This book is a cultural exploration of health and wellness, with a focus on impacts of Covid-19 on the population of India. The chapters in this book present original research, systematic reviews, theoretical and conceptual frameworks, encompassing multidisciplinary, inter- and intra-disciplinary fields of study, in the context of how culture and disease sufficiently unpack and inform each other. The book includes contributions from the social sciences and the humanities and analyses issues that range from smallpox to the history of vaccine, indigenous healing practices, the Macbeth paradigm, Zizekian encounters, mental asylum, and marginalised genders. Using the theme of intellectual interconnectedness in the times of self-isolation and social distancing, the book is a collaboration of critical thinkers who identify and visibilize the hidden global issues related to 'disease' and 'health' that have divided the world into narrow binaries - individual/society, poor/rich, proletariat/bourgeoisie, margin/centre, colonised/coloniser, servitude/liberty, powerless/powerful. By doing so, the book emphasises the potential of holistic wellness to improve human life and humanity across the globe. A novel contribution on the cultural factors that played an important role in contemporary times of Covid-19, this book will be of interest to researchers in the fields of Cultural Studies, Health and Society and South Asian Studies.

Following Francoise d'Eaubonne's creation of the term "ecofeminism" in 1974, scholars around the world have explored ways that the degradation of the environment and the subjugation of women are linked. In the nearly three decades since the publication of the classical work Ecofeminism by Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva in 1993, several collections have appeared that apply ecofeminism to literary criticism, also known as feminist ecocriticism. The most recent of these include anthologies that emphasize international perspectives, furthering the comparative task launched by Mies and Shiva. To date, however, there have been no books devoted to gaining a broad-based understanding of feminist ecocriticism in India, understood in its own terms. Our new volume Indian Feminist Ecocriticism offers a survey of literature as seen through an ecofeminist lens by Indian scholars, which places contemporary literary analysis through a sampling of its diverse languages and in the context of millennia-old mythic traditions of India.

This book is an innovative and rigorous study of Jhumpa Lahiri's Indian American female characters' lived and imagined diasporic house space, using domesticity and the house as an analytical tool to explore their hidden domestic spaces. The book explores how the house as a spatial construct, shares a symbiotic relationship with its inhabitants, and through their implicit and explicit response to various parts of their diasporic house space, interprets their maladies, limitations and opportunities. Indian American diasporic women, especially homemakers, have long been grappling with issues of socio-cultural invisibility as they have no other space to interact with except their houses in the hostland, now more than ever, during the global corona crisis. A reading of this multi-layered relationship between houses and their women will help readers understand not only the political, intellectual, emotional and sexual dispositions of middleclass Indian women in America, but also social, cultural and economic positions they occupy within the hostland. The book shows the represented domestic interstices and looks at them as signifiers of distinct individual trajectories, wherein lies embedded the women inhabitants' oppositions beneath the acceptance of normative Indian family values in diaspora. It also offers elemental insights into ways in which migration acts as an opportunity for establishing new, often hybridized, identities, for which it is important to realise their connections with their house space. Presenting an alternative methodology for reading real and imagined lives of women in Indian American diaspora, the book proposes an unconventional mode of understanding diasporic realities and representations in cultural studies that is not readily apparent. It will be of interest to researchers in the field of South Asian Studies, Diaspora Studies, Migration Studies, Culture Studies, Feminist Writings, Gender Studies and Asian Literature. Foreword by Bill Ashcroft