Description

Over four years, journalist Shruti Vasudevan travelled the country — not the country of Delhi book launches and Bengaluru tech parks, but the other India that begins twenty kilometres beyond any state capital and stretches, almost unwitnessed by the English press, across 6,40,000 villages and 1,000 small towns.

She rode a bullock cart through drought-cracked Marathwada in the third year of the climate crisis. She slept on the floor of a tribal schoolteacher’s home in southern Chhattisgarh. She spent a month in a Kerala fishing harbour where the catch had collapsed by 80 percent. She interviewed Manipuri women in IDP camps during the 2023 conflict. She drank tea with sugarcane labourers in western UP, transgender activists in Coimbatore, Bohra businesswomen in Surat, and a retired Naga insurgent in Mokokchung who had, by the end of the conversation, agreed to translate his unpublished memoir into English.

What emerges, across thirty-one chapters, is a portrait of contemporary India that no television studio is broadcasting and no political party is honestly describing — a country at once more wounded, more inventive, more religious, more unequal, and far more interesting than the metropolitan imagination is prepared for.

Brilliantly reported, fearlessly written, and deeply respectful of the people whose lives it records, *A Country of Strangers* is the most important book about contemporary India published this decade.