No Aging In India

This Book Draws On Extensive Research With Families In Varanasi, And Examples From Indian Cinema, Advertising And Popular Medicine, To Examine The Repercussions Of International Gerontology And The Marketing Of Drugs On Old People, Their Families And Wider Social Norms In India.

Links an investigation of mind and body in old age in four neighborhoods of the Indian city of Varanasi (Banaras) with events and processes around India and around the world.

From the opening sequence, in which mid-nineteenth-century Indian fishermen hear the possibility of redemption in an old woman's madness, No Aging in India captures the reader with its interplay of story and analysis. Drawing on more than a decade of ethnographic work, Lawrence Cohen links a detailed investigation of mind and body in old age in four neighborhoods of the Indian city of Varanasi (Banaras) with events and processes around India and around the world. This compelling exploration of senility—encompassing not only the aging body but also larger cultural anxieties—combines insights from medical anthropology, psychoanalysis, and postcolonial studies. Bridging literary genres as well as geographic spaces, Cohen responds to what he sees as the impoverishment of both North American and Indian gerontologies—the one mired in ambivalence toward demented old bodies, the other insistent on a dubious morality tale of modern families breaking up and abandoning their elderly. He shifts our attention irresistibly toward how old age comes to matter in the constitution of societies and their narratives of identity and history.

Explore Indian policy and practice on aging from a variety of perspectives! This pathbreaking collection provides something that has been missing in the literature on aging in India, especially for non-Indian audiences: studies of various aspects of aging in India combined with analyses of current policies, policy trends and recommendations. You'll examine aging issues from a variety of perspectives—demographic foundations, social and family relations, economics, health and disability, current interventions, and advocacy and policy. An Aging India also provides you with up-to-date references, explanations of differences and similarities within India's diverse population, examples of programs in various settings including a geriatric hospital, a major NGO, and old-age homes, and an overview of the development of India's national policy on aging. Where appropriate, comparisons with U.S. policy approaches are noted. An Aging India: Perspectives, Prospects, and Policies examines: the demography of aging in India the current state of research on aging, and the pitfalls associated with that research income, poverty, and the problems created by the lack of any widespread retirement income system in India the health status of Indian elders and what their healthcare prospects are the situation for the disabled elderly in India elder abuse in the Indian context social networks and grassroots organizations for seniors in India the role of Indian geriatric hospitals and old-age homes The insights of the top researchers and practitioners who contributed to An Aging India: Perspectives, Prospects, and Policies will strike home with their counterparts around the world. Make this book a part of your professional/teaching collection today!

Contributed papers of the Seminar on Senior Citizens and Society, Bombay, 1987, jointly organized by the Association for Senior Citizens, Bombay, and the Citizenship Development Society, New Delhi.

People are living longer, not only in wealthy countries but in developing nations. Western experts have long conceived of aging as a universal predicament--one that supposedly provokes the same welfare concerns in every context. In the twenty-first century, we must embrace a new approach that prioritizes local agendas and values. In this history of how gerontologists, doctors, social scientists, and activists came to define the issue of global aging, Sivaramakrishnan shows that the United Nations, private NGOs, and transnational philanthropic foundations embraced programs that reflected prevailing Western ideas about modernization. The dominant paradigm often assumed that, because large-scale growth of an aging population happened first in the West, developing societies will experience the issues of aging in the same ways and on the same terms as their Western counterparts. Focusing on South Asia and Africa, As the World Ages shows how regional voices have begun to question this one-size-fits-all model and have argued instead for an approach that responds to local needs and concerns.--

The proliferation of old age homes and increasing numbers of elderly living alone are startling new phenomena in India. These trends are related to extensive overseas migration and the transnational dispersal of families. In this moving and insightful account, Sarah Lamb shows that older persons are innovative agents in the processes of social-cultural change. Lamb's study probes debates and cultural assumptions in both India and the United States regarding how best to age; the proper social-moral relationship among individuals, genders, families, the market, and the state; and ways of finding meaning in the human life course.