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This book offers fresh theoretical, methodological and empirical analyses of the relation between religion and the city in the South Asian context. Uniting the historical with the contemporary by looking at the medieval and early modern links between religious faith and urban settlement, the book brings together a series of focused studies of the mixed and multiple practices and spatial negotiations of religion in the South Asian city. It looks at the various ways in which contemporary religious practice affects urban everyday life, commerce, craft, infrastructure, cultural forms, art, music and architecture. Chapters draw upon original empirical study and research to analyze the foundationa...
In this collection of conversations that were conducted in Calcutta, at the London School of Economics, through Jewish Book Week, and on the radical website openDemocracy, internationally renowned Jewish scholar Jacqueline Rose explores the debates that have fueled her writing and thinking over three decades. Drawn out by her interlocutors, Rose discusses the difference between political and sexual identity and inquires whether psychoanalysis can be considered a radical form of thought that can be used fruitfully in dialogue about political struggle. Most significantly--since each of these conversations were sparked by her recent and controversial writing on Zionism, Israel, and Palestine--Rose reflects on the role of Jewish dissent in our time. In these conversations, Rose appears courageous, passionate, ethical, and never afraid to engage politically on issues that are of human concern in the ongoing Middle and Near East crisis.
Mirabai, an iconic sixteenth-century Indian poet-saint, is renowned for her unwavering love of God, her disregard for social hierarchies and gendered notions of honor and shame, and her challenge to familial, feudal, and religious authorities. Defying attempts to constrain and even kill her, she could not be silenced. Though verifiable facts regarding her life are few, her fame spread across social, linguistic, and religious boundaries, and stories about her multiplied across the subcontinent and the centuries. In Mirabai, Nancy M. Martin traces the story of this immensely popular Indian saint from the earliest manuscript references to her through colonial and nationalist developments to sch...
Contributed articles on Ghare baire, Bengali novel, and its English translation, The home and the world.
This book is an attempt at deconstructive counter-reading or at what Jonathan Dollimore called “creative vandalism” (2018) of existing cultural or literary texts. Deconstruction is a much maligned or a much misunderstood word and for many, it usually bears a pejorative ring. While most would flaunt their familiarity with some of its philosophic jargons, for the majority, it is an area to be dismissed as intellectual obscurity or abstruse ‘high theory’. In fact there is a serious dearth of Derrida scholarship because of our collective aversion to Derrida that emanates from our lack of familiarity or engagement with deconstruction theory or with the philosophy of deconstruction. Norm-deviant reading strategies of deconstruction offer fresh insights and rebellious interpretative possibilities. Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
This important book provides a bridge between psychoanalytic perspectives and socio-cultural issues to shine a spotlight on the experiences of women in India today. Women’s well-being and security has often depended upon their gender positioning while other binaries like rural-urban, class, and caste have also played a crucial role globally and especially in India. Historically, women have been subjected to various forms of oppression that include sex selective abortions, domestic violence, bride burning for dowry, and acid attacks. Threats to women’s security have recently increased with progressive polarization and hardening of socio-political and cultural ideologies. This book assesse...
Ritwik Ghatak's The Cloud-Capped Star (Meghe Dhaka Tara, 1960) has been hailed as 'one of the great classics of world cinema' (Adrian Martin), and 'one of the five or six greatest melodramas in cinema history' (Serge Daney). A striking blend of modernist aesthetics and melodramatic force, it is arguably the best-known film by Ghatak, widely considered to be one of the most original, politically committed, and formally innovative film-makers from India. The film's focus on a family uprooted by the Partition of India and its powerful exploration of displacement and historical trauma gives it a renewed relevance in the midst of a global refugee crisis. Manishita Dass situates the film in its hi...
Why is it important to have a revolutionary critical pedagogy? What are the new inter/disciplinary engagements possible within the university? What will it be like to live and learn in this university of the future? Drawing on these essential questions, this volume explores the political future(s) of the university. It does not take a simplistic recourse to the tenets of liberal democracy but seeks a more engaged positioning of the university space within everyday practices of the social. It cross-examines the history of this ‘ideal’ university’s relationship with the banal everyday, the ‘apolitical’ outside and what exceeds intellectual reason, to finally question if such historicizing of the university is necessary at all. Along with its companion The Idea of the University: Histories and Contexts, this brave new intervention makes a compelling foray into the political future(s) of the university. It will be of interest to academics, educators and students of the social sciences and humanities, especially education. It will also be of use to policy-makers and education analysts, and be central to the concerns of any citizen.
Shakespeare in the World traces the reception histories and adaptations of Shakespeare in the nineteenth century, when his works became well-known to non-Anglophone communities in both Europe and colonial India. Sen provides thorough and searching examinations of nineteenth-century theatrical, operatic, novelistic, and prose adaptations that are still read and performed, in order to argue that, crucial to the transmission and appeal of Shakespeare’s plays were the adaptations they generated in a wide range of media. These adaptations, in turn, made the absorption of the plays into different "national" cultural traditions possible, contributing to the development of "nationalist cosmopolitanisms" in the receiving cultures. Sen challenges the customary reading of Shakespeare reception in terms of "hegemony" and "mimicry," showing instead important parallels in the practices of Shakespeare adaptation in Europe and colonial India. Shakespeare in the World strikes a fine balance between the Bard’s iconicity and his colonial and post-colonial afterlives, and is an important contribution to Shakespeare studies.
The book aims to introduce the Bengali writer (1948-2014) to a global audience through some of his short stories and poems in English translation and a series of critical essays on his works. A political commitment to literature frames Nabarun Bhattacharya's aesthetic project and the volume wishes to tease out the various perspectives on this complex meeting of politics and aesthetics. Be it the novel on dogs or those on petro-pollution and the machine, the political question in Nabarun echoes significant contemporary issues, such as animal rights, global warming and techno-capitalism. This opens up the possibility of questioning the traditional paradigm of humanist values in a world of catastrophic and violent encounters such as nuclear war or holocaust, which keeps returning in Nabarun's works.