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Defining Hindustani Raga Musicians and Their Relative Intra-Statuses: An Analytical Study

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282 views

Pragya Pyasi1 and Sanjoy Bandopadhyay2

1Assistant Professor, Department of Music, University of Hyderabad. Email: pragya@uohyd.ac.in

2Professor, Department of Music, Sikkim University. Email: sitardivine@gmail.com

 Volume 13, Number 2, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n2.24

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Two very widely used terms, ‘musicians’ and the ‘musicians’ statuses’, are commonly applied labels across the music fraternity, where Hindustani Raga Music [HRM] is no exception. In HRM, there are no objectively laid definitions of these two expressions. In different music cultures, musicians’ statuses were seen from the societal, economic, and based on the roles played in music production and rendering. The intra-status, a musicians’ relative position within the same group, is not clearly defined. The formal texts of HRM also do not categorically define a musician. In India, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, people use the words vAggeyakAr, kalAvant, mirAsI, kasbi, AtAi, zauqI, and others, but these terms do not categorize musicians within the periphery of a specific musician’s close circuit; these words do not point to intra-status. The current investigation used the DELPHI method to find some objective answers to defining musicians and their intra-status. The HRM Experts from different parts of the world with an average HRM association of 39.11 years joined this investigation. The research exercise systematically generated an objective definition of HRM musician and suggested methods for defining HRM musicians’ statuses.

Keywords: Musician, definition, status, Hindustani Raga Music

Codifying the Oral Traditions, Resisting the Colonial Machinery: A Study of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Storyteller

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Babita Devi1, Divyajyoti Singh2, Satinder Kumar Verma3

1Research Scholar J. C. Bose University of Science & Technology, YMCA, Faridabad Haryana. Orcid Id: 10000-0002-9699-864X

2Associate Professor, J. C. Bose University of Science & Technology, YMCA, Faridabad Haryana

3Assistant Professor, S.D. College Ambala Cantt. Haryana

E-mail: 1babitakpunia@gmail.com

 Volume 13, Number 2, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n2.23

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Leslie Marmon Silko is one of the most important Native writers of America. The remarkable thing about her writings is that they never move away from tradition of her ancestors. She uses her writings to preserve and resuscitate the culture of the Natives and for that purpose, she uses the oral tradition of her people. Her writings serve both purposes: they codify the Native culture and traditions and at the same time they maintain the originality of the oral tradition. Storyteller, for instance, is one book that transcends the generic limitations posed by the Euro-American tradition. The codification of the oral tradition at the same time becomes a site for resistance to colonial policies. By codifying the oral tradition, she makes it more durable so that it is available for future generations and at the same time she exposes the reality of the colonial institutions. The book contains fiction, poetry, history, autobiography and photographs of the family. The book may seem like an interesting assortment of different genres, but it also carries an important message that it is the vitality of the culture of the Natives that has allowed them to survive against the colonial juggernaut. The paper is a study of Leslie Marmon Silko’s book Storyteller.

Keywords: Story, culture, oral tradition, whites.

Creating an Alternate Canon: Achebe to Obioma

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260 views

Virender Pal

Assistant Professor of English, Institute of Honors and Integrated Studies, Kurukshetra University Kurukshetra, Haryana, India.

Email: p2vicky@gmail.com

 Volume 13, Number 2, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n2.22

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Chigozie Obioma is a novelist of Nigerian origin who has published two novels so far. He has been hailed as an ‘heir to Chinua Achebe’ the master African novelist. The comparison of Obioma with Achebe is obvious because both of them belong to the same tribe, but what is more important is that Obioma seems to carry from the point where Achebe left. In his debut novel The Fishermen, Obioma foregrounds the problems that plague postcolonial Nigeria. In the novel, he confirms that whatever Achebe prophesied about the future of Nigeria has come true. Like his illustrious predecessor, he is critical of colonial institutions that have decimated the national culture of Nigeria. The paper is a study of Obioma’s novel The Fishermen.

Keywords: Nigeria, Christianity, Obioma, Achebe, Fishermen.

Laughing with and about Death? Werner Bergengruen’s Philosophical and Literary Approaches

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221 views

Albrecht Classen

The University of Arizona. Email: aclassen@arizona.edu

 Volume 13, Number 2, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n2.21

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Werner Bergengruen (d. 1964) was one of the most popular German authors from ca. 1930 to at least 1970, but his reputation has faded a lot, and there are only a few scholars who are still engaged with his works. In his collection of novels, Der Tod von Reval, however, Bergengruen developed a fascinating range of literary reflections on death as people in this Baltic city (Reval, today Tallinn) had experienced it throughout their history. Drawing extensively from medieval and early modern legendary accounts, this author translated in a highly meaningful manner the fundamental experience of death into an existentialist process profoundly informed by humanist values.

Keywords: Werner Bergengruen; Der Tod von Reval; life and death; historical narratives; Baltic literature

Interrogating Strategies of Justice and Racial Politics: A Post-colonial Reading of Abir Mukherjee’s A Rising Man

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331 views

Febin Vijay1 and Priyanka Tripathi2

1Junior Research Fellow (PhD), Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Patna. febinvijay777@gmail.com

2Associate Professor of English, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Patna. ORCID: 0000-0002-9522-3391.

 Volume 13, Number 2, 2021 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n2.20

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The present article begins with a brief historical account of the exclusionary politics of Western crime fiction, with most of the works representing the East as ‘exotic other’ while assuming the subject position themselves. A post-colonial analysis of Abir Mukherjee’s A Rising Man (2016) is conducted to study how the novel deals with questions of justice and racial politics, and further encompasses a brief inquiry into it can be positioned as an anti-colonial text which advocates a move towards decolonization. The text can be seen as representing the body of work by writers who give voice to the oppressed within colonial contexts and vehemently refuse the idea of being inferior.

 

Keywords: post-colonial, justice, race, crime, violence.

The Word ‘Noor’: Tracing a Long Journey through Translation and Adaptation from Classical Arabic to Contemporary Punjabi/Hindi Pop Songs

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903 views

Azhar Uddin Sahaji

Assistant Professor (ad hoc), Department of English, Zakir Husain Delhi College (M), University of Delhi. ORCID id: 0000-0001-8675-4716. Email: info.azharsahaji@gmail.com  

 Volume 13, Number 2, 2021 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n2.19

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In contemporary India, through popular Punjabi, Bollywood songs, we often come across the word “Noor” (tere chehre ka noor etc.) in reference to a female beauty most of the times. We have become so familiar with the word that we almost forgot that the Arabic original word gained its immortal significance when it is mentioned in the Quran in association with the God. The exact and a fixed meaning of the of word “Noor” is not given in the Quran and perhaps, that gives an opportunity which enabled the word to travel worldwide in different languages with different significance attached to it, from spiritual Sufi literature to sensational pop music. This paper will attempt to show how the word Noor has been translated, transliterated, adopted not just literally but the spiritual and religious significances attached to it. This paper will argue that the word Noor itself has  not gone through so much of translation apart from transliteration but the significance associated with it have gone through tremendous translations in different languages and cultures. The paper will also argue that the journey of the word through different linguistic and cultural spheres have lost some of its significance as well gained significances through the process of translation.

Keywords: Noor, Translation, Adaptation, Arabic, Persian, Vernacular languages, Punjabi/Hindi Pop Songs

Of Dictionaries and Dialectics: Locating the Vernacular and the Making of Modern Malayalam

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352 views

Amritha Koiloth Ramath & Shashikantha Koudur

National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal. E-mail ids: amrithakr27@gmail.com/ sasikant@nitk.edu.in

 Volume 13, Number 2, 2021 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n2.18

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This paper looks at Hermann Gundert’s Malayalam-English dictionary at the juncture of the modernisation of the Malayalam language in the 19th century.  Gundert, the then inspector of schools in the Malabar district, saw the dictionary as the first step towards the cause of a universal education through the standardisation of Malayalam language. But what did a dictionary for all and by implication a language for all mean to the Kerala society? For centuries, much of the literary output in Kerala was in Sanskrit language, even as Malayalam continued its sway.  The diversity of the language system in Kerala navigated its way through the hierarchies of caste and class tensions, springing up new genres from time to time within these dichotomies. Like many other vernacular languages in India, the Malayalam language system remained as the society it was in, decentralised and plural. This fell into sharp relief against the language systems of modern post-renaissance Europe with its standardised languages and uniform education. The colonial project in India aimed at reconstructing the existing language hierarchies by standardising the vernaculars and replacing Sanskrit as the language of cosmopolitan reach and cultural hegemony with English. Bilingualism and translation was key to this process as it seemed to provide a point of direct cultural linkage between the vernacular Indian cultures and Europe. This paper argues that  Gundert’s bilingual dictionary features itself in this attempt at the modernisation of Malayalam by reconstructing the existing hierarchies of Kerala culture through the standardisation of Malayalam and the replacement of Sanskrit with a new cosmopolitan language and cultural values.

Keywords: Bilingual Dictionary, Colonial Language Policy, Vernacular, Education, Malayalam

Going Online! Use and Effectiveness of Online Mode of Instruction in the Teaching of English Language

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338 views

Amal Tom1 and Nagendra Kumar2

1PhD candidate, Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, IIT Roorkee, India. ORCID: 0000-0002-6072-0451 Email: amal_t@hs.iitr.ac.in

2Professor, Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, IIT Roorkee, India. ORCID: 0000-0002-8292-7947. Email: nagendra.kumar@hs.iitr.ac.in

 Volume 13, Number 2, 2021 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n2.17

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Contemporary time necessitated the use of advanced, scientific and digital technologies to take forward the teaching-learning process uninterrupted, making teaching online effective, cheap, convenient, and an alternative to traditional classes. It has been a drastic change that revolutionised English Language classes. Unprecedented levels of digitalisation in the field of education cropped up many logistical and pedagogical problems. This research paper attempts to look into these problems through a survey, analysing the different perspectives and approaches of individual teachers in developing and evaluating language skills, developing primers and ICT tools, and using them for effective, pleasurable online language teaching-learning, making classes student-centred. It also analysed the scope of making online and traditional classrooms supplementary and complementary to each other. Certainly, there is a need for better infrastructure, training, connectivity, integration of Augmented and Virtual Reality to provide experiential learning and to cope up with emerging challenges

Keywords: Online classes, I.C.T. Tools, Evaluation, Syllabus, Teaching-Learning Process.

Affix-based Distractor Generation for Tamil Multiple Choice Questions using Neural Word Embedding

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321 views

Shanthi Murugan & Balasundaram S R

Department of Computer Applications, National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli.

Email: shanthicse9@gmail.com & blsundar@nitt.edu

 Volume 13, Number 2, 2021 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n2.16

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Assessment plays an important role in learning and Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs) are quite popular in large-scale evaluations. Technology enabled learning necessitates a smart assessment. Therefore, automatic MCQ generation became increasingly popular in the last two decades. Despite a large amount of research effort, system generated MCQs are not useful in real educational applications. This is because of the inability to produce the diverse and human alike distractors. Distractors are the wrong choices given along with the correct answer (key) to confuse the examinee. Especially, in educational domain (grammar learning) the MCQs deal with affix-based or morphologically transformed distractors. In this paper, we present a method for automatic generation of affix-based distractors for fill-in-the-blanks for learning Tamil Vocabulary. Affix-based distractor generation relies on certain regularities manifest in high dimensional spaces. We investigate the quality of distractors generated by a number of criteria, including Part-Of-Speech, difficulty level, spelling, word co-occurrence, semantic similarity and affixation. We evaluated our proposed method in grammar based Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs) dataset. The result shows that affix-based distractors, yield significantly more plausible outcomes in certain grammar based questions.

Keywords: Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs), Assessment, affix-based distractors, grammar, automatic generation.

Translation of Anzaldúa’s book Borderlands in Indian language(s): A challenge in the Indian context

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244 views

Shilpi Gupta

Ph.D. Scholar, Women and Gender Studies, University of Granada, Spain. Email: shilpigupta.jnu@gmail.com

 Volume 13, Number 2, 2021 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n2.15

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This paper is a part of a project of translation of the book of Gloria Anzaldúa’ Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) in Indian language(s). Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza is one of the path-breaking books which came in the time when Afro-American feminism already stood in opposition to white feminism by questioning the Euro-American centric feminism. Anzaldúa started discussing Chicana feminism together with black feminism. Her book Borderlands is a painful but challenging narration of those who live on the ‘barbwire’ between Mexico and the USA. In defining the border, she goes beyond the physical meaning to its symbolic significance, and one of them is language. Language in her book has been uniquely presented as an identity that is multilingual, creolized, mestiza and subaltern language. Hence, her book is a challenge in the field of translation, especially in Indian context where languages have political, social and historical impact.  Considering the above book as a project, I would primarily discuss why this book should be translated considering the Indian context? What are the different ways in which the translation can be defined in translating a text from One-Third world to another Third world? In this process, we find it relevant to revise the language and its relations to power in a postcolonial India, taking into account caste, class, and colonial discourse. This epitome opens a debate to enter into the new political strategies which Gloria Anzaldúa propagates through her book “Nueva Conciencia Mestiza” as moving towards “new language” which could be more inclusive.

Keywords: Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza, translation, Indian languages, postcolonial India, Politics of Language

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