Samskara: A Rite for a Dead Man (New York Review Books Classics)

Samskara is one of the acknowledged masterpieces of modern world literature, a book to set beside Chinua Achebe s Things Fall Apart and Tayeb Salih s Season of Migration to the North. Taking its name from a Sanskrit word that means rite of passage but also moment of recognition, it begins when Naranappa, an inhabitant of a small south Indian town and a renegade Brahmin who has scandalously flouted the rules of caste and purity for years, eating meat, drinking alcohol, marrying beneath him, mocking God, unexpectedly falls ill and dies.