Author: Neela Bhattacharya Saxena
Publisher: Indialog Publications
Year: 2004
Language: English
Pages: 325
ISBN/UPC (if available): 818798161X
Description
This is a book about one person meeting the world of words, yet it would not have seen the light of day without a vast number of people who participated in the project in many different ways.
REVIEWS
Neela Bhattacharya Saxena breaks new intellectual ground, articulating the personal understanding of Kali she has gleaned from her upbringing as a Bengali woman, visionary life, and philosophical and literary exploration. Through an unconventional, illuminating reading of a range of texts, Sexena introduces readers to a Kali who helped her remain fee of internalized oppression by offering a source of identity and wholeness that pulses beneath all dualities as universal but nonetheless female desire, creativity, power and joy.
-Miranda Shaw
University of Richmond
Following intuition rather than hermeneutical rule or chronological impulse, Neela Bhattacharya Saxena invites us to share in her journey through texts, ideas and images that remind her, or articulate for her, the meaning of Kali in her life. In the Beginning IS Desire is thus a personal and creative reading of history and narrative that travels an immense landscape-from the Rig Veda and Buddhist stories to Sufi poetry and cotemporary novels- in the quest for a goddess who has fascinated her since childhood.
-Rachel Fell Mcdermott Columbia University
It will be challenging to put this book into a specific category. Though it has a strong feminist leaning, It is not an exclusively gender-oriented work, An although no an autobiography, it retraces the existential quest of the sensitive mind of a young Indian woman from her early teens to adulthood.
-Sanjukta Gupta Oxford University
Contents
FOREWORD
Rachel Fell McDermott
INTRODUCTION
A Gynocentric Perspective
DESIRE AS KALI'S FOOTPRINTS
Towards an Understanding of a Tantric Deity
DESIRE IN THE BEGINNING
The Rig Veda 10: 129
DESIRE AND ASCETICISM
Rabindranath Tagore's Chandalika
DESIRING DUALITIES
Girish Karnad's Hayavadana
DESIRE TO BE
Ismat Chugtai's The Crooked Line
DESIRE BETRAYED
Maitreyi Devi's It Does Not Die and
Mircea Eliade's Bengal Nights
DESIRE AND IDENTITY
Rabindranath Tagore's Gora
UNTOUCHABILITY OF BEING
Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things
A CONCLUDING MOMENT
In the Beginning IS Desire
Glossary
Bibliography
Index