Of Cricket, Guinness And Gandhi â¿¿ Essays Of Indian History And Culture

The eight essays that comprise this book offer a 'dissenting, futurist, and hermeneutic' perspective on India civilisation and various aspects of the modern cultural history of India. Feminism, subaltern 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, mythic, vernacular and pluralist elements of Indian civilisation. 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 parishioners in English in India today including Ashis Nandy, Rustom Bharucha, Shiv Visvanatajn, and T G Vaidyanathan.