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“Sense of Place and Sense of Planet”: Local-Planetary Experiences of Climate Change in Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior

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257 views

Sonam Jalan

Ph.D. Research Scholar, Bankura University, West Bengal. E-mail: sonam0726@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s10n5

Abstract

Climate change has become a harsh reality of our present times. It is happening here, there, and everywhere unbound by the spatial and temporal dimensions. The vacillating impact of such a global crisis equally demands multiple and concurrent scales in order to accurately comprehend the complexity of the problem. Borrowing the title of my paper from Ursula K. Heise’s book, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global, where she proposes the concept of ‘eco-cosmopolitanism’, this article aims at reflecting upon the globalization of the present ecocatastrophes, musing upon the local (the experiences of the working class people) and the global scale (Unnatural Migration and thereby extinction of the Monarch Butterflies) impact of the climate crisis. Ursula K. Heise believes that the ‘deterritorialization’ of the local knowledge is not always detrimental rather can open up new avenues into ecological consciousness. Giving consideration to a deterritorialised environmental vision my paper will fall back on Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior– a novel dealing with the eco-apocalypse, climate change and global warming. In providing a deeply humane account of the working people’s response to the local effects of the global crisis along with a poignant account of the impact on a planetary scale- the Migration of the Monarch Butterflies and their extinction, Kingsolver in this novel contextualizes the micro-geographically bounded human experience and memory within the larger context of the global Anthropocene thereby calling for a ‘sense of planet’ along with a ‘sense of place’- which get along with each other.

Keywords: Climate change, Eco-cosmopolitanism, Monarch Butterflies, Global warming, Anthropocene

Humans, Animals and Habitats: Liminality and Environmental Concerns in George Saunders’ Fox 8

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224 views

Raisun Mathew1 & Dr. Digvijay Pandya2

1Doctoral Research Scholar, Department of English, Lovely Professional University, Punjab (India), E-mail: raisunmathew@gmail.com, orcid.org/0000-0003-3427-0941

2Associate Professor and Research Supervisor, Department of English, Lovely Professional University, Punjab (India), E-mail: digvijay.24354@lpu.co.in, orcid.org/0000-0002-5985-9579

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s10n4

Abstract

With the equal treatment of binary oppositions related to environmental concerns, the hypocrisy of human beings continues to dominate on earth having no counterpart to compete except the ones within the same race. Intruding into the unexplored habitats has helped the race to expand their jurisdictions, often with the exercise of power and unrivalled exhibition of uniqueness. This qualitative research paper aims to interpret the environmental concerns discussed in George Saunders’ Fox 8 in the light of the characteristics of coercive liminality exercised by the invasive domination of humans over the inhabitants. The intrusion of human beings transforms natural habitats to man-made environments, thus making it exclusively accessible only for their purposes. Human invasions lead to domination and it entails exploitation that results in the displacement of inhabitants and resources from their natural habitats. Introduction of the concepts such as coercive liminality from the textual interpretation and the argument of resultant counter-liminality develop the core of the paper. The research contributes to the perspective of liminality on studies related to environmental transitions and alterations due to human intervention.

Keywords: American Literature, domination, environment, exploitation, liminality.

Pink Floyd’s Time: an aural metanarrative exploring time through form, lyric, and musical arrangement

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329 views

Shobana P Mathews1 & Vishal Varier2

1Associate Professor, Christ University.  ORCID: 0000-0001-9700-9420. Email: shobhana.p.mathews@christuniversity.in,

2III MA-English.  ORCID: 0000-0001-9966-4402.Email: vishal.varier@eng.christuniversity.in,

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s10n3

 Abstract

The inability of language to capture the essence of time is a crisis that has been expressed by philosophers starting from St. Augustine to Paul Ricoeur. Appearing on their seminal album, Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd’s Time is a profound artistic attempt which transcends this language barrier by using music to bring the listeners to a more direct confrontation with time; doing so by juxtaposing time as calibrated and as experienced through the music and the lyrics, and by making the reader experience time-based affects such as impatience, expectation, monotony, and such. As a direct function of song, time is experienced as musical time in the song, thereby ensuring that the listener’s confrontation with time is immersive, with lyrics that describe the nature of experienced and calibrated time working synchronously with the music to complete the image. In the context of its release in 1974, the 6:52 minute song was in engagement with the concept of time as well, in that it was among the pioneering ones which redefined radio broadcast time beyond the standard 3 minutes afforded to popular music tracks, with the commercially preferred listener span in mind. The matter of time thus becomes a multi-layered formal engagement in the song, at the level of lyric, recording, music and listening, thereby making possible an image of time that is polished and rounded. These aural, lyrical and production-based concepts will be addressed and expanded upon to show how Pink Floyd’s Time functions as a metanarrative in how it uses and invokes the elements of time to talk about time.

Keywords: Aurality, aural narrative, metanarrative, language, aspects of Time

Nature and Self Reflection in Tagore’s The Crescent Moon

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221 views

Ayanita Banerjee

Professor of English, University of Engineering and Management, New-Town- Kolkata. Email: abayanita8@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s10n1

Abstract

To perceive the human world in co-existence with nature and thereby to nurture freedom and constructive processes we need to rethink the transformative literature of Rabindranath Tagore, who explored an environment conscious, almost ecocritical vision of human existence inspiring a “deep ecological” sense of identification with the immediate environment. Tagore’s philosophy of nature with its wide range and variety reifies the real possibility of ‘living, learning and uniting oneself’ with the “organic wholeness of nature”. The relationship between the man and nature remains interwoven in his writings promoting an intimate, interdependent relationship revealing “the deepest harmony that existed between man and his surroundings”. The paper dealing with Tagore’s simplest collection of poetry The Crescent Moon in particular lays emphasis on the relationship of the mother and the child developing out of his traumatic experiences of childhood namely losing his mother quite at an early age and his subsequent identification with nature as an ‘alternative mother-principle’ Nature confers a psychological closure by connecting him with Mother Nature (my italics) “mother nature you have taken me in your affectionate embrace and have begun to sing your imposing music to me rich in harmony and melody”. Nature removed from the crudity of its daily entanglements activated within him a spirit of companionship and receptivity revealing to him “the deepest harmony that existed between him and his surroundings”.

Keywords– Mother- nature, symbiotic-coexistence, alternative-mother principle.

Study of Trauma and Transgression of the ‘Adult-child’ in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy-Man

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272 views

Jharna Choudhury

Ph.D. Scholar. Tezpur University, Assam, India. Email: jharnachoudhury123@gmail.com

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0916-373

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s9n6

Abstract

Bapsi Sidhwa’s characterization of Lenny Sethi in her fourth novel, the 1991 historical fiction Ice-Candy-Man, is formulated by the heterogeneous impact of the 1947 partition of India on the psychopathology of children. This paper observes how the trope of trauma problematizes the embodiments of childhood, contradicting its axiomatic paradisiacal nature. Parallel to the chaos of communal massacre, mass migration, dysfunctional parenting and the marginality of women and children, Lenny’s traumatic experience surpasses a singular-episodic trauma, and is laden with a multiplicity of source factors, thereby generating “complex trauma” (van der Kolk et al., 2007, p. 202). The child narrator acquires symptoms of irregular curiosity, hyper-vigilance, somatic complaints, fear, PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) and transgresses specific social norms. Lenny is a choreographed child, a problem-child, taxonomized as the ‘adult-child’ in the paper. Now, the question is whether to see the ensuing malfunction symptoms as a diagnostic criterion or adaptative human resilience? Drawing from Anjali Gera Roy’s concept of “intangible violence” (Roy, 2020, p. 43) the paper examines textual openings where the stages of childhood and adulthood deconstruct itself, approximates, and overlaps inside each other; taking cues from a relatively less-documented narrative angle of the child victim of partition.

 Keywords: Ice-Candy-Man, Trauma, Transgression, Partition, Adult-child, Embodiment

The New Face of Abuse?: Questioning the Fall of the Father and Assessing the Child Exploitation in Deborah Moggach’s Porky

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159 views

Poulomi Modak

Ph.D Scholar (JRF), Department of English, Cooch Behar Panchanan Barma University, West Bengal. Email: poulomimodak1992@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s9n3

Abstract

In contemporaneous world child sexual abuse is possibly the most heinous kind of child exploitation; therefore, continuous dialogue and discourse regarding the child sexual abuse should be given the primordial prominence in order to be well aware about and thereby engage with possible measures against this monster in the closet. It is in this context that the paper attempts through a detailed and critical analysis of Deborah Moggach’s controversial novel Porky to make a reading of the narratives of pain, sufferings, and trauma inflicted upon the ‘abject’ body. Further, the novelist has incorporated the havoc of non-consensual incest which concomitantly attributes the novel as a site for insightful discussion. The proposed article, therefore, interrogates family as a possible locus of sexual exploitation of the children. This reorientation of family as a disintegrated entity eventually brings forth the question of victim’s rehabilitation. Extending this, the paper finally argues any possible healing of the oppressed body.

Keywords: abusive father, body shaming, child molestation, non-consensual incest, psychological trauma

Bacha Posh: A Study of The Micronarratives of Gender in Afghanistan

361 views

Pauline Lalthlamuanpuii1 & Suchi2

1Research Scholar, National Institute of Technology Mizoram. Email: poehmar@gmail.com

2Assistant Professor, Research Scholar, National Institute of Technology Mizoram

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s9n2

 ABSTRACT

The blitzkrieg destabilization of Afghanistan by major world powers and factional groups in contemporary times has triggered major academic works on the country. One witnessed a surge in interest and curiosity about the socio-cultural, religious, political, and economic dynamics of the country. Often regarded as one of the most unsafe country for women in the world, this paper will focus on the concept of a bacha posh in Afghanistan. A bacha posh is a Dari word for a girl disguised as a boy. This paper attempts to examine the power structures that ‘created’ a bacha posh in Afghanistan. The idea of a bacha posh in Afghanistan is a “performativity”, shaped by dialogues that moves beyond the “normative” gender binaries of male and female. A bacha posh move beyond the grand totalizing narratives of gender binaries to create a space that marked by fluidity and freedom. Even though the identity of a bacha posh is a shared deceit, created to serve the needs of an androcentric society, one cannot ignore its subversive nature. A bacha posh subverts the dictums of patriarchy by allowing the girl- child to re-define her subalternity. What happens if the realization of her subalternity results, not in striving for acceptance in the dominant framework of knowledge from which she is excluded, but in the establishment of an alternative centre?

Keywords– bacha posh, resistance, subaltern, identity, woman, Afghanistan, empowerment, micro-narratives, performativity.

Palate Tales, Kitchen Truths: Coming Home to Cooking in the Time of Covid

159 views

Ananya Dutta Gupta, Ph.D 

Associate Professor, Department of English, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan. Email: ananya_duttagupta@yahoo.co.uk

   Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s25n0

Abstract:

“Palate Poetry, Kitchen Truths: Coming Home to Cooking” is a long essay comprising non-didactic philosophical reflections on the wisdom of home cooking attained over the first three months spent in Covid-19 lockdown.  I make a case for home cooking and home eating as an experiential strategy that can, mutatis mutandis, alert us to ontologies and knowledge systems that resist the seeming inexorability of neoliberal, millennial urbanised living. I do so without holding forth any normative rejection of technology and other exigencies of modern living; and gesture instead towards an inclusive paradigm where machines can be applied towards a promotion of food making and food sharing that is ethical, cosmopolitan, community-minded, ecologically aware, and yet forward-looking. The auto-ethnographic methodology covers both the analytical prose and the interspersed poems it provides a discursive matrix for. I found myself planting these poems (and accompanying images of food from my kitchen) at strategic moments in the argumentation so as to allow the reader, experimentally, a detour and respite from the critical density of the prose. I suppose I am experimenting with the possibility of treating of the same subject in different mediums and then gathering them back into the fold of the personal, reflective essay.

Keywords: Poetry, auto-ethnography, Cooking, Pandemic, technology.

 

Understanding colonial masculinity and native bodies: Rereading the discourse of homoeopathy as a feminist form of medicine

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185 views

Anjana Menon

PhD Research Scholar, E-mail: anjanaabhinavmenon@gmail.com, https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0423-8959

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s8n2

Abstract

A body can also be read as a site for the production and maintenance of social power. In colonial India, western biomedicine often acted to reinforce the reason/nature split and made manifestations in dualistic divisions between mind/body, and men/women. With the advent of the ‘masculine’ western biomedicine, the indigenous population lost the authority and autonomy over their self-knowledge and social power of their bodies. Thus, Homoeopathy found a space in the spiritual discourse of Indian nationalism as a ‘feminine’ element. This paper is an attempt to analyse how the rhetoric on homoeopathy was effectively employed to redress the grievances of masculinity in health care unleashed by the British state. The study lays stress on power imbalance within the practitioner/patient relationship, the exclusion of social concerns from the biomedical model, and the trivialisation of knowledge within the clinical encounters.

Keywords: Colonial power, masculine body, medical encounters.

Rethinking the India-Bharat Divide vis-à-vis COVID-19: Implications for a Sociolinguistics of Health Communication

209 views

Ajit Kumar Mishra

Associate Professor, Dept. of Humanistic Studies, Indian Institute of Technology (Banaras Hindu University) Varanasi, India Email: akmishra.hss@iitbhu.ac.in ORCID: 0000-0003-4839-1699

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s8n1

Abstract:

Language plays an important role in the dissemination of critical health information across human societies. Taking a cue from the sociolinguistic nuances of the role of language in society, this study probes the India-Bharat divide in the COVID-19 scenario as a potential hurdle to the sense making practices necessary for successful health communication. By delving into the dichotomous linguistic relationship between India and Bharat, this study contends that in order for this sociolinguistic dichotomy to be resolved and health communication to be effective, it is important that all concerned must be in control of the same code. The study raises questions ranging from challenges for health communication with respect to the linguistically diverse population in the country, access to reliable health information, to the problem of incomprehensibility as a barrier to the availability of proper health information. Through qualitative content analysis of the COVID-19 health information terminology mediated through popular Hindi news channels during the first phase of lockdown in India and the corresponding outcome reports across digital platforms, the study analyses the India-Bharat divide and suggests sociolinguistic strategies that can tacitly turn the structural pluralism into an organic pluralism making heath communication in India smooth and discernible.

Keywords: COVID-19, comprehensibility, India-Bharat divide, health communication, sociolinguistics

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