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The anthology Queer Sexualities in Indian Culture: Critical Responses surveys the queer (LGBTQIA+) space in Indian culture in reference to literature, movies and other important media of culture. Shedding light on the marginalised position of queer in Indian culture, the anthology seeks sympathy for this minority class of people from majorities. It traces out factors like gender stereotype, body politics, prejudism etc. causing these minorities to lead a life of invisibility. Along with a critical introduction and an interview with queer activist and author Ruth Vanita, the anthology has covered sixteen well-explored articles through which authors have tried to sincerely articulate their noble ideas on queer studies in Indian context. The book will be helpful not only for readers who want to know about Indian queers but also prove resourceful to scholars who intend to do further studies on it.
This book on Indian literature offers a critique of the aesthetics and politics of modernity as embodied in Indian bhasha literature of the past two centuries. It discusses the complex ways in which the bhasha imagination, even as it reshaped the history of colonial modernity, simultaneously allowed itself to be shaped by it in turn.
The names of Mirabai, Akka Mahadevi and Andal, are known to many, but innumerable women poets remain relatively unknown. When we hear of them, it is invariably as plaster saints or meek followers. It is time to smell the danger in their words again, to listen to their feral sensuality, their searing questions about custodians of gender and faith. It is time to tune into their brazenness, their heartbreaking longing. Not just for their sake but for ours too. In this anthology of sacred poetry that arrives after the much-loved book, Eating God, Arundhathi Subramaniam weaves together haunting voices of, by and for women across the Indian subcontinent. Here is a lineage of audacious woman-centred spirituality that traverses the poetry of ancient Buddhist nuns, Bhakti and Sufi mystics, tantrikas and Vedantins. There are women here, and men singing as women, and both raising their voices in praise of the sacred feminine. Brought to us through translation, these poems surprise with how intimately familiar their ravenous yearnings and ecstatic freedoms are. Wild Women invites us to reclaim an explosive inheritance of female power, rapture and wisdom.
The notion of the postcolonial metropolis has gained prominence in the last two decades both within and beyond postcolonial studies. Disciplines such as sociology and urban studies, however, have tended to focus on the economic inequalities, class disparities, and other structural and formative aspects of the postcolonial metropolises that are specific to Western conceptions of the city at large. It is only recently that the depiction of postcolonial metropolises has been addressed in the writings of Suketu Mehta, Chris Abani, Amit Chaudhuri, Salman Rushdie, Aravind Adiga, Helon Habila, Sefi Atta, and Zakes Mda, among others. Most of these works probe the urban specifics and physical and cul...
Whistling in the Dark: Twenty-one Queer Interviews focuses on issues like sexuality, sexual identity, marriage, gay marriage, heteronormativity, gay utopia, gay activism, gay bashing, police atrocities and the laws vis-à-vis these. The interviewees represent a cross section of society ranging from university professors, gay rights activists and students, on the one hand, to working class men such as office boys, auto-rickshaw drivers and even undertrials who have served prison sentences, on the other. The thought-provoking narratives in this book are the outcome of probing and incisive questions put to the respondents by the editors R. Raj Rao and Dibyajyoti Sarma. Appealing to a wide readership, the narratives go beyond the conventional and provide a rare insight into the private lives of the respondents. Besides being a must read for gay activists and organisations, the book will also be a useful resource for post-graduate students and academics working in the fields of sexuality studies, feminism and alternative literature.
Can deep contemplation give rise to macabre visions? What happens to the attempts of resolving a deranged mind? Some men go through spirals of Decadence, spending years in the pursuit of the authentic, becoming obscure and absurd, finally losing the difference between real and unreal. Exhausted with reasoning and self-reflection, with a subsequent lack of self-control breeds fear, permeating the surroundings. The road to Freedom, or so the narrator believed in until his own experiences begin to unhinge him. The Journal of a man, alienated and occasionally delusional, trying to articulate a method to overcome the ephemeral only to severe ties with the present. Will he understand the deeper meaning of existence after being in limbo, wasting with his degenerating memories and desires?
The more you look around the world, at the chaos, conflict, horror and repression in the name of religious ideology, not least in the lands very close to India, the more you realise how Nehru, for all his imperfections, got the biggest question right. Now that India is finally positioning itself for a spectacular economic takeoff, it is not the right time to endanger that by opening the can of worms that is communalism.
This book engages with the life and works of Indira Goswami, the first Assamese woman writer to win the highest national literary award, the Jnanpith Award, in 2001. From sociological treatises to a springboard of a socio-political milieu, Goswami’s texts are intersections of the local and the global, the popular and the canonical. The writer’s penchant for transcending boundaries gives a new contour and shape to the social and cultural domains in her texts. That every character is a representative of the society, that the context comes alive in every evocation of class struggle, power play, caste discrimination and gendered narratives add an interesting semantic load to her texts. While...