In the winter of 1978; Siddharth; twenty-three; meets Sudhir; twenty; in a friend’s friend’s room in Pune’s Engineering College Hostel. He falls instantly in love. A man of unconventional views—he believes; for instance; that the two heroes in Sholay have the hots for each other rather than for the heroines—Siddharth becomes a full-time lover over the next seven years and stubbornly pursues the object of his lust and affection; despite his job as a college lecturer in Bombay. There are many obstacles along the way; including Sudhir’s family; against whom Siddharth files a police complaint; and Sudhir’s classmates from Belgaum; led by the homophobic Ravi Humbe; who start an anti-Siddharth association. But Siddharth gets support from Gaurav and Vivek; a militant gay pair keen to ambush the enemy. The author of Boyfriend returns with another irreverent look at India’s gay subculture.Deadpan humour and farce come together in this entertaining love story; giving us a glimpse of what really goes on in a boys’ hostel.

One Saturday morning in late 1992, Yudi, a forty something gay journalist, picks up a nineteen-year-old Dalit boy in the Churchgate loo. After hurried sex, he gets rid of the boy, afraid that he may be a hustler. There is nothing to set this brief encounter apart from numerous others, and Yudi returns to his bachelor's flat and sex with strangers. Months pass. But when riots break out in Mumbai, Yudi finds himself worrying about the boy from Churchgate station. He is in love. Chance brings the two together again, and this time they spend a week as a married couple in Yudi's flat, take a holiday, and meet for beer every Friday, till the boy, Milind Mahadik, disappears (he has been hired by a modelling-cum-call-boy agency owned by the Bollywood star Ajay Kapur, a closet bisexual). Desolate, Yudi finds solace in the company of the middle-aged painter Gauri, a highly-strung woman madly in love with him, whose advances he has consistently rejected. When Milind resurfaces, it is only to marry a girl chosen by his parents, for he has had it with Yudi and his kind. Yudi is heartbroken. But all is not lost: in straitened circumstances after marriage, Milind pays his gentleman friend a visit and stays the night. Henceforth, mutual need - Yudi's for love and Milind's for money - will keep bringing them together. In the final analysis, as Yudi tells Gauri - now the mistress of an ageing businessman - everything works out, and 'life is beautiful'. In his first novel, R. Raj Rao brings us a tragi-comic love story from the jumbled up heart of Mumbai.

Contributed articles."Something has happened to English; and something has happened to Hindi. These two languages, widely spoken across India, need to be understood anew through their 'hybridization' into Hinglish -- a mixture of Hindi and English that has begun to make itself heard everywhere -- from daily conversation to news, films, advertisements and blogs. How did this popular form of urban communication evolve? Is this language the new and trendy idiom of a youthful population no longer competent in either English or Hindi? Or is it an Indianized version of a once-colonial language, claiming its legitimate place alongside India's many bhashas? Chutnefying English: The Phenomenon of Hinglish, the first book on the subject, takes a serious look at this widespread phenomenon of our times which has pervaded every aspect of our daily lives. It addresses the questions that many speakers of both languages ask time and again: should Hinglish be spurned as the bastard offspring of its two parent languages, or welcomed as the natural and legitimate result of their long-term cohabitation? Leading scholars from literature, cultural studies, translation, cinema and new media come together to offer a collection of essays that is refreshingly new in thought and content."--Page 2 of cover.

This book develops a queer methodology to analyse a queer archive for the impact of normativity on subjecthood and the ways in which it shapes and curtails gender and sexuality. Chapters demonstrate how normativity functions to mask its own operation, is internalised by subjects, and is continually reproduced through discourse and in material ways. In seeking to make visible the functioning of normativity, the book performs a task of queering normativity by querying that which appears as natural in South Asian public culture. The book engages with both the consolidation and the unsettling of normativity through artefacts of South Asian public culture including canonical figures such as Rabindranath Tagore, literary and cinematic texts, Bollywood films, advertisements, social media posts, and ubiquitous ephemera in South Asia and beyond. Through these texts, the author unpacks the construct of canon, the nation, woman as a post-colonial subject, the home and the child, marriage, same-sex sexuality and identity. This book will be of interest to scholars and students studying and researching Queer Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, South Asian Studies, Cultural Studies, Literary Studies, Film Studies, and Media Studies.

"The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures is a compilation of scholarship on Indian literature from the 19th century to the present in a range of Indian languages. On one hand, because of reasons associated with national academic structures, publishing resources, and global visibility, English writing gets privileged over all the other linguistic traditions in the scholarship on Indian literatures. On the other hand, within the scholarship on regional language literary productions (in Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, etc.), the critical works and the surveys focus only on that particular language and therefore frequently suffer from a lack of comparative breadth and/or global access. Both reflect the paradigm of monolingualism within which much literary scholarship on Indian literature takes place. This handbook instead focuses on the multilingual pathways through which modern Indian literature gets constituted. It features cutting-edge literary criticism from at least seventeen languages, and on traditional literary genres as well as more recent ones like graphic novels. It shows the deep connections and collaborations across genres, languages, nations, and regions that produce a literature of diverse contact zones, generating innovations on form, aesthetics, and technique. Foregrounding themes such as modernity and modernism, gender, caste, diaspora, and political resistance, the book collects an array of perspectives on this vast topic"--

“The stories in this noir anthology are as raw and diverse as the city of Mumbai itself, humming with the feel for the city’s pulse and patter.” —The National Today Mumbai is like any other Asian city on the rise, with gigantic construction cranes winding atop upcoming skyscrapers and malls. Right-wing violence, failing electricity and water supplies, overcrowding, and the ever-looming threat of terrorist attacks—these are some of the gruesome realities that Mumbai’s middle and working classes must deal with every day, while the city’s super-rich zip from roof to roof in their private choppers. Abandoned by its wealthy, mistreated by its politicians and administrators, Mumbai continues to thrive primarily because of the helpless resilience of its hardworking, upright citizens. The stories in Mumbai Noir depict the many ways in which the city’s ever-present shadowy aspects often force themselves onto the lives of ordinary people. What emerges is the sense of a city that, despite its new name and triumphant tryst with capitalism, is yet to heal from the wounds of the communal riots of the 1990s and from all the subsequent acts of havoc wreaked within its precincts by both local and outside forces. Mumbai Noir features stories by: Annie Zaidi, R. Raj Rao, Abbas Tyrewala, Avtar Singh, Ahmed Bunglowala, Smita Harish Jain, Sonia Faleiro, Altaf Tyrewala, Namita Devidayal, Jerry Pinto, Kalpish Ratna, Riaz Mulla, Paromita Vohra, and Devashish Makhija.

This book explores representations of same-sex desire in Indian literature and film from the 1970s to the present. Through a detailed analysis of poetry and prose by authors like Vikram Seth, Kamala Das, and Neel Mukherjee, and films from Bollywood and beyond, including Onir's My Brother Nikhil and Deepa Mehta's Fire, Oliver Ross argues that an initially Euro-American "homosexuality" with its connotations of an essential psychosexual orientation, is reinvented as it overlaps with different elements of Indian culture. Dismantling the popular belief that vocal gay and lesbian politics exist in contradistinction to a sexually "conservative" India, this book locates numerous alternative practices and identities of same-sex desire in Indian history and modernity. Indeed, many of these survived British colonialism, with its importation of ideas of sexual pathology and perversity, in changed or codified forms, and they are often inflected by gay and lesbian identities in the present. In this account, Oliver Ross challenges the preconception that, in the contemporary world, a grand narrative of sexuality circulates globally and erases all pre-existing narratives and embodiments of sexual desire.