Review by Shyamala Parthasarathy

“…English came with the colonizers, but its literature is part of our heritage too, as is pre-partition writing.” I snort at these lines, appearing somewhere close to one-third of the way through Soniah Kamal’s Unmarraigeable, with its tagline of being a Pakistani Pride and Prejudice—which was what drew me to pick up the book in the first place. One of my earliest memories is sitting in a darkened film theater, watching Aishwarya Rai coo the soft sounds of Kandukondain Kandukondain, the Tamil adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, in her beautiful white ballgown. I remember being enthralled by the settings and the color and the desert dances in the dream-sequence music that is so typical of Indian cinema. I remember the laughter and the tears. And I remember, years later, picking up the original Jane Austen book and feeling completely let down, because Regency Romances were too white, too classist and too inaccessible for me, as a brown preteen, to fully enjoy. … More Unmarriageable by Soniah Kamal