Contents: Introduction. 1. Jane Austen and Vikram Seth: Uses of realism in A Suitable Boy/Himansu S. Mohapatra and Jatindra K. Nayak. 2. Midnight's children and a suitable boy: challenges of rendering Indian experience into English/Neelam Srivastava. 3. 'Swimming in a sea of language': linguistic aspects of a suitable boy/Christopher Rollason. 4. The imbalance of Islam: Muslims and unhappiness in Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy/Ian Almond. 5. "Muslims and unhappiness in Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy": a response to Ian Almond/Murari Prasad. 6. A feminist reading of Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy/Mala Pandurang. 7. Passion and prejudice: deconstructing the thematic unity of A Suitable Boy/David Myers. 8. Translating India into English: Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy/Felicity Hand. 9. The social geography of A Suitable Boy/Cielo G. Festino. 10. Select bibliography. Index.

"This collection of essays by diverse hands offers a critical appraisal of the disparate range of themes that make Vikram Seth's panoramic novel, A Suitable Boy, worth its weight and heft. It examines Seth's extensive takes on the issues of inter-faith face-off, language politics, colonial hang-over in postcolonial India, modernity and gender inequity, caste prejudices and several others in this multi-stranded Indian English Novel. The interrogation of the author's mode of narrating the nation with a variety of calling cards is consistently matched with an incisive probe into the complexity of characters and events located in the socio-cultural milieu of the early postcolonial India of nineteen-fifties. Besides, with Seth's concise literary biography and a comprehensive bibliography for those who wish to explore the text further, this anthology is a resource which the readers and researchers can't afford not to have." (jacket)