Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in small town India

Author(s): Pankaj Mishra

Location(s): India

Genre(s): Travelogue

Era(s): Turn of the 20th Century

Location

Content

A little over a decade ago, Pankaj Mishra travelled through the small towns of India and found they had shed their sleepy, half-apologetic air: brash and ostentatious, kitschy and clamorous, here was an India in transition. A convent-educated young woman from Jhansi aspiring to be a beauty queen: a rich young man in Gujarat speaking casually of murdering Muslims: Naxalites in Bihar trying to foment revolution: small shopkeepers planning a vacation in London — Mishra captured, with irony and humour, a people rushing headlong to their tryst with modernity. ‘Butter Chicken in Ludhiana is a marvellous travel book about small-town India, where the village and the city, the folk and the kitsch, and the comic and the violent threaten to converge’ Ashis Nandy ‘A love-letter to the real republic. No other book defines as clearly, and with such troubled irony, our last decade of change’ Amitava Kumar

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