This year, the South Asian Studies program debuted as part of the Office of Global Affairs' Brandeis India Initiative. Prof. Ulka Anjaria spoke with the Justice about her field of study.JustArts: It seems like the Office of Global Affairs' focus on India this semester is in part the result of considerable student interest in Indian culture. Would you agree with that statement? Would you say that your India-related classes have started to gain more and more students in the past couple semesters?

Ulka Anjaria: I definitely notice a significant student interest in topics concerning India. I can't identify precisely the reason for this, though I think it is part of the growing interest among Americans in general in Indian literature and film, which is in part related to-though not completely-the high profile of India's fast-growing economy. I've noticed a recent shift in Western perspectives on India in general, spurred I think by the new generation, today's college students, who are demanding another lens to view India besides the lens of otherness and ineluctable foreignness that for so long has affected how India is seen by the West. The film Slumdog Millionaire reflects that shift, I think: It's not a perfect movie, but its representation of India avoids the pitying gaze that so many representations of slums have generated in the past, and I think that's in part why it has been so successful here.

JA: How did you become interested in post-colonial literature and South Asian culture?

UA: I've always loved reading-all types of literature-and like most Americans my introduction to literature in English classes was mostly Western. As I began to be exposed to South Asian literature, I was fascinated by how Indian novels seem both so indebted to the Western novel and such a radical rethinking of it at the same time. Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things made a huge impact on me when I read it at the end of high school. It both resembled literature as I knew it and was so different from anything I had ever read: what she does with words, with sounds, the way she elicits such beauty from the English language and of course the powerful story. When I read that, I thought it was the first novel ever to do these things. As I read more, I realized that this kind of innovation appeared not only in Roy, or even in the Indian novel, but in post-colonial literature in general.

JA: I noticed that you published a critical essay about Zadie Smith. Do you have any suggestions of contemporary (or non-contemporary) literature for our readers?

UA: Zadie Smith's White Teeth and On Beauty are wonderful, hilarious novels. As for South Asian literature, some fantastic new novels have recently come out of Pakistan, a society many Americans know very little about and one which perhaps has yet to emerge from the lens of Otherness I referred to earlier. Books which stand out are Mohammed Hanif's A Case of Exploding Mangoes, Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and Kamila Shamsie's Kartography. A beautiful recent novel set in Bangladesh that I highly recommend is Tahmima Anam's A Golden Age. From Sri Lanka Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy and Chandani Lokuge's Turtle Nest are both wonderful. Indian literature gets the most press out of South Asian writing, and indeed there have been several really excellent recent releases: Amitav Ghosh's A Sea of Poppies, set in the midst of the British opium trade in the 19th century; Arvind Adiga's The White Tiger, which just won the Booker Prize this year and is a harsh look at the underside of globalization in urban India; and Indra Sinha's Animal's People, a really powerful book set in the aftermath of the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal, India, which will especially interest all those concerned with social and environmental justice.