A little over a decade ago, Pankaj Mishra travelled through the small towns of India and found they had shed their sleepy, half-apologetic air; brash and ostentatious, kitschy and clamorous, here was an India in transition. A convent-educated young woman from Jhansi aspiring to be a beauty queen; a rich young man in Gujarat speaking casually of murdering Muslims; Naxalites in Bihar trying to foment revolution; small shopkeepers planning a vacation in London --- Mishra captured, with irony and humour, a people rushing headlong to their tryst with modernity.

'Butter Chicken in Ludhiana is a marvellous travel book about small-town India, where the village and the city, the folk and the kitsch, and the comic and the violent threaten to converge' Ashis Nandy

`A love-letter to the real republic. No other book defines as clearly, and with such troubled irony, our last decade of change' Amitava Kumar