Parama Roy

Manali Desai

Piya Chatterjee

In the last couple of decades, violence as an analytic category has loomed large in the historical, literary, and anthropological scholarship of South Asia. The challenge of thinking violence in its gendered incarnations fully and in all its complexity is not only theoretical or critical but also irreducibly ethical and political, given the proliferation of civil wars, pogroms and riots, fundamentalist movements, insurgencies and counterinsurgencies, and new technologies of violence and injury. All of these simultaneously feature and help constitute gendered actors and gendered scripts of violence. States of Trauma seeks to examine this terrain by staging a set of questions. How are we to think about the moral charge that accrues to violence? What is the relationship between violence and non-violence? In considering the moral and affective economy of violence, how may we speak of the seductions of the idioms and practices of militarism and sexualized violence for women? How are these seductions/pleasures distinct from those proffered to men, if indeed they are distinct?

Gender and Violence in South Asia

States of Trauma

The continual, unpredictable, and often violent "traffic" between identities in colonial and postcolonial India is the focus of Parama Roy's stimulating and original book. Mimicry has been commonly recognized as an important colonial model of bourgeois/elite subject formation, and Roy examines its place in the exchanges between South Asian and British, Hindu and Muslim, female and male, and subaltern and elite actors. Roy draws on a variety of sources—religious texts, novels, travelogues, colonial archival documents, and films—making her book genuinely interdisciplinary. She explores the ways in which questions of originality and impersonation function, not just for "western" or "westernized" subjects, but across a range of identities. For example, Roy considers the Englishman's fascination with "going native," an Irishwoman's assumption of Hindu feminine celibacy, Gandhi's impersonation of femininity, and a Muslim actress's emulation of a Hindu/Indian mother goddess. Familiar works by Richard Burton and Kipling are given fresh treatment, as are topics such as the "muscular Hinduism" of Swami Vivekananda. Indian Traffic demonstrates that questions of originality and impersonation are in the forefront of both the colonial and the nationalist discourses of South Asia and are central to the conceptual identity of South Asian postcolonial theory itself.

Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India

Indian Traffic

Alimentary Tractsestablishes questions of who eats and with whom, who starves and what is rejected as food as fundamental to empire, decolonization and globalization. Interpreting texts that have addressed cooking, dining, taste, hungers, excesses and aversions in South Asia and its diaspora since the mid-nineteenth century, Parama Roy relates historical events and figures to tropes of disgust, abstention, dearth and appetite. She analyzes the fears of pollution and deprivation conveyed in British accounts of the so-called Mutiny of 1857, complicates understanding of Mohandas K. Gandhi's vegetarianism and examines the "famine fictions" of Mahasweta Devi, who exposed the wrenching failures of the postcolonial state in her portrayals of the lack of access of the landless, low-caste and tribal poor of the Indian hinterlands to food and water. Turning from famine to abundance, Roy reflects on the writings, screen performances and iconic status of Madhur Jaffrey, the leading popular authority on Indian culinary arts in the United States and Great Britain. In many ways colonialism reconfigured the sensorium of colonizer and colonized, generating novel experiences of desire, taste and appetite and new technologies of the embodied self. For colonizers, Indian nationalists, diasporic persons, and others in the colonial and postcolonial world orders, the alimentary tract functioned as an important corporeal, psycho-affective, and ethicopolitical contact zone, staging questions of identification, desire, difference, and responsibility.

Parama Roy

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