Susan Bayly's Asian Voices in a Postcolonial Age is a comparative study of the legacies of colonialism and socialism in Vietnam and India. For Bayly, the post-colonial elites of Vietnam and India were part of a “global socialist ecumene”. Members of this ecumene shared a socialist language that, for Bayly, was less one of political or economic organization than “a set of broadly inclusive moral, emotional, and even aesthetic dispositions” (p. 9). They also shared lives characterized by rupture and movement, whether within the Indian sub-continent or across the network of socialist states in Europe, Asia, and Africa. In order to form understandings of these experiences of rupture, movement, and separation, Bayly concentrates on key sites such as the family, particularly children. This focus allows her to reveal that far from being the passive objects of processes of colonization, de-colonization, and the creation of socialist post-colonies, her “socialist moderns” were “active moral agents engaging reflectively and dynamically with the multiple pasts and presents which they have forged and shared” (p. 240).

Although Asian Voices in a Postcolonial Age is conceived as a comparison of Vietnamese and Indian elites, readers should note that its focus is overwhelmingly on Vietnam, and more specifically on those French-educated Hanoian intellectuals who supported the Communist-led government after 1945. After introducing the book's themes in the first chapter, in Chapters 2 and 3 Bayly investigates how notions of family, nurturing, provision, and education structured experiences of separation and sacrifice for Hanoi intellectuals. In Chapter 4, she continues with a discussion of the problematic ways in which intelligentsia identity has been created and categorized in Vietnam. Interestingly, Bayly argues that despite market-oriented reforms undertaken by Vietnam since 1986, the idioms and practices of socialism remain strongly embedded in the intimacies of intellectual family life. Chapter 5 shifts focus, finding compelling parallels in the professional and familial experiences of Indian intellectuals. Much like their Vietnamese counterparts, they were engaged in a developmental and emancipatory project, “selflessly and faithfully bringing the same universalising standards of technocratic skill and progressive social practice to the provincial environments in which they found themselves” (p. 105).

The following chapters return to the Vietnamese context. Chapters 6 and 7 are devoted to urban and rural spaces respectively, showing how Hanoi intellectuals represented themselves as active participants in the making and mapping of revolution and liberation in the spaces of Hanoi and the Communist-controlled rural “interzones” during the First Indochina War of 1946–1954. Thanks to her informants' childhood stories, Bayly is able to call into question “any idea of simple two-sided power relations between the rural populace and the incoming ‘socialist moderns’ even though they all, children included, unmistakably embodied the new socialist order which the DRV authorities were seeking to bring into being in the interzones” (pp. 164–65). Chapter 8 analyzes the experiences of Vietnamese “experts” who served overseas after 1975 in terms of anthropological theories of gift and exchange. As with her analysis of socialist family relations, Bayly finds that notions of provision, nurturing, and service were central to both personal and national narratives of these experiences. Finally, Chapter 9 provides readers with a useful conclusion.

The strength of Bayly's work lies in her ability to engage critically with a wide range of post-colonial scholarship, and its charm flows from the obvious warmth of the relations she developed with her informants. At the same time, Bayly's training as a scholar of India and her theoretical concern with socialism and post-socialism necessarily shape her analysis. For example, what Bayly describes as socialist preoccupations with credentialized knowledge, service to society, and filial obligations have deep resonances with Vietnam's pre-colonial culture. She nevertheless minimizes these historical roots, writing at one point that while her socialist moderns were impelled by a strong sense of filial obligation, one “should not think of this as Confucian or neo-Confucian ‘traditionalism’” (p. 64). Similarly, the more recent historical context of her informants' stories could have been developed more effectively. Events like the land reform campaign, the division of the country in 1954, the suppression of intellectual dissent in the Nhan Van-Giai Pham affair, or reunification in 1975 appear as footnotes to seamless narratives of active socialist moderns and their sacrifices for family and for nation. More attention to history and a deeper, more critical contextualization of her informants' stories would help shed light on the processes of memory and forgetting that make the construction of such narratives possible.

Asian Voices in a Postcolonial Age is an engaging and original work of interest to scholars of both South and Southeast Asia. Bayly's comparison of Indian and Hanoi intellectuals is novel and useful. It allows her to underline the active and extremely complex relationship that a liminal generation of Asian intellectuals had to its colonial and post-colonial pasts. It also reminds us of how the language of socialism has shaped the experience and memory of colonialism and post-colonialism, and indeed continues to shape a more or less post-socialist present. Finally, it makes accessible to an English-speaking audience the stories of a small group of women and men who will not be with us much longer. When I arrived to do my own research in Vietnam in 2000, I was lucky to meet and become friends with women and men much like the ones who populate the pages of Bayly's monograph. And while the stories they told me were often idealized and certainly polished from countless retellings, it was impossible not to marvel at their experiences and at the sacrifices they had made in the name of creating a new and better society. Sadly, age is silencing these voices at the same time that socialist vocabularies are taking on decidedly neo-liberal inflections in both Vietnam and India. Asian Voices in a Postcolonial Age thus appears at an important moment, reminding us of the achievements of one remarkable generation, and providing perspective on a generation of Hanoi intellectuals to come.