The Best Books to Read Before Traveling to India
Fiction, history, culture & stories that will deepen your experience
There are some destinations where you can show up and just “figure it out.”
India is not one of them.
India is layered. It’s ancient and modern at the same time. It’s opulent and chaotic, deeply spiritual and wildly ambitious. It is a country that rewards travelers who arrive curious, open-hearted, and mentally prepared.
Reading before visiting India is one of the most powerful ways to enrich your trip. Books provide context about history, religion, colonial influence, class, gender roles, family structures, and modern India’s rapid evolution. They help you understand what you’re seeing rather than just observing it.
Whether you prefer to read traditionally or listen on Audible (my preferred method when I’m packing or walking), here are some of our favorite books to read before traveling to India.
🌸 Light Reading (Beautiful, Immersive Fiction)
📘 The Henna Artist – Alka Joshi
Best for: Lovers of strong female leads & rich historical settings
Set in 1950s Jaipur, this novel follows Lakshmi, a fiercely independent woman who escapes an abusive marriage and builds a new life as a sought-after henna artist to the city’s elite. Through her story, you’ll glimpse post-independence India, shifting gender roles, and the tension between tradition and modern ambition. If you’re visiting Jaipur, this book will make the Pink City feel layered and alive before you even land.
Why read before your trip? It beautifully captures the energy, color, and social dynamics of Rajasthan.
📘 The Secret Keeper of Jaipur – Alka Joshi
Best for: Palace intrigue + architecture lovers
The sequel to The Henna Artist dives deeper into Jaipur’s development boom in the 1960s. Corruption, class, loyalty, and ambition all collide against the backdrop of a rapidly modernizing India. You’ll begin to understand how today’s India was shaped by both independence and political maneuvering.
Why read before your trip? It adds political and architectural context to the palaces and forts you’ll explore.
📘 The Perfumist of Paris – Alka Joshi
Best for: Women navigating identity & reinvention
The third installment of the series moves between India and Europe, exploring identity, migration, and ambition. While not entirely set in India, it deepens your understanding of the Indian diaspora and the global ties that connect modern India to the rest of the world.
Why read before your trip? It highlights how India’s story doesn’t exist in isolation, it’s globally intertwined.
📘 The Love Match – Priyanka Taslim
Best for: Modern arranged marriage perspective
A charming, contemporary story centered around a Bengali-American teen navigating family expectations, dating, and cultural identity. It offers a lighter take on arranged marriage and the push-pull between tradition and individuality.
Why read before your trip? It humanizes cultural conversations around marriage in a modern way.
📘 Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows – Balli Kaur Jaswal
Best for: Bold readers who like humor with depth
What starts as a creative writing class for conservative widows becomes a surprisingly empowering story about voice, repression, and female autonomy. It’s witty, smart, and layered beneath its provocative title.
Why read before your trip? It explores generational tension and cultural nuance in a way that’s both entertaining and revealing.
🏛️ Non-Fiction & History (For Context Lovers)
📘 The British in India – David Gilmour
Best for: Anyone curious about colonial impact and modern India’s foundation.
To understand modern India, its railways, language, architecture, bureaucracy, and even social hierarchies, you must understand the British Raj. This book explores the British presence in India through personal stories and political shifts, showing both the opulence and the harm of colonial rule.
It helps explain why English is widely spoken. Why certain buildings look European. Why independence still feels recent in the cultural memory.
Why read before your trip? Because colonialism shaped India and you will see its fingerprints everywhere.
📘 Koh-I-Noor – William Dalrymple
Best for: Lovers of royal history, power struggles, and dramatic storytelling.
This isn’t just a book about a diamond. It’s a story about conquest, empire, shifting power, and cultural ownership. The Koh-I-Noor passed through Mughal rulers, Persian invaders, Sikh emperors, and eventually into British hands.
It’s glamorous and political and heartbreaking all at once and it reveals how objects can carry centuries of violence and prestige.
When you walk through forts and palaces, you’ll start to understand that jewels weren’t just adornment. They were strategy. They were dominance. They were survival.
Why read before your trip? It reframes India’s royal history in a way that feels alive and charged.
✨ Deep, Complex & Not Always a Happy Ending
These books are beautifully written but often intense. They reveal social systems, poverty, patriarchy, and inequality, all part of India’s layered reality.
📘 The Covenant of Water – Abraham Verghese
Best for: Readers who love sweeping, multi-generational epics.
Set in Kerala and spanning nearly a century, this novel follows one family across generations marked by faith, medicine, secrets, and a mysterious condition that haunts them. Verghese writes with intimacy and patience, you feel the weight of tradition, the power of arranged marriages, the sacredness of water, and the tension between science and spirituality.
It’s lush and immersive and deeply human.
Why read before your trip? It gives you insight into Indian family structures and the way legacy, duty, and devotion shape identity.
📘 The Palace of Illusions – Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Best for: Mythology lovers and those curious about India’s epic traditions.
This is a retelling of the Mahabharata from Draupadi’s perspective, one of the most significant female figures in Indian mythology. The story blends politics, war, love, destiny, and divine intervention.
In India, mythology isn’t just literature; it influences architecture, art, language, festivals, and daily references. This book gives you a doorway into that world.
Why read before your trip? Because India’s epics are woven into the cultural fabric, and understanding even a fraction of them adds depth to everything.
📘 Tomb of Sand – Geetanjali Shree
Best for: Literary fiction readers who appreciate nuance.
Winner of the International Booker Prize, this novel centers on an elderly woman who decides to confront her past after the death of her husband, including memories of Partition. Partition (the division of India and Pakistan in 1947) reshaped millions of lives and still echoes today.
This book is poetic, layered, and reflective, more about internal landscapes than external plot.
Why read before your trip? Because Partition shaped modern India in ways that still influence identity and politics.
📘 Behind the Beautiful Forevers – Katherine Boo
Best for: Readers who want to understand modern inequality.
This is narrative journalism at its most powerful. Boo spent years reporting on families living in a Mumbai slum near the airport. The result is intimate, raw, and deeply human.
It does not sensationalize. It reveals. It shows ambition, corruption, survival, and the complexity of poverty in a rapidly globalizing city.
India holds luxury and struggle side by side. This book helps you hold both realities without simplifying either.
Why read before your trip? It grounds you. It prepares you to witness without romanticizing.
📘 The White Tiger – Aravind Adiga
Best for: Readers who appreciate sharp satire and uncomfortable truths.
This Booker Prize winner follows Balram, a driver who navigates India’s brutal class hierarchy. It’s darkly funny, biting, and provocative. Through Balram’s voice, you see the tension between opportunity and exploitation in modern India.
It’s uncomfortable, but intentionally so.
Why read before your trip? Because it challenges idealized narratives and forces you to consider systems beneath surface beauty.
📘 Shantaram – Gregory David Roberts
Best for: Big, immersive, philosophical storytelling.
Nearly 1,000 pages (highly recommend listening on Audible), this novel follows an escaped Australian convict who rebuilds his life in Mumbai’s underworld. It’s romantic and violent and chaotic and reflective.
It captures Mumbai’s intensity, the sensory overload, the contradictions, the humanity.
Why read before your trip? Because it mirrors India’s scale: sprawling, layered, impossible to categorize.
Final Thoughts: India is not a destination you check off
It’s a place that shifts you.
Reading beforehand doesn’t just prepare you, it deepens everything. The monuments feel more meaningful. The food tastes richer. The conversations land differently.
So whether you’re joining us on an I Galavant with us or planning your own bespoke India adventure, start with a book.
And arrive ready.
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