Ecocritical Analysis of Manto’s ‘Toba Tek Singh’: Re-Imaging Aesthetics of Place and Person

This in-depth analysis of the aesthetics of place and person in ‘Toba Tek Singh’, a famous short story by Saadat Hassan Manto, and a masterpiece of South Asian literature in English, presents a re-reading in the light of ecotheoretical concepts of ‘place’. It theorises how material space as ‘place’ is represented in literature and brings to light the hegemony of sociocultural discourses in relation to space, belittling its connection to nature. Ecotheory raises concerns of human and non-human life within the natural ecosystem of specific indigenous places. The protagonist of the story, Bishan Singh, ultimately also the namesake of a place, Toba Tek Singh, dies a terrible death while desperately searching for his native place. The article presents the story as a powerful literary attempt to re-imagine the places and spaces where we live and our relations to them.

CULTURAL EROSION AND CULTURAL MEMORY IN TAUFIQ RAFAT’S ARRIVAL OF THE MONSOON

Purpose of the study: This study focuses on analyzing and locating the cultural images and the elements which present the idea of cultural erosion, and with the lens of cultural memory evokes the idea of identity, and nostalgia in Taufiq Rafat’s poetry. Methodology: This research is qualitative in design. To explore the concepts of cultural memory and cultural erosion Purposive sampling is used for the selection of the poems. For analysis, textual and descriptive methods of analysis are used. Jan Assmann's (cultural theorist and archaeologist) theory of cultural memory serves as a theoretical framework for this study. Main Findings: From the analysis, it is explored that Rafat’s poetry discerns the concepts of cultural erosion and cultural memory. In the majority of his poems, few dominant images are used repeatedly to strengthen the notion of memory and yearning for the past such as time (clock), the flow of time which is fleeting and nontransient. He not only laments on cultural erosion but also keeps his personal and social memories, traditions, ancient civilizations, rituals, and objects alive so that they could be transferred to the next generations to establish mnemonics. Applications of the study: This research may be beneficial to those studying Anthropology, Culture Studies, History, South Asian Literature, and Sociology. Furthermore, the interpretation of major symbols and images related to the culture, and history which evoke cultural memory, and erosion will pave the way for the deconstruction of symbols in poetry. The novelty of the study: Rafat’s poetry is enriched with natural and romantic images, the depiction of beauty and culture about which many studies are available. The significance of this study lies in the fact that the concept of cultural memory from his poems has been evoked and analyzed.

Manju Kapur’s The Immigrant: A Saga of Marital Disharmony

Manju Kapur’s fourth novel The Immigrant was published in 2008 and was shortlisted for the DSC prize for South Asian Literature. It was subtitled by Kapur as ‘a truly compelling portrait of an arranged marriage’ in which she explores the depths of an Indian woman’s mind struggling in search for her own happiness in a foreign country. The novel also deals with the problems of woman aspiring for higher life in general. It is a mesmerizing saga about the complexities of marriage and NRI life by Kapur. The paper is an attempt to show the loneliness, suffocation and longing of a modern woman in an arranged marriage in the context to Indian society.

The drone imprint: literature in the age of UAVs

This article is composed of the schema of Barbara Harlow’s final but unfinished book project, The Drone Imprint: literature in the age of UAVs. Harlow had drafted a proposal, given a version of it as the keynote address at the South Asian Literature Association meeting at the University of Texas, Austin in 2016, and taught many of the materials in it as an undergraduate studies signature course. This piece draws on her proposal, expands it with notes she made and parts of composed text for the talks, and attempts to flesh out and complete the citations. It reveals Harlow’s ongoing commitment to thinking through the dialectical relationship of literary and cultural studies to both the political exigencies of the present and the long histories of Empire. The project is instructive in the ways that it concatenates an interdisciplinary archive – human rights reports, novels, films, diaries, law cases, journalism – to elucidate both what drone warfare is doing to problems of literary and cultural representation and how literary modes are being redeployed in the understanding of the phenomenology of the drone. The project explores with some alarm and outrage what drone warfare is doing to questions of accountability and impunity in international human rights law, ‘kill lists’ as part of US foreign policy, questions of citizenship, habeas corpus and due process in the compressions and attenuations of sovereignty that UAVs accentuate.