A River Sutra was published in 1993. The novel is a series of tales told to the main character, a retirement government official who operates a guesthouse along the Narmada River. This position allows him to meet monks, musicians, and merchants who have storied to tell about their lives and about what brought them to a remote spot along a holy river.
I loved the stories, but I thought of one danger of reading books like this: old, but not exactly classics. And that is that they can reinforce stereotypes about emerging nations. The United States is a different country now than it was 31 years ago, and India is even more different. But if you don’t spend a lot of time there, you can get sucked into thinking that things remain in a past era rather than moving on. With a classic, you know it’s old. With a book that’s not really old but not really new, teasing a Little Free Library browser, you can forget the time of the setting.
And that’s the downside of this book. It presents an India that really doesn’t exist (and maybe never did), but it’s a modern text if not a current one.
