"In its early phase, Subaltern Studies dealt extensively with community and violence in the context of peasant uprisings. Once the problem of peasant involvement in the modern politics of the nation had been posed, complexities in that relationship began to emerge. A new dimension was introduced when the relationship between community, gender and national politics came to be taken seriously. The present volume confronts the whole range of new issues raised by the relations between community, gender and the politics of violence. One set of essays looks specifically at the question of ‘women and nation’, especially minorities. Qadri Ismail looks at the claims of Tamil nationalism in Sri Lanka from the standpoint of the Southern Tamil woman. Aamir Mufti looks at the familiar gendered figure of ‘nation as mother’ – but from the novel standpoint of the rejected minority, as the brutalized prostitute. Tejaswini Niranjana studies the ‘new woman’ in contemporary Indian cinema. Another set of essays looks at women and minorities in the context of the law. Flavia Agnes examines the colonial and nationalist histories of the Hindu law of marriage and women’s property. Nivedita Menon critically reviews the Indian debate over laws against sexual violence on women. David Scott discusses, with an eye to the Sri Lankan situation, the concept of minority rights within modern theories of citizenship. The issue of political violence is taken up by Satish Deshpande in his study of the imagined space within which the new Hindu ‘Right’ seeks to assert its dominance, and by Pradeep Jeganathan in his examination of violence in the everyday cultivation of masculinity. In her summation of the issues raised by the volume as a whole, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak considers the position of the ‘new Subaltern’—the third world labouring woman—within a globalized economic space."
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