Gandhis Tiger and Sitas Smile - Essays on Gender, Sexuality and Culture

Gandhis Tiger and Sitas Smile presents a collection of compelling essays which interrogate a variety of Indian texts and contexts along intersecting axes of gender, nation, and desire. The primary theme that weaves these varied essays together, written at different points of time with varying focal points of interest, is intertextuality. Vanita examines the way in which medieval texts speak to each other and draw on earlier canonical works, rewriting and transforming narrative in a spirit of respectful conversation. She also looks at modern texts, such as nineteenth-century poetry and twentieth-century fiction and cinema, as they converse with each other and with older texts. In doing so, she tries to explore how such pre-modern and modern texts are received in later periods or by other cultures in the same period. These captivating and intensely thought-provoking writings demonstrate the authors superb ability to turn the norm, whether Right-wing or Left-Wing, on its head, and find a fresh way to appreciate diversity and change, and the valuable dialogue they give rise to. Contents
Forword by Shohini Ghosh
Preface
Acknowledgements
Politics and Power
1. Thinking Beyond Gender in India
2. The Self Has No Gender: A Female and A Male Scholar Debate Womens Status in the Mahabharata
3. Gandhis Tiger: Multilingual Elites, the Battle for Minds, and English Romantic Literature in Colonial India
4. A Rose by Any Other Name: The Sexuality Terminology Debates
5. Was Sita Mrs Ram? The Evolution of Womens Surnames
6. Whatever Happened to the Hindu Left?
Love and Friendship
7. God as Sakhi: Medieval Poet Janabai and her Friend Vithabai
8. Gender, Language, and Genre: Hindus, Muslims, Men, Women, and Lesbian Love in Nineteenth-century Urdu Rekhti Poetry
9. Tragic Love and the Ungendered Heart: Reading the Well of Loneliness in India and the West
10. From a Man (Mard) to a Human Being (Insan): Jealous Husbands, Female Sexuality and Discourses of Love in Three Major Hindi Films
11. Social Deviant, Disabled Victim or Normative Human Being? Love Rewrites the Plot in Dosti and Tamanna
12. The Many Colours of Love: Homoerotic Tropes in Modern Indian Fiction
Pleasure, Play, Transformation
13. Sita Smiles: Wife as Goddess in the Adbhut Ramayana
14. Disability as Opportunity: Sage Ashtavakra Mentors Bhagiratha, the Disabled Child of Two Mothers
15. Playing the Field: Homoeroticism in Modern Indian Advertising
16. Pleasure or Moral Purpose? Conflict and Anxiety in Modern Hindi Translations of the Kamasutra
17. Im an Excellent Animal: Cows at Play in the Writings of Bahinabai, Rukun Advani, Suniti Namjoshi and Others
Index


Author/Editor Details
Ruth Vanita , Professor, Liberal Studies and Womens Studies, University of Montana