In a moment of striking candour in the television series Fleabag (2016-19), the eponymous protagonist confesses, ‘I want someone to tell me what to eat. What to like, what to hate, what to rage about. What to listen to… what to believe in.’ Ananya Vajpeyi’s anthology responds to this yearning by orienting readers within a broad constellation of cultural and intellectual references. Part cultural criticism and part autobiographical travelogue, the book maps a moral and aesthetic landscape shaped by the intimacy of lived experience.
The book is organized in fourteen chapters, some titled after cities and others written in distinct literary modes; among them, ‘The Death of Sanskrit’, ‘Lost Cities’, and ‘Universal Beach’ function as explicit homages to intellectual lineages Vajpeyi engages with. Ranging across art forms, landscapes, and sensory registers, the narrative links identity, memory, and belonging to a place, presenting ethics as lived and historically embedded rather than abstract. The opening chapter offers a glimpse into German folklore through the experiences of women in Dresden and their collective agony and coerced prostitution during the post–Second World War reconstruction, establishing early on the book’s concern with memory, loss, and place.
It is difficult to situate this anthology within a single generic category. Rather than conforming to a conventional travelogue or memoir, the book operates as a form of hybrid literary nonfiction, combining essayistic reflection, autobiographical fragments, and cultural-political inquiry. As the author herself observes, ‘A bizarre parallel between the protagonists of my scholarly research and my occasional delving into the history of my own family,…’ (p. 208).
The book is at once intimate and political, binding private grief to collective histories of separation, displacement, and colonial violence. Through a reflective prose that moves between memory and history, Vajpeyi traces shared trauma alongside her own mourning, particularly in relation to the death of her parents. Grief here is not merely registered but transformed into a mode of self-actualization through healing, often described as post-traumatic growth, whereby personal loss acquires political resonance.
‘Our lovers soothe us sometimes, but at other times they take a knife to our heart. Our countries shelter and nurture us until they bring us to our knees, digging in the dirt like the luckless women of Dresden, stitching together rags to hide their profound shame by day and invite their relentless violations by the night. We carry awhile the burden of our Karma like stones; we rise from ashes like jewelled birds; we fly away into the blue, on extended wings’ (p. 5) The extended passage exemplifies Vajpeyi’s mode of writing, in which metaphor and abstraction are mobilized to render ethical crises and human emotional geographies legible.
The book places personal experience within decisive moments of contemporary political history. While Vajpeyi was living in New York and seeking to establish herself as a writer, the September 11 attacks unfolded, registering in the narrative as a rupture that reshaped both the city and her political consciousness. The event is read not only as an instance of immediate trauma but as the onset of a longer moral and geopolitical reckoning with war, retaliation, and imperial power. A similar political attentiveness informs her response to the Central Vista Redevelopment Project, which she treats as democratically contested state intervention into a historically symbolic public space and prompts her participation in collective opposition to its redevelopment.
‘The city changed after 9/11, and so did I. So did my life, but perhaps the PTSD from 9/11 never went away, neither for New York nor for anyone who had lived through that singular shattering. But how much vengeance is enough? Baghdad? Kabul? Gaza?’ (p. 13).
The book cover carries an endorsement from William Dalrymple, a sensibility that resonates in the chapter ‘Indo-Persian Sublime’, devoted to Delhi. Structured around translated verses of Amir Khusro, the chapter renders the city through poetic idioms of historical longing and cultural continuity. However, the exclusive reliance on English translations slightly flattens the linguistic texture, particularly in a work that otherwise foregrounds Persian and Sanskrit as civilizational inheritances.
Although the book brings together essays written at different moments, it nonetheless follows a discernible progression. The early chapters adopt a lyrical and intimate mode, while the later sections move toward more direct political engagement, addressing developments such as the Kashi-Vishwanath Corridor and Namo Ghat in Banaras, Israel’s actions in Gaza, and the everyday realities of Kashmir. In the chapter ‘The Lost City’, Vajpeyi articulates a strong position on the Palestinian tragedy, invoking the Mahabharata to warn that ‘in the implacable, unforgiving, adamantine hatred of our kin lie the seeds of our own destruction’ (p. 68).
A later chapter, ‘The Society of the Spectacle’, deepens this political register through a discussion of the Bosnian Genocide, comparing the trial of Slobodan Milošević with that of Adolf Eichmann.
In her engagement with Istanbul, Vajpeyi treats monuments and urban routes as mnemonic sites rather than touristic markers, rendering the city through movement and historical depth. Her traversal of spaces such as the Golden Horn, Balat, Fatih, and sites including the Süleymaniye Complex and Boğaziçi University sustains a tension between familiarity and estrangement. This attention to the minutiae of streets, landmarks, and local food cultures situates the narrative within a densely particularized urban geography.
Vajpeyi’s forthcoming work on the modern life of Sanskrit provides a backdrop to her chapter ‘The Death of Sanskrit’, where she offers a feminist critique of the language, arguing that its dominant traditions have historically excluded women and asking whether such an exclusionary language deserves to survive. She returns to this question in the chapter ‘Istanbul Interregnum’ by turning to philology as a critical humanist practice, drawing on Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis. Through Edward Said’s engagement with Auerbach, philology is presented not as antiquarian scholarship but as a historically and ethically grounded method attentive to power and empire. Auerbach’s reading of Dante, in which individual lives retain historical specificity, underpins Vajpeyi’s position
Following her call for a critical re-engagement with language, Vajpeyi extends the argument in the chapter ‘Waiting for Giorgio’, which recounts her longed-for meeting with the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben in Venice. Agamben, best known for his work on the state of exception and the figure of homo sacer, examines how sovereign power can decide who may live and who may die; his work has been foundational for contemporary discussions of biopolitics and necropolitics. Vajpeyi frames the meeting as more than a personal milestone. It completes a trajectory that began with an undelivered letter in her earlier piece ‘Prolegomena to the Study of People and Places in Violent India’, and it stages a dialogue between literary and political thought. She reads this encounter alongside her father Kailash Vajpeyi’s earlier exchange with Samuel Beckett decades earlier. What may appear as autobiographical detail in the book ultimately asserts that questions of life and death are inseparable from political power.
The final chapter turns to Banaras, which Vajpeyi consciously calls Banaras rather than Varanasi, underscoring a historically grounded and intimate relationship to the city. She returns there to immerse her parents’ ashes on two occasions within three years and to locate the house her family once occupied when her father was working as a filmmaker documenting the pollution of the Ganga under Rajiv Gandhi’s Ganga Action Plan.
Vajpeyi’s reflections on Mysore, where she explicitly aligns her response with an inherited critical stance: ‘I cannot romanticise Mysore—in fact, my stance towards that city would be one of Naipaulian disgust’ (p. 57).
This intertextual referential positioning becomes more pronounced in her engagement with Bombay, which she situates with sceptical gaze where she goes for the writing projects on the life and ideas of Dr. BR Ambedkar: ‘I was in real Bombay that Salman Rushdie has evoked with so much love, and V.S. Naipaul has depicted with dour scepticism’ (p. 195). She later underscores the depth of this identification by observing, ‘The echoes between my own experience and his (Naipaul’s), a quarter century earlier, felt eerie’ (p. 205). Taken together, these recurring invocations of Naipaul form a deliberate comparative framework through which Vajpeyi reads her urban experiences in continuity with the postcolonial traditions that shape her sensibility.
Vajpeyi foregrounds positionality as a constitutive condition of writing about India. Her argument reframes Said’s critique of Orientalism by showing that insiders lack the protective distance available to external observers and therefore face a heightened ethical exposure. By making positional constraints central, she links personal urban experience to broader civic and epistemic exclusions.
Notwithstanding its polished prose and aesthetic finesse, Place presents obstacles that merit attention. The book is saturated with references to a wide range of thinkers and writers—for example, Orhan Pamuk, WG Sebald, Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Gayatri Spivak, Joseph Roth, Dante Alighieri, Carl Schmitt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, WB Yeats, Nathalie Sarraute, Philippe Sollers, Marcelin Pleynet, Walter Benjamin, Slavoj Žižek, Italo Calvino, Carlo Ginzburg, Primo Levi, Antonio Negri and many others. These figures recur as fragmentary interlocutors or conversational asides rather than as sustained lines of argument. While sustained engagement with these thinkers is not the anthology’s desired aim, the sheer density of intertextual reference of all kinds assumes an attentive and historically literate readership, potentially limiting accessibility for a broader audience.
Sabah Hussain teaches at the Centre for the Study of Social Inclusion, Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi. Trained as a Political Scientist, she writes and thinks across gender, identity, elections, cinema and critical thought. Her work has previously taken her to the Department of Political Science, Lady Shri Ram College, University of Delhi, Delhi.