Cultures of Ageing and Ageism in India

This book examines the discourses on ageing and ageism in Indian culture, politics, art and society. It explores its representations and the anxieties, fears and vulnerabilities associated with ageing. The volume looks at ageing within the contexts of the larger discourses of gender, sexuality, nation, health and the performance and politics of ageing. The chapters grapple with diverse issues around ageing and elder care in contemporary India, shifts in socio-economic conditions and the breakdown of the heteropatriarchal family. The book includes personal accounts and narratives that detail the daily experiences of ageing and living with disease, anxiety, loneliness and loss for both elders and their friends and families. The book also explores the models of alternative networks of kinship and care that queer elders in India create in India as well as examining narratives-in society, art, sports and popular culture that both critique and challenge stereotypical ideas about the desires, aspirations, and mental and physical capabilities of elders. Topical and comprehensive, this book will be useful for scholars and researchers of gerontology, literature, cultural studies, popular culture, sociology, social psychology, queer studies, gender studies, social anthropology, and South Asian studies.

Paromita Chakravarti (D.Phil, Oxon.) is Professor of English, and has been the Director of the School of Women's Studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. She teaches Renaissance drama, women's writing, sexuality and film studies and introduced the first Masters course in Queer Studies in India (2005). She has led national and international projects on gender in textbooks, sex education, women's higher education, homeless women, HIV and women and single women. Her books include Women Contesting Culture (Stree, 2012) Shakespeare and Indian Cinemas (Routledge, 2018) and Asian Interventions in Global Shakespeare (Routledge, 2020). Her book Bengal and Italy: Transcultural Encounters from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Early 21st Century is forthcoming from Routledge. Kaustav Bakshi is Associate Professor, Department of English, Jadavpur University. A Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow, he has worked on Sri Lankan War Literature and sexualities for his doctoral programme. An LGBTIQ+ activist, he has published in several national and international journals, such as, South Asian Review (2012), Postcolonial Text (2015), New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film (2013), South Asian History and Culture (2015, 2017, 2021, & 2022), South Asian Popular Culture (2018), and Cultural Trends (2023) on queer politics, literature and culture. His latest books include, Rituparno Ghosh: Cinema, Gender, Art (Routledge 2015), Queer Studies: Texts, Contexts, Praxis (Orient Blackswan, 2019) and Popular Cinema in Bengal: Star, Genre, Public Cultures (Routledge, 2021).

List of Figures. Acknowledgements. Introduction 1 The Power of Vulnerability: Age, Activism and the "Daadis" 2 From maintenance to care-ing: the aged in times of changing familial geographies 3 Queering chrononormativity in India: challenges and possibilities 4 Care, Intimacy and Shifting Power: The Ageing Body within and without the "Family" 5 Precarious lives, caring networks and queer ageing 6 Physical Cultures and the Ageing Body: The Long Careers of Manohar Aich and Biswanath Datta 7 Umar Ka Lihaz: Ageism in Indian Classical Dance 8 More than Memories: Aging and the Attachment to Material Objects in Three Indian Short Stories 9 "Second Childishness and Mere Oblivion": Indian films on Dementia and the Idea of Ageing Differently 10 His Master Voice: Amitabh Bachchan, Aural Stardom and the Ageless Baritone 11 Actor as a Time-Traveller: Politics of Performing Age Onstage 12 Ageing, Caring and Mortality 13 Loneliness, Belatedness and Care: Arriving Late Where You No Longer Are. Index.