Jasbir Jain
Showing all 23 books
The history of the Partition is neither singular nor static. It appears different from different perspectives. The past is never over, its presence looms large over our presents.
The Partition narrative exceeds the bounds of history, to the large scale exodus often referred to as the third partition—most painful and long-lasting in its emotional, political and social contexts. It impacted both collective and individual identities. In some ways it rendered ...
Forgiveness: Between Memory and History is a work that has risen out of a felt need of our times where violence and forgiveness. The Western discourse going beyond the religious has located forgiveness in legal and historical issues, but the Eastern tradition have commented both on its underlying presence and its surface realization. Working with religious and cultural pasts, the present work asks the questions: what happens when forgiveness enters political ...
The Diaspora Writes Home: Subcontinental Narratives is a work of gathering the multiple dispersions of the emigrants from South Asia across time and space to the various homelands they relate to now. The word 'write' is used in all its multiplicity the fact of creative expression, as an inscription, a mark and writing as a connectivity, a remembrance, an involvement with memory with all its shifts. Writing is also a representation and carries its own baggage of ...
Films and Feminism: Essays in Indian Cinema explores both mainstream and parallel cinema for an analysis of the woman image, the idea of romance, the imposition and defiance of patriarchal order and a woman’s journey towards self-definition.
Films reach a wider audience than literature as they move across the barriers of class, literacy, religion and even language. Not only do they reflect reality, they also construct reality. Their reach and impact makes ...
Cinema is a fairly accurate reflector of the political trends and of presence in public spaces that affect personal lives. It captures the changing graph of social space as well as that of individual anxiety.
Muslim Culture in Indian Cinema brings together in depth explorations of the various facets of Muslim life and culture as they are woven into collective histories. The volume takes into its range more than sixty years of cinematic presentation moves into ...
Feminism in India can trace its origins to the cultural traditions of the country more than is generally accepted. This book explores several foundational texts such as the epics, the Manusmriti, the Natyashastra, etc., and weaves their retellings and interpretations into feminist acts of resistance, both individual and collective, as they indicate the difference from western feminism in context, strategy and concerns of the movement in India.The author places ...
Gender and Narrative is a collection of twenty-two essays which sets out to explore the limits of narrative. No longer identified only with prose narration, or with ‘telling’, narrative today has infilterated other genres in a marked way. Moving beyond plot and story, it has come to represent a complex web of meaning produced through multiple strategies. Narrative today has not only a text, but a sub-text and a hypertext as well. In the age of computers, the ...
The present volume, Indian Feminisms, brings together creative writing – short stories and poems – interviews, critical interventions by creative writers, theoretical formulations, chronicles of women’s history, essays on autobiographies, dalit writing and analyses of socio-political conditions. It reflects the complexity and variety of a woman’s life. There are thematic and theoretical studies and essays which explore histories of language literatures as ...
Writing Women Across Cultures is a collection of eighteen essays which deal with the myriad aspects of the woman question—how women have been inscribed in culture and myth, how they have written themselves and how they write themselves. Working within comparative frameworks, the essays take up the relationships between gender, culture and narrative strategies and work through the writings of women (and also some men) both from India and the Western world. Some ...
Films and Feminism: Essays in Indian Cinema explores both mainstream and parallel cinema for an analysis of the woman image, the idea of romance, the imposition and defiance of patriarchal order and a woman’s journey towards self-definition. Films reach a wider audience than literature as they move across the barriers of class, literacy, religion and even language. Not only do they reflect reality, they also construct reality. Their reach and impact makes it ...
Gendered Realities, Human Spaces: the Writing of Shashi Deshpande works through a close reading of her fiction, her non-fiction and interviews in order to interrogate the strengths and limits of ‘feminist’ positions. It goes on to free Deshpande’s work from a reading confined only to the woman question and opens it out to aesthetic evaluations and sociocultural histories. Jain takes up the position that Deshpande’s work makes a significant contribution to ...
The present volume is a diptych volume and the first full-length study of Attia Hosain’s work. Attia Hosain (1913-1998), is one of the earliest women writers of the Indian diaspora. Despite the fact that her work was mainly written in the fifties and sixties, her reputation has been an enduring one. Her work has gone through several resurrections and continues to have both relevance and meaning. The two sections of this volume, though written independently, ...
Writers of the Indian diaspora have been fairly centrestage in the last decade primarily because of the theoretical formulations, which are now being generated by the critiquing of their work and the growing interest in cultural studies. Language and cultures are transformed as they come into contact with other languages and cultures. Diasporic writing raises questions regarding the definitions of 'home' and 'nation'. Schizophrenia and/or nostalgia are often the ...
Contesting Postcolonialisms is a collection of essays which address the complexity of the term and its myriad meanings. They seek to define, analyse, critique and contest its meanings, its history and implications. In the process of doing so, they are compelled to confront the plurality of its origins and the essential fluidity of the term. It is not possible to draw a linear graph of the development of postcolonialism because of the complexity of the concept. ...
Dislocations and Multiculturalisms seeks to address the most ancient problems of human society as well as the greatest challenges of our times: problems which nag at us and confront us in our everyday world as the contest for space amongst warring opposing forces sharpens, and concepts like self, cultural memory, linearity and continuity, home and rootedness, alienation and belonging clamour for re-definitions. Twenty essays, two fictional pieces and a poem ...
Women's Writing: Dialogues with Patriarachy is a collection of essays on the major women writers of the nineteenth century and their questioning of and response to the ideas of the Enlightenment. The essays travel a journey of more than a hundred years, explore the philosophical aspects of novels relegated to the category of 'romance', trace the interconnections between socio-political ideas and the construction of 'femininity' and 'morality' as they excavate the ...
Beyond Postocolonialism: Dreams and realities of a nation question the narrow framework that postcolonial provides ad seeks to free resistance literature from being confined within it. Taking up the fiction of the last half century, the work considers the dreams and realities that have engaged the attention of the writers from 1947 to the present across languages and regions focusing on the concerns of gender, caste, religion, nation-building and aesthetics both ...
Partition has left deep scars on the national psyche. This one distortion of history, with its disjunction between the minds of men and the course of events, has impacted relationships, the homeland and nation, erased languages and cultures and given rise to a whole set of questions about self and identity. This volume, consisting of an interleavi9ng of fiction, memories, historical and political analysis, moves into philosophical and psychological discussion and ...
Narrative of the Village: Centre of the Periphery attempts to dismantle the polarities of center and margin and substantiate the way they interconnect and flow into each other across all difference of region and language. Crossing disciplinary boundaries, the essays in this volume foray into sociological, political, economic and narratological issues in order to fathom the rural life of India. Landscapes, histories and folk culture interact with each other to ...
Films, Literature and Culture is a collection of nineteen essays that focus on Deepa Mehta's Elements Triology in order to explore the interconnections in the three categories and the manner in which they feed into each other. Films and literature are two mediums -one literacy, the other performative -which use language and image, in order to capture the lived reality of cultural constructs. But the processes of producing meaning and interpreting meaning are ...
The present volume brings to the reader the works of women writers in India across languages, regions, religions, socioeconomic structures, caste hierarchies and genres. In its wide-ranging presentation of creative writing, it also works across generations. A product of the proceedings of two seminars on women writers orgainised by the Sahitya Akademi, the volume brings together debates on definition of women’s writing and feminism, personal narratives and ...