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Gay Subculture and the Cities in India: A Critical Reading of Select Works of R Raj Rao

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Sriya Das

PhD Scholar, Humanities and Social Sciences Department, IIT Kharagpur, West Bengal, India, sriya1312@kgpian.iitkgp.ac.in, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9530-7296

 Volume 13, Number 3, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n3.40

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In delineating the painful experiences of LGBTQ individuals after the introduction of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code R Raj Rao’s works look into the struggle of these people to survive the onslaught of normative sexual discourses. Given the fact that Queer sexuality has been continuously questioned, suspected and tormented prior to its legitimate recognition in 2018, Rao draws attention to the nuances of gay urban life in India. The paper critically analyses the representation of gay subculture in the cities of India as reflected in select works of Rao. It demystifies how gay people share the urban space, manage to make room for their pleasure in the cities, and pose a threat to the dominant understanding of sexuality. The ultimate objective of this paper is to understand the role of the city in the (un)making of a subcultural identity. Textual analysis, with reference to certain theoretical frameworks, would be used as a qualitative research method.

 Keywords: Sexuality, subculture, city, normativity, resistance

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Gender Subtexts in Collusive Linkages between Bhadralok Ethos and Colonial Law in Select Daroga Daptor Narratives

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Tapti Roy

PhD Research Scholar, Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia. ORCID Id: 0000-0001-9354-1882. Email: subterraneanhominin@gmail.com

 Volume 13, Number 3, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n3.39

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Crime writings can be said to have originated in Bengal in the last decades of the 19th century with the emergence of narratives of seemingly true criminal investigations compiled by real-life darogas like Girish Chandra Bose, Priyanath Mukhopadhyay, and Bakaullah. These non-canonical accounts though rendered in simplistic narrative techniques to report cases that may appear inconsequential to present-day readership not only set the field for more complex fictional works of criminal investigation but also laid the foundations of a new genre of vernacular popular fiction favoured till date. It can be mentioned here that the criminal investigation accounts of Priyanath Mukhopadhyay were serialised as Daroga Daptor for a significant span of a decade which owing to its elements of thrill, mystery, and instruction were immensely coveted by the readers. The significance of the Daroga Daptor narratives for the purpose of the paper however lies in its reflections of the contemporary socio-legal setup comprised of responses towards sexual mores, socio-ethical strictures, and gender positions. In this context, the objective of the paper is to analyse select narratives of Daroga Daptor with females as victims or accused, namely the novel Adarini and the short story “Promoda”. Initiating the process with an overview of the office of the daroga emphasising on the popular associations of daroga with sloth and corruption, the paper will note the manner in which Daroga Daptor marked a paradigm shift in the popular imagination with regards to the intellectual abilities and sensibilities of daroga. Proceeding with the analysis of the aforesaid narratives, the paper by emphasising the 19th-century gender roles with respect to hypermasculine bhadralok norms and tenets of colonial law will situate the women characters as existing in an ambiguous position within the colluding grounds of the two apparently opposite masculine factions. The paper thus will establish the 19th-century native female body as a passive pliable vessel for various ideological experimentations reading them as perpetually incarcerated within the dynamic limits of an efficient, promptly adaptive, and multifariously hegemonic masculine order.

Keywords: 19th century Bengal, Gender relations, Daroga Daptor, Crime Writing, Bhadralok, Priyanath Mukhopadhyay

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Relocating Colonial Women in Resistance: An Interpretation of Rabindranath Tagore’s Nastanirh and Chaturanga

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T. K. Krishnapriya1, Dr Padma Rani2, Dr Bashabi Fraser3

1Junior Research Fellow (UGC), Manipal Institute of Communication, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal, India; Email: krishnapriya.t1@learner.manipal.edu; ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5795-1275

2Director & Professor, Manipal Institute of Communication, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal, India; Email: padma.rani@manipal.edu

3Professor Emerita of English and Creative Writing, Director, Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies (ScoTs), School of Arts & Creative Industries, Edinburgh Napier University, Edinburgh; Email: bashabifraserwriter@gmail.com

 Volume 13, Number 3, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n3.38

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The Colonial Bengal of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was a place of contradictions. For instance, despite certain evident advancements in the resolution of the women’s question, some of the emancipatory attempts of the period marked a rather dubious account of women’s liberation as patriarchal underpinnings hegemonized the efforts.  Amid this complex backdrop, the colonial women’s position is further jeopardized by the western feminist scholarship that contrives colonial third world women as perennial victims and beneficiaries of emancipatory actions from the West. The paper attempts to relocate the colonial women and their resistance by negotiating the fissures in their construction. This study, informed by bell hooks’ (1990) postulations on margin and resistance, simultaneously seeks to form a bridge between the experiences of marginalized women beyond borders. Rabindranath Tagore’s Nastanirh (1901) and Chaturanga (1916) are chosen for close textual reading to examine the experiences of colonial women.  The author’s women protagonists often embody the social dilemma of the period. Tagore’s Damini and Charu exist in the margin of resistance whilst Nanibala occupies the margin of deprivation.  Significantly, Charu and Damini traverse the precarious “profound edges” of the margin to imagine a “new world” free of subjugation. Thus, the resistance offered by these women subverts the predominant conceptions of victimhood of colonial women, and it enables them to be posited as active agents.

Keywords: Tagore, hooks, Colonial Bengal, Resistance, Agency

 

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Bimala in Ghare-Baire: Tagore’s New Woman Relocating the “World in Her Home”

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Ayanita Banerjee (Ph.D)

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

 Volume 13, Number 3, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n3.37

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The character of Bimala in Tagore’s Ghare- Baire or The Home and the World as a symbol of struggle for the liberation of Bengali woman as well as Bengal remains at the centre of scholarly discussion since the publication (1916), translation (1919) and the film adaptation (1984) of the novel. Bimala, the main protagonist of the novel is presented as a native Indian woman who gets western education and lives a modern lifestyle due to her marriage. She has conflicting attitudes, feelings and thoughts which recur randomly in the narrative. The paper focusses on the character of Bimala and interrogates the location of her agency with respect to the rising Swadeshi movement and the political excesses on one hand and her relationship with Nikhil and Sandip on the other. On a further note, reflecting on the political and epic underpinnings of Bimala (caught between the gradual and the radical approach to Swadeshi), the paper intends to stretch beyond her “situation” (the apex of the triangular relationship) and explore her self-realization at the end of the novel. Bimala, the woman set between the option of choices between the ‘motherland’ and the ‘two-men’ gradually transgress from the shackles of her naïve identity to become the beset New Woman. To explore Tagore’s rewritten epic of a woman (epitomized in real life as the New Woman), we need to discuss how the writer helped shaping the image of the New Woman through his conscious evoking of Bimala in the role of Sita, Nikhil in the role of Rama and Sandip in the role of Ravana. In response to the popular inscriptions of Bharatmata, Tagore allegorises the iconographic representation of Bimala resembling the “divine feminine strength (Shakti)for creation and (Kali) for the cause of destruction.” (Pandit 1995,217-19).

 Keywords: Zenana, Epic battle, (Re)location, Bharatmata, New-Woman.

Who Remembers those “Undocumented Minors”? Locating the Genealogy of the Oppressed in Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends

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Indrajit Mukherjee

Assistant Professor, Dept. of English, Nistarini Women’s College, Research Scholar, Vidyasagar University. Email ID: perfectindrajit.mukherjee@gmail.com

 Volume 13, Number 3, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n3.35

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We can always look upon the intersection of history and events as an exciting façade, full of deceptions, half-baked truths, and awkward reconciliations in the framework of cultural studies. The Mexican author Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends (2017) attempts to trace the evolution of a set of social, political, and cultural circumstances that are pregnant with significance in the traumatic past of millions of Latin-American children refugees in the United States. First, the article will unpack how Luiselli’s impalpable domain tries to connect the unresolved experiences of the violent wounds of those children’s deportation and dislocation from Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico with their unfortunate encounters in the foreign land. Second, it will attempt to dismantle, disrupt, and deconstruct the construction of America as a heteroglossic space around the challenges of those displaced children by displaying some questions addressed to them at the immigrant court. Finally, the proposed paper will critically scrutinise how this non-fictional work follows the creeping imperialist approaches of the United States through the hazes of childhood recollections, making a heartfelt appeal to everyone to halt discrimination, racial hatred, and poisonous ignorance. Applying Agamben’s idea of the homo sacer, such a study will bring to the fore the dialectics of postcoloniality in the United States, where undocumented children’s claims to identity formation and self-determination processes would be at odds with the more comprehensive national identity in contemporary times.

Keywords: History, Refugees, Heteroglossic, Imperialist, Homo Sacer, Identity.

Refugees from South Asian Islamic States at the footsteps of Global North: Reading Moshin Hamid’s Exit West as an Anticipation of Postnational Future

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Minakshi Paul

Assistant Professor of English, Kandra Radhakanta Kundu Mahavidyalaya. Email: mp951204@gmail.com

 Volume 13, Number 3, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n3.34

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 One of the essential aspects which have been perpetually constituting and reconstituting the tumultuous geopolitical space of South Asia is its interface with the Global North. An inherent element of this interface materializes in terms of the rapidly escalating proportion of the displaced population from the Islamic South Asian and Central Asian countries afflicted with intense political tensions seeking shelter in the Global North regenerating the ground for the imperialist exclusionary politics in a newer manifestation. Considering the tensional position of the Islamic communities in global politics, British-Pakistani writer Moshin Hamid’s novel Exit West (2017) provides a platform for exploring the plight of the refugees from Islamic states of South Asia in the fortress regime of Global North who are denied being assimilated either in their home state in Global South or in the host countries of the Global North thus problematizing their political status. Corroborating Giorgio Agamben’s dismissal of national borders, Hamid deploys the trope of magical doors in his novel that instantaneously delivers the protagonists to different nations rendering the geopolitical borders meaningless. As the concerned conference aspires to obviate the thick smog of western critical theories which fail to address the local issues and local cultural experience, the present paper in this context examines the novel as an aesthetic and poetical account of the hostility and resentment of the indigenous population and assimilated citizenry towards the refugees, the primal loss of their psychic experience of ‘home’ challenging the ‘ethnonationalism’ and the right-wing populism of the western nations invoking the readers to acknowledge the truth of ‘Postnationalism’. This paper thus attempts to diagnose the methods of negotiating the tensional correspondence between Global North and Global South on account of these refugees with contested political and social identities imploring the readers to reexamine the gaps in the complacent, coherent identity of South Asia as a geopolitical unit.

Keywords: South Asia, Refugee, Postnationalism, citizenship, Global North

 

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The Duality of Arab Israeli Identity and the Politics of Survival in Sayed Kashua’s Let it Be Morning

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Neha Soman1, V. Suganya2 & Dr. B. Padmanabhan3

1ICSSR Doctoral Fellow, Department of English, Bharathiar University, neha.efl@buc.edu.in,  https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3900-3607O

2Research Scholar (PhD), Department of English, Bharathiar University, suganya.efl@buc.edu.in, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0989-2653

3Assistant Professor, Department of English, Bharathiar University, padmanabhan@buc.edu.in, https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7395-126X

 Volume 13, Number 3, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n3.33

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This essay closely reads the Arab Israeli author Sayed Kashua’s Let It Be Morning to construe the complex survival trajectories of the Arab minority in Israel’s plural society. Kashua discusses the relentless struggles of Arab Israelis, caught in-between their social identification with Israeli citizenship and Palestinian nationalism. The novel captures the subjective and collective consequences of Israel’s ethnic democracy on the Arab community and demonstrates the social patterns in which Arab Israelis perceive, experience, and respond to systematic social segregation. This essay, through its interpretation of Arab Israeli experiences, manifested in the novel explores the conflict of contested minority identities through the Saidian discourse of orientalism and Anderson’s imagined communities. The nature of intra-communal rivalry among the minority groups for survival is also of interest to this study as the narrative locates the behavioural changes observed within the Arab community due to the negative environmental circumstances. The study also posits the sociological aspects of reinforcement theories to construe human behaviour in politically challenging environments.

Keywords: Israel, Arabs, Communal living, Reinforcement, Survival, Behaviour, Coexistence

Indigenous “People” in the context of the Right to Self Determination: A Critical Appraisal

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Mitul Dutta1 & Navin Sinha2
1Asst. Professor, School of Law, KIIT University, KIIT University, Bhubaneshwar, Orisha. ORCID id- https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6800-8469. Email: mituldutta@kls.ac.in.

2Asst. Professor, School of Business and Law, Navrachna University, Navrachna University, Vadodara, Gujarat. ORCID id- https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3086-3504. Email: navins@nuv.ac.in.

 Volume 13, Number 3, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n3.32

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Under the international human rights regime, the right to self-determination is a right guaranteed to the groups of “people”. This right is one of the most controversial issues of international law as it comes into conflict with the principle of sovereignty and territorial integrity of the states. There are various uncertainties associated with this right regarding the scope of the right and mode of implementation etc. The present article seeks to make an in-depth analysis of the claimants of the right and the uncertainties associated with the meaning of the term “people” in the context of the right to self-determination. The article encompasses, among other things, the right of indigenous people under various international instruments and how they interrelate to the right of self-determination.

Keywords: Right to self-determination, people, indigenous people.

 

Abstract Knowledge, Embodied Experience: Towards a Literary Fieldwork in the Humanities

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Nobonita Rakshit1 & Rashmi Gaur2

1Doctoral Student, Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Roorkee, India. nrakshit@hs.iitr.ac.in, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8584-862X

2Professor, Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Roorkee, India, rashmi.gaur@hs.iitr.ac.in

 Volume 13, Number 3, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n3.31

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The paper attempts to read the representation and (re)creation of Sundarbans into the narrative structure of the three works of Amitav Ghosh- The Hungry Tide (2004), Gun Island (2019), and Jungle Nama: A Story of the Sundarban (2021) through the idea of ‘literary fieldwork’ that the paper develops by putting these literary narratives in conversation with the fieldwork narratives. Drawing from Puri and Castillo’s (2016) concept of “humanities fieldwork” and Ghosh’s (2016) idea of sensuous recognition and identifying the literary texts as primary data for fieldwork, the paper brings home a new reading practice which here qualifies not only the role of Ghosh, the literary ethnographer but also the natives of Sundarbans who narrate their own testimonies of the place and their politics of survival. Their embodied experiences of Sundarbans are embedded with the author’s literary experiments in the texts to advance the place of fieldwork in literary studies and redefine the ideas of fieldwork in the humanities in general. In other words, the paper dwells upon the author’s creative response in portraying the difference between the abstract knowledge of the Sundarbans and the embodied experience of the place that offers literary fieldwork within which it accommodates the points of view of the author, the natives, and the readers and thus, changes the conventional practices of perceiving fieldwork in humanities.

Keywords: Sundarbans, literary fieldwork, humanities fieldwork, sensuous recognition, literary ethnography.

 

 

Resistances to Autobiography: The Indian Experiment with life-writing

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Sanghamitra Sadhu

PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Cotton University, Guwahati, Assam & Former Fellow at Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. Email: sadhusanghamitra@gmail.com

 Volume 13, Number 3, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n3.30

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The article underlines that the epistemology of the self and the practice of life-writing in India marks a departure from the Western conventions and modes of expression. Although there are resistances to autobiography from the Western theoretical standpoint, the genre meets with a twofold resistance in postcolonial milieu in its negotiation with the Indian metaphysics of self. Autobiography in decolonising India negotiates complex pathways between an ardent adherence to Indian epistemology and a potent resistance to the Western modes of writing the self. In a framework to understand the phenomenon of resistance implicit in autobiography in general and the internal resistances to autobiography manifest in the genre during decolonisation in particular, the article argues that such resistances within the genre have redefined the very idea of the self in writing, generated a nuanced notion of the self in narration, as well as challenged the process of writing the self in decolonisation.

Keywords: autobiography, postcolonial life-writing, hybridity, decentering, decolonisation, India

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