Let’s start with the memoir, Beautiful Thing, about bar dancers in Mumbai. This really jumped off the page at me when I read some of the reviews.

It is an unusual book. It’s a memoir, or really a piece of reportage, but it reads like a novel. It’s the story of Leela, who runs away from a small town in North India because she’s being rented out by her father. She ends up in Bombay, and becomes a bar dancer. The book is written very much from Leela’s perspective, although it’s also about the interaction between the author, Sonia Faleiro, and Leela. You’re seeing the sex trade from a woman’s perspective in a way that is very rarely written about. And you can’t really say it’s only about the sex trade, because it’s a lot more than that. It’s really about human relations, the interactions, the power play between individuals.

Leela became a bar dancer in Bombay, and at that time a bar dancer had a particular status. You were not a prostitute, and yet that could sometimes become part of what you did for your work. The book looks at the interaction between the bar dancers and their customers, and at the borderline society they live in. The nub of the book is that in about 2005 the government in Bombay decided, as a kind of a moralistic crackdown, to close all the bars. This meant the bar dancers were left with nothing, and had very bleak options before them.

It’s a shocking book?

Yes, it’s deeply shocking.

What in particular?

I think any story, or social arrangement, can be shocking when you see it from the inside. The way in which some of the people in the book are treated, the things that people do to each other, the kind of betrayals between mothers and sons, or fathers and daughters or mothers and daughters. I think that’s what makes it really shocking, and makes it read like fiction. It’s a book that someone unfamiliar with India might find a bit hard at first, but it takes you right inside that world. The voice of Leela is done very well.

It’s the combination of the glamour and the degradation that makes it fascinating, this book. You have the momentary glamour of the dancer in the bar, and then you have the edifice that holds up that world.

So the bars are shut down. Is there a moral to the story?

You don’t know, at the end of the book, what happens to Leela. But as a bar dancer she had a certain position and status, which she was very conscious of. And you can make quite a lot of money. Your choice after that is, either you manage to move off and start a new life, or you go abroad to Dubai, or you end up in a brothel or, if you’re lucky, you end up as a madam in a brothel in Mumbai.

Is it a good book to read if you’re visiting Mumbai?

It’s more of a glimpse into Indian society. And it’s about the human condition, the relationship between men and women.

Your next choice is India after Gandhi, a post-independence history.

Yes, and the best bit of it, or the bit I enjoyed most, was the 1940s, 50s and 60s. What’s good about this book is that it’s almost like a conversational argument with the reader. It’s a very lively history. It makes you think. You’ll read one page and you’ll agree. You’ll read another page and you’ll disagree. And it gets right inside that period of the first few decades after independence in a way that I don’t think any other book does.

Do you need to know a lot about Nehru and the other important political figures of that era in order to fully enjoy it?

Not really. I think the best history books can be understood by any reader with basic knowledge, and yet they can also be stimulating and exciting to somebody who knows a lot about the subject. I’d say that this book manages to span both.

Can you give me some examples from the book, things you found really intriguing or surprising?

There are so many different things. It could be the situation in Kashmir and how and why the problem between India and Pakistan developed, or the account of the 1962 border war between India and China. There’s a level of very interesting social detail. For example, one of the things the author does quite cleverly is he goes back to the way that events were written about in newspapers at the time, and quotes from them. Or he quotes from people’s personal journals and letters. You really get a very vivid sense of how history was unfolding and, also, just how difficult a lot of the decisions were that faced the Indian leaders in the decades after independence. They had such huge things to deal with.

The book’s subtitle is The History of the World’s Largest Democracy. is that an overall theme – scepticism about whether democracy could work in a huge, poor country like India and how they succeeded?

It’s one of the themes.