Afghanistan

Savage Desires: Afghanistan as a Site for Othering in Dharmatma and Khuda Gawah

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Marjuque Ul Haque  
Independent Researcher, Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 16, Issue 1, 2024. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v16n1.05g
[Article History: Received: 06 March 2023. Revised: 05 March 2024. Accepted: 06 March 2024. Published: 06 March 2024
]
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Abstract

This paper aims to explore how Afghanistan is represented in two mainstream Bollywood films from the pre-9/11 period using Orientalism as a theoretical framework. While much literature exists on Afghanistan being Orientalized in Hollywood films, Bollywood representations of Afghanistan have not been studied from similar critical lenses. With the recent takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban after a twenty-year-long war, it is more urgent than ever today to examine Bollywood representations of Afghanistan given the crucial importance of India as a key geopolitical entity in the region. The paper shall study two films from the pre-9/11 period in order to understand if Bollywood has Orientalized the region like mainstream Hollywood films. Bollywood films well known for taking their influences from Hollywood productions, make it likely to be the case.

Keywords: Afghanistan, Noble Savage, Orientalism, Othering, Bollywood, Hollywood, Dharmatma, Khuda Gawah, 9/11, US Media.

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Citation: Haque, M. U. (2024). Savage Desires: Afghanistan as a Site for Othering in Dharmatma and Khuda Gawah. Rupkatha Journal 16:1. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v16n1.05g 

Syed Mujtaba Ali’s Deshe Bideshe: an Indian’s perspective on Afghanistan

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Abhijit Ghosh

Assistant Professor of English, Balagarh B. K. Mahavidyalaya, Hooghly, West Bengal. Email: abghosh2002@yahoo.co.in

 Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.23

Abstract

Syed Mujtaba Ali’s Deshe Bideshe, first published in 1948, is a travel account of enduring popularity based on his experiences in Afghanistan during the years 1927 to 1929. In this reading I wish to concentrate on the distinctive quality that sets it apart from the typical travel writing of the age produced by the colonial encounter. Mujtaba Ali’s experience of colonialism in India combined with his profound sense of history makes him uniquely capable of providing a glimpse of Afghanistan during a period of social and cultural transformation. His portrayal of the Afghan identity in confrontation with external colonial forces and internal upheaval is not only invigorating but also challenging because it is not directed at demystification or categorization as in colonial texts aiming to comprehend the oriental. His colonised self-consciousness finds in the independent Afghan a cause to celebrate and thus allows us to explore his work as a postcolonial text. According to Justine D. Edwards and Rune Graulund, postcolonial travel writing “subverts both colonial claims to truth making, as well as the nexus between travel and domination” (Postcolonial Travel Writing: Critical Explorations, 3). Therefore, while a typical European travelogue like Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana (1937), written a few years after Ali’s visit provides an unabashed view of Afghanistan as a historical artefact requiring British protection, a colonised Indian’s account of Afghanistan hits out at the “nexus between travel and domination” and seeks to initiate a south-south dialogue inspired by the hope of regional collaboration.

Keywords: travel narrative, Afghanistan, colonialism, postcolonial text, Robert Byron

Stillness of star-less nights: Afghan Women’s Poetry of Exile

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Rumpa Das, Maheshtala College, South 24 Parganas, India

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 Abstract

Contemporary English poetry by Afghan women presents a remarkable reading experience. Critical explorations, at ease with post-colonial conditions, minority solitude and feminist readings, have largely remained inimical to the unique, yet chequered history that women poets such as Zohra Saed, Sahar Muradi, Sara Hakeem, Fatana Jahangir Ahrary, Fevziye Rahzigar Barlas and Donia Gobar document in their works. Most of them write in their native Dari and Pushtun languages as well as in English and often their English compositions have smatterings of their native tongues. Even though individual experiences differ, these women delve into the collective memory of oppression, pain and unrest to give vent to their feelings, and seek to reach out towards a sorority of shared angst. This paper seeks to explore the complex cultural contexts which have given birth to Afghan women’s poetry in exile. Keep Reading

“I was not certain where I belonged”: Integration and Alienation in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist

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Avirup Ghosh, Bhairab Ganguly College, Kolkata

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 Abstract

The article will focus on the contrary impulses of alienation and integration in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist that the central character and narrator Changez goes through in America while working as an employee at Underwood Samson, a “valuation” firm and his subsequent return to his native Pakistan where he assumes what appears to be an ultra-nationalistic political stance. This is to argue that Changez’s desperate attempt at assuming this stance has its roots not only in the cultural alienation and racism that he is subjected to in America, especially in a post-9/11 America, but also in his futile effort to naturally integrate with a Pakistani way of life.  By uncovering certain ambiguities in Changez’s ideological rhetoric, the paper tries show how Changez’s critique of American corporate fundamentalism stems from his lack of a sense of belonging and from a feeling of problematized identity. Keep Reading

Unheeded Caveats: Examining Pax Americana in the Light of Tagore’s Nationalism

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Abin Chakraborty, University of Calcutta, India

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Abstract

Rabindranath Tagore’s much discussed opposition to nationalism has often been seen as a source of consternating confusion which not only invoked the ire of many contemporary nationalists who interpreted his vision as one of helpless inaction as well as by certain contemporary critics who have considered Nationalism to be a disorienting product of “impassioned myth-making” which falls within the tradition of English liberalism[1]. This paper seeks to analyse Nationalism, as well as other related texts, in a different light, by comparing Tagore’s assessment of ‘Nation’ and Nationalism in the West’, with both the Communist Manifesto, as well as Lenin’s Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism in order to reveal how Tagore’s explorations constitute a sustained and scathing critique of capitalism, as manifested through the European bourgeois nation-state which is also relevant for this present age of U.S. imperialism and its consequences as many of the crises unfolding around us were presaged by Tagore’s unheeded caveats. The paper also suggests that whatever post-imperial vision we may imagine for our future, they must always be based on those values that Tagore championed throughout his life and which have often been dismissed as sentimental naivety. Keep Reading