Intimate Class Acts: Friendship and Desire in Indian and Pakistani Women's Fiction by Maryam Mirza (review)

Maryam Mirza's Intimate Class Acts offers an incisive review of the complex inter-class relationships represented in Anglophone fiction by South Asian women writers. Heretofore, Mirza argues, subaltern characters have garnered little attention from Indian and Pakistani literary critics despite "the omnipresence of economic subalterns within the domestic spaces of the privileged classes to which the vast majority of the exponents and readers of South Asian literature in English belong" (xv). She contests the traditional method of reading South Asian English literature through a historical and political lens "where hegemony and subalternity are often understood in terms of the colonial encounter" and suggests that such readings undermine the ubiquitous presence of deep-seated economic disparities in the region (xv). She also criticizes conventional Marxism for focusing only on the labour class and ignoring "domestic servitude" (xxiii). To address this gap, Mirza analyzes the interplay of class, caste, and gender within the domestic sphere in select South Asian literary works while simultaneously challenging stereotypical representations of subaltern characters' agency. She analyzes a diverse trajectory of cross-class intimacies that include (but are not limited to) inter-class heterosexual romance, female friendship, and master/mistress-servant relationships. Her close reading of ten novels by Indian and Pakistani female writers is attentive to hierarchal alliances across class and caste as well as the textual (mis)representation and translation of subaltern characters' alterity in English, which is considered the language of the "elite."

The first two chapters of the book explore relationships between lower-class female servants and their elite female mistresses. The third chapter focuses on intimate inter-class heterosexual relationships and emphasizes the family as an institution that impacts these relationships. The fourth chapter discusses the complex intersection of hierarchy and power operative in intimate relationships between lower-class female employees and their rich male employers. The fifth chapter examines heterosexual relationships between lovers with class differences against the backdrop of national turmoil. The final chapter of the book investigates the political implications of representing subaltern characters' speech in English.

Chapter One analyzes relationships between bourgeois children and young domestic servants in three novels by Pakistani writers: Bapsi Sidhwa's Ice-Candy Man (1988), Rukhsana Ahmad's The Hope Chest (1995), and Moni Mohsin's The End of Innocence (2006). Mirza argues that, in all three novels, the children's age and class identities intersect with gender norms to "inform the complexion as well as the longevity of [their] emotional ties" with their caregivers (1). Although their youth means that the privileged children are less tainted than adults by class prejudices and helps advance transgressive intimacies with their ayahs, those intimacies also engender an early class consciousness and facilitate the wealthy children's transition to their positions as future "leaders and perpetuators of a sexist, class-divided society" (11). By highlighting how the dynamics of class and desire function in the transient relationships between middle-class children and their caregivers, Mirza adds a fresh perspective to readings of these South Asian novels.

Chapter Two builds on this discussion and attends to the emotional bond between adult women characters from heterogeneous economic backgrounds in two Indian novels: The Binding Vine (1992) by Shashi Deshpande and The Space Between Us (2006) by Thrity Umrigar. Mirza suggests that the inter-class bonds experienced by these adult women provide them with an awareness of the patriarchal culture in which they exist as well as "the marginality of women" (32) within that culture. While both novels represent strong bonds between women from polarized classes, neither novel "lets the reader forget that theirs is a highly unequal relationship" (33). Thus, Mirza persuasively underscores how the novels question the possibility of enduring inter-class female solidarity and reject the universal experience of womanhood often claimed by mainstream feminism. Mirza's analysis adds an important angle to existent postcolonial feminist readings of the texts by emphasizing class as...