Download or read book Widows, Pariahs, and Bayadères written by Binita Mehta and published by Bucknell University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes how French dramatists reproduced certain images of India such as the burning widow, the lowly pariah or untouchable, and the exotic 'bayadere' or dancing girl in four plays and one ballet written from the eighteenth century through the twentieth centuries. Addressing questions of Orientalism, the book also argues that it was because the French lost their Indian colonies to the Briish in the eighteenth centuries that India became a part of the French literary imagination.