Suchergebnisse

Sunder Rajan's essay responds to Gopal Guru and Sundar Sarukkai's book The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory. Its primary focus is the authors' arguments regarding the absence of original theory in the social sciences in India, and the case they make for the imperative need for such theory. The essay also places Guru and Sarukkai in conversation with Franz Fanon. It is Fanon, Sunder Rajan contends, who speaks most closely and pertinently to the question of the "lived experience" that Guru and Sarukkai invoke, in the phenomenological mode, as theory's other and its source. But it is not exclusively these obvious parallels between Fanon's pioneering work on the experience and philosophy of race on the one hand, and the contemporary work on Dalit experience and theory on the other, that the essay is interested in tracing. It also draws attention also to a practice of theoretical intervention that Fanon establishes in his work, in Black Skin and in The Wretched of the Earth, that would be of value to caste critiques, which is to use (a certain Other) experience to draw the limits of (European, mainstream) theory.

Judith Butler's perception of a shift in feminism's relationship to the state in Antigone's Claim serves as a useful starting point for my reflections in this essay. The familiar feminist representation of Antigone's "defiance" that she describes and questions leads me to an exploration of the political and historical reasons for the turn from the "antagonistic" model of opposition to the state that this literary icon has long represented, toward a modality of struggle that might be described instead as "agonistic." I examine the classical Tamil epic Silappadikaram, whose heroine Kannaki is a comparable figure, for its political resonances. The subject-constitution of both Antigone and Kannaki as figures of mourning allows me to explore the implications of the contemporary gendered politics of mourning in the first part of this essay. Central to my understanding of agonistic feminist politics is Mrinalini Sinha's revealing analysis in Specters of Mother India (2006) of the circumstances surrounding the mobilization of Indian women around the passage of the Child Marriage Restraint Act in colonial India in 1929, which constitutes the second part of my essay.

A feminist reading/reinterpretation of the ancient Sanskrit epic of the Mahabharatha, especially the episode of the heroine's disrobing, explores its implications for contemporary India. The 2500-year-old story of Draupadi's sexual humiliation is related to the contemporary practice of stripping women & parading them naked in public, a form of male sexual behavior referred to as "eve-teasing," that has become a part of both urban & small-town life despite laws prohibiting such acts. It is argued that the practice is not primarily a pathology of sexual violence, but both an expression of misogyny & a method of social control. The underlying moral in cinematic representations of women in these situations is discussed, along with various modern texts linked to the ancient epic, to shed light on uses of tradition in postcolonial Indian society. Recent feminist critiques & appropriations of the figure of Draupadi are described to argue that the preoccupation of Indian feminists with Draupadi's story is a reflection of the tension in Indian society between the material/real & the ideological. J. Lindroth

An introduction to a collection of essays on gender issues in post-Independence India discusses the nature of India's first 50 years as a sovereign democratic republic & the centrality of gender issues to national culture & politics. Gender is addressed in terms of constitutional equality, legal rights, identity as citizen-subjects, & women's role in the political process. It is noted that the women's movement emerged as the result of increasing violence against women, religious fundamentalism, caste tensions, & a serious gender gap in literacy, workforce participation, land distribution, inheritance, & nutrition. Although the contributors are united in viewing gender as a point of crisis, divisions within the women's movement are seen as part of the struggle to find a viable feminist politics. The essays focus on three broad areas of inquiry within the problematic of gender & postcolonialism: (1) conceptualizations of women as belonging to specific religious, caste, or regional communities; (2) discourses of female identity, subjectivity, & agency; & (3) gender within the narrative of modernity. An overview of each essay is included. J. Lindroth