Religious Division and Otherness as Portrayed in 'Shame' and 'The Ministry of Utmost Happiness'

After the partition of India in 1947, religion has become a major catalyst for division and othering in most of South Asia. Bangladeshi author and activist Taslima Nasrin was exiled from her country, primarily for revealing the mistreatment of the Hindu minorities in Bangladesh in her novel Shame. Indian author Arundhati Roy has also faced severe backlash due to her portrayal of the mistreatment of the Muslims in India in her novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Religion has become an extremely fraught issue in South Asia, making almost any criticism of religious fundamentalism a highly perilous endeavor. Yet, both Nasrin and Roy had the courage to do that. This paper explores how the aforementioned novels expose the process of othering of the religious minorities in India and Bangladesh by highlighting the retributive nature of communal violence which feeds on mistrust, hatred, and religious tribalism – a cursed legacy that can be traced back to the violent partition of the Indian subcontinent based on the two-nation theory.

Community-based learning in higher education: A portal for knowledge production in the time of COVID-19

At the onset of COVID-19 in 2020, the world-renowned writer and political activist, Arundhati Roy, signalled that the pandemic is "a portal, a gateway between one world and the next . . . [and] we can choose to walk through it." Roy's views highlight how we can imagine our world anew through reflection in the time of COVID-19. In this article, we examine the epistemological experiences of students enrolled in a course in community-based learning (CBL) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and consider how CBL during COVID-19 serves as a portal for understanding knowledge that is produced at the nexus between the university and the community. We deemed the Community of Inquiry framework to be a suitable theoretical lens based on its appreciation of the nexus between social (community), teaching (classroom), and cognitive (critical thinking) elements in an online educational experience. Our findings indicate that COVID-19 provides an opportunity for CBL to serve as a portal for understanding how the students' epistemological experiences during the pandemic influenced knowledge production. This is beneficial since university education most often places at the periphery knowledge that students from the surrounding communities bring to the classroom. It is our contention that students bring epistemic value to the university that is not affirmed during the knowledge production process. We conclude that CBL can indeed serve as the gateway for knowledge production between universities and communities during and beyond COVID-19.

Re-creating the hybrid text: postcolonial Indian writings and the European scene

For a language with a wealth of great literature such as English, globaliza-tion has been a mixed blessing. The International English of Mc World is a poor descendant of the language of Shakespeare and Dickens. On the other hand, English literature has been tremendously enriched by writings from the former colonies of the British Empire, creating their own ‘norms’ of English – ‘a new English’, as Chinua Achebe famously put it, “still in full communion with its ancestral home, but altered to suit its new surroundings ”. In the postcolonial literary scene, such ‘hybrid’ texts – or ‘métissés ’– are now a familiar feature, but a complicated one for translators working into other European languages. This essay concentrates on India, and looking at writings by Sethu (Pandavapuram in English translation) and Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things in English and in German translation), it investigates the striking features of hybrid source texts and the cultural and linguistic problems involved in re-creating them for a European target culture.

Feelings, Fascism, and Futures

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed some of the most glaring inequalities within nations and across the globe. While the disruption caused by the pandemic has given rise to hopes for a cultural reset to address these structures of inequality—captured compellingly by Arundhati Roy in her vision of the pandemic as a portal—the sediments of inequality have proven hard to erode. In this contribution, I explore this regressive impulse by honing in on the affect of restraint. While restraint is not ordinarily characterized as such, in the pandemic it has been a defining feature of our lives. However, it was not afforded equally. I begin by showing how restraint has become racialized, serving as a political tool to suppress protests, notably Black Lives Matter. I then move to show how globally, too, there has been an imbalance in who is—and what countries are—expected to practice nonintervention, linking both domestic and international uses of restraint to these preexisting structures of inequality. I end by proffering a vision for how, despite all these obstacles, the pandemic has also offered ways to bypass the state and form new social formations.

COVID-19 Exposes Warped Global Health Power: The System Needs a Course Correction

Just three weeks after the World Health Organization (WHO) recognized COVID-19 as a global pandemic, novelist Arundhati Roy wrote: ‘Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.’1

Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things as the Story of Childhood: Children’s Perspective of Traumatic Experiences

This paper analyzes the novel The God of Small Things written by Arundhati Roy, which is the childhood reflection of her own. The novel reflects the seduction and solicitation and its psychological impacts on the characters as they are affected by the society, especially by the elite people and the government officials. The novel is analyzed using the concepts of childhood studies – particularly Joseph L. Zornado’s concept of “Black Pedagogy” as the tool for textual analysis. The self-cited statements of the characters provide additional strength to the tool. Roy by the help of various characters like Estha, Velutha, Ammu and Rahel depicts the suffering due to the caste and class differences among the society and the high profile people.

Resistance and Identity in The God of Small Things Written by Arundhati Roy

This paper presents an analysis of the novel "The God of the Small Things" written by Arundhati Roy. The primary purpose of this paper is to evaluate the idea of resistance and identity that have been described in the novel by the novelist. It will be demonstrated in this novel that how the resistance against the traditions and norms of post-colonial era is related to the self-realisation. There are different kinds of resistance that have been depicted in the novel at various circumstances. In Postcolonial context identity is a complex concept to be located in just a simple definition or to be investigated throughout a single theoretical approach. Resistance as a concept linked to the identity question. The Novel handles this notion and throughout its plot, besides the burden that is left from the colonial legacy, gender identity comes to the surface. Though women resistance appears as a reaction with identity suppression; yet it is a reflection of self-identification of gender inequality under patriarchal traditions inherited from long dominant masculine power. This paper elaborates on each type of resistance and activism that arises against the feudal and patriarchal forces structured by the economic and politically influential people in the new community as a sample in India after postcolonialism. Consequently, one of the points that the research ends with is that the act of resistance validates the pursuit for self-identity, which is an attempt to renown, reclaim and rename the world.

Women’s Representation and Resistance as Depicted in Josephine Chia’s Frog under a Coconut Shell and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things: A Comparative Study

This study is aimed to analyze the comparison between women’s representation and resistance in Josephine Chia’s novel Frog under a Coconut Shell from Singapore and The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy from India. By using a comparative literature approach, the research focuses on the differences and similarities in women’s representation and resistance to get gender equality in Singaporean and Indian society. Chia’s novel tells the story of Soon Neo and her daughter, Josephine, who struggles to get their rights as women in the midst of patriarchal Peranakan culture in Singapore, and Roy’s novel tells the story of Ammu and her twins children, Rahel and Estha, who fight against the social rules in India that are discriminative against women and the Untouchable people (Paravan). The research employed a descriptive qualitative analysis method and the theory of liberal feminism. There are similarities in the representation of women who are considered as second class and become the objects both sexually and economically; and restrained by their patriarchal society and culture. The difference of both novels is in the caste system which regulates women's freedom only reflected in The God of Small Things. From the perspective of liberal feminism, the female characters in both novels show resistance in making decision, education, society, and economy. However, resisting inequality in economy is only reflected in Frog under a Coconut Shell while resisting inequality in society is only reflected in The God of Small Things. The direct resistance is demonstrated in verbal and non-verbal ways.

Class Struggle in “The God of Small Things” by Arundhati Roy (A Marxist Analysis of the Novel)

The aim of this study is to give a glimpse of class conflict depicted in the novel of Arundhati Roy “The God of Small Things”. Arundhati Roy seems to show that Marx perception of life is not without faults, having this conception Marxists believe that the proletariat class is nothing to lose but their unity. In this perspective the predominant view is that proletariat class has no privileges in India and this is the basic purpose of the study to reveal that it creates a sense of insecurity in the minds of those who are less considered in that society and they are mostly behaved less than the level of human. This research highlights that in the conception of Marxism all the workers should be united and there should be equality in the society.