Book review: Life in the ‘New India’
I’ve always loved reading as a way to transport myself to new worlds and new cultures. In this book I reviewed for the Associated Press, writer Bharati Mukherjee describes life in a “New India,” where old customs clash with new ways of thinking.
Review: Bangalore beckons in ‘Miss New India’
By MONICA RHOR, For The Associated Press
“Miss New India” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), by Bharati Mukherjee: Anjali Bose has a dazzling smile, near-fluency in American-accented English, and a gnawing hunger for life outside her rural Indian town of Gauripur, where the dilapidated Pinky Mahal bears witness to stalled progress and her stolidly middle-class parents are forcing her into an arranged marriage.
Anjali, who prefers to call herself by the more modern Angie, is torn between a life conscribed by traditional rituals and a life of independence in the gleaming metropolis of Bangalore. One future offers the possibility of a handsome husband found through online matchmaking services; the other promises a place where young women like herself work as call-center service agents and sip coffee at Starbucks.
A brutal encounter with a sadistic potential suitor — and the encouragement of her English teacher and mentor — push the 19-year-old Anjali out of her small-town cocoon and into the dizzying, often mystifying, sometimes dangerous, streets of Bangalore.
In “Miss New India,” Indian-born Bharati Mukherjee portrays a country where old customs co-exist and often clash with new social mores; a country where Anjali tumbles loose from the limitations of caste and class, even as her father remains trapped by old structures and superstitions.
In this India, some girls endure elaborate beauty routines and pose for heavily retouched marriage portraits — all in pursuit of the perfect mate. Others — like Anjali — flock to the city where they throw off the shackles of convention, rename themselves Millie or Suzie, and enjoy the once-forbidden freedoms of single life.
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