Suleri's first two essays deal with Edmund Burke and Warren Hastings and the trial which began in 1787 and ended in 1794. Burke studied India for eighteen years and so aquired much more knowledge than his peers had attempted to aquire but his version of India was perhaps in the end no more real than theirs. Suleri sets up the actual trial which was on its surface an impeachment of th East India Companys Warren Hastings but in reality was a discourse about the nature of empire raising questions of power and accountability between merchant and government. Suleri finds the discourse to be one which enabled each in defining the other to also be made aware of its own nature. Burke was an especially interesting figure bringing to bear on the discourse a formidable intellect perhaps better suited for the aesthetic sphere than the political and indeed the trial was initially attended by the public as if it were high theatre. Burke's attempts to describe India are given thorough scrutiny by Suleri. Burke seems to make the point that India is beyond the Englishmans ken and yet he nonetheless makes many attempts to put India into words and Suleri makes much of the language he uses ie "we submit to what we admire, but we love what submits to us", such phrases Suleri feels speak volumes in our understanding of the dynamic that is English India.
The travel logs of Fanny Parks & Harriet Tytler are interesting to Suleri insofar as they present a particularly female challenge to the traditionally masculine discourse of empire. The female travel log was usually a passive document of 'sketches' which rendered a dynamic continent also passive by focusing on the India of the past, ruins and relics. Parks however does not content herself with the picturesque past but focuses on the dynamic present, with a special attention being given her female Indian counterparts.
The last four essays are on Kipling, Forster, Naipaul & Rushdie.
The Kipling essay focuses on the adolescence of Kim and how that adolescent openness closes into a narrower vision when Kim comes of age. She thus reads Kim as an "allegory of colonial education".
The Forster essay concentrates on the relationship between Aziz and Fielding in A Passage to India and how their relationship is indicative of the larger inability of cultural exchange between England and India.
The Naipaul and Rushdie essays are especially impressive as Suleri offers a complete reading of their works to date. She addresses some of the criticism of Naipauls work ,particularly of his Indian travel piece Area of Darkness, but she reads even that work as a natural step in his progress towards self-perception that finds its most complete expression in Enigma of Arrival. Her overall view of the author is much more generous than many other critical views of Naipaul as she reads in his work, "ironies of enablement" that she feels have continued relevance to the newer generation postcolonial authors.
Shame, Midnights Children & Satanic Verses by Rushdie all receive excellent and sustained attention. Suleri praises Rushdies postmodernist histories for their value as reconciling myths that create new openings.
Excellent book.

in the classic way of english writers who decide to tackle foriegn forms, this book cops out on presenting "real" ghazals in english. instead what we have are a collection of poems that could possibly be called "psuedo-ghazals" ...

the ghazal is a very beautiful and intricate form from an extremely rich culture and history; it should be respected as thus. this book, just from looking at the sample pages, shows me that this form has not been respected by its editor. ghazals have been written in english that can, in fact, be called ghazals and that conform to its highly rigid forms; the three ghazals presented in the samples do not show me a book that has attempted to find or solicit these ghazals or their authors.

if shahid should put together another book of ghazals in english, it is my hope more time will be spent compiling real examples of the ghazal form...

Ouch! That added phrase "Real Ghazals in English" in this title brings on the pain felt when the many 'masters' who have assumed they have authority to think they can attempt to tell us what a real haiku or a real renga is. It is bad enough to have to read the phrase once in the title but the graphics on the cover repeat it thirteen times across the front. One gets the feeling of a table being pounded, burning bushes and stone tablets. All of this emphasis is really not necessary nor is it welcomed.We English writers are interested in knowing more of the origins of the ghazal and we can even accept the fact that someone with a Farsi name has an opinion and knowledge of the genre. In fact we are eager to learn all we can about the form as written in both Farsi and Urdu and welcome any information people from these cultures can bring to us.
But we have to feel confident in the abilities of the messenger to bring us the truth. In an example of how he attempts to confuse the information he is supposedly bringing us, Agha tells us that he is the source of the (false) information that 'ghazal' is to be pronounced 'ghuzzle' (the sound of wine drinking) and that he did it as a 'joke' or as he says: "to be teasingly petty". This misinformation got all the way into Lynx pages as we attempted to stay on top of 'new' information on the genre. Nowhere in the introduction to Ravishing DisUnities does Agha tell us his pronunciation for ghazal. (Sunil Datta, translator with Robert Bly of Lightning Should Have Fallen on Ghalib, speaks the word as 'ruzzle' with a very soft, swallowed 'r' with a hint of an 'h'. But even Robert Bly, on the same stage with Sunil insisted on saying the word as gay-zel). Instead of bringing us some clarity on the subject, Agha mixes up ideas and information by stating: "Perhaps one way to welcome the shackles of the form and be in emotional tune with them is to remember one definition of the word ghazal: It is the cry of the gazelle when it is cornered in a hunt and knows it will die." This ties the pronunciation to 'gay-zel". In discussing this with Gene Doty, he stated that his son-in-law, who is Indian, also speaks the word as Sunil does.
Okay. How are the poems in this the first anthology of English-language ghazals? Like any collection there are a few very good poems and a lot which cannot be read to the bottom of the page. What this book is not, is an overview of ghazals being currently written in English because Agha negates any poem that does not hold to the repeats as he espouses in his set of rules. What he seems unable to achieve is the idea that when a poetry form migrates from one culture to another, certain changes will occur. He also seems to forget that when this happens, the newcomers have the courage to drop the very aspects which are choking the form in its home country. In this case, it is the boredom that sets in with centuries of using the repeats. When the newcomers accomplish this sometimes necessary pruning, the genre blooms forth with new vitality and interest that attracts the best poets of the target country. By setting up the rules as known in Persia and India, and judging English ghazals only with this yardstick, Agha Shahid Ali has missed the marvel of what is really happening to the ghazal in English.
One more gripe: Agha Shahid Ali refers to 'haikus', which is bad enough by a professor of Creative Writing of University of Utah, who has also taught at Warren Wilson College, and held visiting appointments at Hamilton College, University of Massachusettes, Princeton, University of New York and State University of New York. He then perpetrates the false idea of the position of haiku in poetry as shared in universities by stating in his introduction: "This seemingly "light" form [the use of the ghazal as song lyrics in many parts of the East] can lead to a lot of facile poetry (haikuish-ly one could say)." and then Agha Shahid Ali goes to write: "It is the sort of thing that happens with haiku (Richard Howard is supposed to have said that as a poetry editor having to read five hundred haikus [sic] a week was like being nibbled to death by goldfish, and James Merrill in his "Prose of Departure" has actually used rhymes for his haikus [sic] so that Americans will know that "something is going on")." No wonder haiku has such a low status among academia when such ideas are dragged out even when informing on a completely different poetry genre. This is gratuitous bashing of haiku - a valid form of poetry by a professor of writing. Why do we have to have people with this narrow mind-set? And why are they the ones who are supported by university presses? The time for a much needed poetry revolution is at hand.
Onward and hopefully this review goes upward. Several poets who have published poems in Lynx are included in this anthology (Marcyn Del Clements, Mary Jo Salter, Robert William Watkins and Bruce Williams) since they also wanted to follow the strictures as Agha puts forth in his announcement of how to get into his book. Names of well-know persons who successfully jumped through the hoop are: Marilyn Hacker, Maxin Kumin, W.S. Merwin, Paul Muldoon. Missing and greatly missed are the works of Adrianna Rich, Robert Bly, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Carolyn Kizer, Gene Doty, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams.
I was very excited to find one poem in the whole anthology in which I felt the repeats worked. The poem was written by Robert Hastings whose bio states: "was in his early teens when he sent in this ghazal. Now in his mid-teens, he is the youngest contributor to the anthology. He lives in Chicopee, Massachusetts." His stanzas were so bizarre and refreshingly odd that the repeats were a welcomed relief in the flow of madness. There is hope for the genre when the young can write like some of the ghazals in this book.
This review previously published in LYNX 16:3 at AHApoetry.com

This book is an outstanding collection of ghazals (which are a very old Persian and Urdu form), written by some of our greatest poets writing in English today.

John Drury's "Ghazal of the Lagoon" is a masterpiece of the ghazal form, and it is one of my favorites in this collection. There are other great ghazals by Michael Collier and John Hollander, and by many other poets.

There is excellent prose (introduction and afterword) here, detailing exactly what a ghazal is, and how challenging it is to write ghazals in English, and how that differs from the process of writing ghazals in their original middle eastern languages.

The ghazals themselves are the real reason to buy this book. They're great! And, they leave the reader in touch with deep, rich, and profound emotion ... I didn't want to put this book down.

Here is a book written with much candor, about a time and place most consider best left untouched. Suleri fills page after page with the heart-rending nostalgia of an immigrant who has gone, but has never forgotten. Her childhood, her innermost tormented thoughts, her journey across bonds and across continents - yes, even poor old Daadi - all are things that drive home the eloquence and the wit of her carefully crafted memoir.

Not only is Meatless Days a gem in the miniscule canon of Pakistani literature in English, it is a treat for readers of the postcolonial experience the world over. It is highly recommended.

Sara Suleri's memoir is a wonderful example of the kind of literary production our faculty memebers should be producing--inspired, original, and compelling. Her non-academic writing, like her literary criticism, moves me to believe there are still people in the academy who understand what it is all about.

Suleri is definitely more cerebral than a lot of more mainstream novelists of the subcontinent, and that is to be expected. It is part of this memoirs charm that there is a pull between her intellectual curiosities/asides and the more narrative moments of pathos. This book does exactly what a memoir *should* do--it represent memories as the palimpsests that they are, all the while communicating the lingering feeling that the author associates with them. Really, a wonderful book.

I looked briefly at the one-star reviews of this book, and for a moment wondered if they had read a different book. This book was wonderful. I read it at the end of a several-month visit to India, while I was in Calcutta. Having read and written (in university and during my visit) about other contemporary authors dealing with the subcontinent's history and weaving it together with their personal histories in novels, essays, and other works--Rushdie, Seth, Desai, etc.--I still found Suleri utterly original and provacative. One of these reviews uses the word 'incomprehensible'; Suleri's articulate and sometimes absolutely perfect sentences are much less deserving of the term than the review itself. Read it again--you missed something.