Author: Vinay Lal
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 2005
Language: English
Pages: 228
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0144000059
Description
The idea of India as a nation-state is slowly encroaching upon the idea of India as a civilization
Feminism, subaltern studies, postcolonial theory and cultural studies have helped to pose new and important questions about our knowledge of India. But there has been insufficient engagement with local and vernacular elements of Indian civilization. Of Cricket, Guinness and Gandhi is an attempt to establish a tradition of modern Indian criticism in this regard.
The eight engaging essays in this book cover a wide range of cultural phenomena and offer a sweeping perspective on contemporary Indian society. They explore the national obsession with the Guinness Book of Records and the paranoia over VIP security; the politics of sexuality as embodied in the lifestyles of hijras and the nationalist fervour over the nuclear tests; the impossibility of the Other in the Hindi film; the cricket World Cup; and Gandhi’s life as an ecological treatise, and his experiments with celibacy. Engaging and lively, these essays offer a ‘dissenting, futurist and hermeneutic’ perspective on the modern cultural history of India.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Public AND POPULAR CULTURE
Indians and the Guinness Book of Records:;
The Contours of a National Obsession
The Near Impossibility of the Outsider,
or the Significant other in the Modern Hindi Film
POLITICS AND THE INDIAN STATE
Now Are We Men, not Eunuchs?
Reflections on the Nuclear Explosion
Black Cat Commandos, Gunmen, and Other Terrors:
The Insecurity of Indian Security
GANDHIAN HERMENEUTICS,/ HERMENEUTIC GANDHISM
Nakedness, Non-Violence, and Brahamacharaya
Gandhiji's Experiments in Celibate Sexuality
Gandhi and Ecological Vision of Life
Too Deep for Deep Ecology,
THE CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE
A CIVILIZATIONAL PERSPECTIVE ON INDIA
Not this not that: The Hijras of India
And the Cultural Politics of Sexuality
The Bittersweet Sweets of Modernity:
Cricket and the South Asian Sensibility
Index