Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation - Community, Religion and Cultural Nationalism

Author: Tanika Sarkar
Publisher: Permanent Black
Year: 2001
Language: English
Pages: 290
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8178240076

Description

This book is a brilliant historicization and scathing critique of many of the dominant concepts by which Indians generally, and north Indian Hindus more specifically, think and live today.

What were some of the major Hindu ideas and traditions that have shaped the dominant conceptions of 'womanhood', 'domesticity', 'wifeliness',, 'mothering' and India as a 'Hindu' nation. This work examines literary and social traditions, elite voices and popular culture - the rhetoric and the grand realities which have together, thorough complex historical processes, created the lived reality of north India today.

Her book includes a searching critique of Bankimchandra Chatterjee, whose novel, Anandmath, is among the best-known instances of a proto-nationlist definition of Hindu nationhood. Tanika Sarkar also examines scandal literature, rumors, and the popular press in colonial times for 'subaltern' ideas that have shaped contemporary India. She concludes with a detailed examination of how earlier Indian religious traditions of saintliness, sacrifice, heroism, and warfare are being subverted or transformed by militant and fundamentalist forms of Hinduism.

Historians, sociologists, political scientists and serious readers who wish to understand how the immediate past shaped India's life will value this incisive work of a major historian.