Dialectics of Defeat

Problems of culture in post-colonial India

G. P. Deshpande

 

155pp. 2006

ISBN : 9788170462798

Rs  275.00 (PB)
$17.95 (PB)
£11.95 (PB)

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‘The Indian writer writing in Marathi, Tamil, Bangla or any Indian language stands on a bridge between India and Europe. However he stands there all alone. European debates have left most of Asia or the erstwhile colonized world far behind . . . India figures in the English consciousness, if at all, as an undifferentiated ethnic reality . . . an imaginary India . . . it is necessary to see that if our plural and varied cultural memory is not recognized for what it is we shall have no intellectual or literary strategies to turn this cultural memory into cultural nationalism.’

 

Leading Marxist critic and scholar Professor G. P. Deshpande is at his acerbic and knowledgeable best in this collection of essays on the politics of culture in contemporary India. With a sweeping international perspective and a deeply rooted historicist approach, these observations on the contemporary crises of culture come from someone who, as a practising playwright in Marathi, is both an artist and a critic. From Buddhism to the Enlightenment project, from the Natyashastra to the modern playwright, he comes to grips with problems, issues and concerns that permeate the field of cultural politics.

G. P. Deshpande is a Marxist scholar, an academic, and a widely produced and translated playwright. 

 

Culture Studies