Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan is an assistant professor of English at Rice University, where she works on contemporary Asian American and South Asian Anglophone literatures and cultural theory. She has also taught at the University of Nevada, Reno; the University of Arizona; and the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned a PhD in Rhetoric.
Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan
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Writing on Public Books
My Mother’s Book, My Grandmother’s Life
“I always thought that the challenge of writing my grandmother’s story was capturing her singular voice. Rereading her emails, I remember why.”
Our Mothers, Ourselves
Both miscarriage and abortion are incredibly common. Yet they are, oddly, still taboo subjects.
Our Mothers, Ourselves
I intended to begin with a personal admission. “I didn’t like being pregnant,” I was going to write, before describing the bodily discomforts (hypersalivation!) and psychic stresses (due date during finals!) I experienced while carrying my children. At the end of the review, I would loop back with a second admission: that reading journalist Angela […]
Our Mothers, Ourselves
I intended to begin with a personal admission. “I didn’t like being pregnant,” I was going to write, before describing the bodily discomforts (hypersalivation!) and psychic stresses (due date during finals!) I experienced while carrying my children. At the end of the review, I would loop back with a second admission: that reading journalist Angela […]
Cricket and the Future of India
“What is cricket?” Does it represent the past or the future of India? The first time the question appears in Aravind Adiga’s Selection Day, Mumbai scout Tommy …
Cosmopolitans in Indian Fiction
“What does it take to stop dreaming of alternative lives?” Two versions of this question from Anjum Hasan’s The Cosmopolitans speak to challenges now faced around the globe. First: what would it take—in India, in America, anywhere in 2016—to stop dreaming of alternative political systems and pathways for migration, of alternatives to poverty, scarcity, inequality, […]
Everyday India
Nikhil Suroshe is the child of small farmers in Yavatmal district, Maharashtra. He is fair-skinned, with a mop of brown hair and a regal nose, and in India, where skin is often read as an indicator of caste background and class privilege, it is the first thing you notice about him. He is a handsome […]
Complicity and Critique
In a posh Delhi neighborhood, in a walled estate with glass chandeliers and bathrooms of Italian marble, a 25-year-old heir to his family’s business and real estate fortune dreams of transforming the world with his money. “Have you seen what the Rockefellers did,” he asks. “Every person in [the United States] is somehow touched by […]
Lahiri, High and Low
Before beginning graduate school, I promised myself that I would never write about Jhumpa Lahiri. I had studied Lahiri’s debut novel, The Namesake (2003), in a maddening undergraduate literature course called “Good Girls, Bad Girls,” and at the time, it represented everything I sought to resist: “model minority” mythology; ethnic assimilationist imperatives; diasporic nostalgia. The Namesake had […]
Fiction Brief Round-Up
As if the arrival of Public Picks earlier this month weren’t enough, our new round-up of four brief reviews of recent novels offers that many more suggestions for intriguing summer reads: from unlikely friends from Boston with ambiguous relationships to exotic lands, to the “ordinary horror” of living through Bangladesh’s 1971 war of independence; from […]
