Rahul Bhattacharya

Rahul Bhattacharya was born in 1979 in Mumbai and studied at St Xavier's College before turning to writing — initially journalism for Wisden CricInfo, where he covered cricket in the Caribbean, and then the travel writing that grew out of those assignments.

The Sly Company of People Who Care (2011) is his debut, and it is extraordinary. It is set in Guyana — a country that travel writing had almost entirely ignored — among the Indo-Guyanese community whose ancestors were brought from India as indentured labourers after the abolition of slavery. Bhattacharya spent months in the country, and his account moves between the racial complexity of Guyanese society, the extraordinary landscape of the Rupununi savannah and the forested interior, and the personal encounters that accumulate into something like an understanding.

The prose is dense and assured — influenced by V.S. Naipaul (who also wrote about the Indian Caribbean diaspora) but looser and warmer, less politically certain. Bhattacharya is interested in what India means to people who have been Indian for 150 years in a place where India is a memory, not a present reality.

His cricket writing, collected in Pundits from Pakistan (2005), shows the same quality of attention applied to a form of international travel that is specific to cricket nations.