Reading India Now

“Reading India Now is a very compelling and persuasive book that offers illuminating analyses, sharp insights, and new perspectives about how contemporary Indian literature and culture demand that we reinvent the very language and lens through which we approach not just Indian literature, but all literature and culture that is contemporary. Anjaria’s book is a well-researched and wide-ranging work that intervenes in the fields of Postcolonial Literatures, Global Anglophone Literatures, and South Asian Literatures and Cultures in extremely interesting and important ways.”—Kavita Daiya, Director of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program, Associate Professor of English at George Washington University, and author of Violent Belongings: Partition, Gender, and National Culture in Postcolonial India (Temple)

"In Reading India Now, Ulka Anjaria outlines an epistemology for current scholarship in the fields of Indian literary theory and popular culture. Anjaria’s project is to interpret contemporary works of mainstream Indian literature and culture not only as symptoms of our historical time but also identify countercultural and resistant elements in these texts.... Reading India Now covers a variety of contemporary cultural texts and Anjaria's close textual analysis brings up pertinent questions of representation and criticism in these works."—Studies in South Asian Film and Media

"Ulka Anjaria’s Reading India Now attends to India’s shifting literary landscape with the necessary urgency and precision.... [It] offers a necessary corrective to scholarship on postliberalization India that remains attached to a story of cultural and political decline. In doing so, it adds a much-needed chapter to studies of Indian English literature which have favored globally circulating works over those that enjoy readership in India.... Reading India Now leaves us with fundamental questions about postcolonial literary criticism today."—Journal of Asian Studies