freedom

Travel through Remote Terrains: Tibet in Focus

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Kiron Susan Joseph Sebastine

MPhil Research Scholar, Dept. of English and Languages, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham. ORCID: 0000-0002-0621-0303.Email: kiron.susan@gmail.com.

 Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.11

Abstract

As Ramana Maharshi a twentieth century mystic reflects, travel is not just physical journey from one place to another but also subliminal from one thought to another. The outer journey implies meaning only when it is accompanied by an inner journey. Travel writing incorporates everyday explorations along with cultural mappings, musings and meditations on the encounters experienced in the course of the travel. Travelling solo on an impulse; out of the natural curiosity that life brings, is the delight of living the journey. This paper does a comparative analysis of Nabaneeta Dev Sen’s On A Truck Alone, To McMahon (2018) and Vikram Seth’s From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet (1990). Both the authors journey through remote territories and terrains while maintaining their focus towards the Roof of The World, Tibet. While the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution in China occupies the centre stage in Seth’s travelogue, the soreness of the Indo China War shrouds a permeable veil in Sen’s work. The paper further explores the thin line between pleasure and adventure keeping in mind the gender binaries in travel writing. The human imagination is a no-man’s land that encounters the prickles of political hostilities and the precarious suspicions of the state machinery. The human dimensions of the territorial borders annihilate the joys of travel as an experiment in freedom. Travel acknowledges the constant fluidity of the cognitive entities, the rejection of the familiar and the embrace of the unfamiliar.

Keywords: Travel writing, Subliminal, Cultural mappings, Self-writing, Freedom

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Heidegger and the Question of Freedom in The Eumenides

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Bahee Hadaegh1 Mohsen Sohrabi2

1Assistant Professor, Shiraz University, Faculty of Letters and Humanities, Department of Foreign Languages & Linguistics, Department of Foreign Language and Linguistics. Email: bhadaegh@rose.shirazu.ac.ir

2M.A. Graduate of Shiraz University, Department of Foreign Languages & Linguistics. E-mail: soshiant.sohrabi@gmail.com

 

Volume 8, Number 4, 2016 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v8n4.07

Received August 13, 2016; Revised November 20, 2016; Accepted December  22, 2016; Published January 14, 2017

Abstract

This paper first applies Heidegger’s notion of in/authenticity to Orestes in Aeschylus’ The Eumenides. The examination of authenticity is the departure point after which the question of freedom in this tragedy can be addressed mainly with Heidegger’s Being and Time in view. It then discusses a possible interpretation of the Greek god Apollo which frees and yet entangles Orestes in his course of decisions, which is also a harbinger of a new historical era in which the mythos for the historical Dasein brings it to the destiny of people. Heidegger’s understanding of tragedy brings the fate of historical man to the destiny of its people; therefore, in this reading of Aeschylus’ The Eumenides the individual—as in early Heidegger— transforms into a historical gestalt which is meaningful only with a look into the possibilities of future.

 Keywords: Authenticity, Being and Time, Freedom, History, The Eumenides

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“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

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In the World of Men: Tagore’s Arrival in the Spiritual Domain of Nationalism

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Banibrata Goswami, Panchakot Mahavidyalaya, India

Abstract

Rabindranath Tagore was born in a family which, on one hand, inherited a legacy of rich Indian culture, and on the other, did not hesitate to welcome the modernism, freshly arrived from Europe through waves of Enlightenment. He was sent early to England to imbibe the gifts of modern science and rationalism that could lead him to a standard and secured career. But even though the discipline of work, love for liberalism and quest after scientific truth and technological perfection there impressed him much, in its over all effect the West’s efforts of de-humanization disappointed Tagore and disillusioned him as well. This led him finally to the realization and reconstruction of the motherland that is India. He came to meet the common man and his everyday sorrows and tears in rural Bengal, in Silaidaha, Patisar and Sazadpur where he was given the duty to look after the family estate. The raw and rough smell of the soil, the whirl of the waves in river Padma, the play of seasons on the strings of nature lent him a unique insight. He learnt to weave his words offering a perfect slide show of mutual reciprocation of man and nature, accompanied by a hitherto unheard melody of folk tune that glorifies the struggles of that life and thereby consolidating it gradually to a consciousness out of which a nation is born. The present essay intends to seek and understand the secrets of that story, which, though lacking miserably in sound and fury, strives towards a steady self emergence and emancipation paving the way for political freedom. Keep Reading

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