SOURCE: Karamcheti, Indira. “Cover Stories.” Women's Review of Books 11, no. 4 (January 1994): 20-1.

In the following review, Karamcheti compliments Mehta's imagery and cultural romanticism in A River Sutra but argues that the stories are superficial and ignore the social and political issues facing modern India.

You'd never know it over here, but India is one of the largest makers of movies in the world. The Indian film industry is astonishing for its sheer industriousness, if not for its renown. Yet here in the US, and probably through most of the West, we don't see (and don't really know about) this extraordinary output, this twentieth-century proliferation of Indian self-expression and interpretation of the world. It's not that we're wholly ignorant of it, but, typically, we're familiar with only one name at a time. India's entire fertile film industry has been fetishized in Satyajit Ray, whose works have enormous responsibility for...