Author: Vinay Lal
Publisher: Seagull Books
Year: 2003
Language: English
Pages: 223
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8170461847
Description
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 forms of knowledge, and with the non-modern, ahistoricist, mythic, vernacular and pluralist elements of Indian civilization. Although this scholarship offers rearrangements within the existing frames of knowledge, it seldom dispenses with the frames. This book is an attempt to help in establishing a tradition of modern Indian criticism, of which there are only a handful of practitioners in English in India today including Ashis Nandy, Rustom Bharudha, Shiv Visvanathan, and T G Vaidyanathan.
These essays explore the national obsession with the Guinness Book of records and the paranoia over VIP security, the politics of sexuality as embodies in the lifestyles of hijras and the nationalist fervour over the nuclear tests. There are essays on the impossibility of the Other in the Hindi film, on the World Cup of Cricket, on Gandhi’s experiments with celibate sexuality. The idea of India as a nation-state is, as the essays suggest, slowly encroaching upon the idea of India as a civilization, and the essays explore how our finite games can be transformed into infinite
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PUBLIC AND POPULAR CULTURE
ONE
Indians and the Guinness Book of Records:
The Contours of a National Obsession
TWO
The Near Impossibility of the Outsider,
Or the Significant Other in the Modern Hindi Film
POLITICS AND THE INDIAN STATE
THREE
Now Are We Men, Not Eunuchs?
Reflections on the Nuclear Explosion
FOUR
Black Cat Commandos, Gunmen, and Other Terrors:
The Insecurity of Indian Security
GANDHIAN HERMENEUTICS /HERMENEUTIC GANDHISM
FIVE
Nakedness, Non-violence, and Brahmacharya:
Gandhi’s Experiments in Celibate Sexuality
SIX
Gandhi and the Ecological Vision of Life:
Too Deep for Deep Ecology
THE CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE:
A CIVILIZATIONAL PERSPECTIVE ON INDIA
SEVEN
Not This, Not That: The Hijras of India and the Cultural Politics of Sexuality
EIGHT
The Bittersweet Sweets of Modernity:
Cricket and the South Asian Sensibility
Index