Author: Rajeswari Sunder Rajan
Publisher: Kali/Zubaan
Year: 2000
Language: English
Pages: 382
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8186706364
Description
The essays in this volume map the concerns of gender onto the terrain of nation, finding significant connections, disjunctions and tensions between them. The authors argue that for any cultural analysis to be performed in the context of the decolonised nation-space, gender must take centrestage.
As a newly independent nation-state, India saw itself as initiating progressive social change, increasing economic prosperity and encouraging the advancement of political ideals. Though the reality has been a vastly different one of struggle, compromise and the lapse of ideals, there have been some hard-won gains, in these areas. Issues of gender have been central to the process of new nation-state formation.
The essays in this volume further explore gender as a point of crisis in the cultural, social and political space of the nation. They attribute the existence of these crises to conflicts between gender, on the one hand, and family, community and nation on the other. These are then analyzed in terms of female identity, subjectivity and agency within a narrative of historical modernity.
THE EDITOR:
RAJESWARI SUNDER RAJAN is a Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, and Visiting Professor in the English Department, George Washington University, Washington DC. She has edited a collection of essays, The Lie of the Land: English Literary Studies in India, and is the author of Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Post colonialism.
Contents
Introduction
Virgin Mother, Beloved Other
The Erotics of Tamil Nationalism in Colonial and Post-Colonial India
Thanking About the New Indian Middle Class
Gender, Advertising and Politics in an Age of Globalisation
Gender, Development and the Women's Movement
Problems for a History of the Present
Gender-Cleansing
The Paradox of Development and Deteriorating Female Life Chances in Tamil Nadu
Gender, Caste and Modernity
A Reading of U.R. Anantha Murthy's "Samskara" in its Intellectual Context
Impossible Subject
Caste and Desire in the Scene of the Family
Understanding Sirasgaon
Notes Towards Conceptualising the Role of Law, Caste and Gender in a Case of "Atrocity"
Cutting to Size
Property and Gendered Identity in the Indian Higher Courts
Of Victims and Vigilantes
The "Bandit Queen" Controversy
The Story of Draupadi's Disrobing
Meaning for Our Times
Mnemosigning
Ecstasies in Pain