"The seriousness, nuance, and historical depth that Ghosh brings to the cross-cultural categories of migrancy and cosmopolitanism and her capacity to situate this body of work within overlapping sets of concerns and varied global histories is what sets the work apart from many others of its kind."Parama Roy, associate professor of English, University of California, Riverside

"This book belongs to the select circle of exemplary scholarship that pushes the disciplines it emerges from into a serious consideration of the twenty-first century context in which it is produced and consumed." Rosemary Marangoly George, author of The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and 20th Century Fiction

Indias 1997 celebration of the Golden Jubilee marked fifty years of independence from British colonial rule. This anniversary is the impetus for Bishnupriya Ghoshs exploration of the English language icons of South Asian postcolonial literature: Salman Rushdie, Vikram Chandra, Amitav Ghosh, Upamanyu Chatterjee, and Arundhati Roy. These authors, grouped together as South Asian cosmopolitical writers, produce work challenging and expanding preconceived notions of Indian cultural identity, while being sold simultaneously as popular English literature within the global market. This commodification of Indian language and identity reinforces incomplete and simplified images of India and its writers, and at times counteracts the expressed agenda of the writers. In this book, Ghosh focuses on the politics of language and history, and the related processes of translation and migration within the global network. In so doing, she develops a new approach to literary studies that adapts conventional literary analysis to the pressures, constraints, and liberties of our present era of globalization.

Bishnupriya Ghosh is an assistant professor of English at the University of California, Davis.