The literature of colonial India has two distinct bodies: work written by or from the perspective of the colonizers, which tends to treat India as backdrop, problem, or symbol; and work by Indian writers reckoning with what colonialism did — to the subcontinent, to its people, to the languages and cultures that were distorted by over a century of British rule. The books worth reading are the ones that understand colonialism not as a historical setting but as a structural condition whose effects are still being worked through.
E.M. Forster's A Passage to India (1924) is the most significant British novel about colonial India, and it is significant precisely because Forster understood the impossibility of the relationships it depicts. The friendship between Fielding and Dr. Aziz, and the question of whether an English woman was assaulted by an Indian man in the Marabar Caves, are not solvable because they exist within a system that makes honest communication between colonizer and colonized structurally impossible. Forster does not resolve the ambiguity of what happened in the caves; the point is that the colonial context makes the truth inaccessible regardless of what actually occurred.
Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981) takes the end of British rule as its starting point: Saleem Sinai is born at the exact moment of Indian independence, August 15, 1947, and his life is allegorically linked to the life of the new nation. The novel uses magic realism not as decoration but as formal argument: the history of colonialism and partition is so extreme, so implausible in its actual details, that realism cannot contain it. What Rushdie is doing is reclaiming the right to tell India's story in a form that India — polytheistic, multilingual, mythologically rich — can recognize as its own rather than an imitation of the British novel.
Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (1997) is set in 1969 Kerala, examining two families whose lives are shaped by the intersecting hierarchies of caste, class, and the residue of colonial social organization. Roy's central relationship — the love affair between Ammu, a Syrian Christian woman, and Velutha, an Untouchable — is transgressive along multiple axes simultaneously, and the novel's structural conceit (moving back and forth in time toward a tragedy the reader knows is coming) enacts the way that social structures maintain themselves through the anticipation of punishment. The "small things" of the title are the ordinary human bonds that the "big things" — ideology, law, history — cannot finally suppress but also cannot protect.
Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy (1993) is set in newly independent India in 1951 — the colonial period just ended — and follows four families across a year as the country holds its first elections and a mother tries to arrange her daughter's marriage. The novel is enormous (1,349 pages) and deliberately so: Seth is constructing a social world as complete as those of Tolstoy and George Eliot, and the scale is the argument. India in 1951 is a country with a history and a social texture that cannot be reduced to its colonial experience; the novel is a refusal to let that history be the only story.
Amitav Ghosh's Ibis trilogy — beginning with Sea of Poppies (2008) — traces the opium trade between India and China through the voices of an ensemble cast that includes indentured laborers, American sailors, a Bengali zamindar, and a French botanist. Ghosh is interested in the economic infrastructure of colonial rule: the opium grown in Bihar, processed at British-owned factories, shipped to China at gunpoint when the Chinese tried to stop the trade. The trilogy makes visible the machinery that made empire profitable and examines what that machinery did to the people who passed through it.
Saadat Hasan Manto's stories, collected in Manto: Selected Stories, are the most direct literary account of the 1947 Partition — the displacement of twelve million people and the death of between 200,000 and two million — written from the inside. Manto was a Punjabi writer who moved from Bombay to Lahore after Partition and wrote about the violence with a directness that got him tried for obscenity six times. His stories do not explain the violence or provide context; they render specific acts and their aftermath with a compression that resists the packaging of atrocity into history.