Looking Through Glass [Hardcover]

Mukul Kesavan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1996

Suddenly transported back to India in 1942, where he journeys through Muslim neighborhoods, Hindu wrestling academies, and splendid colonial enclaves, an ambitious young photographer meets a change-mongering nationalist, a pioneering pornographer, and his own grandmother. A first novel.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

En route to Benaras to toss his deceased grandmother's ashes in the Ganges, the nameless narrator of this audacious novel undergoes time travel and finds himself back in Delhi in 1942, where he encounters the same grandmother, a social worker. The narrator, a Hindu photographer, stays with a Muslim family (passing himself off as an amnesiac), joins a doomed anti-British rebellion, is wounded and convalesces in a wrestling academy. There he meets Gyanendra, a lecherous filmmaker who is shooting a rendition of the Kama Sutra, the ancient erotic manual. Rescuing Parwana, an unwed pregnant actress, from Gyanendra's clutches, the narrator flees with her toward Delhi. His further adventures span the tumultuous years through India's independence in 1947, when Hindu-Muslim riots took thousands of lives and after which, spurred by the haste of Hindu and Muslim leaders alike, Kesavan suggests, the subcontinent split violently and tragically into India and Pakistan. Meanwhile, Parwana pursues a lesbian crush on a politician's daughter-just one unconventional element among many in this unusual first novel that blends vivid realism, fantasy, raunchy sexual comedy and political commentary.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 378 pages
• Publisher: South Asia Books (April 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0025160060
• ISBN-13: 978-0025160064
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.5 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,478,456 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars attached emotionally/intellectually to India? Read this book, December 13, 1999

By 

haru (Ypsilanti, MI) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Looking Through Glass (Hardcover)

Walking my dog in lawns of the Old Fort in New Delhi early one morning in the summer of 1998, I froze in my tracks as I remembered the line from Looking Through Glass, "The fort is a sump, said Angrez Mashriqi, into which the Mussalmans of Hindustan are being drained."

1947 and the following year are the darkest years in India's recent history. India's independence and partition in the August of '47 was followed by upheaval that left a million dead and made refugees of over 10 million. A nation was torn apart not only physically but also psychologically. The wounds fester unhealed to this day.

To people sensitive to India's history and psychology, Mukul Kesavan gives a book that, more than ANY other, transports the reader to India's most important years of the last three centuries. The book does not tell a story. Nor is it a history book. It is meditation in which the author takes the reader on an odyssey through the events and times that were India's trial by fire. This work is much more an experience than just a book.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Terrific read, full of humour, almost like being there, October 9, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (Delhi, India) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Looking Through Glass (Hardcover)

Forget the stylistic pyrotechnics of Salman Rushdie and the heady exotica of Arundhati Roy. This is a book by a writer who knows how to tell a straightforward (or backward ... in time, that is) very well indeed. Its very, very funny and highly evocative of its time (pre-independence India) and locations (Delhi, Shimla, Lucknow, Benaras of those days). Its a bright and sunny book, ideal for a good old-fashioned read, which will transport you completely. Of all the talented Indian writers in English, Mukul Kesavan is one of the most underrated. I feel he is the best of the whole lot- and I have read Rushdie, Roy, Seth, Chandra, Ghosh et al. You won't regret reading this book, specially if you have lived in the time or places described. You should read it if you weren't there - its the next best thing to being there and living there from day to day.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Indian magic realism and a touch of farce, November 11, 2003

By 

Lynn Harnett (Marathon, FL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Looking Through Glass (Hardcover)

The nameless narrator of this Indian author's first novel, is a modern young photographer on route to deposit his grandmother's ashes in the Ganges when he falls from the Mail Train and lands in 1942.

Pretending amnesia, he is taken in by a Muslim family which includes a young revolutionary, Masroor, his sister Asharf,i and Ammi, the mother who is waiting for a husband who disappeared some years before on a Haj, a pilgrimage to Mecca.

At first terrified, our narrator refuses to stir from the house, in fear he may change history, until finally he is impelled out of doors by the discovery that he has head lice.

It's the day of the Quit India Resolution, voted by the new Indian Congress, a result that Masroor has feared because he believes it will lead to partition of the country between Hindus and Muslims.

Taken by Masroor to a barber, the hapless narrator is immediately embroiled in Indian politics when he is the only witness to Masroor's disappearance - into the recruiting poster on the side of an army truck.

Kesavan combines magic realism and outright farce in an energetic, even frenetic, story of the displaced narrator's life in a time not his own. At first the narrator feels only the futility of political effort - for him, history is already ordained and the fervor of people like Masroor seems futile and puppetlike.

But once he is caught up in life - earning a living as a waiter, developing attachments, saving a young, unwed, pregnant actress from the clutches of a pornographer, meeting his grandmother, doing his inept best to manipulate the lives of his friends for their own good - history becomes a backdrop to life.

Beautifully written, funny, sometimes raunchy, sometimes sly, the novel's only real flaw is its meandering story line. Some events (as in life) seem to have no real purpose and no goal. Others serve only to introduce figures of history whose walk-on parts intimately affect the lives of those who've never met them.

An unusual and entertaining novel with layers of meaning, many of which I suspect eluded me as they may elude other American readers.