Bombay Before Mumbai: Essays in Honour of Jim Masselos edited by Prashant Kidambi, Manjiri Kamat and Rachel Dwyer, Penguin Random House India, 2019; pp 428, ₹999 (hardbound).
On the lines of Sadat Hasan Manto's facetious letters to Uncle Sam written at the height of the cold war when Pakistan was being wooed by the US as an ally to fight communism, this letter was written in 2002 to the then Prime Minister Vajpayee by historian Ayesha Jalal. Written as a spirited assessment of the standoff between India and Pakistan, the letter is peppered with rare insights that have always been Manto's hallmark.
