Reviews

This book offers a rich discourse of the animal, and brings forth the fundamental reconsiderations of nonhuman and human difference, otherness, and subjectivity.
New Asia Books

Each article in this volume gives us a quick but intriguing glimpse of an often unfamiliar (sub-) culture from a unique angle.
Indo-Iranian Journal

Charming Beauties and Frightful Beasts considers representations of animals in South Asian narratives as subjects, objects, symbols and signifiers. In doing so this edited book poses important questions about the nature of culture itself and the role of power and ethics within it.
The text's concentration on folk narratives, through literature, arts, myth and ritual, is important in making this a particularly valuable contribution to the developing cultural discourse of ‘animal studies’, paying heed to the south Asian multiplicity of religions and communities. The book's objective to explore the ways in which animals have shaped human paradigms and alternative worldviews is met with rich and varied.contributions.
South Asia Research

On the whole this volume offers food for thought to the current conversation on animals. Even if animal voices still simply reflect human desires and human traits, fortunately for us, some of the contributions encourage us to rethink assumptions that the animal is mute, and its representations merely constructions of the human, as its other.
Journal of Hindu Studies