Exploring Caste and Sexuality in Indian English Writing

Outcast Subcultures

Exploring Caste and Sexuality in Indian English Writing cover

Exploring Caste and Sexuality in Indian English Writing

Outcast Subcultures

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Description

Exploring Caste and Sexuality in Indian English Writing: Outcast Subcultures examines the ways in which caste intersects and shapes matters of desire, gender, religion, and language. It demonstrates how postcolonial upper-caste theorists and fiction writers obscure caste, and when they do discuss it, they seem to reinforce it. Dominant brahminic discourse discusses issues concerning women's rights, equality, justice, and neocolonialism, but ignores caste-based discrimination and exclusion and the practice of untouchability which are everyday occurrences in Indian life. To understand the brahminic obsession with caste and sexuality, this book examines the works of Arundhati Roy, V. S. Naipaul, R. K. Narayan, and M. K. Gandhi, making a compelling argument that the freedom of choice in matters of sexuality was not unknown in medieval and ancient India: If the urban elite pursues desire freely today, so did the upper-caste men and women of Vatsyana's time. Unlike the upper-caste elite, caste regulated 'ordinary people' or Dalits then just as it regulates them now, which suggests how the brahminic elite in different epochs creates non-normative spaces for itself without giving up caste order.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Chapter One: Introduction
Chapter Two: On Balance
Chapter Three: A Brahminic Home
Chapter Four: A Queer Home
Chapter Five: Materiality of Caste
Chapter Six: English Language Politics
Chapter Seven: Outcasts in Twenty-first Century India
Chapter Eight: Conclusion
Bibliography
About the Author

Product details

Published 18 Jan 2024
Format Hardback
Edition 1st
Extent 298
ISBN 9781793651709
Imprint Lexington Books
Dimensions 236 x 159 mm
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

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