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There is a publishing boom in fiction by authors from the Indian subcontinent. Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, and Bangladeshi authors are being discovered almost daily. The literature from India is several thousand years old. However, following the notoriety of Salman Rushdie, the meteoric success of Arundhati Roy’s novel The God of Small Things, and the Oscar-winning screen adaptation of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, it is almost impossible to open the New York Times Book Review without reading of another new highly-praised novelist from the region. Most of these authors write in English. Many are expatriates, living in Canada, England or the United States. These novels, with the variety of experiences described, in settings that are exotic and often unknown to the average high school or college student, are ideal for a Reading Across the Curriculum assignment in the social sciences. In the assignments, each student reads a work of fiction from an approved bibliography and writes a book review that applies the sociological, political, historical, and/or economic concepts that have been covered in class to the contents of the novel. Often the student is also required to research the cultural, ethnic, or national milieu in which the novel is written.

Instructors who have used fiction to teach social science classes report that their students seem more engaged in the content area because of their fictional explorations. The novels tend to make real the theoretical issues discussed in the classroom.

The Reading Across the Curriculum assignment has been developed to meet many educational objectives. First, because students are reading less, it is important to encourage them to read. Any librarian can cite statistics to document the problem. In my own library, periodical usage is down almost 80 percent from pre-Internet days. Book circulation has taken a 30 percent dive. In addition, textbooks that prepackage excerpts from larger works are the sine qua non of most courses. The days when a student was required to read several complete works in the course of a semester largely exist in the memories of aging baby boomers. It is easy to blame the Internet or television, either of which, with quick hits and sound bites, encourages the short attention span of high school and young undergraduate students. It is also possible to craft reading assignments to counter this trend.

Second, many educational institutions are including international education and diversity initiatives in their mission state- ments. At my own college, the Liberal Arts Division mission statement says, “Johnson County Community College will actively promote the understanding and appreciation of diversity . . . through the implementation of curriculum initiatives and activities as a natural part of the educational process in order to create an environment that values all people.” Using an international or multicultural reading assignment allows an instructor to incor­porate an international or diversity compo­nent into a course without substantially altering the teaching syllabus.

Third, the assignment of a novel not only encourages reading, but also encour­ages use of the library’s resources. It is unfortunately naive to assume that college students will go to the library to check out good literature for recreational pleasure. In my library, the novels with the highest cir­culation statistics are those on Reading Across the Curriculum bibliographies and the old-standbys by authors like Hemingway, Poe, and Fitzgerald, which are assigned routinely in high school, col­lege, and even graduate school.

Fourth, it is difficult, perhaps impos­sible, to cut and paste together a paper that meets the goals of the Reading Across the Curriculum assignment. Thus, students are forced to think about the material and write a paper based on their own ideas. Given the nature of the writing required, an instructor can recognize plagiarism almost instantly. And since each student reviews a different book, each paper is somewhat unique.

While there are no statistical studies about the success of this type of assign­ment, there are anecdotal reports. Instruc­tors who have used fiction to teach social science classes report that their students seem more engaged in the content area because of their fictional explorations. The novels tend to make real the theoretical issues discussed in the classroom.

I know of social science classes in which a bibliography of African or Latin American novels is used. I have also seen classes where a bibliography of interna­tional novels from a number of countries is used. I have not yet encountered a class that uses novels from the Indian subconti­nent exclusively. Yet the region is larger than Europe, encompassing four countries, each with a variety of religious and ethnic groups. India alone recognizes fourteen official languages. Now, with so many authors being published, it is possible to compile an impressive bibliography of contemporary Indian fiction, which includes that of her close neighbors.

Virtually every novel on the bibliog­raphy addresses a number of significant issues. Here are three examples. Moth Smoke by Mohsin Hamid looks at the ram­pant political and economic corruption in Pakistan where the rich and powerful get away with virtually all the crimes they commit, while talented but poorly con­nected individuals like the protagonist Daru and his drug-dealing friend Murad must pander to the wealthy or turn to crime for economic success. Women in Moth Smoke, like Daru’s lover Mumtaz, are forced into subterfuge in order to pur­sue a career. Her work as an investigative journalist is published under a masculine pseudonym. A sociology student could use the novel as the focal point for a discus­sion of women’s issues or of crime in a society where most of the wealth is con­centrated in a small percentage of families.

Nectar in a Sieve by Kamala Markan­daya, tells the story of the arrival of a tan­nery in a traditional village. It shows how fragile a traditional agrarian society can be, and how little it takes to turn a prosper­ous small farmer into a beggar. Issues of class and caste, of the woman’s role in tra­ditional society, of the exploitation of peasants by factory owners, and of family organization are all present in the novel.

Now, with so many authors being published, it is possible to compile an impressive bibliography of contemporary Indian fiction, which includes that of her close neighbors.

Finally, The God of Small Things, ostensibly the story of a tragic love affair between an upper-class woman and an untouchable man, delineates the persistence of caste in India. It is a marvelous example of politics gone mad when the Communist demonstrations, just to prove a point, force the closing of the pickle factory that has been the community’s economic mainstay. Again, it shows how little women are valued, even educated women. Just incidentally, it also is concerned with child sexual abuse and the resultant trauma. These three novels are only examples of the richness of the fiction for use in research papers focusing on issues discussed in the classroom.

Below is a selective, annotated bibli­ography of Indian, Pakistani, and Sri Lankan fiction. Following each citation, if it can be determined, I have noted the region or city and sometimes the religious group about which the author is writing. I have only included books that I have per­sonally read, or at least examined. I have made no attempt to be comprehensive. I have included works by expatriate authors that examine the lives of immigrants, e.g., Jhumpa Lahiri and V. S. Naipaul, because of my belief that immigrants bring their cultures with them. The lives of Gujuratis in Trinidad or Bengalis in New England relate more to their experiences as Ben­galis or Gujuratis than to life in their new homes. Many of the authors, like R. K. Narayan, Salman Rushdie, V. S. Naipaul and Anita Desai, are prolific writers, only a few of whose works I have cited. In the case of Vikram Seth, I have read and enjoyed but did not cite The Golden Gate, or An Equal Music because neither book introduces a student to the subcontinent or to the experiences of its immigrants abroad. The same rationale applies to the omission of Ondaatje’s English Patient, despite its one Sikh character. I have not yet read some authors, for example, Romesh Guneskera, Raj Kamal Jha, Amit Chaudhuri, Bapsi Sidhwa, and Kushwant Singh, and have perhaps inadvertently omitted other authors’ finest works. Like all bibliographies, it is a work in progress and will continue to grow.