The Indian family in transition : reading literary and cultural texts / editors, Sanjukta Dasgupta, Malashri Lal.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Dasgupta, Sanjukta.

Lal, Malashri.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Families--India.

Families.

India.

Families in literature.

Physical Description:

380 pages ; 22 cm

Place of Publication:

New Delhi ; Thousand Oaks, Calif. : Sage Publications, 2007.

Summary:

Social scientists have identified how the four crucial institutions-the state, the market, the community/civil society and the family/kinship are implicated in the discourse of understanding gender position and interpersonal relationships within the Indian family system. Though anthropological data traces the origin and growth of the Indian family, it is however, in literature and through other cultural representations that the structural composition, changes and the emotional tensions that are an integral part of restructuring the family, are scripted.

This book critiques literary and cultural representations of the Indian family to explore the manner in which the family and its structure are in transition. The various papers explore (and expose) how the Indian family, whether in India or abroad, needs to be redefined in the current context-in this age of rapid industrialization, globalization (both cultural and economic) and the emergence of new technologies.

The family is viewed from a variety of perspectives, as represented in film, theatre and literature-both in English and in the vernacular. Including reflective pieces by several well-known scholars, this volume offers a holistic understanding of local and global shifts and fissures that shape the family today. Erudite, yet extremely readable, this volume will be of interest to anthropologists, literature scholars, and the lay reader.

Contents:

As the husband, so the wife : old patriarchy, new patriarchy and misogyny in one late nineenth-century domestic science manual / Judith E. Walsh

Women and agency : vignettes from Indian families / Mukul Mukherjee

Modern families and independent living : reflections on contemporary aging / Sarah Lamb

Women and the Naga family today : communitarianism in practice / Bonita Aleaz

Society, family and the self in Indian fiction / Jayita Sengupta

Imagined family : pangs of transition / Esha Dey

The politics of home and food in Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies / Irma Maini

Representation of the family in Marathi autobiography written by Dalit women / Pushpa Bhave

Real and imagined Gujarati families : shifting positionalities of gender in contemporary Gujarati women's writings / Sutapa Chaudhuri

Hypocrisy and hollowness in the Indian joint family system : a study of Mahesh Dattani's plays / Arpa Ghosh

Reflections of family and women in Telugu literature : a look at women's fiction / N. Venugopal Rao

Globalization and diasporic family dynamics : reconciling the old and the new / Mary Mathew

Food, family, widowhood in Ashapurna Devi's short fiction / Naina Dey

The self and the family in Telugu women's poetry / M. Sridhar and Alladi Uma

The family in flux : the decimated family in Rituparno Ghosh's films / Shoma A. Chatterji

The "reel" Indian family : reflections from celluloid / Meghna Gulzar

Hunting for fish : a poem / Meena Alexander

The family : as I saw it, as I see it / Vidya Bal

Thoughts on home / Nonda Chatterjee

Looking back / Shashi Deshpande

Small-scale reflections on an ancestral home / Makarand Paranjape

Indian families in the world : forty years in Manitoba / Uma Parameswaran

A dialog with Amartya Sen / Sanjukta Dasgupta and Malashri Lal.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0761935681

9780761935681

OCLC:

171151200