“Stories that go on and on”: Transformative Resilience against Gender Violence in Tishani Doshi’s Girls Are Coming out of the Woods

Tishani Doshi’s Girls Are Coming out of the Woods (2017) details the gender violences inflicted against women in India and the world to promote consciousness-raising, resistance, and subversion against interlocking systems of patriarchal power based on economy, ethnicity and gender. In this paper I firstly propose that Doshi promotes a transformative mode of resilience that guarantees socio-politic change rather than acceptance and submission. Secondly, I reflect on how Doshi’s description of the fear and gender violences systemically inflicted on women unveil counter-stories that exceed the portrayal of women as victims. Finally, I propose that Doshi’s presentation of resilient bodies embraces the interplanetary possibilities of creating constellations of co-resistance that allow the world to go forward instead of leaning back.

Believe Me, Do not Believe Me: Jhumpa Lahiri and the Royal Family of Oudh

In Interpreter of Maladies (1999) Jhumpa Lahiri gives voice to Boori Ma, a durwan (doorkeeper) who chronicles about the easier times she enjoyed before deportation to Kolkata (previously known as Calcutta, India) after Partition of 1947. Lahiri plays with the word real implying that Boori Ma’s stories could be deciphered as real or not. Boori Ma’s fictitious life resembles the one of the Royal Family of Oudh, which Lahiri seems to be inspired by. Foreign correspondents (Kaufman, 1981; Miles, 1985; Barry, 2019) did not question the veracity of this family’s life story. In the present article, the two stories are compared: a literary and a real one. It is our intention to prove that traumatic experiences, such as Partition, cause subjects to imagine an alternative life; strategy which is unconsciously activated to heal trauma (LaCapra, 1999; Mookerjea-Leonard, 2017). The latter is what western journalists and readers failed to acknowledge

Snapshots of Indian Otherness in Aparna Sen’s Cinema

Aparna Sen turned to film directing in 1980 after a highly successful career as an actor. Her debut film, 36 Chowringhee Lane (1981) highlights the loneliness of an elderly Anglo-Indian woman. One of her best-known films outside India is Mr & Mrs Iyer (2002), in which an upper caste Hindu woman saves the life of a Muslim stranger in an act of personal commitment with the Other. In 15 Park Avenue (2005), a film that focusses on schizophrenia, Sen shows how the female members of a family struggle to cope with mental illness. In this article I discuss how Sen explores different ways of being Indian in these three films and how she draws attention to values such as personal commitment and tenacity in the face of disability, ageing and communalism

Negotiating Identity and Belonging in the Western Indian Ocean: Fluid Enabling Spaces in M.G. Vassanji’s Uhuru Street

This article analyses the short story cycle Uhuru Street, which describes the life of the members of the minority Ismaili community, whom Vassanji fictionalises as Shamsis, in the context of crucial changes in the history of Tanzania. Diaspora, fragmentation and ethnic multiplicity in a really hierarchical tripartite society will be studied within the framework of cross-cultural networking in the Western Indian Ocean, where complex identity relations are established. Our discussion stems from a brief historical genealogy of the Indian community in Tanzania, it analyses the complex identity relations and affiliations among Tanzanian citizens of Indian descent, and moves on to the analysis of Vassanji’s short stories in order to explore those fluid and enabling spaces where identity and belonging are to be negotiated.

The Fight for Land, Water and Dignity in Lindsey Collen’s The Malaria Man and Her Neighbour

The novels of South-African born Mauritian writer and activist Lindsey Collen expose a historical continuum of class exploitation, ranging from the slave past of the country including both pre-abolition African slavery together with indentured labour from the Indian subcontinent to post-independence sweat-shop toil, ill-paid domestic labour and exploited agricultural workers. Her latest novel to date, The Malaria Man and Her Neighbours (2010) probes this continuing class conflict and queries mainstream notions of heteronormativity. Access to water and land will be seen to lie behind the murder of the four main characters and the subsequent popular reaction. Collen insists that the underprivileged can become empowered through union, that participation and joint, communal effort can still make a difference.

Exploring the Challenges of Ethnic Fluidity within the Writings of Ronnie Govender

"This paper explores how the fiction writer and playwright, Ronnie Govender, narrates Asian diasporic identity in the context of South African society. I shall depart from the premise that this Indian presence is ambiguous inasmuch as its subjectivity must negotiate the ontological categories of both whiteness and blackness. With this triangulated relationship in mind, I shall proceed to evidence how Govender delivers a layered reading of ethnic fluidity and how this was historically curtailed by a white minority who, systematically, dynamited conviviality as a means to shore up its own privilege. The principal texts employed in this study shall be: The Lahnee’s Pleasure, At The Edge and Other Cato Manor Stories, and Black Chin White Chin: The Song of the Atman."

Exploring the Interstices of Aging and Narrative Agency in M.G. Vassanji’s The Book of Secrets and Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea /

Indian Ocean literature has captured the porousness and fluidity that configure the Indian Ocean space through narrations in which history and memory, both individual and collective, blend to voice the uninhabited silence forged by unsettled colonialism. M.G. Vassanji’s The Book of Secrets (1994) and Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea (2001) are perspicuous exponents of the undertows that lurk behind the troubled existence of uprooted individuals for whom the act of telling stories becomes their means of survival. Given the old age of the protagonists of both novels, Pius Fernandes in The Book of Secrets and Saleh Omar in By the Sea, this article examines the power of narration from the perspective of narrative gerontology. Imbued with the spirit of Scheherazade’s The Arabian Nights, itself an Indian Ocean literary reference, Pius Fernandes and Saleh Omar biographical accounts become the source of their literal / literary survival.