The eight essays that comprise this book offer a 'dissenting, futurist, and hermeneutic' perspective on Indian civilization and various aspects of the modern cultural history of India. 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.
The essays, all in an easily readable style, 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 nuclear tests. There are essays on the impossibility of the Other in the Hindi film, on the World Cup of Cricket, on Gandhi's life as an ecological treatise, and on Gandhi's experiments with celibate sexuality. The idea of India as a nations-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 games.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
Vinay Lal is associate professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of South Asian Cultural Studies: A Bibliography (1996), Empire of Knowledge: Culture and Plurality in the Global Economy (2002), The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India (2003), Introducing Hinduism: A Graphic Guide (2010) and The Other Indians: A Political and Cultural History of South Asians in America (2008)
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
Shipping:
£ 13
From United Kingdom to U.S.A.
Book Description 1st edition. A very nice clean, bright copy Used - Very Good. VG hardback in VG dust jacket. Seller Inventory # BOOKS265277I
Book Description Condition: Very Good. Ships SAME or NEXT business day. We Ship to APO/FPO addr. Choose EXPEDITED shipping and receive in 2-5 business days within the United States. See our member profile for customer support contact info. We have an easy return policy. Seller Inventory # 52732318