Ralph Russells compact, appealingly personal history of Urdu literature is informed without being pedantic, balanced but up-front about the authors own predilections, and sympathetic to the subjects he writes about without abandoning a critical stance entirely (his critiques of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and well-rounded assessment of Iqbals national vision for Pakistan, stand out as especially nuanced). I appreciated his description of his own initial difficulties in learning to enjoy the conventions of the ghazal, and his treatment of the populist, didactic ambitions of The Progressive Writers Movement in the 1930s does a great job of judging the work by its own standards. (The portrait of Prem Chand is particularly helpful).

Assembled from a patchwork of papers and occasional essays, the book doesnt aim for anything like completion. But as a rough and ready introduction to the Urdu literary tradition, its a great resource to start with. Russell's bio reads almost like a caricature of the modern British Orientalist--Classics at Cambridge, war service in India, a career at The School of African and Oriental Studies in London--but he was also a lifelong Communist whose political sympathies, like those of Raymond Williams or E.P. Thompson, remind you how potent that fusion between English dispassion and Leftist commitment could be.