Author Description

The idea of India as a nation-state is slowly encroaching upon the idea of India as a civilization. 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 and vernacular elements of Indian civilization. Of Cricket, Guinness and Gandhi is an attempt to establish a tradition of modern Indian criticism in this regard. The eight engaging essays in this book 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 the nuclear tests; the impossibility of the Other in the Hindi film; the cricket World Cup; and Gandhi s life as an ecological treatise, and his experiments with celibacy. Engaging and lively, these essays offer a dissenting, futurist and hermeneutic perspective on the modern cultural history of India.