The essays assembled in Clearing a Space , written over the last fifteen years, cover an astonishing range of subjects. The writer treats himself as a specimen for an exploration of what it means to be a modern Indian in relation to the West. Personal memoir gives readers a glance into a nation’s history; his relationship to the West provides insight into India’s national relationship to the West; and, his struggle to define ‘Indianness’ for himself becomes a paradigm of searching for Indian identity.With the same elegance and intelligence for which the author has become known, Chaudhuri writes anecdotally in these essays about Indian popular culture and high culture, travel and location in Paris, Bombay, Dublin, Calcutta and Berlin, empire and nationalism, Indian and Western cinema, music, art and literature, politics, race, cosmopolitanism, urban landscapes, Hollywood and Bollywood, Anglophone India, internationalism, globalisation, the Indian English tradition that pre-dates Rushdie, post-colonialism and much more.