Minority Discourses in India: Narrating Centers and Peripheries

Minority discourses provide differential, conceptual and theoretical frameworks for questions of identity based on gender, caste, race, class and ethnicity, as well as political and linguistic factors. They underline social and cultural pluralism in contemporary liberal democratic societies which often homogenize citizenship while simultaneously upholding discursive master-narratives that privilege domination and subordination by majority groups. Modern secular states attempt to transcend pluralism through principles of social cohesion while at the same time ironically organizing ideological categories based on prevailing ruling classes. Minority Discourses in India: Narrating Centers and Peripheries makes an effort to investigate varied texts, contexts and narratives of marginality in order to represent the heterogeneity and intersectionality of emerging minority discourses in India. The themes the writers have chosen to discuss are varied and reflect the diversity that the Indian subcontinent is. Problems encountered on the basis of caste, community, religion, gender, language and several other identities and categories that are integral to human living are investigated into and an attempt at negotiation through these papers is evident.