Tag
India
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The Allure of Postcolonial Pathos
“To what extent might the Booker—and venues like it in Europe and the US—be drawn for self-serving reasons to fiction like Kiran Desai’s?”
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Silicon Valley Is Not a Place
Silicon Valley has no mystical powers. It gets away with being thought of as apolitical simply because few have called its bluff.
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India’s Fans and India’s Future
Obsession is one of the hallmarks of love in Indian cinema: specifically, a love that breaks down borders.
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The Ruse of Fiction: An Interview with Amitava Kumar
Amitava Kumar’s recent novel, Immigrant, Montana, tells the story of Kailash, an Indian graduate student who …
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Fill the Halls: Space and Possibility in Lahore, Pakistan
Lahore today can feel like a city of security checks and gated passages, tall walls and …
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Risky Choices: Women and Cabs in Hyderabad, India
The arrival of app-based ride-hailing in Indian cities has made a significant difference in the way the middle class, especially young men and women …
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India’s Youth: Small Chances, Big Dreams
The first time someone recommended Snigdha Poonam’s Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing the World to me, I rolled my eyes at the title. I wondered …
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The Banality of Empire
One of the basic paradoxes of British imperialism is that even as it relied so fundamentally on violence, it insisted on presenting itself as opposed to violence, indeed as dedicated to stamping it out. In 1856, a London newspaper called the Examiner insisted that “wherever there are Europeans, no matter whether officials, merchants, or missionaries,…
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We Are All King Lear’s Children
Which is Shakespeare’s timeliest play—the one that best mirrors our present moment? This is a perennial question, and perhaps a silly one, but we might begin an answer …
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Virtual Roundtable on “The Mana of Mass Society”
Many of anthropology’s terms of art are taken from afar. Especially in the half century after 1870 …
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India’s Garbage Politics
Writing in 1993, after decades spent documenting America’s shifting landscapes, poet A. R. Ammons suggested that “garbage [ought] to be the poem of our time.” Inspired by “mounds of disposal” along a stretch of I-95 in Florida, Ammons’s plea to recognize the silent ubiquity of waste would grow into a book-length tribute.1 But the waste…
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Virtual Roundtable on Presidential First Use of Nuclear Weapons
Is it legal? Is it constitutional? Is it just?
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Global Water Wars and the Public Good
Future global water wars are now widely predicted. In 1995, Ismail Seragaldin, vice president of the World Bank (1993–2000), first raised the specter of crisis with the …
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Indian Queer Futures
The landmark Delhi High Court verdict in 2009 striking down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code—the section criminalizing homosexual sex—heralded a significant shift in queer activism and queer representations in India. While the verdict was the result of extended campaigns by the Naz Foundation and others, the euphoria that followed the Delhi High Court’s…
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Great Aspirations
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…
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The Indispensable Anger of Arundhati Roy
Angry novels are divisive. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Arundhati Roy’s hyperanticipated and indignant return to fiction, has accordingly delighted and …
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Cricket and the Future of India
“What is cricket?” Does it represent the past or the future of India? The first time the question appears in Aravind Adiga’s Selection Day, Mumbai scout Tommy …
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Signs of Bombay
In December 2016, Public Books Editor in Chief Sharon Marcus spent a few days in Mumbai, participating in the Times of India Literary Festival and walking around the city. Mumbai, also known as …
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Singing in the Dark
They came to bury her with praises but, defeated once again by her sheer presence, their words shriveled and rotted in the monsoon damp. As Mahasweta Devi’s dead body lay in a Kolkata hospital on July 28, 2016, Indian politicians—many of whom Devi had fought throughout her life with great courage—queued up to make a…
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A Storm of Words
Imagine a world where the hottest degree was an MPA, a Masters in Poetry Administration. Where a single poem could send global financial markets into a spin, where poets were the envy of all, and instead of shopping for material objects people ran out to buy poems to hang on the walls of their parlours. This…
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The Pocketbook Illustrations of the Rebel Artist B. M. Anand
This photo-essay was originally published in The Caravan. The featured artwork has been excerpted from Aditi Anand and Grant Pooke, Narratives for Indian Modernity: The Aesthetic of Brij Mohan Anand (HarperCollins India, 2016). Born in 1928, the artist Brij Mohan Anand was greatly informed by the political and social climate around him. Anand grew up…
