The figure of Sita becomes the point of highlight in the narration as Paley compares her own break up with her husband with Sita’s separation from Rama. Paley’s witty narrative hints that the comparison of a liberated, modern woman from the 21st century with a mythical woman who is hailed as a goddess becomes possible through one defining, parameter: their devotion and love towards a man. Sometimes, the blues become a little excessive but it puts forward and sums up many of themes that this imaginative retelling tries to evoke.

The madwoman as a figure of hysteric rage has the power and most importantly, the potential to rebel against patriarchal modes of oppression – something that feminism as a movement hopes to achieve.

The body becomes a particularly important marker in this kind of nationalist discourse which involves the intermingling of the conceptual ideas of gender and nation. Particularly, the use of the female body is an interesting phenomenon to study in terms of the Indian nationalist project. The representation of India in terms of a feminine ‘bodyscape’[4] began with the event of anticolonial struggle in India.

Sometimes I say to myself: I don’t know where the edges of my body are, what my shape looks like… What good are mirrors?
Spivak in her essay Woman in Difference: Mahasweta Devi’s Douloti the Bountiful draws our attention to which she terms ‘postcolonial in the space of difference, on decolonized terrain’. She explains that after [...]

 
You log on to this website, this first Sunday of March. You have already put yourself through all the advertisements on television urging you to celebrate female identity, glossed through all the events that are happening in the city on occasion of women’s day. Yes, and you have already texted your female friends wishing them [...]

 
The body itself has been a literal text on which colonization has written some of its most graphic and scrutable messages.
The undoing of European colonialism in the twentieth century was marked with numerous revolutions, rebellions and acts of violence. Decolonization is a complex process for it is commonly thought to be replaced by other [...]

Gender is a complexity whose totality is permanently deferred, never fully what it is at any given juncture in time. An open coalition then, will affirm identities that are alternately instituted and relinquished according to the purposes at hand, it will be an open assemblage that permits multiple convergences and divergences without obedience to a normative telos of definitional closure

The Virahini is portrayed as the desiring subject and God as the desired object. The devotee longs for the divine gaze and seeks to enclose it, to ‘trap’ it to attain salvation. However, the dynamics of the gaze within the space of Viraha Bhakti is complex: the gaze of the devotee could be singular but that of God forms a matrix – for the beloved (in the case of Krishna) equally divides his attention amongst all his devotees ( the Gopis) and like the earthly husband is polygamous. In this polygamous framework, how do these Bhakti poets depict their longing to merge with God? Does Mira articulate her desire in explicitly feminine terms than Kabir who only dons a female voice?

O Ascetic, think hard
And figure it out:
Is it a male or female?

Introduction:
 
If they see
Breasts and long hair coming
They call it woman,
If beard and whiskers,
They call it man:
But look the self that hovers
In between
Is neither man
nor woman
O Ramanatha.