No aging in India

by Cohen, Lawrence

Cohen draws extensively on years of fieldwork, especially with families and institutions in the Indian city of Varanasi (Banaras). He links the everyday politics of when and how old persons are listened to by their children and others with events and processes around India and around the world - the generational dynamics of Indian cinema, advertising, and popular medicine; the formation of international gerontology and its relation to Indian state welfare and social science; and the intensified marketing of senility drugs globally. Cohen's analysis leads us to consider the centrality of the old body in the emergence of colonized elites and in the cultural politics of colonial and postcolonial identity across class. No Aging in India takes us from the study of aging to the idea of age itself.