Exploring Caste and Sexuality in Indian English Writing

Lucky Issar

doi:10.5771/9781793651716

Summary

Exploring Caste and Sexuality in Indian English Writing: Outcast Subcultures examines the ways in which caste intersects and shapes matters of desire, gender, religion, and language. It demonstrates how postcolonial upper-caste theorists and fiction writers obscure caste, and when they do discuss it, they seem to reinforce it. Dominant brahminic discourse discusses issues concerning women's rights, equality, justice, and neocolonialism, but ignores caste-based discrimination and exclusion and the practice of untouchability which are everyday occurrences in Indian life. To understand the brahminic obsession with caste and sexuality, this book examines the works of Arundhati Roy, V. S. Naipaul, R. K. Narayan, and M. K. Gandhi, making a compelling argument that the freedom of choice in matters of sexuality was not unknown in medieval and ancient India: If the urban elite pursues desire freely today, so did the upper-caste men and women of Vatsyana's time. Unlike the upper-caste elite, caste regulated 'ordinary people' or Dalits then just as it regulates them now, which suggests how the brahminic elite in different epochs creates non-normative spaces for itself without giving up caste order.