re going through. Guess what? We care. (I’ve said this elsewhere, but friendships are the single most important thing about this industry, and the best way to navigate its ups and downs. Because, when all else fails, they will still be there. Hopefully.)

A final option is one you won’t find in any writing manual … Quit. Yes, I said it. There’s nothing wrong in deciding that you really don’t want to put yourself through this anymore. It doesn’t have to be permanent. But there’s nothing worse than trying to slog on when every fibre of your being is pulling in the opposite direction. I don’t mean to get all Mr Miyagi on you, but your mind and body must be as one. You don’t have to get up each day positively ejaculating from your eyeballs with enthusiasm, but you do need to feel good enough about writing to want to push forward. Motivation is everything as an author. If all you want to do is take an axe to your laptop then you really aren’t in the right place to continue.

Anxiety can be crippling for a writer. Fear of failure, fear of rejection, fear of seeing your ambitions go up in smoke. These are all valid feelings and we’ve all had them at some time or another. Conventional wisdom would tell you to simply persist and keep going – and, yes, if that suits your personality and your circumstances, then absolutely you should do that.

But there are other options too; don’t be afraid of taking the unconventional path. There’s more than one way to skin a camel.

The Writer Whisperer has spoken.

(Disclaimer: I’m not a therapist, and none of the above constitutes that sort of professional advice. So don’t sue me.)

If you would like more from the Writer Whisperer … my quarterly newsletter contains articles, competitions, giveaways, short stories, book news, and recommendations. Simply register here. 

This article is one of a series of 50. Together they explore the history and culture of India from her most ancient civilisations to the nation’s ambitious space programme. All 50 articles will be collected into a digital book and published in due course. To receive a FREE copy of the book, simply register for my newsletter here.

The Indian farmer is as much a figure of mythology as any of the subcontinent’s pantheon of heroes.

From the earliest beginnings of civilisation, farming – in a largely fertile land, irrigated by multiple rivers and inundated by the annual monsoon – has formed the bedrock of Indian society. Even today some sixty percent of the country’s 1.5 billion inhabitants derive their livelihood directly from agriculture.

And yet, Indian farming is at a crossroads, at war with forces both old and new.

Image credit: Flickr: NP India burning3 CC 2.0

The subcontinent has always relied on farming, agriculture serving as the economic backbone of every major Indian civilisation and the means by which local populations were sustained. This state of affairs, one that had lasted millennia, underwent a dramatic and, for the most part, debilitating, transformation with the arrival of Europeans.

The British enterprise on the subcontinent began in a spirit of mutual trade, but, within a century, became a venture of rapacious and one-sided income generation – a large proportion of that income was derived by pushing the local agricultural ecosystem towards growing crops that could be exported for cash. Thus began a stagnation of Indian farming, and a downward slide in the welfare of farmers.

The issue was exacerbated by the country’s longstanding feudalist architecture, known as the zamindari system. Wealthy landowners – and noble houses – owned large tracts of the most fertile land and employed farm workers on terms that left them little better than bonded labour. Under the British, this rigid hierarchy was used as a means for ever-increasing taxation, including the infamous ‘Land Tax’, which, in places such as Bengal, rose as high as 90% of the rental rate of the land.

Of course, those at the top of the food chain were protected from the consequences of these draconian tithes.

In essence, the East India Company – and later, the British Crown – treated India as a vast profit centre where almost all of the profits were made on the subcontinent and then transferred overseas.

This was particularly true of crops such as cotton.

Following the American Civil War, a world shortage of American cotton saw elevated prices around the globe. Once Britain realised that cotton could be grown more cheaply in India, vast swathes of the subcontinent were turned to this enterprise. This cheap cotton was exported to British mills, to manufacture fabrics. These expensive fabrics were then imported back into India and sold to the garment industry, all but forcing Indians to buy clothes they couldn’t afford.

Little wonder then that Gandhi, attuned to the increasing dissatisfaction of the masses, led a boycott of British cloth and began making his own khadi – a rough, hand-spun fabric – on a spinning wheel. (As a piece of revolutionary propaganda it was a masterstroke, so much so that till today the enduring image of the Mahatma is of him sat in front of his wheel.) In so doing, he gave new life to the swadeshi movement – the principle of boycotting British goods, a tactic that went on to become a cornerstone of India’s campaign of non-violent resistance.

Following Indian Independence, the new Nehru government – in line with Gandhian ideals – embarked upon a programme of forcible acquisition of land from noble houses and feudal landowners in order to make a more equitable distribution among those who actually worked the land.

The strategy was only partially successful and farming remained as one of the poorest sectors of the economy in the decades to follow.

In modern times, new challenges have risen to impact the livelihoods of those in the sector.

A 2017 study by the University of California, Berkeley suggested that climate change may have contributed to the suicides of nearly 60,000 Indian farmers over the past three decades. Other statistics suggest a figure closer to 300,000 when including for those who have killed themselves due to crippling debt and other stresses associated with the sector. In 2015 alone 12000 farmers killed themselves across India; farmers immolating or poisoning themselves outside banks that held their loans have made headlines in recent years.

In response, the Indian government has enacted an insurance scheme to protect against crop failures. The scheme has met with limited success due, in part, to the old subcontinental bugbears of bureaucracy and corruption.

Some have turned to technology for a solution. For instance, farms are using sensors and connected IoT (Internet of Things) technologies to monitor crop and soil health. Artificial Intelligence-based algorithms are being used to predict the optimal time to sow seeds, or to alert farmers to risks from pest attacks.

The future is by no means secure for the Indian farmer.

But in a country where the burden of overpopulation is increasingly crippling, it is imperative that the agricultural sector innovate in order to remain productive and healthy. What can never be forgotten is that at the heart of India’s agricultural enterprise is the humble farmer, so often a hostage to fortune and to the vicissitudes of climate, economics, and political whim.

My latest novel, The Lost Man of Bombay, is set in India, in the 1950s, and features India’s first female police detective, Persis Wadia, as she investigates the body of a white man found frozen in the foothills of the Himalayas with only a small notebook containing cryptic clues. Soon, more bodies begin to pile up in Bombay, India’s city of dreams … Available from bookshops big and small and online. To see buying options please click here.  

This article is one of a series of 50 that I will be publishing on my website. Together these pieces explore the history and culture of India from her most ancient civilisations to the nation’s ambitious space programme. You can read all 50 pieces here.

All 50 articles will be collected into a digital book and published in due course. To receive a FREE copy of the book, simply register for my newsletter here. The newsletter goes out every three months and contains updates on book releases, articles, competitions, giveaways, and lots of other interesting stuff. 

This article is one of a series of 50. Together they explore the history and culture of India from her most ancient civilisations to the nation’s ambitious space programme. All 50 articles will be collected into a digital book and published in due course. To receive a FREE copy of the book, simply register for my newsletter here.

In 1998, in a small office in Delhi, a truly momentous event took place, though no one knew it at the time. An Indian entrepreneur named Pramod Bhasin invited his eighteen employees to begin taking calls on behalf of an American corporation located on the far side of the world.

India’s first modern call centre was up and running.

Picture credit: Employees operate the telephones at the Touch Solutions Ltd call centre. ©ILO/Benoit Marquet. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 IGO License.

Bhasin could not have envisaged that within a decade, hundreds of other entrepreneurs would follow in his wake, employing hordes of eager young Indians, and making India the call centre capital of the world.

This bonanza could not have been possible without a vast, English-speaking local workforce, and a low-cost telecoms infrastructure that allowed Indian companies to price out call centre operations in western nations. The economics of moving to the subcontinent made sense, outweighing concerns about accents, the infamous Indian approach to bureaucracy, and an untested workforce.

The industry saw immediate and explosive growth – over 50% per annum, year on year – some of it fuelled by an economic slowdown in the west which only encouraged more companies to cut costs by shifting back office operations overseas.

By 2015, there were more than 350,000 call centre workers in India, making it one of the most lucrative sectors in the New India economy. Blue chip companies from around the world transferred call centre ops to India. American Express, British Airways, Axa Sun Life, Top Shop, even Harrods. And why not? With starting salaries at a fifth of their British call-centre counterparts, the savings for these organisations were more than significant – they were irresistible. 

Call centre owners left nothing to chance.

Extravagant offices and inviting working environments – to levels previously unseen in India – attracted the best young workers – largely under the age of thirty, unmarried, and college-educated, both male and female. Late night buses were laid on for those working the graveyard shift. Salaries were five times greater than average. For young men on the make this sort of relative wealth made them highly sought after prospective sons-in-law.

For those serving British markets, a training regimen of British TV (e.g. soap operas such as Coronation Street and EastEnders) was imposed, aiming to familiarise workers with regional accents. Call centre operators were expected to take crash courses in British culture, celebrities, the royal family, cuisine, and how to maintain endless discussions about the weather. Local newspapers became essential reading. Many were asked to adopt western names while calling (though, in time, this strategy soured, and was later dropped), and to undergo accent neutralisation training.

Not everything went smoothly.

In many western countries, a backlash followed, initially, from workers’ unions – India’s gain was the western worker’s loss. Complaints began to flow in from customers, too – accents they couldn’t follow, the length of time it took to get someone on the line, shoddy follow-up.

And for the call centre workers themselves, the relentless grind, unsociable hours, and high expectations took their toll. Burnout led to high churn rates. Rampant consumerism saw pay packets squandered. Isolation led to mental health issues. Drug abuse became a problem.

In recent years, these failings have seen the meteoric rise of rivals in China, Eastern Europe, and, most notably, the Philippines, which, according to some, is now the world leader in call-centre services.

The response of Indian companies has been to aim higher, to evolve from just offering voice services to securing lucrative BPO – or Business Process Operations – work from their overseas clients. These more complex “non-voice” services include such offerings as running recruitment services or providing outsourced legal advice. Advanced data analysis services are another key battleground, with western retailers, in particular, keen to use Indian companies to sift through mountains of customer data in order to seek insights into their customer base.

Many Indian companies have also decided to fight their rivals the old-fashioned way – on the ground. Opting to open their own operations in rival countries, such as the Philippines, they aim to secure their future revenue streams by a combination of hard-won expertise combined with their rivals’ local assets.

Who will win the call centre war? Only time will tell.

My latest novel, The Lost Man of Bombay, is set in India, in the 1950s, and features India’s first female police detective, Persis Wadia, as she investigates the body of a white man found frozen in the foothills of the Himalayas with only a small notebook containing cryptic clues. Soon, more bodies begin to pile up in Bombay, India’s city of dreams … Available from bookshops big and small and online. To see buying options please click here.  

This article is one of a series of 50 that I will be publishing on my website. Together these pieces explore the history and culture of India from her most ancient civilisations to the nation’s ambitious space programme. You can read all 50 pieces here.

All 50 articles will be collected into a digital book and published in due course. To receive a FREE copy of the book, simply register for my newsletter here. The newsletter goes out every three months and contains updates on book releases, articles, competitions, giveaways, and lots of other interesting stuff. 

This article is one of a series of 50. Together they explore the history and culture of India from her most ancient civilisations to the nation’s ambitious space programme. All 50 articles will be collected into a digital book and published in due course. To receive a FREE copy of the book, simply register for my newsletter here.

In Danny Boyle’s Oscar-Winning hit, Slumdog Millionaire, we are confronted with a vision of life in Mumbai’s slums that has been accused by some critics of “aestheticizing poverty in India”. While this may not be entirely the case, Boyle’s depiction of a Mumbai slum and those who dwell there is more a concoction of western wishful thinking than reality. The truth is that such slums starkly represent the inequality evident in not just India, but many nations, but also act as a reminder that no matter how terrible their circumstances human beings usually find a way to adapt, survive and, in their own way, thrive.

Credit: Nishandtd85 CC 3.0

Today Mumbai is one of the world’s wealthiest cities. The past two decades have seen an enormous influx of riches – and migrants. Mumbai’s architectural map now boasts vast shopping malls, fashionable new suburbs replete with coffee shop chains, boutique hotels and megaplex cinemas, and some of the tallest skyscrapers on the subcontinent. Indeed, the world’s richest private home is in Mumbai – it belongs to one of India’s wealthiest men, a 27 storey tower worth $2billion and boasting three helipads (because, of course, one helipad just wouldn’t cut it in India’s city of dreams). Property prices in the city are among the highest in the world. 

And yet … Mumbai has the largest slum population of any urban centre in the world. More than half of the city’s population lives in slums that often lack access to clean water, electricity, and public transportation. Foremost among Mumbai’s insalubrious enclaves is Dharavi.

Founded in 1883, during the colonial era, Dharavi grew rapidly, with a significant growth spurt during Partition when incoming refugees from the newly-created Pakistan flocked to the city. Today Dharavi houses a population of 700,000-1 million (no one is entirely sure) in an area of just over two square kilometres, making it one of the most densely populated regions in the world. And yet, with a literacy rate of 69%, Dharavi is also the most educated slum in India.

Many of Dharavi’s inhabitants are second-generation migrants who have lived here for decades. They work as potters, tanners, weavers, and soap makers, and in a thousand micro-businesses whose offices are located beneath living spaces and in tiny bedrooms.The slum’s economy produces around $1 billion a year. In addition to artisan workers, Dharavi benefits from a massive recycling industry reported to employ approximately 250,000 individuals. Dharavi exports goods around the world, leather products, jewellery, accessories, and textiles. Markets for Dharavi’s goods include stores in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East. 

Yet for many, the abiding image of Dharavi is as a sort of twilight zone, where houses are constructed from whatever materials are available to hand – corrugated tin, plywood, pukkah bricks, asbestos and cardboard sheets; where black smoke from the potters’ kilns creates a constant artificial cloudbank; where hundreds of thousands of shopkeepers, street vendors, ragpickers, tinkers, tailors, black marketeers and miniature moguls operate beyond the reach of the municipal authorities; and where the sound of hammering from the metalworkers’ smithies is a constant background noise. In some ways, Dharavi is Mumbai compressed into a smaller-scale version of itself. Thousands of little one-room dwellings sprout aerials for TV connections; posters of the latest Bollywood releases are plastered on every paint-peeled wall; old men discuss the elections while smoking beedis and defecating into open sewers; women gossip as they fill buckets from communal spigots. There are even beggars here. 

As India continues to modernise, plans to redevelop the slum are regularly mooted, though little has changed on the ground. In the meantime, the slum dwellers carry on, in their own way ennobled by their life of hardship. 

And one more thing worthy of consideration. It is outsiders looking in who label them slum dwellers. To the residents of Dharavi, their environment is simply home.

My latest novel, The Lost Man of Bombay, is set in India, in the 1950s, and features India’s first female police detective, Persis Wadia, as she investigates the body of a white man found frozen in the foothills of the Himalayas with only a small notebook containing cryptic clues. Soon, more bodies begin to pile up in Bombay, India’s city of dreams … Available from bookshops big and small and online. To see buying options please click here.  

This article is one of a series of 50 that I will be publishing on my website. Together these pieces explore the history and culture of India from her most ancient civilisations to the nation’s ambitious space programme. You can read all 50 pieces here.

All 50 articles will be collected into a digital book and published in due course. To receive a FREE copy of the book, simply register for my newsletter here. The newsletter goes out every three months and contains updates on book releases, articles, competitions, giveaways, and lots of other interesting stuff.