Of Cricket Guinness And Gandhi

The eight essays that comprise this book offer a ‘dissenting futurist and hermeneutic’ perspective on Indian civilization and various aspects of the modern cultural history of India. Feminism 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. The essays all in an easily readable style cover a wide range of cultural phenomena and offer a sweeping perspective on contemporary Indian society. They explore the national obsession with the Guinness Book of Records and the paranoia over VIP security the politics of sexuality as embodied in the lifestyles of hijras and the nationalist fervour over nuclear tests. There are essays on the impossibility of the Other in the Hindi film on the World Cup of Cricket on Gandhi’s life as an ecological treatise and on Gandhi’s experiments with celibate sexuality. The idea of India as a nations-state is as the essays suggest slowly encroaching upon the idea of India as a civilization and the essays explore how our finite games can be transformed into infinite games.