Mobilizing India

“Mobilizing India. . . is a sophisticated, well-written, and engaging book which does indeed-as promised- provide a model for comparative cultural research across the global South. Those interested in Caribbean cultural studies, in the development of popular music in postcolonial societies, in identity and gender politics in a multiracial polity, will all find much that is valuable and original in this book.” - Bridget Brereton, Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies

“[F]ascinating. . . . This book should have tremendous appeal for those interested in cultural politics both in the Caribbean and in India.” - Nalini Rajan, The Hindu

“[F]resh and provocative. . . .” - Keith E. McNeal, American Ethnologist

“Niranjana . . . has written a sophisticated study of women, diasporic dynamics, and ethnic identity in Indo-Trinidadian society, using popular music as a lens though which to view these. . . . Her book is certainly recommended reading for students and scholars of South Asian diasporas and Caribbean studies.” - Peter Manuel, Ethnomusicology

“Overall, this book is a very important contribution to the literature on Caribbean performance, as it presents a view from India on questions about Caribbean ‘Indianness’ and even on Caribbean ‘Africanness.’” - Tina K. Ramnarine, Journal of Asian Studies

“The language of the text is accessible, the analyses substantiated with meticulous research, and the insider/outsider perspective benefits Trinidad thinkers in its sensitivity, detachment, and refreshing of ideas we have come to take for granted. The central argument that Trinidad participates in a unique construction of Indian identity that progressively subverts India’s Hindutva nationalism is made within a feminist, leftist, egalitarian framework and represents the first substantial look, in the Trinidad context, at the implications of India’s outreach to Indians overseas.” - Sheila Rampersad, The Trinidad and Tobago Express

“This book is not simply about music, and needs to be read as an urgent intervention in studying comparative popular culture from a standpoint troubling the universalizing address of Western global modernities.” - Sanjay Sharma, Darkmatter

“This book needs to be read as an urgent intervention into the study of comparative popular culture from a standpoint troubling the universalizing address of western global modernities. - Sanjay Sharma, Ethnic and Racial Studies

“Tejaswini Niranjana listens to the tones and echoes of Indianness in the Caribbean and elaborates a South–South genealogy that obligates us to reconceive the cultural geography of modernity. From the ‘moral status of the coolie woman’ in British colonialist and Indian nationalist discourses to the figure of the ‘Indian woman’ in Afro-Trinidadian calypso, Hindi cinema musics, and female chutney-soca performances, she pronounces the gendered rhythms of popular music as subaltern cultural politics.” - Lisa Lowe, author of Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics

“Tejaswini Niranjana’s fine achievement in Mobilizing India is to have given shape to a compelling way of rethinking the conceptual agenda for the comparative study of the Third World.” - David Scott, author of Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment