Meet & Greet: Author Beena Kamlani

Thursday, March 20 | 3:00 p.m.
Join us at Waterstone as author Beena Kamlani discusses her debut novel, The English Problem. Learn more about the story and the inspiration behind her work.
Beena Kamlani is a Pushcart Prize-winning fiction writer whose work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, Identity Lessons: Learning to Be American, Growing Up Ethnic in America, The Lifted Brow, World Literature Today and other publications.
About the Book
A young Indian man is tapped to help his country’s fight for freedom—but his heart engages him in a different war.
Shiv Advani is an eighteen-year-old growing up in India. But he is no ordinary young man. Shiv has been personally chosen by Mahatma Gandhi to come to England, learn their laws, and then return home and help drive the British out of India. Before he leaves, his family insists he fulfill his arranged marriage, and he is hastily betrothed to a young woman he hardly knows.
He arrives in London and soon discovers a world he is both repelled by and drawn to. Shiv knows his duty: get in, learn the letter of the law, get out. But as anyone who has ever lived in a British colony can tell you, “the English Problem” is multifaceted. The racist colonialism of “the empire on which the sun never sets” seeps into everything—not just landed territories, but territories of the mind: literature, language, religion, sexuality, self-identity. Soon the people Shiv sought to be liberated from will be the people he desperately wants to be a part of. In the end, Shiv must fight not only for his country’s liberation but also his own.