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Climate Change in India: A Wakeup Call from Bollywood

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540 views

Manvi Sharma1 & Ajay K. Chaubey2

1Research Scholar(English, National Institute of Technology, Uttarakhand, E-mail- manvi.sharma4779@gmail.com, ORCID ID 0000-0003-2708-4403

2Assistant Professor-I (English, National Institute of Technology Uttarakhand, E-mail- kcajay79@nituk.ac.in, ORCID ID 0000-0002-6413-798

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s10n2

Abstract

Amidst Bollywood’s romanticized landscapes and grandeur settings, depiction of the flora and fauna, roaring rivers and drought prone lands, is difficult to locate. But the new millennium has witnessed some new generation filmmakers, sensitized towards the ecological concerns, thus marking a shift from the illustration of idealised landscapes to the representation of nature’s wrath. Since, cinema in India, has a deep-rooted impact on the masses, these creators employ films as tools to sensitize the population towards the climate change threat which though as perilous as the COVID-19 crisis, is often ignored by a significant amount of population. Dawning upon themselves the responsibility of environmental awakening, Nila Madhab Panda and Abhishek Kapoor highlight in their movies, Kadvi Hawa(2017) and Kedarnath(2018), respectively, the horrors of human callousness, leading to drastic change in Climatic condition in India. Panda’s Kadavi Hawa, dealing with non-repayment of loans followed by suicides, portrays the heart-wrenching imagery of environmental degradation and Climate change that has rendered the Village of Mahua, arid and infertile. Kapoor’s Kedarnath on the other hand, appeals for action through horrifying imagery of the catastrophic floods that disrupted the holy town of Kedarnath, in 2013. Through a detailed analysis of the aforementioned visual portrayals, this article aims to emphasise as to how Films can play an important role in effectively addressing dealing with the issues related to Climate. Further, the rationale of this paper is to underscore the possibility of more such storylines, as a tool towards effective engagement and levitation of conscience.

Keywords: Climate Change, Cultural Studies, Bollywood, Films, Eco-criticism etc

Psychosocial Impacts of War and Trauma in Temsula Ao’s Laburnum for My Head

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276 views

Raam Kumar T.1 & Dr.B.Padmanabhan2

1PhD Research Scholar, Department of English and Foreign Languages, Bharathiar University. Email: raamkumar.efl@buc.edu.in. ORCID: 0000-0003-0694-8671
2Assistant Professor, Department of English and Foreign Languages, Bharathiar University. Email: padmanabhan@buc.edu.in. ORCID: 0000-0001-7395-126X

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s9n4

 Abstract

Violence constantly carries trauma and suffering to combatants as well as non- combatants identically. It also brings enmity and negativity to everyone both emotionally and physically. The cause for any conflict does not emerge from single motive but depends on multiple factors like socioeconomic conditions, marginalisation, discrimination, political power and sometimes even environmental elements. In recent times, the conflicts often emerge among various regional groups rather than states. North Eastern part of India is one of the hotspots for such ethnic conflicts and violence. The major motives for bloody conflict between Indian Army and the underground armed rebels are perceived political imbalance and desire for a separate nation. Even the common civilians are forced to join the rebel groups without knowing consequences. Temsula Ao is one of the prominent English writers from Nagaland who through her moving narratives brings out the existent misery of conflict in her native land. The aim of this paper is to study the psychological impact of domestic violence over the combatants as well as non-combatants whose lives are inseparably intertwined with violence and bloodshed. Though violence is considered as typical condition of human nature most of the time it leads to unbearable trauma and misery. This paper also attempts to interpret the representation of women from the marginalised Ao community who finds difficult to preserve the customs and moral values in spite of regional revolt.

Keywords: Psychological imbalance, Domestic violence, Aggression, North East India

The Absence of the Female in Medical Discourses of 19th century Bengal

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242 views

Tapti Roy

Assistant Professor, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Sharda University

E-mail: subterraneanhominin@gmail.com/tapti.roy@sharda.ac.in, ORCID Id: 0000-0001-9354-1882

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s8n3 

Abstract

The 19th century also witnessed a plethora of innovations in medicine that led to the rejection of the theory of miasma giving rise to a new perspective on human body and the diseases thereof which facilitated substantial study on tropical medicine and diseases by the imperial administration. Few contemporary novels bear testimony to this advancement of medicine and the advent of natives in the military and civil medical services. The paper, in question, will utilise one such novel that is, Banaphool’s Agniswar as an entrepot to question the absence of women in the evolving 19th century colonial medical discourse as active beneficiaries. It would seek to establish that women suffered worse than their male counterparts as their diseases were considered to be private affairs to be dealt exclusively within the confines of the household. The paper will commence by classifying contemporary females under three heads that is Memsahibs, Bhadramahilas, and the rest followed by studying them on the basis of Edward John Tilt’s Health in India for British Women, the case of Queen Empress vs Hurree Mohun Mythee, 26th July, 1890, and finally Ranajit Guha’s Chandra’s Death. To sum up, the female bodies will be studied as homogenous, dehumanized, and malleable, spaces appropriated by the males both native and colonial, to serve as sites of performative resistance against polluting mutual influences. Additionally, as female bodies they were intended to be ideologically consumable objects embodying the discourses of purity of the respective civilizations. Protecting the female body, claiming ownership, and control followed by the apathy of the colonial administration will be demonstrated as a reflection of medicine and public health in colonial India as a selective enterprise seeking to maximize economic and political gains.

Keywords: Colonial medicine, 19th century Bengal, Female bodies, Public health, Colonial woman, Chandra Chashani, Phulmoni Dasi

Rhizomatous Identity in “The Yellow Wallpaper”: A Deleuzo-Guattarian Perspective

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458 views

Preeti Puri1 & Shefali2’

1Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities and Management, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar National Institute of Technology Jalandhar. Orcid id: 0000-0002-6822-5420. Email: purip@nitj.ac.in

2Assistant Professor, DAV University. Email: shefalibassi1997@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s6n3 

Abstract

This article is an attempt to move beyond the conventional binary heuristic of identity to its progressive representation based on multiplicity, difference, and dispersion popularized by the ‘rhizomatic’ theory of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story, “The Yellow Wall Paper”. It is a cliché belief that multiplicity comprises of numerous units, and these units can be eventually united under one category such as the ages of population. Deleuze and Guattari interrogated such logocentric assumptions, and ‘arborescent root- tree’ model of objectified structures, language, identity and self. This article seeks to trace the voyage of Jane’s identity whose dairy constitutes the story “The Yellow Wall Paper”. Her identity has evoked ramified and conflicting networks of references. Feminists broach that she is caged to be a conventional caring mother; for a Freudian she is a ‘hysteric’ struggling with temporary nervous depression, Lacanian posit that she is a ‘psychotic’ who persistently tries to satisfy the ‘gaze’ of her physician husband John, and for a Deleuzian the moment she fails to bear the burden of capitalism driven ‘bio-power’ and ‘nuclear family’ she becomes a ‘schizo’. The object of study of this article is not Jane’s mind which romanticizes asylums rather the interrelation between ‘bio-power’ and her ‘desire’. The article will portray that Jane’s ‘self’ is evacuated from its fixed position to cherish free form of human interaction, and her identity is not handcuffed by any law, rather it is in a state of constant ‘flux’, in a ceaseless motion of ‘becoming’, it is a ‘rhizome’, facilitating a non- hierarchical network.

Keywords: Body Without Organs, Assemblage, Desiring- Machine, Rhizome

Privileging Oddity and Otherness: A Study of Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore

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357 views

Rasleena Thakur1 and Vani Khurana2

1Ph.D. Research Scholar, School of Social Sciences and Languages, Lovely Professional University, Punjab, India.Email: rasleena1103@gmail.com, ORCID ID: 0000-0002-3032-2831

2Assistant Professor, Centre of Professional Enhancement, School of Social Sciences and Languages, Lovely Professional University, Punjab, India.Email: vani.khurana@lpu.co.in

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s6n2 

Abstract

The concept of otherness in literature usually comes under the broad purview of postcolonial studies, relating to the subaltern and the displaced. This paper, however, focuses on the concept of the ‘other’ and the ‘odd’ in the light of magical realism and how the characters which are generally side-lined by society on the basis of their sexual preference, mental capability, physical deformity, gender fluidity and age find a clear and distinct voice in these fictions. Haruki Murakami’s novel Kafka on the Shore is taken up for this study. The unique blend of surrealism (the progenitor genre) with magical realism (the offspring mode) in the novel creates an oneiric landscape which is still very much rooted in reality, in present day Japan. The paper concentrates on the trauma of certain characters and how their exclusion from society leads to their subsequent recovery. The paper through a detailed and critical study of the novel’s unusual characters and their non-deterministic status of being typified in traditional categories posits magical realism as an apt literary mode for those who lack a voice and are underrepresented in conventional texts. Here ostracism is not portrayed as pessimistic but as a locus for growth and self-discovery.

Keywords: Magical Realism, Murakami, Gender fluidity, Disability, Otherness, Trauma.

The Search for Identity in Doris Lessing’s The Good Terrorist and Abdallah Thabit’s The Twentieth Terrorist

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286 views

Bushra Juhi Jani

Nahrain University, Baghdad, Iraq, E-mail: bushrajani@ced.naharinuniv.edu.iq, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8981-7003

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s6n1 

Abstract

This paper investigates the search for identity in two culturally diverse novels, Doris Lessing’s The Good Terrorist (1985) and Abdallah Thabit’s autobiographical novel The Twentieth Terrorist (2006). The paper examines how identity crisis makes Lessing’s heroine, Alice, squat with a group of radicals in London and be drawn into their terrorist activities, and makes Zahi, the protagonist of Thabit’s novel, accept being recruited by extremist religious group. However, the findings of this study prove the transformation of both Alice and Zahi. Alice is a different woman at the end of the novel and Zahi escapes from being the terrorist number 20 of the September 11th attack.

Keywords: search for identity, radicalization, terrorism, September 11th attacks.

Psychological Landscapes and Mines of the Mind: Narrative and Discourse of Red Displacement, White Settlements and Black Laws in the works of Leslie Marmon Silko

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252 views

Babita Devi

Ph.D. Scholar, J.C. Bose University of Science & Technology, YMCA, Faridabad, Haryana, E-mail: babitakpunia@gmail.com, Orcid Id: 0000-0002-9699-864X

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s5n4 

Abstract

This study explores the possibility of foregrounding narratives and discourses from marginalized communities such as that of Native Indians. It attempts to assess the efficacy of articulating subaltern subjectivities as in Leslie Marmon Silko’s works. The article investigates the narrative and informing discourse that propels writing of Native Indian authors who engage with issues like displacement, deviance and behavioural changes in context of the colonial experience. The impact that severed relationships can have on people, the psychological trauma resulting from cultural losses and the intangible changes happening in the recesses of the mind are difficult to quantify, therefore these are conveniently dismissed in mainstream discourses. Yet, the important insights that the subjective perceptions of unquantifiable and intangible losses give is unparalleled and cannot be matched by any scientific claims that may be based on surveys and statistics interpreted within the paradigm of White Man’s discourse. Silko’s narrative offers a bridge to the other side, the possibility to transcend knowledge and information validated by the Whites and glimpse the world so far relegated and marginalized. At the same time, the present study while valuing the quasi- real or semi-fictional qualities of the narrative, the subjective experiences shared and admitting the significance of deep experiences in which the reader is invited to partake of or witness, also undertakes a lexical analysis of Silko’s Ceremony using Voyant Tool to intercept psychological and cultural concerns evoked in the text by studying the frequency of words as they appear in the narrative. The author has often referred to words that have association with land and terrain inhabited by the Natives. This triangulation in research is supposed to be enriching and supportive to the concerns of the authors who many a times use the tools, approach and instruments of West to register their protests emphatically- they use the language of the colonizer, the critical approach of the colonizer and the whole jargon of the colonizer to dismantle the edifice of colonialism. Similarly, this study operates in a way analogous to the text under study by both questioning as well using quantitative research tools to unravel dimensions that may be dear in the given context.

Keywords: Natives, whites, land, culture Silko

Perpetrator Plays the Victim: The Politics of Representation in the Captivity Narratives of the Whites

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230 views

Virender Pal

Assistant Professor, Institute of Integrated &Honors Studies, Kurukshetra University Kurukshetra, Haryana, Email: p2vicky@gmail.com, v_pal@kuk.ac.in, ORCID ID 0000-0003-3569-1289

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s5n3 

Abstract

This paper draws upon and brings into focus an interesting part of the colonial corpus- the captivity narratives. The discoverers of the New World who then shortly turned invaders had to face resistance from the Natives as they embarked upon their conquest, usurpation and assumption of Property in the virgin lands of the continent lying unexploited till the White man set foot on it. To rightfully and legally take that did not belong to the White intruders they had to be morally, culturally and even ethically superior. This question of ‘Might is Right’ is resolved easy through legal systems and machinery on one hand and narratives and discourse and institutions on the other. The Captive Narratives were put to work operating to dub and dismiss the Native. The captive narratives though taken together as a body worked as a device to denigrate the Natives and typecast them so that their extermination would be found as relieving rather than horrendous; as a step towards safety rather than a brutal incursion, they also offered rare insights when not written as part of a strategy but as biographical accounts of Whites held captive by the Reds. Especially, accounts that do  not fall neatly onto the timeline set by the White diverge from popular, touted, dominant accounts that underscore barbaric customs of the Reds. These rare narratives by White people brought up by Natives cast a different light on the Red culture and offer substantial clues that the Red way of life was preferable.

Keywords: New World, Red Indians, Natives, Captivity Narratives, Land,  Federal Laws, representations, colonization

 

“In the mountains, we are like prisoners”: Kalinggawasan as Indigenous Freedom of the Mamanwa of Basey, Samar

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320 views

Apple Jane Molabola1, Allan Abiera2, & Jan Gresil Kahambing3

1 Professional Education Unit, Leyte Normal University, ORCID: 0000-0002-4568-9038

2 Social Science Unit, Leyte Normal University, ORCID: 0000-0002-8043-8832

3 Social Science Unit, Leyte Normal University, vince_jb7@hotmail.com, ORCID: 0000-0002-4258-0563

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s4n1 

Abstract

The Lumad struggle in the Philippines, embodied in its various indigenous peoples (IPs), is still situated and differentiated from modern understandings of their plight. Agamben notes that the notion of ‘people’ is always political and is inherent in its underlying poverty, disinheritance, and exclusion. As such, the struggle is a struggle that concerns a progression of freedom from these conditions. Going over such conditions means that one shifts the focus from the socio-political and eventually reveals the ontological facet of such knowledge to reveal the epistemic formation of the truth of their experience. It is then the concern of this paper to expose the concept of freedom as a vital indigenous knowledge from the Mamanwa of Basey, Samar. Using philosophical sagacity as a valid indigenous method, we interview ConchingCabadungga, one of the elders of the tribe, to help us understand how the Mamanwa conceive freedom in the various ways it may be specifically and geographically positioned apart from other indigenous studies. The paper contextualizes the diasporic element and the futuristic component of such freedom within the trajectory of liberation. The Mamanwa subverts the conception of freedom as a form of return to old ways and radically informs of a new way of seeing them as a ‘people.’ It supports recent studies on their literature that recommend the development of their livelihood rather than a formulaic solution of sending them back to where they were. The settlement in Basey changes their identification as a ‘forest people’ into a more radical identity.

Keywords: Mamanwa, Kalinggawasan, Indigenous, Freedom, Basey, Sagacity

Of Fairy Tales: The Reparative Fantasy in Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”

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396 views

Cassie Jun Lin

University of Macau, mb84026@um.edu.mo, ORCID ID: 0000-0001-7749-1491

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s3n3 

 

Abstract

With the heated debate on the utility of the humanities as a context, this paper reads Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” as an attempt to reconcile the emerging functional attitude towards the humanities and the susceptibility of the humanities to the neo-liberal condition. This paper traces connections between the “reparative” or the “post-critical” turn and fairy tales or fantasies in order to argue that Christina Rossetti’s much debated poem, “Goblin Market,” could be framed in a fantastic framework that substantiates a reparative orientation that is “additive and accretive” (Sedgwick, Touching Feeling 149). A stubborn insistence on the hermeneutics of suspicion has informed much of the readings of the “Goblin Market,” especially the haunted market, as “kinda subversive, kinda hegemonic” (Sedgwick, Queer Performativity 15). I aim to provide a different approach given that recent scholarship on “Goblin Market” ignores the possibility of reparation. In this paper, I attempt to withhold suspicion in order to hone caring eyes to uncritical materials that are often deemed untenable to politicized life. I reparatively read the female participation in the market that resuscitates a full female identity and the “muted” ending that is often subjected to paranoid readings. Locating “Goblin Market” in a fantastic framework, I argue, helps us to see the actual world and it helps us visualize a fantastic world that brings out an ethical efflorescence that entertains human experience in its plenitude. This essay also argues that “Goblin Market,” partakes in “a new wave of innovative fairy tales” (Zipes 98) that gained ascendancy in the latter half of the nineteenth century and this serves as an affective archive to document long marginalized figures and feelings. I also argue that Rosetti’s poem invites thoughts on how aesthetic devices sustain and reproduce selves that ripple off from real-life experiences in a fantastic interruption of spatiality and temporality.

Keywords: reparative and paranoid readings, and fairy tales

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