Resisting Modernity

Samir Dayal's book Resisting Modernity is provocative. Provocative because it undoes the allures of propulsion toward modernity at the same time that it refrains from a retreat into an idyllic and elusive pre-colonial past. Drawing on a wide body of postcolonial studies scholarship emanating from South Asia and on psychoanalytic theory, Dayal complicates our understanding of three prominent Indian figures-Ramakrishna Paramahansa, Rabindranath Tagore, and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi-active in the decades before independence from British colonial rule. He sees them as resisting the modernist rhetoric of sovereignty and rational nationalism prevalent in those years. Through his focus on these protagonists, Dayal illuminates how their critique of the nationalist project of the pre-independence years was at once strategic and limiting, inclusive and exclusionary, empowering and potentially debilitating. --Rajini Srikanth, University of Massachusetts, Boston. She is the author of The World Next Door: South Asian American Literature and the Idea of America (Temple, 2006), co-editor of the award winning anthology Contours of the Heart: South Asians Map North America (Rutgers, 1996) and co-editor of the collection of critical essays A Part, Yet Apart: South Asians in Asian America (Temple, 1998). Resisting Modernity is an admirable endeavor that opens up modernity to possibilities of postcolonial/subaltern re-recognition. Dayal's conjunctural readings of the gendered, affective as well as cognitive performances of Ramakrishna, Tagore, Gandhi, and Ambedkar are richly symptomatic of the human condition under colonial modernity. A welcome addition to the genre of the global interrogation of modernity. ---R. Radhakrishnan, Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Chair of the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Diasporic Mediations: Between Home and Location (Minnesota, 1996) and Theory in an Uneven World (Blackwell, 2003).