Culture and the Making of Identity in Contemporary India.

CULTURE AND THE MAKING OF IDENTITY IN CONTEMPORARY INDIA. Edited by Kamala Ganesh and Usha Thakkar. Thousand Oaks (California), New Delhi, London: Sage Publications. 2005. 274 pp. (B & W photos.) US$39.95, paper. ISBN0-7619-3307-7.

Debates over definitions of "Indianness" and "Indian culture" have been at the heart of Indian politics since independence. The resurgence of Hindu nationalism at the cultural and political levels since the 1980s has brought these debates into a highly politicized arena, in which "Indian" is often equated with "Hindu," and purity is attributed to an ancient "golden age." Crucial to this politics is the idea that "foreign" influences, easily definable as such and thus easily separable from what is really "Indian," should be eradicated if Indian culture is to thrive.

This book, although not explicitly located in relation to contemporary forces in Indian politics, can be seen as a response to and argument against this politics. The editors have somewhat loosely focused the essays around the broad theme of what they variously call syncretism, hybridity and fusion: the results of indigenous traditions encountering modern ideas and practices and the global market and its compulsions. As a collection, the volume tackles disparate fields where there seems to be something at stake in defining what is "Indian": on the one hand music, art, literature and theatre; and on the other hand feminism, history writing and science.

Since the essays deal with so many different topics, the volume tends not to hold together in a very convincing way. It definitely needs a more persuasive framing; the editors, while they make several programmatic kinds of statements about claims to Indian culture and Indianness, fail to locate these claims (or arguments against them) in terms of their politics. The editors pit an idealized, homogenized notion of Indian culture against "a contrasting notion of composite culture that does not merely acknowledge diversity but builds it into the very conceptualization of Indian culture as plural and syncretic" (p. 23). However, the individual essays, for the most part, do little to address or support this theme. Several of them, in fact, ironically seem to argue for another version of cultural purity, suggesting that India needs to go back to its indigenous traditions and reject colonial or other foreign "impositions."

The volume is ambitious in combining essays by academic scholars with pieces written from the practitioner and activist perspectives. While this can be valuable if done in an intentional and managed way, the result here is a collection that seems very uneven in tone and content. A few of the essays, such as Tapati Guha-Thakurta's contribution on discourses about the history of Indian art, and Uma Chakaravarti's piece on the place of women in historical writings, are detailed in their historiographical approach and citation of other works. The majority of the essays, however, hardly cite other works at all; they are more like thought pieces, programmatic statements or, in some cases, simply opinions unsupported by evidence or any historical or anthropological research. Claude Alvares and Gita Chadha, for instance, decry the hegemony of modern science but instead of looking at the history of cultural encounters behind this dominance, they suggest the need for a rediscovery of an "indigenous science" that would lie outside of modern Western science. Ashok Ranade's article on music, while claiming to make a historical argument about mixing and fusion always having been part of Indian music, in fact cites no historical sources at all, further contributing to a widespread tendency to view music and other performing arts apart from their social, historical and political contexts.

The articles on translation, particularly those by Meenakshi Mukherjee and U.R. Ananthamurthy, are genuinely interesting, offering provocative meditations on the politics of what gets translated into English, what gets recognized as Indian literature, and what it means to translate works in Indian languages into English. It is regrettable that the collection as a whole is not more consistent.

AMANDA WEIDMAN

Bryn Mawr College, PA, U.S.A.