scholarly journals Dalit Culture and Ethos in Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 9
Author(s):  
Bandari Suvarna
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
Life Style ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Indian English ◽  
Indian History ◽  
Rohinton Mistry ◽  
History Of

Rohinton Mistry (1952- ) is a South Asian Canadian writer. He was born in Mumbai on July 03, 1952. A Fine Balance (1996), Mistry’s second novel, is set in India of mid seventies and focuses especially on the period during Emergency and afterwards i.e. post- Emergency. The setting of the novel is from 1945 to 1984. In this novel Mistry delineates the predicaments of the Chamaars (leather-workers) who are considered untouchables. Mistry is seen to draw abundantly from Indian history, but more purposely to rewrite the history of the marginalized and the oppressed.  A Fine Balance is one of the very few Indian English novels which present reader the very essence of Dalit culture. Many other novels confine to portraying Dalit characters by neglecting to include their very life style, culture due to which the characters are too apart from their roots. Dalitness which is the soul of the character itself is not seen in the characterization. That is the reason many works cannot be a part of Dalit Literature in which projecting the Dalit culture is an essential part of it. But A Fine Balance is an exception to it. The novel A Fine Balance is effective in presenting Dalit culture realistically to some extent

scholarly journals An existentialist reading of K.S. Maniam’s ‘The Return’

2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 100-108
Author(s):  
Saroja Dhanapal
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
The Novel ◽  
South Asian Diaspora ◽  
Indian Diaspora ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Raja Rao ◽  
Asian Diaspora ◽  
Cultural Struggle ◽  
History Of ◽  
Existential Perspective

According to Peyre (1948:21), the fathers and forefathers of existentialism were mostly Germans, but it was adapted and transformed by the French and was re-exported to the rest of the world. Peyre’s inference reduces the history of existentialism to a nutshell. Existentialism can be defined as an intellectual movement that reflects all aspects of modern life. In literature, this theory acts as a useful approach to analysing literary works in order to make sense of the complexities, contradictions and dilemmas surrounding the characters. The purpose of this research paper is to study the novel of Subramaniam Krishnan, popularly known as K. S. Maniam, an Indian Malaysian academic and novelist, from an existentialist perspective. His novels deal with the lives and problems of the post-colonial Indian Diaspora in Malaysia. In 2000, he received the Raja Rao Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Literature of the South Asian Diaspora. His first novel ‘The Return’ is an autobiographical novel which deals with cultural struggle and cultural identity. This novel will be analysed from an existential perspective. 

The Anglo-Indian Novel to 1947

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph Crane
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Indian Literature ◽  
Dominant Form ◽  
Indian History ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
Prose Narratives ◽  
History Of ◽  
Anglo Indian

This chapter explores the Anglo-Indian novel. The history of British writing on India stretches back almost as far as the Indo-British imperial encounter and includes travel writing, missionary letters, military memoirs, and scholarly accounts of Indian history and culture, all of which were published in great numbers in the eighteenth century. Literary texts followed, and included short prose narratives depicting Anglo-Indian life, missionary tales, descriptions of the landscape, and stories of native life. While all these forms were well received in their day, none was to prove as popular as the novel, which during the nineteenth century became the dominant form of Anglo-Indian literature. In the early nineteenth century, India was also used as an exotic setting for early fictions by a number of writers who would go on to rank amongst the best-known novelists of the Victorian period.

History of Contemporary Indian English Poetry: An Appraisal

POETCRIT ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-82
Author(s):  
Pravat Kumar Padhy ◽  
Keyword(s):  
English Poetry ◽  
Indian English ◽  
History Of

“What Freedom?”

2019 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-331
Author(s):  
John Owen Havard
Keyword(s):  
South America ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Free Condition ◽  
Narrative Design ◽  
Economic Liberalism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
John Owen

John Owen Havard, “‘What Freedom?’: Frankenstein, Anti-Occidentalism, and English Liberty” (pp. 305–331) “If he were vanquished,” Victor Frankenstein states of his monstrous creation in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), “I should be a free man.” But he goes on: “Alas! what freedom? such as the peasant enjoys when his family have been massacred before his eyes, his cottage burnt, his lands laid waste, and he is turned adrift, homeless, pennyless, and alone, but free.” Victor’s circumstances approximate the deracinated subject of an emergent economic liberalism, while looking to other destitute and shipwrecked heroes. Yet the ironic “freedom” described here carries an added charge, which Victor underscores when he concludes this account of his ravaged condition: “Such would be my liberty.” This essay revisits the geographic plotting of Frankenstein: the digression to the East in the nested “harem” episode, the voyage to England, the neglected episode of Victor’s imprisonment in Ireland, and the creature’s desire to live in South America. Locating Victor’s concluding appeal to his “free” condition within the novel’s expansive geography amplifies the political stakes of his downfall, calling attention to not only his own suffering but the wider trail of destruction left in his wake. Where existing critical accounts have emphasized the French Revolution and its violent aftermath, this obscures the novel’s pointed critique of a deep and tangled history of English liberty and its destructive legacies. Reexamining the novel’s geography in tandem with its use of form similarly allows us to rethink the overarching narrative design of Frankenstein, in ways that disrupt, if not more radically dislocate, existing rigid ways of thinking about the novel.

Dancing Women

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Usha Iyer
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
The Body ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
History Of ◽  
Material History ◽  
Cultural Forms ◽  
Hindi Cinema

Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema, an ambitious study of two of South Asia’s most popular cultural forms—cinema and dance—historicizes and theorizes the material and cultural production of film dance, a staple attraction of popular Hindi cinema. It explores how the dynamic figurations of the body wrought by cinematic dance forms from the 1930s to the 1990s produce unique constructions of gender, stardom, and spectacle. By charting discursive shifts through figurations of dancer-actresses, their publicly performed movements, private training, and the cinematic and extra-diegetic narratives woven around their dancing bodies, the book considers the “women’s question” via new mobilities corpo-realized by dancing women. Some of the central figures animating this corporeal history are Azurie, Sadhona Bose, Vyjayanthimala, Helen, Waheeda Rehman, Madhuri Dixit, and Saroj Khan, whose performance histories fold and intersect with those of other dancing women, including devadasis and tawaifs, Eurasian actresses, oriental dancers, vamps, choreographers, and backup dancers. Through a material history of the labor of producing on-screen dance, theoretical frameworks that emphasize collaboration, such as the “choreomusicking body” and “dance musicalization,” aesthetic approaches to embodiment drawing on treatises like the Natya Sastra and the Abhinaya Darpana, and formal analyses of cine-choreographic “techno-spectacles,” Dancing Women offers a variegated, textured history of cinema, dance, and music. Tracing the gestural genealogies of film dance produces a very different narrative of Bombay cinema, and indeed of South Asian cultural modernities, by way of a corporeal history co-choreographed by a network of remarkable dancing women.

Australianama

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samia Khatun
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
South Asian ◽  
South Asian Diaspora ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Asian Diaspora ◽  
Broken Hill ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Anglophone World ◽  
Indian Ocean World

Australian deserts remain dotted with the ruins of old mosques. Beginning with a Bengali poetry collection discovered in a nineteenth-century mosque in the town of Broken Hill, Samia Khatun weaves together the stories of various peoples colonized by the British Empire to chart a history of South Asian diaspora. Australia has long been an outpost of Anglo empires in the Indian Ocean world, today the site of military infrastructure central to the surveillance of 'Muslim-majority' countries across the region. Imperial knowledges from Australian territories contribute significantly to the Islamic-Western binary of the post- Cold War era. In narrating a history of Indian Ocean connections from the perspectives of those colonized by the British, Khatun highlights alternative contexts against which to consider accounts of non-white people. Australianama challenges a central idea that powerfully shapes history books across the Anglophone world: the colonial myth that European knowledge traditions are superior to the epistemologies of the colonized. Arguing that Aboriginal and South Asian language sources are keys to the vast, complex libraries that belie colonized geographies, Khatun shows that stories in colonized tongues can transform the very ground from which we view past, present and future.

Reading Statelessness

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lyndsey Stonebridge
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Political Sovereignty ◽  
History Of

Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the failure of human rights to address statelessness is well known. Less commented upon is how important literature was to her thought. This chapter shows how Arendt’s 1940s essays on Kafka connect the history of the novel to shifting definitions of legal and political sovereignty. Arendt reads The Castle as a blueprint for a political theory that is also a theory of fiction: in the novel K, the unwanted stranger, demolishes the fiction of the rights of man, and with it, the fantasy of assimilation. In a parallel move, Kafka also refuses to assimilate his character into the conventions of fiction. Arendt’s reading changes the terms for how we might approach the literature of exile and of human rights.

V.S. Naipaul, Caribbean Writing, and Caribbean Thought

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Ghosh
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Development ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Derek Walcott ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Kamau Brathwaite ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
History Of ◽  
Principal Subject ◽  
Intellectual Formation

This book presents a new portrait of V.S. Naipaul, one of the twentieth-century’s most controversial writers about colonialism and its aftermath, by looking at his relationship with the Caribbean, the region of his birth. It argues that whilst Naipaul presented himself as a global public intellectual—a citizen of nowhere—his writing and thought was shaped by his Caribbean intellectual formation, and his investment in Caribbean political debates. Focusing on three key forms of Caribbean writing—the novel, the historical narrative, and the travel narrative—it shows how the generic, stylistic, and formal choices of writers had great political significance. Telling the story of his creative and intellectual development at three crucial points in Naipaul’s career, it offers a new intellectual biography of its principal subject. By showing Naipaul’s crucial place in the history of Caribbean ideas, it also provides new perspectives on a number of major writers and thinkers from the region, including C.L.R. James, Eric Williams, Kamau Brathwaite, Sylvia Wynter, George Lamming, Derek Walcott, Maryse Condé, and David Scott.

Northeast India as an Indigenous Centre for the Domestication of Plants and Animals

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manjil Hazarika
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
Close Association ◽  
Northeast India ◽  
Indian Culture ◽  
Rice Agriculture ◽  
Animal Domestication ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Diverse Cultures

Northeast India is situated at the nexus of the South Asian, Southeast Asian, and East Asian biogeographical realms and harbours diverse biota, providing a unique opportunity to archaeologists and anthropologists for the study of the relationship between humans and their environment over the ages. Moreover, this region, the abode of diverse ethnic groups with diverse cultures and customs, hints at a long history of continuous and close association between humans and nature, which is important in the understanding of plant and animal domestication. Genetic analysis of present-day domesticates with their wild counterparts provides valuable insights into their differentiation, time of domestication, and changes in their morphological traits through control by humans. The chapter also elucidates the role played by rice in Northeast Indian culture and highlights the long-term history of rice agriculture in the region.

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