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The Juror-poet: a New Assessment of William Jones

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Kush Sengupta

M. Phil Research Scholar, University of Delhi.

ORCID 0000-0003-1088-1211. Email: little92monster@gmail.com

 Volume 10, Number 1, 2018 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v10n1.11

Received September 17, 2017; Revised December 15, 2017; Accepted December 30, 2017; Published February 04, 2018.

Abstract

When we consider the career of William Jones, terms like “Indologist” or “Philologist” are chiefly used. Even in the canon of Jones himself, his juridical and academic writings occupy a higher pedestal than his literary endeavors. This has led to a lopsided view of this dynamic man. In this paper, I seek to propose a new appellation for Jones, preferring to call himself a “Jurist-Poet”. The cognate term as I would believe can be best used to suit the ambivalent nature of his poetry. It is my contention that Jones was simultaneously in and out of the process of the Empire building and critical focus has been to stress on any one aspect of his character. The term that I propose to use for Jones would help to encapsulate the ambiguities that occur in him. It can only be achieved by a close reading of his poetry and using it to judge him as a true vehicle of the trajectory of his career.

Keywords: William Jones, Orientalism, Colonial India, Juror-Poet, Religious Hymns

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English Transference of Hindustani: a Pragmatic-Stylistic Study of Gulzar’s Poetry

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Pallavi Kiran

Senior Research Fellow, Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology (Indian School of Mines), Dhanbad, Jharkhand.E-mail: pallavikiran@ymail.com

 Volume 10, Number 1, 2018 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v10n1.10

Received September 27, 2017; Revised December 11, 2017; Accepted December 30, 2017; Published February 04, 2018.

Abstract:

Gulzar (Sampooran Singh Kalra) is a contemporary Indian poet versing in Hindustani. Emerged during the 14th century, Hindustani came from the Deccan representing the mix of Hindi and Urdu. It soon became a literary language and poetic communication through the Hindi-Urdu format appealed to every reader. Similarly, Gulzar makes poetry out of Hindustani colloquial speech that strikes the head and heart of the listener. However, is it the same when transferred into English? To find out the aesthetic effect of Gulzar’s poetry, the present study selects two poems randomly with their English translation by J. P. Das and Rina Singh. The original and the translation are compared through a pragmatic and stylistic approach. The approach helps to locate the loss in translation without overanalysing. The study effectively brings out how the translators capture the allusiveness of Hindustani in English and makes the target readers feel the same aesthetics.

Keywords: Gulzar’s poetry, Hindustani language, English translation, Pragmatic analysis, Equivalence or loss.

Mapping the contours of a Tempestuous Interiority: Reading Kamala Das through Kristeva

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Sandhya V1, Hari M G2 & Harini Jayarman3

1Assistant Professor, Department of English and Humanities, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore, India. Email: v_sandhya@cb.amrita.edu ORCID Id: 0000-0002-8885-3571

2Assistant Professor, Department of English and Humanities, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore, India. Email: mg_hari@cb.amrita.edu ORCID Id: 0000-0003-0508-8112

3Professor, Department of English and Humanities, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore, India. Email: j_harini@cb.amrita.edu ORCID Id:0000-0002-9747-2850

 Volume 10, Number 1, 2018 I Full Text PDF [fa type=”file-pdf-o”]

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v10n1.09

Received September 27, 2017; Revised December 11, 2017; Accepted December 30, 2017; Published February 04, 2018.

Abstract

This paper examines Kamala Das’ attempt to translate the ever changing contours of feminine subjectivity into the structured space of language, in the light of the French philosopher Julia Kristeva’s theorization of psyche. Das’ instinctual urge to resist definitive structuring of the inner zones of female consciousness echoes Kristeva’s concept of Revolt, which is identified to be the psychic re-ordering to explore the varied dimensions of subjectivity. Revolt is explained by Kristeva as the disruptive potential of the innate desire drives of human psyche, which challenge the very stability of the discourses pertaining to identity in the ‘Symbolic’. The manifestation of Revolt in the writings of Das breaks the fetters of gendered identity and opens up the possibilities to experience one’s ‘self’ in unspecified ways.  The resistance to the order of the ‘symbolic’ and the inclination to oscillate between the blurring borders separating the most natural urges of the “semiotic” and the ordered space of the symbolic, defines the essence of female psyche in Das. This paper discusses this unstable and trangressive nature of female subjectivity in Das which reflects Kristeva’s thrust on the dynamics of Revolt in defying categorization.

Keywords: Kamala Das, Kristeva, Revolt, Subjectivity

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Translating the Traveled Culture: an Analysis of Tamarind City: Where Modern India Began by Bishwanath Ghosh

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Arpana Venu

Department of English, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Amrita University, Coimbatore. Email: venu.arpana@gmail.com.

 Volume 10, Number 1, 2018 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v10n1.08

Received September 27, 2017; Revised December 11, 2017; Accepted December 30, 2017; Published February 04, 2018.

Abstract

Travel writing, often reflects the culture of the traveled land through the cultural lens of the traveler. This article attempts to analyze how cultural translation operates in a travelogue. The analysis is based on Bishwanth Ghosh’s Tamarind City: Where Modern India Began, an account of his experience as an outsider in the city of Madras. One of the primary reasons for selecting this particular text is that not many authors have extensively written about Madras (Chennai), one of the oldest cities of India. The travelogue unlike others that are mostly records of passing travels is different in a way that it documents the transformation of a city on account of the author’s stay there for almost a decade. The well acclaimed travel critic Mary Campell has elaborated on the major concerns of the traveler, while encountering a foreign culture.  . It therefore represents not only the changing times, but also the intra-cultural transformations along with the socio-political and demographic changes, that happened in a city with a long history.

Keywords: Cultural translation, travelogue, Madras city.

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Deconstructing Culture/Violence in Distant Star and By Night in Chile

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Mandeep Boro

Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Ettimadai

orcid.org/0000-0001-9671-9527. Email: b_mandeep@cb.amrita.edu

 Volume 10, Number 1, 2018 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v10n1.07

Received September 27, 2017; Revised December 11, 2017; Accepted December 30, 2017; Published February 04, 2018.

Abstract

In Roberto Bolaño’s Distant Star (1996), Carlos Wieder embarks on a journey to change the landscape of Chilean literature. Yet it is through physical torture, murder, violence and photographic exhibitions of mutilated dead bodies that he seeks to bring in the literary transformation. He is a poet but also a professional serial killer. Funded by dictatorial regime his poetic acts include writing macabre verses with smokes of airplane in the sky. In another novella By Night in Chile (2000) by the same author, intellectuals organize tertulias to discuss philosophy, politics, poetry, art while the military junta torture people in the basement of the same building. Thus, culture and violence overlap in these texts and they lead to the problematic core of our understanding/conceptualization of literary culture as the stories told in these narratives put the literary institutions in crisis mode and blur the line between what is called culture and violence. This paper explores these issues and argues that the Bolañian novels by narrating such stories surpass the limits of the law, transgress, devalue the traditional notion of literature and completely strip it off its aura by enmeshing arts and violence together. They thus deconstruct the popular myths related to literary culture.

Keywords: Roberto Bolaño, literature, culture, violence.

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What is Performance Studies?

Richard Schechner Tisch School of the Arts, New York University  Download PDF Version Because performance studies is so broad-ranging and

Entwining the Omenala and Samskara: an Indo-Nigerian Ethnographic Study of Buchi Emecheta’s Fiction

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A. Karthika Unnithan1 & Harini Jayaraman2

1Research Scholar, Department of English, Amrita School of Engineering, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore, Tamilnadu, India. Email: alakkad.karthy@gmail.com

2Professor, Department of English, Amrita School of Engineering, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore, Tamilnadu, India

 Volume 10, Number 1, 2018 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v10n1.06

Received September 27, 2017; Revised December 11, 2017; Accepted December 30, 2017; Published February 04, 2018.

Abstract

Omenala is the Igbo word for the traditional religious practices and cultural beliefs of the Igbo people of southern Nigeria whereas Samskara is the Indian word for the cultural and traditional customs of India. The chosen topic for the study is the writings of a Nigerian author, Buchi Emecheta, since her novels reflect her Igbo heritage and represent Nigeria, more specifically Igbo society and who has also lived in her own indigenous culture and in London as well. The task at hand is an attempt at conducting an ethnographic study on the indigenous Igbo culture as seen in a few select novels of the author, simultaneously comparing it with the cultural features of India. The study also attempts to discuss the presence of cross-cultural practices as seen in the contemporary Nigerian society. The scope of study is restricted to only three of her works viz., Joys of Motherhood, Bride Price, and The Slave Girl. The basis of arguments in the study has been taken from Katherine Fishburn’s interactive reading that demands reading across cultures and also reading our own selves. She, in her book Reading Buchi Emecheta: Cross-cultural conversations, mentions that to initiate a cross-cultural conversation with a novel, involves a give-and-take, “where I question it, and it questions me.” (Pref.X). Fishburn further points out that “Though it is possible that we may never fully understand these alien practices, we may learn more of ourselves from our very inability to understand” (xiii). Based on this, a cultural study of Nigeria is taken upon in this paper while looking through the eyes of an Indian reader constantly comparing one with the other.

Keywords:  Cultural-study, ethnographic-reading, Igbos, translation, Nigerian writings, amalgamation.

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Revisiting Ethno-nationalism: A Study of Nihal De Silva’s The Road from Elephant Pass

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Bibhuti Mary Kachhap1 & Aju Aravind2

1Research Scholar, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology (ISM), Dhanbad 826004, Jharkhand, India. Email: vibhuti3119@gmail.com

2Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology (ISM), Dhanbad 826004, Jharkhand, India. Email: aaravind13@gmail.com

 Volume 10, Number 1, 2018 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v10n1.05

Received September 27, 2017; Revised December 11, 2017; Accepted December 30, 2017; Published February 04, 2018.

Abstract

Sri Lanka in the last decade witnessed a catastrophe of incidents that blurred the lines of nationalism. The two ethnic communities of Sri Lanka the Sinhalese and the Tamils suffered differences that later transformed into a Civil War (1983-2009). The post-independence era brought out ‘nationalism’ within the country but turned ethnic in a short course of time. Therefore the theme of ethno-nationalism is prevalent in Sri Lankan English literature. Literature of the War also produced biased and chaotic pictures of the event. Ethno-nationalism possessed the island and left it bruised and dismantled to which we find evidences in texts. Sri Lanka had not imagined a twenty six year long War therefore its aftermath left the country to figure out the dilemma yet to be produced. This paper will focus on the subject of ethno-nationalism in selected Sri Lankan fictions. Its aim will be to objectify the ethno-nationalist war (Civil War) through the theories of nationalism and ethno-nationalism in the fictions. The term ‘revisiting’ here emphasizes the actions of people who had shown nationalistic fervor during the War and how the author has (re)presented it in fiction. As literature in particular fiction (here) has been gestated and created to enlighten how ethno-nationalism is perceived in Sri Lankan fictions and in particular Nihal De Silva’s novel The Road from Elephant Pass. It highlights the dual aspects of ethnicity through its protagonists who is a Tamil and Sinhalese respectively, their love story which compel them to dissolve the line of animosity.

Keywords: Ethno-nationalism, Tamil, Sinhalese, war and nationalism.

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Reconsidering Performativity, Performance and Imagination: A Possibility in Erasing the Difference

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Tapaswi H M

Doctoral research scholar, Manipal Centre for Philosophy and Humanities (MCPH), MAHE. ORCID: 0000-0002-6867-6088. Email: tapaswi.hm@gmail.com

 Volume 10, Number 1, 2018 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v10n1.04

Received October 30, 2017; Revised January 26, 2018; Accepted January 30, 2018; Published February 04, 2018.

 Abstract:

The overarching history of the term ‘performativity’ seems to have undergone variety of meaning starting from linguistic studies to gender. This variation in meaning, however, seems to differentiate the term ‘performativity’ from the other term which has the same root word, i.e. ‘performance’. The association between ‘performativity’ and ‘performance’ doesn’t seem to be studied extensively with reference to theatre. This article tries to examine the possible connection between these two terms and the role of imagination in the process of connecting these two terms. Taking into the account the idea of transformation of actor into a character and the role of imagination this article examines the subtleties of performance and performativity. The article discusses this connection with the help of an example from the mid-sixteenth century.

 Keywords: Performativity, performance, imagination, gender, actor, audience.

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What is Performance Studies?

Richard Schechner Tisch School of the Arts, New York University  Download PDF Version Because performance studies is so broad-ranging and

Using Untranslatable Dictions as a Literary Device

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Rajendran Sankaravelayuthan

Centre for Excellence in Computational Engineering and Networking (CEN), Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham. Email: s_rajendran@cb.amrita.edu.

 Volume 10, Number 1, 2018 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v10n1.03

Received September 27, 2017; Revised December 11, 2017; Accepted December 30, 2017; Published February 04, 2018.

 Abstract

This paper intends to analyse the writings of Indian novelists and find out how they make use of untranslatable dictions as a literacy device.  Indian writers often choose Indian situations or Indian themes while resorting to create a literary piece in English. One can find Indianism in the writings of all the Indian English authors.  We come across many novelist of early period as well as the present period choose a theme familiar to them by place, culture and acquaintance and build their characters and stories so that the stamp of Indianism is imprinted in their writings. While going through the writings of Indian authors, of early period such as R. K. Narayan, Ahmad Ali , Raja Rao and Mulk Raj Anand  and the present day Arundathi Roy, Anita Nair, Amish Tripathi, Chetan Bagat, Sudeep Nagarkar and others, we can observe that they codify English to suit their intention of narrating stories with Indianism. They resort to a unique deviation at all the levels of language structure such as discourse level, syntactic level, lexical level, morphological level and phonological level. Code mixing is the major strategy they adopt. They make use of untranslatable dictions to present before their readers an Indian menu to consume. The outcome of their efforts becomes artificial or artificially code mixed. The language spoken by their characters may not exist in the real world. So they make a distinction between the textual world and real world. The textual world allows the use of artificial English loaded with cultural terms or untranslatable items.

Keywords: Indianism, untranslatability, code mixing, lexical deviation, morphological deviation, syntactic deviation, discourse deviation, phonological deviation, cultural translation

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Literature (Now) Contains Graphic Language: Adaptation, Visualization and Transmedia Texts

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Pramod K. Nayar

Professor, Department of English, University of Hyderabad, India.

ORCID: 0000-0003-2317-6570. Email: pramodknayar@gmail.com

 Volume 10, Number 1, 2018 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v10n1.02

Received December 15, 2017; Revised January 26, 2018; Accepted January 30, 2018; Published February 04, 2018.

Abstract

Literary influence is now visible in the form of a graphic visualization, whether as a graphic novel or, as this essay demonstrates in computer-generated visual data around texts and textual relations. All of these are adaptations of the literary text. I first argue that the ‘graphing’ of the source/original – if we retain old-world categories such as ‘original’ – text into visual language renders literary texts into our most recognizable interface: the screen with its icons. This ‘iconization in graphic adaptation is a mirroring and a ghostification. In the second part of the essay I argue that textual criticism is an instance of adaptation because the critical texts are produced from and about literary texts.  Today, this process utilizes the graphic language and representational modes of the digital medium and is therefore transmedial. Maps of literary influence, built through software, graphic visualizations of literary texts. In the third section, the essay argues that the work of criticism in the digital age gestures at the contexts and processes outside the task and textual frame, and to signs and symbols within it. In transmedia metareferencing is a form of adaptation because it takes material from various media to compose the cultural history of the text in the form of whatever is laid out on the screen. In the final section, the essay proposes a poetics of transmedia adaptation and graphic visualization.

Keywords: Graphic Language, transmedia adaptation, graphic visualization, metareferencing, graphic language.

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