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Beyond Partition
Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India
Deepti Misri (Author)
9780252038853
Hardback, published 30 October 2014
224 pages, 8 black and white photographs
22.9 x 15.2 x 2 cm, 0.454 kg
"An original and engaging piece of scholarship. It ranges widely and easily across materials in many genres and disciplines; it demonstrates a very fine eye for the telling textual detail; in a field vulnerable to sentimentality, it is clear-eyed and willing to pose uncomfortable questions; and it is written with verve and force."
--Parama Roy, University of California, Davis
Communal violence, ethnonationalist insurgencies, terrorism, and state violence have marred the Indian natio- state since its inception. These phenomena frequently intersect with prevailing forms of gendered violence complicated by caste, religion, regional identity, and class within communities. Deepti Misri shows how Partition began a history of politicized animosity associated with the differing ideas of ""India"" held by communities and in regions on one hand, and by the political-military Indian state on the other. She moves beyond that formative national event, however, in order to examine other forms of gendered violence in the postcolonial life of the nation, including custodial rape, public stripping, deturbanning, and enforced disappearances. Assembling literary, historiographic, performative, and visual representations of gendered violence against women and men, Misri establishes that cultural expressions do not just follow violence but determine its very contours, and interrogates the gendered scripts underwriting the violence originating in the contested visions of what ""India"" means. Ambitious and ranging across disciplines, Beyond Partition offers both an overview of and nuanced new perspectives on the ways caste, identity, and class complicate representations of violence, and how such representations shape our understandings of both violence and India.