Includes bibliographical references and index.

CONTENTS: Locality of culture -- English in an uneven land -- His films, their stories -- Indian films in english -- Internal diaspora: translating from a neighbouring language -- The house and the road: two modes of nostalgia -- Mapping an elusive terrain: literary debates in India in the last half century -- Uses of the past -- Women and Christianity: three texts from nineteenth-century India -- From the margins of history: Agnes smedley and virendranath chattopadhyay -- History and Imagined history: romesh chunder dutt's construction of the past -- Tod's rjasthan and the Bengali imagination -- Narrating a nation -- Whose center, which periphery.

Divided into two sections, the thirteen essays included in this volume address diverse issues pertaining to modern India. The first section examines a few strands among the many that are woen in the texture of India's plural existence: language, translation, films, migration, nostalgia for a lost home, literary debates that cut across regions, while most essays in the second section go back in time to inquire the questions of religion, politics, the construction of the nation and forming of identities that constitute India's past.