Real and Imagined Women Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism

Real and Imagined Womenexplores 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 Womenoffers a challenging mode of "reading resistance" which destroys the stereotyped andsensationalist humanist image of the "third world woman" as victim.Rajan, Rajeswari S. is the author of 'Real and Imagined Women Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism' with ISBN 9780415085045 and ISBN 0415085047.