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Existence of the freedom to read, write, print, publish, discuss, debate, and dispute creative writing and dissident writing in India.
This book explores the process of monumentalisation of Indo-Islamic historical places and their remaking as political sites in contemporary India situating these within the Muslim political discourse. It studies the process through which various monuments such as the Jama Masjid in Delhi and the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya became ‘political sites’ many decades after independence and the modes by which a memory of a royal Muslim past was articulated for political mobilisation. It analyses the histories of these archaeological monuments, their function, their status as living memories and as heritage, emerging Muslim religiosities and the internal configurations of Muslim politics in India. This new edition also explores the aftermath of the Supreme Court verdict of the Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi land title dispute and the Hindutva politics of heritage. Raising critical questions such as whether Muslim responses to political questions are homogenous, the book will greatly interest researchers and students of political science, modern Indian history, sociology, as well as the general reader interested in contemporary India.
An interdisciplinary collection of primary texts on the subject of violence, from Freud to Gramsci to Foucault, from Ghandi to Osama bin Laden. The editors' introductions frame the texts within questions of how violence is generated and perpetuated in so
Salman Rushdie is perhaps the most important writer of the present time. His significant and controversial literary interventions in debates on post-colonial culture and contemporary South Asian Islam are matched by the contribution he has made to postmodern literature in the West (culminating in the award to him in 1993 of the twenty-fifth-anniversary Booker of Bookers prize). This collection of articles focuses on Rushdie's five novels. The context is set by the introduction, The Politics of Salman Rushdie's Fiction, which discusses the political stance of Rushdie's fiction, the various influences on his work, and the textual strategies and techniques he employs, for political expression and cultural critique. The postmodern/post-colonial interface, the carnivalesque, and satire are major themes treated here and in the articles that follow, which also provide diverse other perspectives on Rushdie's thought and method. A number of essays have been commissioned specially for this volume. An appendix listing selected writings by Rushdie and articles on the Satanic Verses Affair is followed by a comprehensive bibliography annotating critical studies of Rushdie's work.
An Open Access edition is available thanks to the kind sponsorship of the libraries participating in the Jisc Open Access Community Framework OpenUP initiative. Debates about reading in postcolonial studies rarely discuss non-professional readers, except to secure the authority of professional reading practices. In Reading Postcolonial Literature, Hayley G. Toth places non-professional reading practices in dialogue with received academic wisdom to debunk common-sense assumptions about non-professional readers as ‘Western’ or ‘neocolonial’ consumers. Drawing on reading practices recorded in academic books, journal articles and on online book-reviewing platforms like Amazon and Goodrea...
Since the end of the 1980s in India, self-styled representatives of a variety of ascriptive groups—religious, caste, regional, and linguistic—have been routinely damaging artworks, disrupting their exhibition, and threatening and assaulting artists and their supporters. Often, these acts are claimed to be a protest against allegedly ‘hurtful’ or ‘offensive’ artworks, wherein its regularity and brazenness has led to an intensifying sense of fear, frustration, and anger within the art world. Art Attacks tells the story of this phenomenon and maps the concrete political transformations that have informed the dynamic unfolding of violent attacks on artists. Based on extensive interactions with offence-takers, assailants, and artists, the author argues that these attacks are not simply ‘anti-democratic’ but are dependent in perverse ways on the very logics of democracy’s functioning in India. At the same time, they have been contained, at least until now, by this very democratic system, which has prevented the spiralling of attacks into an outright condition of art plunder.
Includes a chapter on circumstances leading to the demolition of the Babari Masjid, Faizabad, India, on December 6, 1992.
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