Subtitle: Gender Issues in Post-Independence India
Author: Edited by Rajeswari Sunder Rajan
Subject: Asian and Asian American Studies/Gender Studies
Paper ISBN 0-8135-2912-3
Pages: 390 pp.
Description: An exploration of gender's central role in defining India's status as a postcolonial nation-state.

"The incisive essays in this volume . . . add to our understanding of the complex and troubled question of gender, caste, citizen and nation. . . .The detailed and comprehensive introduction makes this book one worth reading."--Vasanth Kannabiran, Indian Review of Books

"A courageous and intellectually dazzling series of confrontations between Indian feminists and the specters of difference that haunt them. Required reading for anyone concerned with the stubborn complexities of postcolonial justice."--Bruce Robbins, English Department, Rutgers University

The essays in this volume map the concerns of gender onto the terrain of nation, finding significant connections, disjunctions, and tensions between them. The authors argue that gender must take center stage in any cultural analysis performed in the context of decolonized nation-space. Contributors explore gender as a point of crisis in the cultural, social, and political space of a nation. They attribute the existence of these crises to conflicts between gender, on the one hand, and the family, community, and nation on the other. These crises are then analyzed in terms of female identity, subjectivity, and agency within a narrative of historical modernity.

Rajeswari Sunder Rajan is the author of Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture, and Postcolonialism as well as other books and articles on South Asian gender issues, and feminist and postcolonial theory. She will soon be joining the English faculty at the University of Oxford.