India (with CD)

How can we understand India today, fifty years after Independence and only months after its nuclear tests outraged the world? The novelist Arundhari Roy has written, especially for this collection, a fierce denunciation of the Indian nuclear program, which serves as an introduction to eight essays on India, all originally published in The New York Review of Books.

The nine disparate essays in this anthology, all of which originally appeared in the New York Review of Books, include political and historical commentary by Christopher de Ballaigue and Roderick MacFarquhar, women's writing by Anita Desai, and Amartya Sen's look back at the early 20th-century poet Rabindranath Tagore. In her introduction, Arundhati Roy attempts to link all this material to India's recent nuclear sword-rattling with Pakistan. A particularly charming essay is Pankaj Mishra's "Edmund Wilson in Benares," in which Mishra recalls his discovery of Wilson's books in a dusty library of his university. Also included is a CD featuring a selection of traditional and contemporary Indian folk music. These well-written essays are interesting as stand-alone pieces and collectively suggest the baffling diversity and contradictions of modern India. Still, they are just fragments that will likely have limited general interest. The book is therefore best suited for larger public and academic libraries. Harold M. Otness, formerly with Southern Oregon Univ. Lib., Ashland Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.