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Book recommendations
9bbB1v
No.725
There exists a significant percentage of urban English educated middle class who can no longer speak or read their mother tongue fluently.
There are many who can't string a single sentence together without throwing in some English (source: me). It's the khichdi phenomenon.
Top 10 most spoken languages of India:
1. Hindi
2. Bengali
3. Marathi
4. Telugu
5. Tamil
6. Gujarati
7. Kannada
8. Odia
9. Punjabi
10. Malayalam
I want some book recommendations (at least 15) for each of these languages that fulfill the following criteria:
>beginner friendly for slow readers, new learners, and the linguistically challenged
>not leftist trash
>not translations
>preferably fiction
>ideally doesn't use a lot of English loan words, but not priority as such
A list of useful dictionaries, apps, software etc. would be appreciated as well.
Feel free to recommend classics, but my priority is for easy beginner friendly reads, regardless of genre.
The larger goal is to help build an ecosystem for indigenous languages to flourish in.
I know there are a few platforms like Pratilipi, but I haven't used it so don't know much about it.
Anons who have used it or other similar platforms, please share your experience as to the content, quality, etc.
There are also very few ebooks out there. By ebooks I don't mean shitty scanned PDFs from the 2000s, but proper reflowable EPUBs that are compatible with e-readers. But that's a story for another thread.
Give me your best anons!
s5sfar
No.736
>>725(OP)
Try Nirmal Verma's works. 'Ve Din', 'Raat ka Reporter', 'Antim Aranya', etc. He was a leftist at the onset of his career, but slowly became sympathetic to soft-revivalist causes. As long as you're well versed in at least one tradition (either Hindi or English) you won't have a problem in reading him, as he's directly influenced by Proust, etc.
Secondly, I know you prefer fiction, but if you're open to travelogues and non-fiction, Rahul Sankrityayan should be your go-to. He's literally one of the most underrated scholars of the 20th century and the amount of work he's done in his field (Buddhism + Indology) is massive. A word of caution: he's a staunch Marxist and synthesizing Buddhist ideas with Marxism was one of his projects. (which is why I recommended you his non-political works).
Works: 'Meri Tibbat Yatra', 'Ghumakkad Shastra'
Another guy is Krishna Baldev Vaid, who is famous for his structurally and linguistically experimental works. Works: 'Uska Bachpan', 'Bimal urf Jaayein toh Jaayein Kahan'.
I could've also recommended you Agyeya, but he uses heavily Sanskritized vocabulary and it takes quite a time to get hang of his style. Works: 'Shekhar Ek Jeevni', 'Nadi ke Dweep'.
Political satires: try Parsai, Shrilal Shukla
that's all i know for stuff that'
