Antoinette Burton has written and edited several books on British imperial culture, India and Indians under British colonialism, and the dynamics of gender and empire. None of the books have focused on so insignificant a figure as Santha Rama Rau, and yet this latest book by Burton is the one that will have the biggest scholarly impact of all her work.

The book begins simply enough: “Santha Rama Rau (b. 1923) was one of the best-known South Asian writers in postwar America. The author of half a dozen books between 1945 and 1970 … she was typically celebrated as the embodiment of ‘East Meets West.'” Readers might ask why such a minor figure deserves an entire book even when one understands full well that the status as minor and major accorded to public figures is shaped by preexisting hierarchies. Rather than countering this query with an argument that transforms Rama Rau into a major figure, Burton skillfully leads her readers to appreciate what major lessons can be learned from a close examination of the minor. Burton uses Rama Rau to work through a complex argument about the complicities and continuities between British and U.S. imperialism, between colonial identities and cosmopolitanism, and between orientalist writing and a critique of the same.

In a brilliant opening chapter, Burton persuasively argues that Rama Rau's elite/high-caste family background (diplomat father and feminist activist mother), as much as her Wellesley College education, her subsequent marriage to the American aide to General MacArthur, and her travels and long residence in different parts of the globe, gave her a unique perspective on the non-Western world that she assiduously wrote about for a primarily U.S. audience. Burton presents Shanta Rama Rau as a “cold war cosmopolitan” whose work was “grounded in her Indian experiences, inflected by her American careers and shaped by gendered apprehensions of ‘the East' that her work both embodied and challenged” (4). What Burton exposes is the fundamental complexity of a figure like Rama Rau: “The sweep of her eye, the geographical orientation of her criticism, was—like her brand of cosmopolitanism itself—a break with Eurocentric models, even as it pivoted on an often unspoken American axis” (10). Burton then moves on to compare, through careful historicizing, Rama Rau's ability to capitalize on her “special relationship” (15) with former and current colonial locations in the marketplace of Cold War cultural media with the careers of postcolonial critics in the 1980s who also displayed a special understanding of the non-West in their writings from and to the West. Burton insists that she is not arguing that Rama Rau be raised from relative obscurity to serve as a newly discovered originary of postcolonial discourse as practiced in the West; rather, Burton asks that as we begin to write histories of postcoloniality “in the shadow of globalization and its hand-maiden, Euro-American imperial hegemony” (23), we begin to see, in the eccentricity of Rama Rau's vision, a precursor of the critical position occupied by the first generation of cosmopolitan postcolonial theorists in the 1980s, namely “such monumental figures as Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, or Edward Said” (21).

Burton uses Rama Rau's writing in the years of her initial fame, between 1945 and 1960, to highlight the “non-aligned” movement launched by newly independent “Third world” countries. Burton insists on the need to historicize the roots of the brand of cosmopolitanism embodied by Rama Rau and other non-Western elites in her wake, by linking it to the coalitions among non-aligned nations and the special role of India and Indians as “sites of translation between one Anglophone empire (Britain) and another (United States)” (33). Rama Rau emerges then as that “quintessential cold war figure: the postcolonial expert” (38) whose work, blatantly on occasion and subtly otherwise, presents a world that is minutely regulated by emerging hierarchies that nevertheless rely on old imperial ones.

Burton's discussion of Rama Rau's first book, Home to India (1945), skillfully demonstrates how the end of British imperialism in India is marked by a geographic, cultural, and ideological reorientation to the United States even as the young author takes stock of the almost independent nation that she has come home to. After Indian independence, when her father is appointed the first Indian ambassador to Japan, Rama Rau accompanies him to Tokyo as his official hostess. Her experiences in the region result in the publication of a second travelogue, East of Home (1950). Burton's discussion of this text displays an impressive ability to articulate the different tensions in the postwar period that inform Rama Rau's India-centric pan-Asianism.

The emergent “semi-imperial gaze” (59) that Burton identifies as operating in Rama Rau's reportage on Asia is magnified in her reportage on Africa, specifically in the essays she wrote on the Mau Mau movement and on Jomo Kenyatta in the midfifties for U.S. outlets such as the New York Times. In translating these places, movements, and people to Americans in terms that they could understand, Rama Rau inevitably strengthens her own cosmopolitan credentials, as well as the special place of Indians in a world transitioning from British imperialism to U.S. domination. In the next chapter, Burton focuses on Rama Rau's long engagement with E. M. Forster's A Passage to India and demonstrates how Rama Rau becomes literally and figuratively the custodian of this story as she writes a play based on the novel and prepares the initial script for David Lean's film version. This chapter serves to beautifully illustrate one of the central points that Burton makes in this book, namely that in interpreting (and fighting to retain control of) Forster's story, Rama Rau underscores the necessity of an Indian interlocutor to authenticate the representation of the British Raj to a U.S. audience.

The final chapter of this book provides a delightful account of Santha Rama Rau's compilation of an Indian cookbook for the Time-Life series, titled The Cooking of India (1969). Burton transforms the increasingly hostile correspondence between author and editors into an occasion to appreciate the multivalent politics of cookbook writing as cultural translation. Once again, Burton shows Rama Rau to be ahead of her time, in that her cookbook presents Indian food as no single cuisine that mirrored a nation but as an amalgam born (like the nation itself) of the many encounters between different communities and their culinary influences. India, then, in Rama Rau's presentation of its authentic cuisine(s), is already cosmopolitan and modern without the usual attendant implication that it is also necessarily Westernized, a very difficult idea to introduce to a Western audience except perhaps through cookbooks.

It might have been worthwhile for Burton to have included her discussion (published elsewhere) of Rama Rau's final work, a novel titled The Adventuress (1970), which was met with critical silence; why did Rama Rau lose her grasp on her U.S. audience, and why did it happen so swiftly? Another aspect of this story that is left unexamined is the Indian reception, however slight, to Rama Rau's many accomplishments. Rama Rau is judged in the Indian context as belonging to that set of writers in the 1940s and 1950s—Attia Hosain, Kamala Markandaya, G. V. Desani, Raja Rao, Dom Moraes, Nayantara Seghal—all from high-caste and/or elite, cosmopolitan backgrounds, all mold-breaking in their personal lives, English educated, well traveled, and comfortable with an international audience.

In Burton's hands, then, Rama Rau is a minor figure whose career(s) as literary author, commentator on the non-West, cookbook writer, playwright, and journalist illuminates the many economies and historical valences that shape postcolonial cosmopolitanism in the second half of the twentieth century. In the beginning of the book, Burton presents a telling anecdote—at a cocktail party late in her life, Rama Rau is asked, “Santha Rama Rau? Didn’t you used to be famous?” After reading Burton's book, we learn that such questions are not for the individual to answer; we are all minor except when our life is momentarily caught in the nexus/crossfire/spotlight (call it what you will) of larger social, economic, and politi cal forces. In reading her into a genealogy of postcolonial cosmopolitanism, Antoinette Burton has secured a place for Rama Rau as a precursor for the excellent, and often radical, work that follows.