LIMITING SECULARISM:
THE ETHICS OF COEXISTENCE IN INDIAN LITERATURE AND FILM
by Priya Kumar
“Limiting Secularism is a book for our times. Though scrupulously specific to the context of post-Independence India—and invaluable for that reason—its provocations resonate well beyond the boundaries of the unique nation-space. Working through but pushing well beyond the secularism debates in India, Kumar asks the vital question that few have as yet attempted: what vision and modality of the ethical life will enable those of opposed faiths to live well together?
A work of this kind is not undertaken lightly. Kumar’s assumption of responsibility is everywhere apparent in the seriousness with which she engages the reality of religious violence at multiple levels, theoretical, historical and critical, as the urgent reason for exploring the imaginative possibilities of living otherwise. Intellectual work at such a level of challenge and commitment does nothing less than open the doors of the mind.” Rajeswari Sunder Rajan
"Limiting Secularism is part of the emerging discourse on rethinking secularism in the wake of fundamentalisms of all stripes. Priya Kumar’s cogent, historically grounded, theoretically sophisticated, comparative readings of South Asian literary texts and films makes a significant contribution to contemporary cultural engagements with religion, cosmopolitanism, secularism, and ethics. Kumar’s book is truly superlative in terms of the writing—the clarity, the fluidity, the effortlessness with which dense material is presented is quite an accomplishment.” Sangeeta Ray
ISBN 81-7824-234-6 / Rs 695 / 320pp / hardback / published May 2008 / Co-published by the University of Minnesota Press [and Permanent Black]/ For sale in South Asia only
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction: At Home with the Stranger
1. Rethinking Secularism
2. For God’s Sake, Open the Universe a Little More: Cosmopolitan Fictions
3. Acts of Return: Literature and Post-Partition Memory
4. Fictions of Violence: Witnessing and Survival in Partition Literature
5. It’s My Home, Too: Minoritarian Claims on the Nation
Available via Orient Longman
