Recent essays:
- “A Book History of the Novel” (NOVEL, 2025)
“A small handful of novels, comprising a very small handful of forms, from among an even smaller handful of places, has determined both the history and the theory of the novel even as the novel today enjoys a thriving global presence. Is a different theory of the novel possible that incorporates common readers and markets and, on this basis, understands the novel’s geographical expansion in the twenty-first century?”
- “Archives in Action: Three Lessons from the Frontline” (Routledge 2025): link
“Archives are made by those who construct them as well as by those who use them. The term’s seventeenth-century arrival in the English language coincided with the rise of the British Empire. …There is much connecting the impulse behind political expansion and preserving records of that expansion.”
- “Can Literary Theory be Participatory?” (post-45, 2019): link
“In an unfolding moment when digital platforms enable open-source participatory opportunities for remixing and redeploying “culture,” literary theory has remained obstinately analog—unwilling to engage with current practices of production and consumption.”
- “The Novel as Commodity” (Cambridge, 2018): pdf
“To study the novel as a commodity includes studying its circulation in material and symbolic realms as an object that trades both in commercial and in cultural capital.”
- “Chetan Bhagat: Remaking the Novel in India” (Cambridge, 2015): pdf
“A curious thing happened to the Indian novel in English on the way to the twenty-first century. It stopped being a child of midnight. It even stopped being a child.”
- “Genre Fiction in India” (Oxford, 2019): pdf
“In general, the story of genre fiction situates the Anglo American world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as its locus classicus. Applying this history to India obscures what is unusual about Indian publishing and the very recent— C21— proliferation of genre fiction on the subcontinent.”
- “Globalizing Victorian Studies” (Yearbook of English Studies, 2011): pdf
“Might ‘Victorian’ be a term whose real use lies in indexing a set of preoccupations rather than confining those preoccupations to history and geography?”
Books:
Bollywood’s India: A Public Fantasy
(Columbia UP, 2015; ISBN: 978-0231169615)
—Read the introduction,”Bollywood’s India,” here
In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture and the English Novel in India
(Columbia UP, 2002; Oxford UP, 2003; ISBN: 978-0231125857)
—Read the introduction, “The Poetical Economy of Consumption,” here
The 1970s and its Legacies in India’s Cinemas
(co-edited; Routledge 2014; ISBN: 978-0415836586)