The Literary Mirror

Kapadia's essay collection makes its case city by city — Nagpur, Bhopal, Kochi, Siliguri — arguing that Indian writing in English has spent three decades listening to Delhi and Mumbai and calling the result a national voice.

The strongest essays are the most local: a piece on Bhopal's Urdu press and its quiet, unglamorous survival is worth the cover price alone. A later essay on literary festivals reads more like a grievance than an argument, and the book is weaker for including it unedited.

Even so, Spectrum and the Second City is a useful corrective on a shelf that badly needs one, and its bibliography — regional magazines, small presses, self-published chapbooks — is arguably more valuable than the essays built on top of it.

“Kapadia's argument is simple and rarely made this plainly: the centre was never where the language lived.”