Gyanendra Pandey is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of History at Emory University and author of
Epilogue: Ym Ylimaf
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Published:December 2024
The epilogue adds a few reflections from the author’s own and his natal family’s experiences. It refers to family “secrets” that he discovered, accidentally, in the course of writing this book, and suggests how these are tied to notions of honor, respectability, and modernity. It also indicates how traces of the broader history outlined in the book continue to mark the lives of recent generations—the author’s parents’, his own, and indeed those that follow. It concludes with the proposition that a close-to-the-bone investigation of domestic morals and practices, such as the present study, may lacerate the flesh, the self and self-image, in unexpected ways. It is, nevertheless, a task that we must undertake if we are to confront the endlessly humiliating practices of caste, class, and gender intolerance that continue to plague India’s everyday.
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