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Books

British colonialism is once again under attack in Aatish Taseer’s sprawling Indian epic

Bright bazaars and dark family secrets are temptingly on offer in Aatish Taseer’s The Way Things Were,

21 March 2015

9:00 AM

21 March 2015

9:00 AM

The Way Things Were Aatish Taseer

Picador, pp.560, £16.99

Early in the second section of Aatish Taseer’s The Way Things Were we are presented with a striking description of Delhi. The city’s bright bazaars and bald communal gardens, among them ‘the occasional tomb of a forgotten medieval official’, are ‘stitched together with the radial sprawl of Lutyens’s city’. Taseer acknowledges the landscape’s beauty, but buried in his description, with its reference to the British architect who designed much of Delhi during the empire, is the painful and stifling legacy of history.

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