Signposts: gender issues in post-independence India

"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. Book jacket."--Jacket.

Originally published: New Delhi : Kali for Women, ©1999.

Virgin mother, beloved other: the erotics of Tamil nationalism in colonial and post-colonial India / Sumathi Ramaswamy -- Thinking about the new Indian middle class: gender, advertising and politics in an age of globalisation / Arvind Rajagopal -- Gender, development and the women's movement: problems for a history of the present / Mary E. John -- Gender-cleansing: the paradox of development and deteriorating female life chances in Tamil Nadu / Barbara Harriss-White -- Gender, caste and modernity: a reading of U.R. Anantha Murthy's "Samskara" in its intellectual context / Nalini Natarajan -- The impossible subject: caste and desire in the scene of the family / Susie Tharu -- Understanding Sirasgaon: notes towards conceptualising the role of law, caste and gender in a case of "atrocity" / Anupama Rao -- Cutting to size: property and gendered identity in the Indian higher courts / Srimati Basu -- Of victims and vigilantes: the "Bandit queen" controversy / Priyamvada Gopal -- The story of Draupadi's disrobing: meanings for our times / Rajeswari Sunder Rajan -- Mnemosigning: ecstasies in pain / D. Venkat Rao.