Download or read book Infinite Variety written by Madhavi Menon and published by . This book was released on 2018-05-10 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Elegant, lucid and funny, this book will appeal to as many readers as there are desires.'--Shohini Ghosh 'The history of desire in India, ' writes Madhavi Menon in this splendid book, 'reveals not purity but impurity as a way of life. Not one answer, but many. Not a single history, but multiple tales cutting across laws and boundaries.' In Bhakti poetry, Radha and Krishna disregard marital fidelity, age, time and gender for erotic love. In Sufi dargahs, pirs (spiritual guides) who were married to women are buried alongside their male disciples, as lovers are. Vatsyayana, author of the world's most famous manual of sex, insists that he did not compose it 'for the sake of passion', and remained celibate through the writing of it. Long hair is widely seen as a symbol of sexuality; and yet, shaved off in a temple, it is a sacred offering. Even as the country has a draconian law to punish homosexuality, heterosexual men share the same bed without comment. Hijras are increasingly marginalized; yet gender has historically been understood as fluid rather than fixed. Menon navigates centuries, geographies, personal and public histories, schools of philosophy, literary and cinematic works, as she examines the many--and often surprising--faces of desire in the Indian subcontinent. Her study ranges from the erotic sculptures of Khajuraho to the shrine of the celibate god Ayyappan; from army barracks to public parks; from Empress Nur Jahan's paan to home-made kohl; from cross-dressing mystics to androgynous gods. It shows us the connections between grammar and sex, between hair and war, between abstinence and pleasure, between love and death. Gloriously subversive, full of extraordinary analyses and insights, this is a book you will read to be enlightened and entertained for years.
Download or read book Infinite Variety written by Madhavi Menon and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Being English written by Sayan Chattopadhyay and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2021-11-29 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book critically examines the cultural desire for anglicisation of the Indian middle class in the context of postcolonial India. It looks at the history of anglicised self-fashioning as one of the major responses of the Indian middle class to British colonialism. The book explores the rich variety of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writings that document the attempts by the Indian middle class to innovatively interpret their personal histories, their putative racial histories, and the history of India to appropriate the English language and lay claim to an “English” identity. It discusses this unique quest for “Englishness” by reading the works of authors like Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Rabindranath Tagore, Cornelia Sorabji, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Dom Moraes, and Salman Rushdie. An important intervention, this book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of postcolonial studies, Indian English literature, South Asian studies, cultural studies, and English literature in general.
Download or read book The Desire of India written by Surendra Kumar Datta and published by . This book was released on 1908 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Desire and Motivation in Indian Philosophy written by Christopher G. Framarin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-03-27 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book advances an original interpretation of the orthodox Indian theories of motivation in light of the Indian prohibition on desire and evaluates its consequences for Indian ethics and soteriology.
Download or read book Sakhiyani written by Giti Thadani and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-10-06 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The product of many years of research, this unique book presents fascinating perspectives on contemporary lesbian life in India and unravels some of the history of lesbian desire from centuries past. Through detailed examination of mythology, cosmology, ancient art and artefacts and her exegesis of ancient Sanskrit texts, Thadani constructs a tapestry of feminine kinship, genealogy and sexual or erotic bonding between women (sakhiyani) in ancient India. The author offers an historical perspective on the effect of colonization upon lesbian identities in India, showing how women were viewed by Western imperialists either as soft victims or as sexually dangerous, possessing an overgrown clitoris and in need of heterosexual domestication. The second half of the book focuses on contemporary lesbian realities and issues, including lesbian marriages, suicide pacts, forging lesbian space, lesbian human rights, lesbophobia, sexual exile and the different construction of gender, family and possible kinship alliances.
Download or read book Edge of Desire written by Chaitanya Sambran and published by Philip Wilson Publishers. This book was released on 2005-05-11 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book presents a decade-long perspective on contemporary visual practices in India, with stunning visuals and insightful essays by leading intellectuals in the field. Engaging with a diversity of art practices and creative conditions, the publication (and exhibition) questions cultural structures that segregate visual practices, making a case for a polycentric aesthetic. In this argument for an inclusive and non-hierarchical consideration of visual culture, Edge of Desire presents a new contribution from the sub-continent to the debate on the nature and purpose of art practices and art histories. At the same time, it offers a visually exciting and intellectually stimulating array of new art from India generated through an intermingling of influences and traditions.
Download or read book Hi Stories of Desire written by Rajeev Kumaramkandath and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-20 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Draws upon multi-disciplinary frameworks of analysis to provide an account of the making of sexual cultures in modern India.
Download or read book Courting Desire written by Rama Srinivasan and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-17 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inquiries into marital patterns can serve as an effective lens to analyze social structures and material cultures not only on the question of sexuality, but also on the nature of a private citizen’s engagement with state and law. Through ethnographic research in courtrooms, community,and kinship spaces, the author outlines the transformations in material culture and political economy that have led to renewed negotiations on the institution of marriage in North India, especially in legal spaces. Tracing organically evolving notions of sexual consent and legal subjectivity, Courting Desire underlines how non-normative decisions regarding marriage become possible in a region otherwise known for high instances of honor killings and rigid kinship structures. Aspirations for consensual relationships have led to a tentative attempt to forge relationships that are non-normative but grudgingly approved after state intervention. The book traces this nascent and under-explored trend in the North Indian landscape.
Download or read book Desire of the Moth written by Champa Bilwakesh and published by University of Arkansas Press. This book was released on 2017-03-15 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fifteen-year-old widow runs across a bridge to catch a train bound for Trichi. Sowmya is running away to make sense of the events that had seized her body and her mind, and had ripped apart her world. She is determined to flee her destiny of numbing isolation within her community, the Brahmins of the Thanjavur district in South India. Her plans pivot when she meets a devadasi--an aging dancer--in her compartment. When the woman Mallika opens her drawstring bag and buys Sowmya her dinner, Sowmya recognizes what she needs to overcome her own condition, that of a young woman in possession of a thin cotton sari, a head shorn clean, and little else. She asks Mallika how she too can achieve that kind of power--the power to open a bag and pull out money. Thus begins Sowmya's transformation in the city by the sea, Madras, which is in the grip of its own political and social changes while India is struggling to seize its independence from the imperial British raj. Here she learns the beauty of dance from Mallika, and the sweetness and agony of falling in love with a married man. The cinema brings unimagined opportunities and all the power and riches that she could desire, but it also consumes her relentlessly. When a letter arrives, Sowmya begins her quest to regain everything that had been lost when she once lived in that small village tucked into a little bend of the Kaveri River. Hear Champa Bilwakesh reading from Desire of the Moth here: http://voicethread.com/myvoice/#thread/5863247/30058528/31699244
Download or read book Kama written by Gurcharan Das and published by India Allen Lane. This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A riveting account of love and desireIndia is the only civilization to elevate kama-desire and pleasure-to a goal of life. Kama is both cosmic and human energy, which animates life and holds it in place. Gurcharan Das weaves a compelling narrative soaked in philosophical, historical and literary ideas in the third volume of his trilogy on life's goals: India Unbound was the first, on artha, 'material well-being'; and The Difficulty of Being Good was the second, on dharma, 'moral well-being'. Here, in his magnificent prose, he examines how to cherish desire in order to live a rich, flourishing life, arguing that if dharma is a duty to another, kama is a duty to oneself. It sheds new light on love, marriage, family, adultery and jealousy as it wrestles with questions such as these: How to nurture desire without harming others or oneself? Are the erotic and the ascetic two aspects of our same human nature? What is the relationship between romantic love and bhakti, the love of god
Download or read book With Respect to Sex written by Gayatri Reddy and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-05-15 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With Respect to Sex is an intimate ethnography that offers a provocative account of sexual and social difference in India. The subjects of this study are hijras or the "third sex" of India—individuals who occupy a unique, liminal space between male and female, sacred and profane. Hijras are men who sacrifice their genitalia to a goddess in return for the power to confer fertility on newlyweds and newborn children, a ritual role they are respected for, at the same time as they are stigmatized for their ambiguous sexuality. By focusing on the hijra community, Gayatri Reddy sheds new light on Indian society and the intricate negotiations of identity across various domains of everyday life. Further, by reframing hijra identity through the local economy of respect, this ethnography highlights the complex relationships among local and global, sexual and moral, economies. This book will be regarded as the definitive work on hijras, one that will be of enormous interest to anthropologists, students of South Asian culture, and specialists in the study of gender and sexuality.
Download or read book Desire Named Development written by Aditya Nigam and published by Penguin Books India. This book was released on 2011 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The predatory neo-liberal capitalism that has become the norm in India over the last two decades raises many uncomfortable questions. Today, consumption defines what we are. And with the western capitalist model reigning supreme, all of us seem to have been reduced to being just consumers in the eyes of the government. The effect on India's peasantry has been tremendous. The recent tragic stories played out in Kalinganagar, Singur and Nandigram show how many farmers suddenly find themselves up against the might of the state. The theft of agricultural land from poor farmers in the name of progress has become routine. Meanwhile, private corporations continue to ravage the country's natural resources without any protest from the administration. In Desire Named Development, Aditya Nigam makes the case for dismantling some cherished beliefs and for restructuring the economy and our cities in particular ways. A substantial change in government policies and individual consumption habits can still make another world possible for India's future. Nigam makes a strong case for dismantling some cherished beliefs and for restructuring the economy and our cities in particular ways.
Download or read book The Law of Desire written by and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Desire and Devotion written by Pratapaditya Pal and published by Philip Wilson Publishers, Limited. This book was released on 2001 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The catalogue is accompanied by two introductory essays: "Introduction: Desire and Devotion," by Pratapaditya Pal, and "Artistic Production, Religious Practice: Material and Ideological Constraints," by Hiram Woodward."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Bollywood Cinema written by Vijay Mishra and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-08-21 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: India is home to Bollywood - the largest film industry in the world. Movie theaters are said to be the "temples of modern India," with Bombay producing nearly 800 films per year that are viewed by roughly 11 million people per day. In Bollywood Cinema, Vijay Mishra argues that Indian film production and reception is shaped by the desire for national community and a pan-Indian popular culture. Seeking to understand Bollywood according to its own narrative and aesthetic principles and in relation to a global film industry, he views Indian cinema through the dual methodologies of postcolonial studies and film theory. Mishra discusses classics such as Mother India (1957) and Devdas (1935) and recent films including Ram Lakhan (1989) and Khalnayak (1993), linking their form and content to broader issues of national identity, epic tradition, popular culture, history, and the implications of diaspora.
Download or read book The Queen s Desire written by Hume Nisbet and published by . This book was released on 1893 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
