A Noble Mansion for All?: The Production of Difference in Selected Works By Mahesh Dattani and R. Raj Rao

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dc.contributor.advisorMukherjee, Arun P.
dc.creatorHazra, Anindo
dc.date.accessioned2016-09-20T16:29:23Z
dc.date.available2016-09-20T16:29:23Z
dc.date.copyright2015-10-02
dc.date.issued2016-09-20
dc.date.updated2016-09-20T16:29:23Z
dc.degree.disciplineEnglish
dc.degree.levelDoctoral
dc.degree.namePhD - Doctor of Philosophy
dc.description.abstractThis dissertation reads selected works of two queer Indian writers, Mahesh Dattani and R. Raj Rao, as sites of the production of difference in contemporary, fin-de-millnaire India. The literary analysis in this project tracks the particular texture of the selected primary texts. It follows the particular weave of what stories are being told, and how they are being told, which creates unique patterns of difference, providing the means for critical readings of diversity and difference in contemporary India. Close readings of the primary texts reveal artful, significant interventions in two intersecting discursive fields: namely, nationalism and sexualities. Moreover, the art-work of the texts reveals how the idea of India as a model of unity-in-diversity is by no means politically or ideologically neutral; specifically, the texts show how it is conceptually inadequate for understanding, let alone accommodating, any radical approaches to difference, especially the kind manifested in queerness. While the ramifications of Indian national identity animate one line of enquiry, those of dissident sexualities and gender energize the other, drawing into both lines region-specific questions and enquiries into identity- and subject-formation at large. The queer India crystallizing in the works of Dattani and Rao comes to signal a heterogeneity, complicating stabilized notions of identity (the self-same) and difference (extraneous other/s), all the while interrogating the ground on which that same term rests. Both writers works defer stable assumptions of what it means to be queer and what it means to be Indian. This project examines these forms of deferral as productions of differences in which the irreducibility of, but also radical unsettled interconnections between, difference is theorized.
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10315/32121
dc.language.isoen
dc.rightsAuthor owns copyright, except where explicitly noted. Please contact the author directly with licensing requests.
dc.subjectSouth Asian studies
dc.subject.keywordsQueer literature
dc.subject.keywordsIndia
dc.subject.keywordsQueer India
dc.subject.keywordsIndian writing in English
dc.subject.keywordsIndian drama in English
dc.subject.keywordsSexuality
dc.subject.keywordsSexuality in India
dc.subject.keywordsGender
dc.subject.keywordsTextual Analysis
dc.subject.keywordsQueer theory
dc.subject.keywordsPostcolonial theory
dc.titleA Noble Mansion for All?: The Production of Difference in Selected Works By Mahesh Dattani and R. Raj Rao
dc.typeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation

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