1st Edition
The Indian Postcolonial A Critical Reader
India has often been at the centre of debates on and definitions of the postcolonial condition. Offering a challenging new direction for the field, this Critical Reader confronts how theory in the Indian context is responding in vital terms to our understanding of that condition today.
The Indian Postcolonial: A Critical Reader is made up of four sections looking in turn at:
- visual cultures
- translating cultural traditions
- the ethical text
- global/cosmopolitan worlds.
Each section is prefaced with a short introduction by the editors that locate these interdisciplinary articles within the contemporary national and international context. Showcasing the diversity and vitality of current debate, this volume collects the work of both established figures and a new generation of cultural critics.
Challenging and unsettling many basic premises of postcolonial studies, this volume is the ideal Reader for students and scholars of the Indian Postcolonial.
Introduction – Elleke Boehmer and Rosinka Chaudhuri Part 1 - Visual Cultures Introduction – Elleke Boehmer and Rosinka Chaudhuri 1. Partha Chatterjee. ‘Nationalist Icon to Secular Image’ 2. Tapati Guha Thakurta. ‘Religious Icon and Art: The Case of M.F. Hussain' 3. Robert Young, ‘Sanjayit Ray’ 4. M. Madhava Prasad, ‘Fan Bhakti and Subaltern Sovereignty: Enthusiasm as a Political Factor’ Part 2 - Translating Cultural Traditions Introduction – Elleke Boehmer and Rosinka Chaudhuri 5. Aamir Mufti, ‘Auerbach in Istanbul’ 6. Vinayak Chaturvedi, ‘Vinayak and Me’ 7. Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Belatedness as Possibility: Subaltern Histories, once again’ 8. Aniket Jaiware, ‘Of Demons and Angels' Part 3 - The Ethical Text Introduction – Elleke Boehmer and Rosinka Chaudhuri 9. Gayatri Spivak, ‘Ethics and Politics in Tagore and Coetzee’ 10. Udaya Kumar, ‘Self, Body and Inner Sense’. Studies in History' 11. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, ‘Gandhian Ethics’ 12. Ashis Nandy, ‘Humiliation: The Politics and Cultural Psychology of the Limits of Human Degradation’ Part 4 - Global/cosmopolitan worlds Introduction – Elleke Boehmer and Rosinka Chaudhuri 13. Amit Chaudhuri, ‘The Alien Face of Cosmopolitanism’ 14. Santanu Das, ‘India, Empire, and First World War writing’ 15. Nivedita Menon, ‘Thinking through the Postnation’ 16. Ranajit Guha, ‘A Colonial City and its Times’
Biography
Elleke Boehmer, Rosinka Chaudhuri
'Readers of this anthology will find much to read and much to reflect upon; they will be (re-acquainted with the diversity and richness of Indian social sciences and humanities; they will be convinced by the necessity to refocus and relocate the work of postcolonial theory.' - Commonwealth Essays and Studies
