Confronting Life (Book Review of New Dalit Writing)

A book review of two volumes of Dalit writing, "No Alphabet in Sight: New Dalit Writing from South India" and "The Oxford India Anthology of Tamil Dalit Writing". Published in The Indian Express, March 31, 2012.

Managing Hindi: How we live multilingually and what this says about our language and literature

Published in The Caravan, vol. 4, issue 4, April 2012.

Urban Legends: 10 Social Transformations

Published in India Today, 27 December 2010

A reflection on changes in India's social sphere over the last 35 years - as part of India Today's special anniversary issue.

On the Delhi Metro: An Ethnographic View

Published in Economic and Political Weekly (EPW) in November 2010.

A Suitable Text for a Vegetarian Audience: Questions of Authenticity and the Politics of Translation

Published in Public Culture in 2007.

This essay is based on ethnographic research of Delhi's literary field and looks at competing language ideologies of English, Hindi, and other languages as played out among writers, translators, critics, and others. It reveals several layers of obfuscation (relating to caste, especially) in a controversy that erupted over the Hindi translation of Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy.

Two Tales of a City: The Place of English and the Limits of Postcolonial Critique

Published in Interventions in 2009.

This essay is about the place of English in the multilingual literary consciousness and the work it does as a mediator in the Indian linguistic landscape. It links the transnational production of literature, especially the framing of Salman Rushdie in Granta in 1980 versus in the New Yorker seventeen years later, to a comparison of Ahmed Ali's Twilight in Delhi and Anita Desai's In Custody.

Reading Delhi: Englishwallahs, Hindiwallahs, and the Politics of Language and Literary Production

Dissertation submitted for Ph.D. at U.C. Berkeley (Anthropology, 2003). A thoroughly revised version of it, with a new title - ENGLISH HEART, HINDI HEARTLAND: THE POLITICAL LIFE OF LITERATURE IN INDIA - was published in February 2012 by the University of California Press.

Review of Blowback: Linguistic Nationalism, Institutional Decay, and Ethnic Conflict In Sri Lanka. By Neil De Votta. Stanford University Press, 2004, in Journal of Asian Studies

Review of At Home in Diaspora: South Asian Scholars and the West, edited by Jackie Assayag and Véronique Bénéï, in Biblio.