Of Cricket, Guinness and Gandhi

Of Cricket, Guinness and Gandhi

Product ID: 80008

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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