Tag
South Asia
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“A Safe Haven”: Huguenots, Jews, and Bangladeshis in Brick Lane, London
Jamme Masjid, the famed mosque at 59 Brick Lane, used to be a Jewish synagogue; before that, a Methodist church; and even before that, a Huguenot chapel.
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Islamic Alternatives to Global Finance
Across the Muslim world today ambitious experiments are underway to create an Islamic alternative to conventional finance. These initiatives are inspired by the …
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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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Cosmopolitans in Indian Fiction
“What does it take to stop dreaming of alternative lives?” Two versions of this question from Anjum Hasan’s The Cosmopolitans speak to challenges now faced around the globe. First: what would it take—in India, in America, anywhere in 2016—to stop dreaming of alternative political systems and pathways for migration, of alternatives to poverty, scarcity, inequality,…
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Seeing Things
December 1, 2015 — One of the great myths of our time concerns the promise of a global vision, of seeing things with the power, distance, and clarity of an all-encompassing vantage point, what Donna Haraway once called “the god trick.”1 It is no surprise that the first photographs to give this kind of perspective on…
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O My Swineherd!
The last century may have ushered in an epoch of wars that have no end, but Homer’s Odyssey continues to inspire. You do not have to be James Joyce or Derek Walcott to find the story of a man’s protracted struggle to return home from a fight he did not want appealing. With Odysseus Abroad,…
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Gems, Monsters, and Broodmares for Corpses
“No Hindu ever reads the Mahabharata for the first time,” A. K. Ramanujan, the celebrated poet, translator, and linguist, once wrote. The same cannot be said of the reader of contemporary literary English. Most have probably heard of the Bhagavad Gita, some might have an acquaintance with one of the poem’s modern Indian television avatars…
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Complicity and Critique
In a posh Delhi neighborhood, in a walled estate with glass chandeliers and bathrooms of Italian marble, a 25-year-old heir to his family’s business and real estate fortune dreams of transforming the world with his money. “Have you seen what the Rockefellers did,” he asks. “Every person in [the United States] is somehow touched by…
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Lahiri, High and Low
Before beginning graduate school, I promised myself that I would never write about Jhumpa Lahiri. I had studied Lahiri’s debut novel, The Namesake (2003), in a maddening undergraduate literature course called “Good Girls, Bad Girls,” and at the time, it represented everything I sought to resist: “model minority” mythology; ethnic assimilationist imperatives; diasporic nostalgia. The Namesake had…
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Margaret Mead’s Countercultures
If you were raised in the United States during the 1960s, as I was, and if you came of intellectual age in the 1980s, as I did, chances are that you too have inherited a strangely black-and-white history of mid-20th-century American culture. The story goes something like this: In the wake of World War II,…
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Calcutta’s Via Negativa
Amit Chaudhuri is, as is perhaps not widely enough recognized, the author of five remarkable novels, as well as a collection of short stories, a book of poetry, a work of academic literary criticism, and a volume of critical reviews and essays. (He is also a musician and composer of some note.) At one time…
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To Chuck or Not to Chuck
Cricket has a certain charge in writings on the postcolonial world as a site of political contestation between decolonized subjects and their former colonial masters. Scholars such as C. L. R. James, Arjun Appadurai, and Simon Gikandi have written of cricket as a central part of the “colonial ecumene” (Appadurai) in India and the West…
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The American Dream Outsourced: India and the Genre of Growth
For much of the twentieth century, the conjugation of “India” and “economic growth” invoked either despair or derision. The phrase “Hindu rate of growth”—coined by economist Raj Krishna to distinguish India’s nominal 3.5 percent average rate of growth between 1950 and the 1980s from that of the dynamic “tiger” economies, South Korea and Taiwan—captured both…
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The City as Literary Field
Sujan Singh Park is a tiny neighborhood by Delhi standards—more of a large square than a full-fledged “colony,” as the upper-middle-class neighborhoods of South Delhi are called. But this one happens to be where the city’s linguistic, social, and architectural capitals meet. Madhu Jain, a chronicler of the Indian arts scene, describes Sujan Singh Park…
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Lives at the Urban Margins
“Every great city,” wrote Friedrich Engels, in The Condition of the Working Class in England, “has one or more slums, where the working-class is crowded together. True, poverty often dwells in hidden alleys close to the palaces of the rich; but, in general, a separate territory has been assigned to it, where, removed from the…
