Ira Raja
Biographic Data
| ID | 3594746 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ira Raja |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ira |
| FAMILY NAME | Raja |
| SIGNATURE | RAJA I |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Delhi |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 22 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 15 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Chicken Nation
This article examines the cultural and political significance of chicken in contemporary India, situating its circulation within histories of caste hierarchy, religious distinction, and majoritarian politics. While scholarship has foregrounded beef as a site of prohibition and public confrontation, this study turns to chicken as the meat of permissibility, tracing how power operates through the normalisation of everyday consumption within shared …
Inessential objects
Postcolonial world literature
Postcolonial criticism has repeatedly debunked the ostensible neutrality of the 'world' of world literature by pointing out that and how the contemporary world - whether conceived in terms of cosmopolitan conviviality or neoliberal globalization - cannot be understood without recourse to the worldly event of Europe's colonial expansion. While we deem this critical perspective indispensable, we simultaneously maintain that to reduce 'the world' to…
Colonial design, postcolonial facade
The expansion in the 1990s of policies to reserve seats for students from historically disadvantaged castes opened up Indian universities to many first-generation learners from underprivileged back
Funda
The cultural politics of shit
In this article we seek to interrogate the cultural, political and economic conditions that generate the crisis of sanitation in India, with its severe implications for the poor and the marginalized. The key question we ask is how to interpret and explain the spectre of ‘open defecation’ in India's countryside and its booming urban centres. The discussion is divided into three parts. Part one examines the cultural interpretation of ‘shitting’ as …
Can the subaltern eat
This article looks at three post-Independence Indian short stories to do with masculine guilt about eating. Looking to alleviate the boredom of their clerical existence, the male protagonists in this fiction seek refuge in a fantasy of consumption focused on foods such as milk, ‘chicken fry’ and sweets. Right when their desires look to be met, however, a clamour of alternative claims on the food compels them to forego fulfilment. What does this n…
Contractarianism and the Ethic of Care in Indian Fiction
Through close readings of recent fiction from English, Hindi and Kannada sources, this paper analyses the feminist ethic of care with reference to adult daughters caring for their critically-ill or dying mothers. The discussion focuses on problems associated with the care ethic and examines some of its assumptions, particularly its inability to account for the emotional complexity of adult caregiving relationships, which can make the invocation o…
The unruly city
Many questions concerning the future of the urban Indian landscape have at their core the conflict of a modernist design aesthetic, which privileges uniformity and predictability, with what many consider to be the unsightly presence of a chaotic local aesthetic. The hand-painted signboard, a hallmark of Indian urban experience, is largely disdained by modernist planners, who became especially vocal in the lead-up to the Commonwealth Games in 2010…
Media and mediated popular cultures in India
We live in worlds of signs and wonders. Nowhere is this more evident than in the contemporary mega-cities of India. For over a century now, urban sociologists, flaneurs, ethnographers, psycho-geographers, and semioticians have been pointing to the power of the visual media and publicity of the city street – not just the street lights, signboards, posters, and graffiti, but the very design of the motor car and the tram, of shopfronts and sidewalks…
Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2005
Ageing Subjects, Agentic Bodies
Signifying the Nation
Desiring Daughters
(2003). Desiring Daughters: Intergenerational Connectedness in Recent Indian Fiction. Women's Studies: Vol. 32, No. 7, pp. 853-874
Embodied History, Disrupted Habitus
Embodied History, Disrupted Habitus: The Class Dynamics of Intergenerational Discord in Mahasveta Devi's "The Son"." South Asian Review, 23(2), pp. 33–34
The cultural politics of shit
In this article we seek to interrogate the cultural, political and economic conditions that generate the crisis of sanitation in India, with its severe implications for the poor and the marginalized. The key question we ask is how to interpret and explain the spectre of ‘open defecation’ in India's countryside and its booming urban centres. The discussion is divided into three parts. Part one examines the cultural interpretation of ‘shitting’ as …
Ageing Subjects, Agentic Bodies
Postcolonial world literature
Postcolonial criticism has repeatedly debunked the ostensible neutrality of the 'world' of world literature by pointing out that and how the contemporary world - whether conceived in terms of cosmopolitan conviviality or neoliberal globalization - cannot be understood without recourse to the worldly event of Europe's colonial expansion. While we deem this critical perspective indispensable, we simultaneously maintain that to reduce 'the world' to…
Signifying the Nation
Embodied History, Disrupted Habitus
Embodied History, Disrupted Habitus: The Class Dynamics of Intergenerational Discord in Mahasveta Devi's "The Son"." South Asian Review, 23(2), pp. 33–34
Desiring Daughters
(2003). Desiring Daughters: Intergenerational Connectedness in Recent Indian Fiction. Women's Studies: Vol. 32, No. 7, pp. 853-874
Signifying the Nation
Ageing Subjects, Agentic Bodies
Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2005
The unruly city
Many questions concerning the future of the urban Indian landscape have at their core the conflict of a modernist design aesthetic, which privileges uniformity and predictability, with what many consider to be the unsightly presence of a chaotic local aesthetic. The hand-painted signboard, a hallmark of Indian urban experience, is largely disdained by modernist planners, who became especially vocal in the lead-up to the Commonwealth Games in 2010…
Media and mediated popular cultures in India
We live in worlds of signs and wonders. Nowhere is this more evident than in the contemporary mega-cities of India. For over a century now, urban sociologists, flaneurs, ethnographers, psycho-geographers, and semioticians have been pointing to the power of the visual media and publicity of the city street – not just the street lights, signboards, posters, and graffiti, but the very design of the motor car and the tram, of shopfronts and sidewalks…
Can the subaltern eat
This article looks at three post-Independence Indian short stories to do with masculine guilt about eating. Looking to alleviate the boredom of their clerical existence, the male protagonists in this fiction seek refuge in a fantasy of consumption focused on foods such as milk, ‘chicken fry’ and sweets. Right when their desires look to be met, however, a clamour of alternative claims on the food compels them to forego fulfilment. What does this n…
Contractarianism and the Ethic of Care in Indian Fiction
Through close readings of recent fiction from English, Hindi and Kannada sources, this paper analyses the feminist ethic of care with reference to adult daughters caring for their critically-ill or dying mothers. The discussion focuses on problems associated with the care ethic and examines some of its assumptions, particularly its inability to account for the emotional complexity of adult caregiving relationships, which can make the invocation o…
The cultural politics of shit
In this article we seek to interrogate the cultural, political and economic conditions that generate the crisis of sanitation in India, with its severe implications for the poor and the marginalized. The key question we ask is how to interpret and explain the spectre of ‘open defecation’ in India's countryside and its booming urban centres. The discussion is divided into three parts. Part one examines the cultural interpretation of ‘shitting’ as …
Funda
Postcolonial world literature
Postcolonial criticism has repeatedly debunked the ostensible neutrality of the 'world' of world literature by pointing out that and how the contemporary world - whether conceived in terms of cosmopolitan conviviality or neoliberal globalization - cannot be understood without recourse to the worldly event of Europe's colonial expansion. While we deem this critical perspective indispensable, we simultaneously maintain that to reduce 'the world' to…
Colonial design, postcolonial facade
The expansion in the 1990s of policies to reserve seats for students from historically disadvantaged castes opened up Indian universities to many first-generation learners from underprivileged back
Inessential objects
Chicken Nation
This article examines the cultural and political significance of chicken in contemporary India, situating its circulation within histories of caste hierarchy, religious distinction, and majoritarian politics. While scholarship has foregrounded beef as a site of prohibition and public confrontation, this study turns to chicken as the meat of permissibility, tracing how power operates through the normalisation of everyday consumption within shared …
Sociology (12 works) · Gender Studies (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Art (7 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Aesthetics (6 works) · Epistemology (6 works) · Gender Studies (6 works) · History (6 works) · History (6 works)