Minority Discourses in India : Narrating Centers and Peripheries

Contents: 1. Dalit Literature in India: Marching Beyond Confines/S.A. Khader. 2. My Cart, Her Class: Exploring Class and Gender in Indian Advertisements for Online Shopping Sites/Namrata Harish. 3. The National vis-à-vis the Tribal Museum in India: Politics, Pedagogy and Performativity/Rose Sebastian. 4. Negotiating Minority Identities in Mahesh Dattani’s Dance Like a Man, Seven Steps Around the Fire and On a Muggy Night in Mumbai/Miruna George. 5. The Periphery of the Margin: Contemporary Indian Children’s Literature and the Minority/Padma Baliga. 6. Yayati – The Body-Soul Dualism Debated through Interwoven Tales of Lust and Aversion/Christina Dhanasekaran. 7. The Negotiation of Religious Identity in the Secular Ideal/Amala Poli and Madhurima Maji. 8. Linguistic Minorities in India: An Overview of the Challenges, Rights and Provisions/Divya K.B.

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.(jacket)