PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksRight away, Lal takes on previous commentators, both from Nur’s day and those of subsequent eras, who seemingly could not handle the prowess of a strong woman ... As a feminist historian, Lal writes that her goal is to foreground the stories of women and girls largely missing from the histories of pre-colonial South Asia ... Refreshingly, there is no linear \'first this, then this\' narrative. Lal instead paints rich multisensory tapestries, beginning with the story of Nur’s birth and her caravan as a baby to the lands of the Mughal court, and then the pluralistic milieus into which Nur married ... Big chunks of Empress come to us in the form of contextualized history, mingled with speculation ... we get the impression that this is Lal’s mission...to illuminate and serve Nur Jahan’s life, to place her in the light rather than chart every known detail in a linear fashion. In other words, Lal releases Nur from the condescending ways in which previous commentators have trivialized, belittled, and diminished her accomplishments.
Kushanava Choudhury
RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksThe Epic City is an artfully disjointed assemblage of addas, but with enough through lines to make all the sections cohere ... The author comes to accept the garbage, the bodily fluids, the raw sewage, the malaria-soaked floods, and the pulverizing humidity. Channeling V. S. Naipaul’s An Area of Darkness, Choudhury doesn’t whitewash the filthy veneer of bodily fluids coating a particular landscape. He emphasizes the degree to which urine coats the entire Calcutta topography.
