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51 In A Passage to India, an Indian man (Aziz) is accused of molestation by an Englishwoman (Adela). The English community makes Adela into a heroine, a victim of black men's rapa- cious tendencies, but when she retracts her ac- cusation, claiming she was confused, she is outcast, understood as a sort of traitor, whose delusions are a result of the sexual fantasies of an unmarried bluestocking. In this way, the novel, as Jenny Sharpe has suggested, asks readers to choose between two prevailing dominant ideologies - a racial one that sug- gests that all colonised men desire white women and are violent, and another sexist one that all women are potentially hysterics. See Jenny Sharpe's Allegories of Empire: the Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text, pp 113-36.
52 V Geetha, "Power, Violence and Dalit Women", The Hindu, 11 June 2012, accessed at http://www. thehindu.com/arts/books/article3515761.ece, accessed on 10 September 2012
53 Anu Ramdas, "My Man", Round Table India, posted 4 July 2012, accessed at http://roundta- bleindia.co.in/index.php?option=com_content &view=article&id=5364:my-man&catid=119:f eature&Itemid=132, accessed on 10 September 2012.
54 Interlaced they may be, but the fact remains that it is Arun alone who is violent, while Nath's patriarchy takes a far less offensive form.
55 See Kannabiran's essay in Rao, Gender and Caste.
56 Aijaz Ahmad, "Reading Arundhati Roy Politically",Frontline, 8 August 1997, 103-08.
57 G P Deshpande argues that starting with Shantata, "we see Tendulkar moving towards a position that treated violence and cruelty as primordial. ...A potential rebel has turned into a nihilistic metaphysician" ("Remembering Tendulkar", Economic & Political Weekly, 43: 22 (31 May-6 June 2008), pp 19-20 at p 20. But it is impossible to abstract violence from the grounds on which it is enacted; in KANYADAAN it is after all, not the violence of liberalism but the violence of dalit men that the audience will remember.
58 Namdeo Dhasal, "Just a Bit More Time", trans- lated by Laurie Hovell and Jayant Karve in Laurie Hovell, "Namdeo Dhasal: Poet and Panther", Journal of South Asian Literature, Vol 24, No 2, Miscellany (Summer, Fall), 1989, pp 65-82 at p 79. This is not to romanticise or sanitise Dhasal, as Sudhanva Deshpande suggests Chitre does by minimising or glossing over Dhasal's association with both Indira Gandhi during the Emergency and the Shiv Sena, "Superstar Dhasal", Frontline, 24: 14, 14-27 July 2007, accessed at http://www.flonnet. com/fl2414/stories/20070727000107200.htm,12 August 2012.
59 See the review by Joel Lee. I am also indebted to Shanta Gokhale's discussion of this issue (personal communication).
60 Express Newsline (The Indian Express online), 15 July 2007. "All About Daughters" by Anurad- ha Mane, http://cities.expressindia.com/full- story.php?newsid=246135
61 Hugh Quarshie, Second Thoughts about Othello (Chipping Camden, International Shakespeare Association), 1999.
*Ania Loomba is Catherine Bryson Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (OUP, 2002), Colonialism-Postcolonialism (Routledge, 1998; second edition 2005, third edition, forthcoming), and Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama (Manchester University Press, 1989, Oxford 1992). She is co-editor of South Asian Feminisms (Duke, 2012), Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion (Palgrave, 2007); Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (Duke 2005) and Post-Colonial Shakespeares (Routledge, 1998). She is also editor of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra (Norton 2012).
This paper was first published in the October 26, 2013 issue of Economic & Political weekly (EPW). It has been published here with the author's permission.
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