This book explores the relationship between mainstream and marginal or subaltern religious practice in the Indian subcontinent, and its entanglement with ideas of nationhood, democracy and equality. With detailed readings of texts from Marathi and Hindi literature and criticism, the book brings together studies of Hindu devotionalism with issues of religious violence.

Drawing on the arguments of Partha Chatterjee, Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, the author demonstrates that Indian democracy, and indeed postcolonial democracies in general, do not always adhere to...

Deploying the provocative idea of the 'subaltern citizen', this book raises fundamental questions about subalternity and difference, dominance and subordination, in India and the United States. In contrast to other writings on subordinated and marginalized people, the essays presented here devote deliberate attention to diverse locations of subalternity: in the conditions and histories of slaves, dalits, peasants, illegal immigrants, homosexuals, schoolteachers, women of noble lineage; in the Third World and the First; in pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial times.

With...

This text deals with the relationship between communalism and globalization in South Asia, addressing the issue of time scale and causality of the two concepts and asking whether globalization has amplified or muted the processes of communalism.

Commodity culture and colonialism are intimately related and mutually constitutive. The desire for commodities drove colonial expansion, at the same time that colonial expansion fuelled technological invention, created new markets for goods, displaced populations, and transformed local and indigenous cultures in dramatic and often violent ways. Contemporary interest in the object and its affective regimes has intensified following the recent material turn in literary and cultural studies.

This book analyses the transformation of local cultures in the context of global interaction...