In Required Reading, Priyasha Mukhopadhyay plots a history of nonstandard reading under the everyday material pressures of the colonial state in South Asia. Indeed, some of the texts she considers evince the very medium of this duress. To the field of literary studies that is excessively attached to the novel form and the "reader lost in a book," Mukhopadhyay contributes a fresh orientation to what counts as our objects of analysis and how to define ourselves aswriters and readers (18). Most significantly, by treating moments where a text is not fully comprehended, where reading is impossible, or where the text is encountered through another (i.e. tactile) sense, Required Reading expands and enlivens what we deem literary and what we consider reading.

The lithe, highly readable, delightful book takes its trajectory from the careful wording of its striking title. "Required reading" first and foremost contextualizes Mukhopadhyay's objects of analysis--the everyday texts and bureaucratic documents that colonial subjects and agents were required to engage with. The four chapters are organized by textual material: the first chapter covers military handbooks, the second bureaucratic petitions and appeals, and almanacs and a women's literary magazine in the third and fourth chapters respectively. "Required" as a qualifier of "reading" also animates readerly affects other than pleasure. "Boisterous soldiers, bored colonial administrators, peasants confused [by paperwork], and lonely women" who do not want to read, who cannot read, and/ or who try to read prompt us to reconceive the act and purpose of reading itself (4). As important as the social identities of these (un)readers are, so are their affective relationships with the texts. To understand these readers as bored or frustrated or lonely makes us better acquainted with them, and with the texts and the networks they circulated in. "Confused," for instance, tells us that peasants attempting to comprehend accounts, licenses, and petitions were largely illiterate and thus found such documents that determined their material lives obfuscating. It also tells us the documentslacked clarity and access. Such an archaeological approach helps us to understand colonial bureaucracy as an arbitrary, dismissive, callous form of governance in its everyday material practices.

The first chapter takes up the curious reception history of The Soldier's Pocket-book for Field Service (1869), a military handbook authored by Garnet Wolesley (who retired as a commander in chief of the British Armed Forces in 1900). It was widely owned but seldom, if at all, read by its intended audience. And yet, it was everywhere. It circulated as a joke; quotations and snippets pervaded military training halls and classrooms. Figures from the explorer Henry Morgan Stanley (who went on to lead the Emin Pasha Relief expedition in 1887) to the prolific writer Rudyard Kiplingdeemed the Pocket-Book as erroneous, ineffective, morally harmful, and above all, tedious. Mukhopadhyay pursues the Pocket-book and its historical and imagined readers--in letters, antiwar pamphlets, newspaper articles, scrapbooks, and short stories by Rudyard Kipling--across Himachal Pradesh and provinces in the North-West Frontier Provinces in South Asia, Burma, Britain, and the United States. Readings of the book, or rather the readings around the book--the myriad "opinions, misreadings, and obfuscations"-- ultimately reveal, Mukhopadhyay argues, a profound concern over the moral life of the British imperial soldier, and more broadly over the moral dimensions of empire's military ventures (55). Intentional or not, Mukhopadhyay makes a startling move here, one that may not be to every reader's preference. Because the focus was so overwhelmingly on what was said about the Pocket-book rather than what it says, the reader of the chapter may feel akin to one of these un-readers of the Pocket-book--coming to understand it not by reading it but rather by circumnavigating the dizzying web of information about it.

The second chapter on colonial bureaucracy and (il)legibility begins with an instance of Leonard Woolf burning an administrative document in 1909 when he was an Assistant Government Agent in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Reading this moment as Woolf's "grievance about empire's unhealthy entanglement with documents," Mukhopadhyay explores the life of imperial paperwork such as account books, licenses, and petitions amidst eliteeducated and nonelite quasi-literate populations in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ceylon (58). The latter "illiterate readers" are Mukhopadhyay's primary focus here. Like in the previous chapter, she pairs historical traces of interpretive attempts recovered from Sri Lanka National Archives and fictionalized scenes of reading in Woolf's The Village in the Jungle (1913) and to a much lesser extent H. E. Beal's Indian Ink (1954), and excavates meaning-making practices--alternative to interpretive reading--with which these readers made sense of the countless unreadable documents that determined their day to day lives. In so doing, the chapter demonstrates how illegibility can wield unexpected, even eccentric epistemic power (86).

In the third chapter, Mukhopadhyay considers the competing temporalities of the traditional Bengali Hindu life and imperial capitalist modernity in the nineteenth century by analyzing the reading practices that Panjikas inspire. This chapter diverges from the previous in two ways--one, this (and the next) chapter shifts from a focus on texts produced by the colonial text to "commercially produced forms of print published for and by South Asians, aimed at guiding them through a landscape modified by colonial rule," as stated by Mukhopadhyay in the introduction. Secondly, the method she uses here to explore how these Bengali Hindu almanacs were read by analyzing the content, format, and marginalia on the page, rather than by pursuing archival/fictional traces of their readers, as in the previous chapters (24). There was a tension between these volumes' professed everyday necessity--indeed, Mukhopadhyay shows that their format allowed for selective reading and courted repetitive reading--and their unreadability, in that their print and layouts often thwarted comprehension. These unreadable essential texts ultimately helped their audience navigate the changed, accelerated temporality and the routine pressures of an unreadable empire.

While most of the book considers readers who were men, the final chapter crucially highlights women readers. It turns to The Indian Ladies' Magazine, a Madras-based, English language monthly established in 1901 by Kamala Satthianadhan with the aim of educating women socially and politically. Mukhopadhyay argues that this magazine acted as a tool against provinciality by making English literature functional and by cultivating a community of women readers in the empire's provinces. She characterizes the magazine's "supportive textual apparatus" as "scaffolding"--referring to its content of book reviews, literary lists, word puzzles, and similar artifacts that made English literature manageable and practical--and demonstrates how it "accompanied, complemented, and assisted South Asian women in their individual acts of reading English literature" (132). Mukhopadhyay seeks fictionalized women readers of such literary magazines in Rabindranath Tagore's Nastanirh [The Broken Nest] (1901) and attends to readers' letters, subscribers' answers to the quizzes and puzzles, entries to writing competitions, and even the contributions in The Indian Ladies' Magazine's as a practice of reading/writing in community practice. The shared consumption (perhaps even production) of the magazine against racial and geographical bounds, Mukhopadhyay argues, enacted a practice much like reading together, enabling these women to be "participants in, not just provincial witnesses to, the cultural and literary discussions of their time" (25).

As stated by Mukhopadhyay, the primary contribution of the book is the concept of the "functional archive," which is variously defined at different points in the book; however, the definition that stuck with me is this: "the scrappier textual forms spurred on by the informational turn in the colonial imagination" (8). Ultimately, I was not wholly convinced that The Indian Ladies' Magazine quite fit this definition of the functional archive, even as it provided a most fascinating case study for Mukhopadhyay's other major offering--broadening the scope of what reading entails. To me, the value of the functional archive lies not in the invitation to look at "ordinary forms of writing"--which many scholars have done--but in articulating a way of conceptualizing and reading the very ubiquity of this sprawling archive (5). Indeed, the colonial state's inextricable, overwhelming dependence on paperwork and everyday print cultures necessitates--requires--that we look at these materials not merely as sources of historical information, but as transacting important literary and epistemic work in their own right. The title Required Reading thus also frames a call to our discipline at large to reconsider what we deem required.

Readers who come to the book with an archival studies orientation may be disappointed that Mukhopadhyay does not devote excess space to theorizing the functional archive. In the introduction, she does offer us four ways of thinking about the functional archive, namely network, transaction, dispersion, and ephemerality (concepts that have been developed variedly by many scholars across different fields), but she does not subsequently integrate them into her rich analyses. Further, while Mukhopadhyay uses literary texts in interesting ways to read the functional archive, readers who may be expecting these literary texts to be reciprocally lensed through the extra-literary texts will be less satisfied. Finally, while affect was everywhere in the book--the readers and reading practices are defined first and foremost in their affective domains-- it never acquired the critical valence it deserved. In conceiving of colonial readers' engaging with the functional archive as a practice of reading/misreading/not reading the empire, Mukhopadhyay suggests that the readers being bored, frustrated, lonely, aspirational tell us about the nature of colonial governance. I sought a more comprehensive understanding of how these affects circulated in the (extra)literary publics and print economies, and wondered what weight they may have carried in shaping not only readerly communities and personas but also everyday lives within a colonial state.

After reading the book, I wanted more from it. This can be construed as a critique, but I intend it as a high commendation for her work that it offers many exciting openings and directions for our discipline. There is much in Required Reading for scholars of empire studies, South Asian studies, print cultures, archival studies, and Victorian studies to discover, learn, and to pounce on and run with in their own work.