Clearing a Space

This book brings together many of Chaudhuri's best essays, written over the past decade in journals such as the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement. Often beginning with the personal, Chaudhuri enquires into the nature of the secular in India, into the history of such categories as the West, the foreign, the global, and the exotic, and into the frequently torn and self-divided nature of modern Indian identity. Chaudhuri also makes a powerful case for thinking about Indian literature and culture in a way that departs strikingly from the parameters created since the publication of Midnight's Children and the consolidation of postcolonial studies. While his mode is broadly oppositional, it is also one of constant engagement with the positions he is arguing against.