Selected Book Reviews
Review of Love, War and Other Longings: Essays on Cinema in Pakistan
How to engage with cinema simultaneously as a fan and a critic? This compelling book does exactly that, a much-needed respite from film criticism that sometimes becomes a joyless bludgeon. The editors, Vazira Zamindar and Asad Ali, have compiled a series of 11 eclectic engagements with contemporary Pakistani cinema that manage to offer significant insight and historical context while simultaneously engaging with those aspects of the cinema that touch the heart.
Review of Nacohus, by Purushottam Agrawal
Dreams and reality merge in this 2016 dystopian novel by the well-known Hindi satirist and writer Purushottam Agrawal. The novel begins when a crocodile leisurely walks down a small street and begins to chew on the leg of an elephant who happens to be lying there. No one seems to notice.
“Indian Queer Futures”
Review of Mohanaswamy by Vasudhendra and Murder in Mahim by Jerry Pinto
There has been a flourishing of queer representations and texts in India today. This has included sex-positive websites like Agents of Ishq, e-zines such as Gaysi, graphic novels such as Kari (2008), and Bollywood films such as Aligarh (2016), along with a range of queer voices in fiction. Although some of these texts specifically address the continuing need to repeal Section 377, others have begun to consider the diversity of queer lives in the heterogeneous subcultures that constitute India today. These texts present queer formations across traditional divides of urban/rural and English/bhasha to offer new possibilities for queer representation in India beyond the legal domain.
“Great Aspirations”
Review of One Indian Girl by Chetan Bhagat
Chetan Bhagat is possibly the most successful Indian English novelist ever, having sold over seven million copies of his books over a relatively short career. But he is largely unheard of in the West, part of a trend in Indian publishing that has seen the rise of numerous popular authors writing in English who make little effort to market themselves outside of India.
Indian critics often see Bhagat’s popularity as a reflection of a recent rightward shift in public culture, marked by an embrace of Hindu nationalism and free-market capitalism. The fact that in interviews and op-eds Bhagat often espouses right-wing views bolsters this sense that his works represent a rejection of the secularism and cosmopolitanism of Nehru and his followers. Bhagat’s fiction also demonstrates significantly less artistry than Indian English novels by authors such as Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry, and Jhumpa Lahiri that have gained international fame. But it is precisely for these reasons that Bhagat’s works appeal to a broad spectrum of readers in India’s expanding middle class.
“Pakistan’s Place in World Literature”
Review of Mirages of the Mind by Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi
There are international novels you read and feel fairly certain will circulate among book clubs and appear on display tables at trendy bookstores in the US. Mirages of the Mind, published in 1990 in Urdu as Aab-e-gum and now ably translated into English, is not one of those. The novel is intelligent, sarcastic, at times laugh-out-loud funny, and captures a certain sensibility in South Asian writing that is—to use an unpopular word—authentic. And yet, unfortunately, Yousufi’s work is unlikely to compel many American readers of international fiction. The plot is loose and episodic, the characters are rendered more with a satirical eye than an interest in complex psychology, and themes of exile, nostalgia, loss, and history—favorites of US readers of international fiction—are treated either tongue-in-cheek or ignored altogether.