The concept of identity has steadily emerged in importance in the field of intercultural communication, especially over the last two decades. In a transnational world marked by complex connectivity as well as enduring differences and power inequities, it is imperative to understand and continuously theorize how we perceive the self in relation to the cultural other. Such understandings play a central role in how we negotiate relationships, build alliances, promote peace, and strive for soc...

The Indian Independence Act of 1947 granted India freedom from British rule, signaling the formal end of the British Raj in the subcontinent. This freedom, though, came at a price: partition, the division of the country into India and Pakistan, and the communal riots that followed. These riots resulted in the deaths of an estimated 1 million Hindus and Muslims and the displacement of about 20 million persons on both sides of the border. This watershed socioeconomic–geopolitical moment cast...

Stories of Home: Place, Identity, Exile offers a window into the distinct ways that home is theorized and conceptualized across disciplines. The essays in this volume consider how people “speak” and “story” home in their everyday lives, why “home” is central to our notion of who we are, and how making home a unit of analysis in research makes a strong conceptual contribution to the field of communication. This collection engages home from diverse contexts and disparate philosophical underp...

In this powerful, compassionate work, one of anthropology’s most distinguished ethnographers weaves together rich fieldwork with a compelling critical analysis in a book that will surely make a signal contribution to contemporary thinking about violence and how it affects everyday life. Veena Das examines case studies including the extreme violence of the Partition of India in 1947 and the massacre of Sikhs in 1984 after the assassination of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. In a major de...

First published in 2000, Dipesh Chakrabarty's influential Provincializing Europe addresses the mythical figure of Europe that is often taken to be the original site of modernity in many histories of capitalist transition in non-Western countries. This imaginary Europe, Dipesh Chakrabarty argues, is built into the social sciences. The very idea of historicizing carries with it some peculiarly European assumptions about disenchanted space, secular time, and sovereignty. Measured aga...

The concept of an encyclopedic museum was born of the Enlightenment, a manifestation of society’s growing belief that the spread of knowledge and the promotion of intellectual inquiry were crucial to human development and the future of a rational society. But in recent years, museums have been under attack, with critics arguing that they are little more than relics and promoters of imperialism. Could it be that the encyclopedic museum has outlived its usefulness?With Museums Ma...

Jhumpa Lahiri is among the few contemporary writers being read widely by both mainstream and minority audiences, the general public and academic scholars, in the U.S. and globally. While her works focus on specific ethnic experiences of highly educated, upper middle-class professional Bengalis and their children living in New England since the 1970s, they simultaneously address universal themes that consistently keep them on the New York Times bestseller lists, and that have made the film ...

Queering India is the first book to provide an understanding of same-sex love and eroticism in Indian culture and society. The essays focus on pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial gay and lesbian life in India to provide a comprehensive look at a much neglected topic. The topics are wide-ranging, considering film, literature, popular culture, historical and religious texts, law and other aspects of life in India. Specifically, the essays cover such issues as Deepa Mehta's rec...

Fought between India and what was then East and West Pakistan, the war of 1971 led to the creation of Bangladesh, where it is remembered as the War of Liberation. For India, the war represents a triumphant settling of scores with Pakistan. If the war is acknowledged in Pakistan, it is cast as an act of betrayal by the Bengalis. None of these nationalist histories convey the human cost of the war. Pakistani and Indian soldiers and Bengali militiamen raped and tortured women on a mass scale....

Looking back now, I am more than ever aware of the part that [Satyajit] Ray played in shaping the imaginary universe of my childhood and youth. I see this even in such details as my interest in science and science fiction; in ghost stories and the fantastical…When I saw Agantuk [The Stranger], in which the main character is an anthropologist, I began to wonder whether my interest in anthropology too, owed something,perhaps subconsciously, to Ray…, ruminates Amitav Ghosh in this book. Ghosh...

Sultana’s Dream, first published in 1905 in a Madras English newspaper, is a witty feminist utopia-a tale of reverse purdah that posits a world in which men are confined indoors and women have taken over the public sphere, ending a war nonviolently and restoring health and beauty to the world."The Secluded Ones" is a selection of short sketches, first published in Bengali newspapers, illuminating the cruel and comic realities of life in purdah.

The present anthology The Fiction of Amitav Ghosh: A Post-colonial Perspective attempts to bring together reading of Ghoshs selected and most exquisite novels from a refreshingly different viewpoint against the background of Post-colonialism. Amitav Ghosh is unarguably one of the most cosmopolitan of contemporary Indian English writers whose extra ordinary oeuvre of fiction has been a source of magical fascination and exerts a bewitching influence on the mind and heart of the lovers of lit...