Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion and Cultural Nationalism

"What are some of the major Hindu ideas and traditions that have shaped the dominant conceptions of ‘womanhood’, ‘domesticity’, ‘wifeliness’, ‘mothering’ and India as a ‘Hindu’ nation? Tanika Sarkar’s book examines literary and social traditions, elite voices and popular culture the rhetoric and the ground realities which have together, through complex historical processes, created the lived reality of north India today. Her book includes a searching critique of Bankimchandra Chatterjee, whose novel, Anandamath, is among the best known instances of a proto-nationalist definition of Hindu nationhood. Tanika Sarkar also examines scandal literature, rumours, and the popular press in colonial times for ‘Subaltern’ ideas that have shaped contemporary India. She concludes with a detailed examination of how earlier Indian religious traditions of saintliness, sacrifice, heroism, and warfare are being subverted or transformed by militant and fundamentalist forms of Hinduism. This book is a brilliant historicization and scathing critique of many of the dominant concepts by which Indians generally, and north Indian Hindus more specifically, think and live today. Historians, sociologists, political scientists and serious readers who wish to understand how the immediate past has shaped India’s life will value this incisive work of a major historian."