Acknowledgments

This book owes a great deal to the critical perspicacity and generosity of friends, colleagues, mentors, and institutions, whom I am grateful to be able to name and thank. These pages would have been impossible to bring to fruition without the encouragement and intellectual support of Sandhya Shetty and Carole-Anne Tyler, who consistently asked the difficult questions and who taught me through the inspiration of their own scholarship. I am also grateful to Lalitha Gopalan, who so often told me what I was thinking before I knew it myself. I am grateful too to the many other friends and colleagues who read the manuscript, either in full or in part, or who responded to my work at conferences: Katherine Kinney, Joe Childers, R. Radhakrishnan, Inderpal Grewal, Vincent Cheng, Daniel Boyarin, Kim Devlin, Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, Bette London, Ron Inden, Robert Goldman, Aditya Behl, Gayatri Spivak, Jennifer Brody, George Haggerty, Lawrence Cohen, Sue-Ellen Case, Philip Brett, and Susan Foster. I am indebted to the readers for the University of California Press, especially Caren Kaplan and Sangeeta Ray, for their meticulous, constructive, and sympathetic evaluation of the project. My editor, Doris Kretschmer, has been unfailingly helpful and patient. I am also grateful to Dore Brown and Diane Jagusiak of the University of California Press, and to Sarah Myers, for their scrupulous editing. I am indebted above all to my parents, Amalendu and Ramola Roy, as well as to Bharat Trehan for (among other things) his recall of a youth productively spent watching Bombay films.

This project has been funded by a University of California President’s Research Fellowship in the Humanities in 1991–1992, a fellowship in the University of California, Riverside’s Center for Ideas and Society in the spring of 1994, and by two pretenure faculty-development awards from the University of California, Riverside. I am grateful for this support.