A Passionate Life is a collection of essays on Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, edited by Ellen Carol Dubois and Vinay Lal. Here is a woman, born in 1903, in a rural area in South West India, not only breaking every social and cultural norm of that era, but walking into the highest places in India’s freedom struggle. There are hardly any substantial writings by the prominent modern history scholars on this woman’s life.
Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain was first and foremost a very courageous woman who dared to fight against all odds and achieve for women a status of dignity, self-reliance and creative agency in a time and milieu that was hostile, inhospitable and even against the equal rights of men and women.
David Kinsley says in his preface that he came to Calcutta to undertake research on the Bengal Vaishnavas—‘and it was with some eagerness that I anticipated seeing Krsna expressing himself in a cultic context’. Then he tells us about the tumultuous celebrations of Durga Puja he saw, finally how ‘in the rear…
The structural violence at both the public and personal levels that Indian women face routinely in the physical world has taken the better part of four decades to recognize, articulate and resist. Today, it continues to remain one of the biggest crises of Indian social life, taking on new forms and permeating new ecologies. Foremost among these new ecologies is the cyber space.
When, during the first half of this century, art surrendered to a revivalist ethos because a subject people had to cling to memories of past greatness to forget their current humiliation, art criticism mostly amounted to singing the greatness of the legend, poetry or epoch of which the paintings were illustrations…
The thesis this book presents is based on Jaques’s speech in As You Like it, ‘All the world’s a stage’, which postulates the view that human beings in a social context are like actors in a play performing their parts, filling out their roles. ‘Otherwise put, reality is a drama, life is theatre, and the social world is inherently dramatic’…