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Language, Ecology and the Stories We Live By: The Ecolinguistics of Tholkappiyam

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648 views

V Shri Vaishali 1 & Dr. S. Rukmini 2

1Research Scholar, Department of English, School of Social Sciences and Languages, VIT, Vellore. venkatshrivaishali@gmail.com 9940805789 Orcid id: 0000-0001-7843-9521

2 Sr. Assistant Professor, Department of English, School of Social Sciences and Languages, VIT, Vellore. rukminikrishna123@gmail.com Orcid Id: 0000-0001-8414-3145.

Corresponding Author: Dr. S. Rukmini

Volume 13, Number 4, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n4.51   

Abstract

The term “ecolinguistics” is relatively a recent discussion with Eliar Haugen (1972) bringing up the concept of “The ecology of Language”. Since then, various methods and approaches to the field have been suggested to study the language-ecology interaction, primarily from the west. As a result, ecolinguistics is conceived as a new-born western discipline. However, Ecolinguistics, as the term suggests is the specialized study of language-ecology interaction. The “feeling” of the existence of the necessary relationship between language and ecology even before makes us ask the question if the concept of ecolinguistics has not been discussed by linguists before 20th Century. The ancient Tamil linguistic treatise called Tholkappiyam (dated between 6th BCE to 8th CE) presents the fundamental nature of the relationship between ecology, language and culture through the theory called Tinai. The paper primarily draws attention to look into the linguistic philosophy of Tholkappiyam through an ecological perspective. From the ecolinguistic perspective, the paper analyses Tinai based on three criteria: Ecosophy, Aspects of Language-ecology-culture interaction and the theoretical framework of Tinai. Having analysed from the aforementioned criteria, the paper advocates that the framework of Tinai can contribute to the ecolinguistic studies parallel to the philosophies of Edward Sapir (1912) and Hagege (1985).

 Keywords: Ecolinguistics, Tinai theory, Ecosophy, Language Ecology, Critical Discourse Analysis, Tholkappiyam.

Examining the Shifting Paradigms of Bhakti and Sanskrit Literature through Devotional Poetry of Jayadeva and Dadu

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431 views

Dr. Aditi Swami1 & Dr. Manju Dhariwal2

1Postdoctoral Researcher (Sociolinguistics, Indian Council of Social Science Research, New Delhi). The LNM Institute of Information Technology, Jaipur, Rajasthan, India. ORCID id: 0000-0001-5950-6346. Email: aditirdswami@gmail.com

2Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, The LNM Institute of Information Technology, Jaipur, Rajasthan, India

ORCID id: 0000-0002-1579-1218. Email: manju@lnmiit.ac.in

Volume 13, Number 4, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n4.50   

Abstract

The wave of the Bhakti movement significantly affected India for over a period of twelve centuries. Considering that it left inerasable impressions on the history and culture of the land, this research paper argues that what only imbibed the feeling of pure devotion also became a tool in the hands of those who were desirous of radical religious, political and social changes. To prove this, the paper undertakes the translation of Dadu Dayal’s Sanskrit compositions. Additionally, the paper also questions the very model of Bhaktikal (the Age of Devotional Literature), propagated by the scholars of Hindi Literature, which divides it into two distinct theological categories, Sagun and Nirgun. By examining the devotional poetry of Jayadeva Goswami and Dadu Dayal, and their sectarian positions, it demonstrates that the proponents of the two diametrically opposite schools of Bhakti did not always honour such a distinction for bhakti’s spirit is above such schisms.

Keywords: Bhakti poets, Dadu Dayal, Jayadeva Goswami, Medieval Bhakti Literature, Nirgun Bhakti, Sagun Bhakti, Sanskrit Literature.

D. H. Lawrence’s Travel Writing: Concept of Nudity and Sexuality with a Difference

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647 views

Abhik Mukherjee

Assistant Professor of English, Vellore Institute of Technology Vellore. ORCID ID: 0000-0002-8701-365. Email: abhik.mukherjee@vit.ac.in

Volume 13, Number 4, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n4.49   

Abstract

In that he spent most of his life outside Britain, D. H. Lawrence often seems the least British of the British Modernists. His interest in and willingness to be influenced by Italy, Sicily, the American Southwest, Mexico and Australia can be easily explored in his travel books. Whereas his novels are too didactic in nature, his philosophies get naturally matured as he travels and they are expressed very succinctly in his travel writing. In various parts of his four travel books, namely Twilight in Italy (1916), Sea and Sardinia (1921), Morning in Mexico (1927), Sketches of Etruscan Places (1932) Lawrence depicts the difference between nudity and nakedness and how they influence him. The other contrast here is between art and life, with the nude standing for art and nakedness for life with the section on Florence and the art there. The essay focuses on how Lawrence views art differently when actually experiencing these works himself during his travels.  I show different phases in his response to nudity/nakedness as shown in his four travel books and what accounts for these changes. The thesis is the examination of Lawrence’s belief that the touch of amateurism and primitivism can inject new freshness into our lives and can salvage them from the clutches of habit, and the mechanized civilisation. Nudity and sexuality as part of primitive modes of life can balance and heal what Freud termed the discontents of civilisation. Situated on the thin line between nudity and sexuality, D.H. Lawrence’s travel writing recounts man’s true relationship with the cosmos. And finally, the paper shows some misunderstanding on the part of the second wave feminists on his representation of masculinity in nakedness.

Keywords: travel writing, nakedness, nudity, sexuality, feminism

 

Lost in Translation: Culture-bound Lexical Items in English Subtitles of the Rap Songs by Indian Rapper ‘Badshah’ in Bollywood Movies from 2016-2021

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439 views

Ritika Sinha

Assistant Professor of English, Goswami Ganesh Dutta Sanatan Dharma College, Sector 32, Chandigarh. E-mail: ritika.sinha@ggdsd.ac.in, ORCID: 0000-0003-1746-316X

Volume 13, Number 4, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n4.48   

Abstract

Subtitling, a subfield of translation studies has witnessed a recent upsurge in India. The rise of subtitling services can be attributed to the fact that the number of viewers from outside the country is increasing phenomenally, thanks to the global streaming platforms. Subtitling is an art; it involves translation of the language of the video to another language with an objective to retain the temper of the original message for the target audience. The subtitler is faced with the daunting task of preserving the idiom of the source text (ST) and the target text (TT). Since, the meaning in both source and target language is profoundly affected by the cultural context, it is important to undertake the practice of translation while respecting and reflecting cultural ethos of each language. This research aims to investigate the English subtitles of selected famous rap sequences by Indian rapper ‘Badshah’ in Bollywood songs released from 2016 to 2021. With an aim to assess the quality of translation of the selected song sequences, an analysis is made of the sematic peculiarities that are lost in translation from Hindi/Punjabi to English. The loss can be mainly attributed to Hindi and Punjabi cultural references or culture-bound terms which do not have a suitable equivalent lexical item in English language.

Keywords: Translation, Subtitles, Translation studies, Bollywood subtitling, rap songs, English Subtitles

 

Ability as ‘performance’: analyzing the able-ness of ‘life’ through a critical study of The Shawshank Redemption and The Dark Knight

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441 views

Dr. Souradip Bhattacharyya

Assistant Professor, Amity Institute of English Studies and Research, Amity University, Kolkata. Email: srdp007@gmail.com, sbhattacharyya@kol.amity.edu

Volume 13, Number 4, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n4.47  

Abstract

This article deals closely with the relation between the ability and state of being alive. It asks an elemental question: what does the word ‘life’ remind us of? While ‘life’ may generically be defined as the ability to do all that signifies the act of living, a more political way of defining ‘life’ would be to consider it as the medium of being alive as human or, an individual person’s existence. The generic definition of ‘life’ given above may suffer from reductionism if ‘ability’ is interpreted as a thing-in-itself, natural to mankind as an inherent, embedded process. This article, therefore, aims to analyze life by stepping out of this biological method of understanding and concentrates on the socio-economic and cultural nexus in which the ability to do is produced. It has chosen cinema as a medium of analysis because cinema does not dwell in a (cinematic) utopian space of its own, but it represents reality as much as it affects reality through the audio-visual experience of the audience.

Keywords: life, ability, performance, subject, death

From Agatha Christie’s The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side to Rituparno Ghosh’s Shubho Muharat: Film Authorship and Transcultural Adaptation

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551 views

Akaitab Mukherjee

Assistant Professor, School of Social Sciences and Languages (SSL), Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT), Chennai, India. ORCID id: 0000-0001-6410-9898. Email: akaitab.mukherjee@gmail.com

Volume 13, Number 4, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n4.46  

Abstract

In her book A Theory of Adaptation Linda Hutcheon uses the term “transcultural adaptation” to illustrate different context in which literary or other cultural texts are adapted. This relocation of text through adaptation often adds multiple interpretations or alters textual politics. Hutcheon further argues that transcultural adaptation can transform the text in unpredictable direction. The paper seeks to explicate eminent Bengali film director Rituparno Ghosh’s (1961-2013) Shubho Muharat (The First Day of the Shoot, 2003) which is influenced by Agatha Christie’s (1890-1976) novel The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side (1962). The essay untangles Ghosh’s strategy to add Indian socio-cultural background in the western text. He expresses authorial intensions when he re-narrates of the novel on screen. The paper argues that the transcultural adaptation creates a “Third Space of enunciation” where the auteur uses the traits of detective film and repeats authorial intention. Following Janet Staiger’s reinterpretation of auteurism the essay argues that duplication of authorial impulse is Ghosh’s “technique of the self”.

Keywords: Transcultural adaptation, Film Authorship, Third Space of enunciation, Detective Film, Rituparno Ghosh

Locating an efficacy of the humane time in Ray’s Agantuk: a travel beyond the object

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287 views

Richik Banerjee

State Aided College Teacher, St. Paul’s Cathedral Mission College, University of Calcutta, PhD scholar (English), Amity University, Kolkata, banerjee.richik@gmail.com, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0851-284X

Volume 13, Number 4, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n4.45   

Abstract

The ontology of time and space has always been a subject of materialist prospectus bearing a halo effect of ‘modernity’ and ‘progress’. The enquiry into the sign of modern is a mechanical category of production where substantial copies of ‘progress’ have religiously been equated with a break from the past. This breaking away from the centre (soul) is, of course, associated with a desire for the non-native design. Simultaneously, the past becomes historicized as primitive dangers while the present/‘modern’ morphs into a non-past spectacular diffusion. Satyajit Ray reloads his artillery of the cerebral one last time in his masterpiece titled, Agantuk (The Stranger), where he pits the idea of a spectral past having an agency to redo the class binary against the totalitarian time(s) in a modern urban space which prides itself on the abuse of power-as-civility. Ray introduces a nuclear family of three (a married couple and their son) where the protagonist, Manmohan Mitra, returns as an archived data in the body of a forgotten relative. His entry into the house ruptures the canny knots of the ‘home’ where the director exposes limits of the modernized time. This paper tries to analyze how Ray uses the motif of ‘travel’ in its cinematic cloth to critique the ingestion of global progress as nothing but an accumulation of fallen spectacles that commodify both a subject who is consuming the object-in-time (progress) and also the object that is all the time getting alienated from its own subjective merit. Mitra becomes the mouthpiece of the director for conveying the paradoxes of time-as-capital in the burgeoning of speculative modernity.

Keywords: modernity, progress, primitive, home, time

Tyrannous Minds and Tamed Bodies: The Curious Case of Irene Adler from Canon to Screen

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516 views

Debanjali Roy1 & Tanmoy Putatunda2

1Assistant Professor, School of Languages, KIIT Deemed to be University, itsmeanjee@gmail.com, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2496-6091

2Assistant Professor, School of Languages, KIIT Deemed to be University, tanmoy.putatunda@gmail.com, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9698-9487

Volume 13, Number 4, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n4.44   

Abstract

Appearing in the singular short story “A Scandal in Bohemia” in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series, the character of Irene Adler has been adapted and reconstructed in subsequent literary and visual media. Twenty-first century screen adaptations have swivelled upon postfeminist re-appropriations of the character and overt sexualisation of the ‘body’, thereby engaging in reassessment of the Irene-Sherlock relationship and problematizing gendered presentations of the character. Locating Irene in a heteronormative space, such narratives have attempted to revise the image of the cross-dressing ‘adventuress’ through varied portrayals which seemingly broaden her scope by means of her deliberate transgressions of fixed gender tropes. This article, by taking into account the gendered power-play embedded in three popular twenty first century screen adaptations of the text, namely, the films Sherlock Holmes (2009) and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011), CBS’s Elementary (2012-2019) and BBC’s Sherlock (2010-2017), scrutinizes the dilemma of presentation of Irene Adler through the lenses of sexual dynamics and gendered performances.

Keywords: Gender dynamics, Sexuality, Body, Subversion, Adaptation, Performances, Identity

Ideological Reconfigurations: Privacy, Voyeurism and Form in Recent Malayalam Cinema

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459 views

B. Abhijith

Research Scholar, Department of Cultural Studies, The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, E-mail: aabhinov.91@gmail.com, ORCID id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8394-612X

Volume 13, Number 4, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n4.43   

 

Abstract

This paper traces a particular moment in the recent history of Malayalam Cinema when a shift in the representation of the private sphere was attempted. In the period after 2010, a set of new Malayalam films carried a shift in terms of aesthetics and narrative techniques and went on to unfold in a full-fledged manner by the end of the decade. The paper would look at Chappa Kurishu (Head or Tails, 2011), one of the early movies of this tide to shed light on the remarkable shift it achieves in representing the scenes of romantic and erotic intimacy on screen. As the narrative of the movie centers around the fight over a smart phone that ensues between two strangers in the city of Kochi, it gets entangled with questions of privacy, class and contest over the urban spaces.  Bringing to the discussion contestations over the meanings of public and private manifested in certain urban-based movements in recent times like ‘Kiss of Love’ protests, it is argued that Chappa Kurishu can be read as a response to the contradictions arising out of the emergence of new subjects in the wake of urban transformations and the conflicting cinematic publics of multiplex and single hall theatre. The formal transactions between cinematic form and video form, the paper suggests, is one of the ways in which Chappa Kurishu attempts to respond to this situation in a way that signals the transitional position of the spectator subject.

Keywords: Malayalam Cinema, Voyeurism, Privacy, Video, Film Form

Melancholic Vision and Utopian Imagination: Amma Ariyan and Left-wing Culture in Kerala in the 1970s

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391 views

P. Muhammed Afzal

Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani (BITS Pilani), Pilani, Rajasthan, India-333031. ORCID ID: 0000-0002-9989-6251. Email: muhammed.p@pilani.bits-pilani.ac.in

Volume 13, Number 4, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n4.42   

Abstract

Situating the Malayalam film Amma Ariyan in the context of radical Left politics in Kerala during the “long 1970s”, this paper argues that Left-wing cultural productions during the period offered a melancholic vision of history that sustained a utopian imagination. In popular discussions, the 1970s is seen as a period of “misguided adventurism” and defeat, and the nostalgia for the period is treated as a paralyzing, backward looking attitude.  Drawing on contemporary scholarship on Left melancholy, nostalgia, and utopia, this paper looks back at the 1970s from a perspective where melancholia is a stance that offers a critical vision of the past as well as the future. This paper argues that the “failed heroes” in Left-wing cultural productions in the 1970s refused to “resign themselves to … the inevitable and ‘natural’ character of the most monstrous inequalities”. This “refusal to be realistic” has been very central to the sustaining of a utopian imagination which acquires more significance in the context of the perceived reactivation of “communist desire” in the contemporary times.

Keywords: Amma Ariyan, Radical Left, Left Melancholy, Malayalam Cinema, Kerala

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