Of Cricket, Guinness and Gandhi

Author: Vinay LalPublisher: Seagull BooksYear: 2003Language: EnglishPages: 223ISBN/UPC (if available): 8170461847 DescriptionFeminism, subaltern studies, postcolonial theory and cultural studies have helped to pose new and important questions about our knowledge of India, but there has been insufficient engagement with local forms of knowledge, and with the non-modern, ahistoricist, mythic, vernacular and pluralist elements of Indian civilization. Although this scholarship offers rearrangements within the existing frames of knowledge, it seldom dispenses with the frames. This book is an attempt to help in establishing a tradition of modern Indian criticism, of which there are only a handful of practitioners in English in India today including Ashis Nandy, Rustom Bharudha, Shiv Visvanathan, and T G Vaidyanathan.These essays explore the national obsession with the Guinness Book of records and the paranoia over VIP security, the politics of sexuality as embodies in the lifestyles of hijra