Redefining Nationhood and Nationality through Historiographic Metafiction in the Shadow Lines

Purpose: Postmodernism is a general movement that developed in the late 20th century across the arts, philosophy, art, architecture, and criticism, marking a disappearance from modernism. The term has been more often used to describe a historical age which followed after modernity. Postmodernism is a period of uprising which refers to ups and downs in each walk of life and the different disciplines of knowledge be it literary work, philosophy, or science. Postmodern literature revokes some modern literary methods by transforming them. Historiographic Metafiction is a contradictory term that consists of two opposite categories such as history and metafiction. It is having dual representations because such writings reflect the reality as well as fictional position. An attempt is made by the Post-colonial Indian English writers to liberate Indian English literature from the foreign bondage. Historical events such as agitations, migration, movements, refugees, colonial hegemony; social-economic and cultural problems like encounter of the east-west, caste, and class became the concerns of the writers. Design/Methodology/Approach: This paper is prepared by making a study of Primary source and accumulating secondary data from educational websites and written publications. This qualitative research is carried out by studying and interpreting the existing knowledge on the subject. The paper tries to analyze the historiographic metafictional features as depicted in The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh. Findings/Result: After reviewing many articles, books and thesis it has been found that the paper aims to study Amitav Ghosh's notions like ‟ Nationhood and National distinctiveness in "The Shadow Lines” as a reminiscence novel, highlights a few historical happenings like the Second World War, the Swadeshi movement, and the Partition of India in 1947 and communal uprisings in Bangladesh and India. The ardent nationalism upheld by the protagonist that is the narrator’s grandmother is questioned and re-analysed. Ghosh searches for appropriateness of traditional identity such as nation and nationalism. Originality/Value: This paper makes a study of the major character Thamma with special reference to her concerns of Nationhood and Nationality. The identity of Thamma in the novel is given prominence being a woman she stands for her thoughts and identifies her as an individual who faced tragedy but still who had the courage to raise her voice till the end. Paper Type: Analytical Research paper.

Understanding Rivalry: Staging Jealousy in Karnad’s “Broken Images”

Acclaimed Kannada and English playwright, Girish Karnad’s play Broken Images focuses on human relationships and their intricacies, as well as on the relationship between languages. Outwardly, it addresses the sibling relationship and focuses on its destructive side. However, on a close reading, this monologue unfolds a series of diverse human relationships, viz., the relationship of the two sisters, Manjula and Malini; the husband-wife relationship between Manjula and Pramod; the camaraderie of Pramod and Malini; the friendship between Pramod and Lucy; and the amity between Lucy and Manjula. Besides these personal relationships, the play deals with and explores at length another important relationship, the one between two languages, one regional and one global, the legacy of the erstwhile colonizers. The relationship between Manjula and Malini acts as a metaphor for the mismatch and the hierarchy between regional language writers and Indian English writers on the Indian literary scene. This paper, therefore, examines the aforementioned human relationships in the play to reveal the motives behind the enmity and the causes which lead to sinful actions that remain invisible at all times, and in the process comments upon the relationship between different language writers, as well as what leads to the formation of existing hierarchies. First, the paper investigates the sororal bond between Manjula and Malini; second, it examines the tripartite relationships and how the third party is perceived as a rival in the relationships of Manjula-Lucy-Pramod and Manjula-Malini-Pramod; and finally, it looks at the relationship that exists between the Bhasha writers and Indian English writers, and exposes the enmity in these relationships and its various causes.

Anita Desai’s Cry the Peacock: A Manifesto of Maya’s Psychological Predicament

The present paper aims to explore Anita Desai’s Debut novel, Cry, the Peacock as a manifesto of Maya’s psychological predicament. Cry, the Peacock is Anita Desai’s first novel published in 1963. Anita Desai is one of the most known and distinguished Indian English novelists with worldwide fame and name. She is gifted with extraordinary penetration and sharpness of vision. Her works have provided her with worldwide fame and attention. The novelist is accomplished with prospecting psychological insight. Majority of Anita Desai’s novels are the true and real manifesto of women’s situation and predicament. Cry, the Peacock is a manifesto of Maya’s psychological predicament. Desai’s has very well explored the inner or interior world of woman, her anger, frustration and storm raging inside her mind and heart through the protagonist of this novel. The novelist’s concern with the emancipation of Maya can be seen in almost every page of the work. She often peeps into the interior or inner psyche of her main characters instead of just focusing on the outer view. She is a master in composing the psychological novels. She very well knows how to explore the psychic depth of her main protagonists as well to analyse and examine their motives in details. The novelist is generally considered as a trendsetter in the area of psychoanalytic study. Through her extraordinary penetration of vision and sharpness, the novelist has brilliantly portrayed the inner turmoil going on in the psyche of Maya who is a hysterical personality. She is successful in bringing out the frustration, loneliness and claustrophobia of Maya.

Border Crossings

This chapter examines Andrew Clark’s exploration of language and language barriers in war-time use, and the border crossings that words often revealed. French, Belgian, Russian, Indian English, and German (among others) all attracted his attention. As he explored, articles and advertisements in the British press appeared in Flemish or French, directly addressing the shifting constitution of the Home Front in the wake of war. Clark’s interest in Indian English is richly documented. French, in particular, claimed a topical currency, infusing trench slang (and reported speech) alongside popular reportage. In contrast, distinctive forms of logophobia with reference to German as the language of the enemy generated a set of highly divisive language tactics in which linguistic and moral inversion were intentionally aligned.

Indian English is also Creole: Incorporating Regional Bias in Research Pedagogy

Research pedagogy in India should readjust itself to accommodate claims of regional autonomy in arts and letters. Different ways of reconstructing a pedagogy of research are recommended. Reflexive Humanism ensures adequate assessment and evaluation of cultural, literary, and aesthetic achievements of diverse populations. The Indian English corpus is redefined as a creolized Indian language with lexical and semantic factors borrowed from English. The consciousness of pro-national subjectivism is also considered an essential constituent of Indian English literature. Lines of research are suggested for aspiring scholars in the Indian academy. The author emphasizes a dynamic and sensitive adaptation of research methodology which respects and reintegrates itself with the evolution of globally aware, contemporary society in India.

Social Hypocrisies in Vijay Tendulkar’s The Vultures

Early plays in India were written in Bengali by Bengali writers which were mostly translated into English from Bengali in the 19th century. But drama in English failed to serve a local theatrical habitation, in sharp contrast to plays in the mother tongue (both original and in the form of adaptations from foreign languages); and the appetite for plays in English could more conveniently be fed on performances of established dramatic successes in English by foreign authors. Owing to the lack of a firm dramatic tradition nourished on actual performance in a live theatre, early Indian English drama in Bengal as elsewhere in India grew sporadically as mostly closet drama; and even later, only Sri Aurobindo, Ravindranath Tagore and Harindranath Chattopadhyaya produced a substantial corpus of dramatic writing. Between 1891 and 1916 Sri Aurobindo wrote five complete and six incomplete verse plays. Keywords: exploitation, sexual violence, homosexual, individuall degradation, consciousness, hypocrisies

Cross-language comparison of long-term average speech spectrum and dynamic range for three Indian languages and British English

Purpose: The Long-Term Average Speech Spectrum (LTASS) and Dynamic Range (DR) of speech strongly influence estimates of Speech Intelligibility Index (SII), gain and compression required for hearing aid fitting. It is also known that acoustic and linguistic characteristics of a language have a bearing on its LTASS and DR. Thus, there is a need to estimate LTASS and DR for Indian languages. The present work on three Indian languages fills this gap and contrasts LTASS and DR attributes of these languages against British English.Methods: For this purpose, LTASS and DR were measured for 21 one-third octave bands in the frequency range of 0.1 to 10 kHz for Hindi, Kannada, Indian English and British English.Results: Our work shows that the DR of Indian languages studied is 7-10 dB less relative to that of British English. We also report that LTASS levels for Indian languages are 7 dB lower relative to British English for frequencies above 1 kHz. Finally, we observed that LTASS and DR attributes across genders were more or less the same.Conclusions: Given the evidence presented in this work that LTASS and DR characteristics for Indian languages analyzed are markedly different than those for BE, there is a need to determine Indian language specific SII, as well as gain and compression parameters used in hearing aids.

Existentialism in Anita Nair’s Ladies Coupe

This paper is an attempt to explore the fragrance of existentialism in Anita Nair’s Ladies Coupe. She was born on 26th Jan., 1966. She has penned down three very famous novels; The Better Man (1999), Ladies Coupe (2001) and Mistress (2005). She happens to be a multi-talented literary figure, holding her authority not only in the field of fiction but also that of poetry. She is better known as a competent modern woman-novelist in the realm of Indian English literature of the modern age. Currently she lives in Bangalore. Ladies Coupe is basically a novel of the “feminine sensibility” but it remains unsuited to the category of the female-writing that represented women as “battered, bartered and abandoned” on the shoals of low self-worth. It rides triumphantly against the tide giving us a glimpse of the innate strength that a woman has to rebuild up her life. This is why Nair has called her novel a story revealing about “ordinary women with indomitable spirit”. Unlike her first novel – ‘The Better Man’, having a male protagonist, Nair’s ‘Ladies Coupe’, rotates around the 45 year old bachelor Akhila or Akhilendeswari, being a pen pusher in the Income Tax Department. She has gone fed up with the lone provider in her family. One day, she happens to get a ticket booked for Kanyakumari to explore certain answers for herself, mainly to the question if a woman is able to make her survival alone, being away from her family. There are five other women accompanying her for the overnight journey. They are Janaki, married with Margaret, a forty year old young Chemistry-teacher, Prabha Devi, very close to Akhila’s age, the fifteen year old Sheela and Mariakonthu, a woman who is obviously different from the rest of them. All these women connect their life-stories to Akhila, helping the latter to gain her full potential woman and struggle with the response to the questions she has been searching out so long. Thus this paper analyses the search-operation of Akhila as she arrives by degrees as to how she should live her life freely and maintain her own identity in this patriarchal society. Anita Nair has paid emphasis on the fact that it is not the response to the question which has been alluding Akhila so long, but the search for exploring it which is more pleasant to the protagonist. The central character Akhila’s responsibility has been considerably exposed. She has found the potential to come out more afresh from the prison-house of her old-self as symbolized by the stiffness of the cotton saris she always used to put on while working. She can at least switch back to her previous life where perhaps nothing could have changed on the surface but on a mental plane a sure process of development has occurred.