scholarly journals No more “Us’’ Versus “Others”: Critique of Cultural Trauma in the Movie Partition by Vic Sarin

2021 ◽  
Vol 34 (01) ◽  
pp. 213-220
Author(s):  
Yog Raj Lamichhane

On 15 August 1947, the glory of Indian Independence has introduced with a political hubris, dividing British India into two separate independent nations: secular India and Islamic Pakistan. The partition brings trauma in the life of millions; nevertheless, this trauma itself becomes the victim of nationhood and community both in official history and literary writing. In this background, the study examines how a Hollywood movie Partition directed by Vic Sarin in 2007, exceptionally surpasses that tendency of dividing the community into ‘‘as’’ and ‘‘others’’ imparting Indian partition trauma politically. While analyzing the behavior and action of major characters along with the overall imparted theme of the movie, it rethinks the customary archives of community and nationhood depicting partition memory objectively. The protagonist never pronounces a single word of communal intolerance even when he has been mocked and tortured in the name of religion. Conversely, some characters in the movie always attempt to massacre the truth of trauma spreading communal bile; however, the overall essence and message of the movie keep that alive. Rethinking cultural trauma and using the approach of memory, the study concludes that this in-between movie appears as “West Running Brook” that exceeds the common communalization and perpetual politicization in the history of depicting Indian partition. Eventually, the study establishes that sharing pain seems to work as a healer among victims to overcome their trauma on one side and uniquely it adjoins the British as a party in Indian partition trauma in the next, which has been blurred considering insignificant in the one-to-one conflict between two giants.

2016 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 9
Author(s):  
Terezinha Oliveira

The considerations on the book “VirtuosaBenfeitoria” aim atevaluating the relevance of a social project to guide the actions of the ruler and theindividuals, with a view to practical actions that converge to the common good. The infant D. Pedro, also known as the Duke of Coimbra, wrote the work. The central focus of the book is to address the sense of improvement and how the prince should practice and bestow it and how the subjects would receive and practice it. The arguments of D. Pedro to deal with the good and the society are strongly influenced by classical authorities and authors of scholasticism, especially Thomas Aquinas. In this sense, on the one hand our study seeks to show that such knowledge was essential for him to understand the plots that build human relationships, whose premises, to him, should be the ones leading society towards the common good;on the other hand, the goal is to analyze the work we regard as essential theoretical and methodological principles of history that allow us to recover, through memory, historical events that potentially guide us through paths that show the relevance of the Master of the University, as a vector in the organization of a given society. 


Artifex Novus ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 58-75
Author(s):  
Anna Sylwia Czyż

ABSTRAKT Sprowadzone do Wilna między 1616 a 1618 r. benedyktynki utworzyły niewielką i skromnie uposażoną wspólnotę. Ich sytuacja zmieniła się w 1692 r., kiedy to dzięki bogatym zapisom Feliksa Jana Paca mogły wystawić murowany kościół konsekrowany w 1703 r. Hojność podkomorzego litewskiego nie była przypadkowa, bowiem do wileńskich benedyktynek wstąpiły jego córki Sybilla i Anna, jedyne potomstwo jakie po sobiepozostawił. Z nich szczególne znaczenie dla dziejów klasztoru miała Sybilla (Magdalena) Pacówna, która w 1704 r. została wybrana ksienią. Nie tylko odnowiła ona życie wspólnoty, ale stała się również jedną z najważniejszych postaci ówczesnego Wilna. Po pożarze w 1737 r. Sybilla Pacówna energicznie przystąpiła do odbudowy klasztoru i kościoła, którą kończyła już jej następczyni Joanna Rejtanówna. Wzniesioną wówczas według projektu Jana Krzysztofa Glaubitza fasadę ozdobiono stiukowo-metalową dekoracją o indywidualnie zaplanowanym programie ideowym odwołującym się i do tradycji zakonnej i rodowej – pacowskiej. W fasadzie wyeksponowano ideały związane z życiem benedyktyńskim sytuując je wśród aluzji o konieczności walki na płaszczyźnie ducha i ciała, włączając w militarną symbolikę także konieczność walki z wrogami Kościoła i ojczyzny oraz charakterystyczną dla duchowości benedyktyńskiej pobożność związaną z krzyżem w typie karawaka oraz zOpatrznością Bożą. Jednocześnie przypominano o bogactwie powołań w klasztorze benedyktynek wileńskich przyrównując mniszki do lilii. Porównanie to dzięki obecności w fasadzie herbu Gozdawa (podwójna lilia) oraz powszechnego w XVII i XVIII w. zwyczaju określania Paców „Liliatami” można było odnosić także do ich rodu, w tym do zasłużonej dla klasztoru ksieni Sybilli. Tak mocne wyeksponowanie fundatorów było nie tylko chęciąupamiętnia darczyńców, ale wraz z całym architektonicznym i plastycznym wystrojem świątyni wiązało się z koniecznością stworzenia przeciwwagi dla nowego i prężnie rozwijającego się pod patronatem elity litewskiej klasztoru Wwizytek w Wilnie. Przy tym charakter dekoracji fasady kościoła pw. św. Katarzyny wpisuje się w inne fundacje Paców: kościół pw. św. Teresy i kościół pw. śś. Piotra i Pawła będąc ostatnią ważną inicjatywą artystyczną rodu w stolicy Wielkiego Księstwa Litewskiego. SUMMARY The Benedictines, who had been brought to Vilnius between 1616 and 1618, formed a small and modest community. Thanks to the generous legacy of Feliks Jan Pac, in 1692 their situation changed as they could erect a brick church, which was then consecrated in 1703. The generosity of the Lithuanian chamberlain was not a coincidence; his two daughters, Sybilla and Anna, the only offspring he left, had joined the Benedictine Sisters in Vilnius. Sybilla (Magdalena) Pac, who became an abbess in 1704, was particularly important for the history of the monastery. Not only did she renew the community life, but she also became one of the most important personalities of the then Vilnius. After the fire in 1737 Sybilla Pac vigorously started rebuilding the monastery and the church, which was completed by her successor, Joanna Rejtan. The facade which was then erected after Johann Christoph Glaubitz’s design was adorned with stucco and metal decorations with a perfectly devised ideological programme which referred to the tradition of the order and to the one of the Pac family. The facade presented ideals connected with the Benedictine life, which placed them among the hints of having to fight at the level of spirit and body, incorporating among the military symbols also the need to fight the enemies of the Church and the state, and the typical for the Benedictine spirituality piety connected with the Caravaca cross and the Divine Providence. At the same time, it reminded of the Benedictine vocations comparing nuns to lilies. This comparison, due to the presence of the Gozdawa coat-of-arms (double lilie) and the common nickname of the Pac family in the 17th and 18th cc. “the Liliats”, could also apply to their lineage, including the abbess Sybilla and her services to the monastery. Exposing founders in such an emphatic way was not only the will to immortalise them, but was also, together with the entire architectural and artistic decor of the church, connected with the need to counterbalance the new and dynamicallydeveloping Visitation Monastery in Vilnius. At the same time, the nature of the facade decoration of the Church of St. Catherine is in line with other foundations of the Pac family: St Theresa’s Church and the St Peter and St Paul Church, and was the last significant artistic initiative of the family in thecapital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania


1990 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 385-401 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas M. Peers

The history of the East India Company's rule of India is marked by sporadic outbursts of civil-military conflict. It was not unknown in India for European officers to down tools and commit acts that bordered on outright mutiny. Perhaps this could be expected when, on the one hand, the Company, as a commercial body, sought to maximize its profits, while on the other, the army was essentially a mercenary force, ever grasping for a larger slice of the fiscal pie. If, however, we penetrate deeper into the labyrinth of their relations, we find that the issues at stake lose their simplicity. In the early nineteenth century, a third group came into play, further confusing the state of civil-military relations in India. The Anglo-Indian bureaucracy, which had incorporated military attitudes into the operating system of British India, had begun to assert itself. Through such spokesmen as Thomas Munro, John Malcolm, Charles Metcalfe and Mountstuart Elphinstone, an increasingly militarized rule of British India was put forward, angering the court of directors and allowing the officers to mask their private interest under the guise of the national interest. This ideology of militarism, however, must be firmly placed within the context of nineteenth-century British India for it bore little resemblance to those strains of militarism witnessed elsewhere.


2013 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-122
Author(s):  
Tiziana Pontillo

Abstract As Kātyāyana emphasizes while commenting on the ekaśeṣa-rules, words apply per object. Consequently, no word should be capable of conveying more than one object. By contrast not only does paronomasia, the so-called śleṣa, break the one-to-one relation between the śabda- and artha-levels of language; there are also grammatical rules which look like deviations from the naturally expected cause-effect relation between word forms and their meanings. The ekaśeṣa-rule represents one of these exceptions, since some parts of the artha are comprehensible, even without employing the word-form denoting them, such as mātṛ in the dual noun pitarau, meaning ‘mother and father’ rather than ‘the two fathers’. P atañjali already mentions an intriguing option in the use of śabdas, when he notes that a word form can merely convey its primary denotation, such as candra denoting the ‘moon’, or can express something that is ‘like something else’, such as candra conveying the sense of a ‘face like a moon’. These exceptions are reconsidered here within the framework of the “yugapad-expression”, which is how Bhartṛhari defines one of the two language options (the other one being kramaḥ ‘sequence’), an option realised when a single word simultaneously conveys more than one meaning, but an option whose use is discouraged. Technical (ritual and grammatical) speculations on simultaneity as an exception to the bi-unique relationship between a cause and its effect date back to the 2nd to 3rd centuries BC. Nonetheless, grammarians insist on excluding these extreme applications of meaning extension; only the late kāvyālaṃkāraśāstra- authors extol the virtues of the phenomenon. The paper focuses on the trajectory that might have been followed in the intervening changes.


Africa ◽  
1933 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 172-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arthur Mayhew

The fact that the Yearbooks of Education, 1932, 1933, edited by Lord Eustace Percy, devote a large portion of their space to education in British dependencies, and that the whole of the Educational Yearbook, 1931, of the International Institute of Teachers College, Columbia University, is devoted to a study of Colonial systems of education, with a liberal apportionment of space to British Colonial policy, shows the widespread interest that is now being taken in the education of the more primitive or indigenous races for which the more advanced countries are acting as trustees. The articles on British Tropical Africa and British India in the Yearbooks of Education, 1932 and 1933, and the survey of education in Tanganyika Territory in the Columbia University Yearbook, afford material for a comparison of educational aims in Africa and India, which may be of interest to the reader, as it certainly has been a source of profit to the writer of this article. The time has not yet come for passing any judgement on British educational policy in the African colonies, and it would be rash to predict the results of plans that have not yet matured and are constantly being adapted to changing conditions and newly discovered needs. But it is possible to survey as a whole the history of education in India from the date of Macaulay's Minute up to 1920, when education passed from the control of the central British Government to the charge of Ministers responsible to Provincial Legislative Councils. This history reveals risks to which tropical races brought into educational contact with western civilization are exposed, and suggests, by its record, of failure as well as success, means whereby these risks, so far as they are real in Africa, may be minimized. Sir Philip Hartog and Mr. Rivers-Smith are so well qualified for the work they have done in these Yearbooks, and have been so cautious in their presentation of the Indian and African situation, that no careful reader of their articles is likely to suppose that conclusions drawn from the one country are necessarily applicable to the other. But there is very much to be gained from a comparative study.


Author(s):  
Deby Babis

Purpose The official history of an organization is usually found on the organization’s website and in brochures. The purpose of this paper is to explore the narrative of an institution’s official history, the autobiography, as compared to the biography constructed by researchers. Design/methodology/approach A case study was conducted on the Organization of Latin American Immigrants in Israel (OLEI), covering the entire history of the organization. Based on a longitudinal, holistic and qualitative perspective, the research methodology combines data collected from interviews, archival and digital sources. The access to these data enables researchers to explore some of the reasons and circumstance behind the construction of the official history. Findings The analysis of the data revealed a significant gap between the autobiography and the biography in four episodes. The common thread running through them was the creation of a narrative that reinforces and emphasizes the growth and stability of the organization, through the use of strategies such as forgetting, erasing and remythologizing. This narrative was found to have been re-constructed following a period of instability. Originality/value The originality of this study relies on the use of the terminology of autobiography and biography for the exploration of the official history of an organization. The innovative research methodology applied in this paper, which compares an organization’s biography with its autobiography, enables the exploration of different dimensions and dynamics, emphasizing the value of understanding autobiography by constructing a biography.


2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 460-478
Author(s):  
Nadezhda G. Mikhnovets ◽  

The article examines the history of formation and development of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “soil concepts” in the 1860s in the light of his close attention to the work of Alexander Ostrovsky. Previously, researchers did not correlate the different positions of Ostrovsky and Dostoevsky in the writers’ shared process of the cognition of folk life. The main focus of the article is centered on revealing the dynamics of changes in Dostoevsky’s attitude towards the work of Ostrovsky: from the recognition of impartiality of the playwright’s portrayal of the Russian people to the belief of his misunderstanding of foundations of folk life and the conviction of the gradual increase in accusatory tones in its coverage, starting from the final resolution of the play Thunderstorm. The article identifies the areas of synchronicities and disagreements of the two writers from a problem-thematic standpoint. The work concludes that the main point of divergence in the writers’ understanding of the Russian people was, on the one hand, Dostoevsky’s certainty of the monolithic unity of the Russian people, anchored in the Orthodox faith, and, on the other, Ostrovsky’s idea that the fundamental crises of the mid-19th century encompass all strata of Russian society, without any exceptions. The idea of the significance of the Last Judgment in the life of the common people is identified as essential for Ostrovsky.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (5) ◽  
pp. 166-176
Author(s):  
Maitree Vaidya Sabnis

Modern Indian historians has focused most of its attention on writing history of British India and discourses on the princely states or ‘Indian India’ was left to the margins. The Princely states which consisted of at least half of population and region in the pre-independent times did not experience the strength of national movement. There were two contradictory responses from the states. On the one hand the rulers were believed to be in cahoots with the colonial government and on the other people of some of the princely states went against their own rulers and supported the Indian national movement. This paper highlights various writings on the idea of nationalism in the princely states and its binary responses.


Maska ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (200) ◽  
pp. 84-101
Author(s):  
Kaja Kraner

Since the 1990s, the common thread to artistic practices based on the collection, archiving and presentation of historical documents can be derived from what is happening with the space, time and the regimes of visibility and knowledge as part of digital reproductivity. Nevertheless, roughly two separate key approaches can be identified: construction approaches that are often designed as an intervention in the dominant historiographical practice, on the one hand, and approaches focusing on the study of infrastructural, epistemological and other conditions for the possibility of archiving and historicization in general, on the other. The latter approaches frequently question the standard treatment of documents that is most often based on the ability to trace their origin as well as on their presumptive expressive and narrative potentials. The article therefore analyses the approach to studying history adopted by Lebanese-American artist Walid Raad, drawing from the performance-lecture Les Louvres and/or Kicking the Dead, which is part of a broader project about “a history of art in the Arab world”. In the process of defining the specifics of Raad’s approach based on the concepts of “spaces of interrupted histories” and “self-historicization”, the article draws a comparison between artistic uses of documents in the context of former socialist countries and the Middle East or, more specifically, the Lebanese socio-political context. Instead of unifying both “spaces of interrupted histories” by focusing on narrativization and temporality in Raad’s work, I concentrate mostly on the differences.


2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 317-337 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID KEARNS ◽  
RYAN WALTER

ABSTRACT‘Theory’ is taken for granted as an object of historical study, especially in relation to the history of political thought, and most historiography proceeds as if little were lost by construing authors such as Aristotle, Machiavelli, and Smith as ‘theorists’. This article argues that the costs are likely to be high, and that in consequence ‘theory’ ought not to be considered a generic category capable of neutrally describing a given piece of thinking from the past. On the one hand, ascribing theoretical argument can obscure the nature of rival idioms for making claims regarding political life, such as biblical criticism, the common law, and ‘office talk’. On the other hand, the evidence suggests that the ‘political theorist’, as an avowed identity, only emerged in Britain late in the eighteenth century, tentatively and under the force of peculiar pressures. It follows that it will rarely be appropriate to use the term before c. 1800, and considerable caution will still be necessary when using the label in the post-1800 period. Abiding by this discipline is likely to lead to new discoveries in what has been a flat terrain of ‘political theory’.


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