Contradictory Indianness

Contradictory Indianness
Author: Atreyee Phukan
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2022-07-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1978829124

As Contradictory Indianness shows, a postcolonial Caribbean aesthetics that has from its inception privileged inclusivity, interraciality, and resistance against Old World colonial orders requires taking into account Indo-Caribbean writers and their reimagining of Indianness in the region. Whereas, for instance, forms of Indo-Caribbean cultural expression in music, cuisine, or religion are more readily accepted as creolizing (thus, Caribbeanizing) processes, an Indo-Caribbean literary imaginary has rarely been studied as such. Discussing the work of Ismith Khan, Harold Sonny Ladoo, Totaram Sanadhya, LalBihari Sharma, and Shani Mootoo, Contradictory Indianness maintains that the writers' engagement with the regional and transnational poetics of the Caribbean underscores symbolic bridges between cultural worlds conventionally set apart—the Africanized and Indianized—and distinguishes between cultural worlds assumed to be the same—indenture and South Asian Indianness. This book privileges Indo-Caribbean fiction as a creolizing literary imaginary to broaden its study beyond a narrow canon that has, inadvertently or not, enabled monolithic and unidimensional perceptions of Indian cultural identity and evolution in the Caribbean, and continued to impose a fragmentary and disconnected study of (post)indenture aesthetics within indenture’s own transnational cartography.

India Abroad

India Abroad
Author: Sandhya Shukla
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2021-03-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0691227616

India Abroad analyzes the development of Indian diasporas in the United States and England from 1947, the year of Indian independence, to the present. Across different spheres of culture--festivals, entrepreneurial enclaves, fiction, autobiography, newspapers, music, and film--migrants have created India as a way to negotiate life in the multicultural United States and Britain. Sandhya Shukla considers how Indian diaspora has become a contact zone for various formations of identity and discourses of nation. She suggests that carefully reading the production of a diasporic sensibility, one that is not simply an outgrowth of the nation-state, helps us to conceive of multiple imaginaries, of America, England, and India, as articulated to one another. Both the connections and disconnections among peoples who see themselves as in some way Indian are brought into sharp focus by this comparativist approach. This book provides a unique combination of rich ethnographic work and textual readings to illuminate the theoretical concerns central to the growing fields of diaspora studies and transnational cultural studies. Shukla argues that the multi-sitedness of diaspora compels a rethinking of time and space in anthropology, as well as in other disciplines. Necessarily, the standpoint of global belonging and citizenship makes the boundaries of the "America" in American studies a good deal more porous. And in dialogue with South Asian studies and Asian American studies, this book situates postcolonial Indian subjectivity within migrants' transnational recastings of the meanings of race and ethnicity. Interweaving conceptual and material understandings of diaspora, India Abroad finds that in constructed Indias, we can see the contradictions of identity and nation that are central to the globalized condition in which all peoples, displaced and otherwise, live.

Indian Writers

Indian Writers
Author: Jaspal Kaur Singh
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2010
Genre: East Indian diaspora in literature
ISBN: 9781433106316

Indian Writers attempt to locate diasporic voices in the interstitial spaces of countless ideologies. The anthology provides a critical examination of dislocated diasporic subjects - those who have adjusted to the dislocation well, those who have chosen the hybrid spaces for empowerment, those who are dragged forcefully to various territories, and yet those who gleefully inhabit trans-local spaces. A wide range of voices raise these critical questions: How do we read these voices? How are the voices received in various locations? Are these voices considered Indian? Do they represent Indianness, or some hybridized version of it? What is an authentic cultural identity? What, ultimately, is Indianness, or for that matter, any hard-won national or ethnic identity? Additionally, as more female writers are being read, both in the global south and in the north, the reception of these texts, particularly in an era of globalization, and in the aftermath of the 9/11 attack in the United States, raises questions on how the «other», the subaltern, is represented and read. Some writers use an assimilationist approach to the cultures of the West to such a degree that they find Indian culture monolithically oppressive, while others continue to romanticize Indianness, yet others eroticize and ethnicize the east for western consumption. The authors of the essays in this anthology examine contemporary debates in postcolonial and transnational literary criticism in an attempt to understand the often complex and hybrid narratives of the diasporic Indian subject.

Playing Indian

Playing Indian
Author: Philip J. Deloria
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2022-05-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300153600

The Boston Tea Party, the Order of Red Men, Camp Fire Girls, Boy Scouts, Grateful Dead concerts: just a few examples of white Americans' tendency to appropriate Indian dress and act out Indian roles "A valuable contribution to Native American studies."—Kirkus Reviews This provocative book explores how white Americans have used their ideas about Native Americans to shape national identity in different eras—and how Indian people have reacted to these imitations of their native dress, language, and ritual. At the Boston Tea Party, colonial rebels played Indian in order to claim an aboriginal American identity. In the nineteenth century, Indian fraternal orders allowed men to rethink the idea of revolution, consolidate national power, and write nationalist literary epics. By the twentieth century, playing Indian helped nervous city dwellers deal with modernist concerns about nature, authenticity, Cold War anxiety, and various forms of relativism. Deloria points out, however, that throughout American history the creative uses of Indianness have been interwoven with conquest and dispossession of the Indians. Indian play has thus been fraught with ambivalence—for white Americans who idealized and villainized the Indian, and for Indians who were both humiliated and empowered by these cultural exercises. Deloria suggests that imagining Indians has helped generations of white Americans define, mask, and evade paradoxes stemming from simultaneous construction and destruction of these native peoples. In the process, Americans have created powerful identities that have never been fully secure.

Debating the 'Post' Condition in India

Debating the 'Post' Condition in India
Author: Makarand R. Paranjape
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2017-10-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 135158359X

How was the post-modernist project contested, subverted and assimilated in India? This book offers a personal account and an intellectual history of its reception and response. Tracing independent India’s engagement with Western critical theory, Paranjape outlines both its past and ‘post’. The book explores the discursive trajectories of post-modernism, post-colonialism, post-Marxism, post-nationalism, post-feminism, post-secularism — the relations that mediate them — as well as interprets, in the light of these discussions, core tenets of Indian philosophical thought. Paranjape argues that India’s response to the modernist project is neither submission, willing or reluctant, nor repudiation, intentional or forced; rather India’s ‘modernity’ is ‘unauthorized’, different, subversive, alter-native and alter-modern. The book makes the case for a new integrative hermeneutics, the idea of the indigenous ‘critical vernacular’, and presents a radical shift in the understanding of svaraj (beyond decolonisation and nationalism) to express transformations at both personal and political levels. A key intervention in Indian critical theory, this volume will interest researchers and scholars of literature, philosophy, political theory, culture studies and postcolonial studies.

Speaking Havoc

Speaking Havoc
Author: Ramu Nagappan
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2011-12-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0295801719

Annotation Who has the right to speak about trauma? As cultural products, narratives of social suffering paradoxically release us from responsibility while demanding that we examine our own connectedness to the circumstances that produce suffering. As a result, the text's act of "speaking havoc" rebounds in unsettling ways. Speaking Havoc investigates how literary and cinematic fictions intervene in the politics and reception of social suffering. Amitav Ghosh's modernist novel The Shadow Lines (1988), A Fine Balance (1995) by Rohinton Mistry, the short stories of Saadat Hasan Manto, Salman Rushdie's postmodernist novel Shame (1983), and the "spectacular" films of Maniratnam each bear witness to social violence in South Asia. These works confront squarely the catastrophes and innumerable minor tragedies that arise from clashes among religious and ethnic communities. Focusing on central events such as the Partition of 1947, the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984, and more recent religious conflicts between India and Pakistan, Nagappan demonstrates the differing ways that narratives engage the political violence that has marked the last fifty years of South Asian history. Is it possible to tell fully the stories of those who have died and those who have survived? Can writing really act as a counter to silence? In his compassionate engagement with these concerns, Nagappan demonstrates the relevance of literature and literary studies to fundamental sociological, anthropological, and political issues. With its interdisciplinary scope, historical perspective, and lucid style, Speaking Havoc is destined to become a foundational text for scholars of South Asian studies and postcolonial and culturalstudies, and for readers interested in trauma and social suffering as well as in the literature, films, and histories that take this field as their topic.

India's Nuclear Bomb and National Security

India's Nuclear Bomb and National Security
Author: Karsten Frey
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 466
Release: 2007-01-24
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1134144938

India’s Nuclear Bomb and National Security gives an analytic account of the dynamics of India's nuclear build up. It puts forward a new comprehensive model, which goes beyond the classic strategic model of accepting motives of arming behaviour, and incorporates the dynamics in India’s nuclear programme. The core argument of the book surrounds the question about India's security considerations and their impact on India's nuclear policy development. Karsten Frey explores this analytic model by including explanatory variables on the unit-level, where interests are generally related to symbolic, less strategic values attributed to nuclear weapons. These play a significant role within India's domestic political party competition and among certain pressure groups. They also impacted India's relationship with other countries on non-proliferation matters, for example the concept of the country's 'status' and 'prestige'. Identifying the role of the strategic elite in determining India's nuclear course, this book also argues that one of the pivotal driving forces behind India's quest for the nuclear bomb is India's struggle for international recognition and the strong, often obsessive sensitivities of India's elite regarding 'acts of discrimination' or 'ignorance' by the West towards India.

Routledge Handbook of Education in India

Routledge Handbook of Education in India
Author: Krishna Kumar
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 434
Release: 2017-10-17
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1351608525

This comprehensive handbook introduces the reader to the education system in India in terms of its structural features, its relations with society and culture, and the debates that have shaped present-day policy ethos. Expert scholars provide a lucid analysis of complex themes such as the equal distribution of educational opportunities, legal provisions shaping the opportunity structure, and curricular issues in major areas of knowledge. The volume provides a general overview of India’s education system and examines key and current issues that face higher and school education, the examination system, disciplines of social sciences, curriculum, teachers, law, coaching and unemployment. This handbook will serve as a valuable resource and guide to anyone seeking authentic information about India’s contemporary educational challenges in relation to its society, economy and politics. It will be useful to scholars and researchers of education, public policy and administration, sociology and political studies as well as practitioners, think-tanks, those in media, government and NGOs.