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Beena Kamlani

Biography

Beena Kamlani

Beena Kamlani is a Pushcart Prize-winning fiction writer whose work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review; Ploughshares; Identity Lessons: Learning to Be American, eds. Gillan (1999); Growing Up Ethnic in America, eds. Gillan (2000); The Lifted Brow (2008); World Literature Today and other publications. She has been awarded fellowships at Yaddo, MacDowell, Ledig House/Writers Omi, Hawthornden Castle, Jentel Arts and Hedgebrook. A former senior editor for the Penguin Group, she taught book editing at New York University for nearly two decades and was presented an award for teaching excellence.

Beena Kamlani

Books by Beena Kamlani

The English Problem
by Beena Kamlani - Fiction

Shiv Advani is an 18-year-old growing up in India who has been personally chosen by Mahatma Gandhi to come to England, learn their laws and then return home and help drive the British out of India. He arrives in London and soon discovers a world he is both repelled by and drawn to. Shiv knows his duty: get in, learn the letter of the law, get out. But as anyone who has ever lived in a British colony can tell you, “the English Problem” is multifaceted. The racist colonialism of “the empire on which the sun never sets” seeps into everything --- not just landed territories, but territories of the mind: literature, language, religion, sexuality, self-identity. Soon the people Shiv sought to be liberated from will be the people he desperately wants to be a part of. In the end, Shiv must fight not only for his country’s liberation but also his own.