Synopses & Reviews
An essential addition to the postcolonial debate which offers a challenging mode of reading resistance' which destroys the stereotyped and sensationalised humanist image of the third world woman' as victim.
Synopsis
Real and Imagined Women explores the position of the female subject in a postcolonial state, focusing on the practice and representation of sati--the practice of burning widows with their husband's funeral pyres. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan investigates the problematic relationship between the theory of the first world against the matter of the third--that is, she brings postcolonial theory to bear on the politics of gender, religion, and culture of contemporary India.
She covers a range of subjects such as: pre-colonial Tamil and Indian texts and colonial Imperialist texts; Indian writings and films; women's victimization by forms of sanctioned violence and their fraught, if passive, subject-position; contemporary novels by Indian women writers, and the elite woman-as-leader, focusing on the discourse generated by Indira Gandhi.
Real and Imagined Women offers a challenging mode of reading resistance which destroys the stereotyped and sensationalist humanist image of the third world woman as victim.