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Dharma in America: A Short History of Hindu-Jain Diaspora by Pankaj Jain

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Routledge. 2020. ISBN: 9781138565456.

Dr Jyoti Tyagi

Deputy Director, Migration and Diaspora Institute, Delhi. Email: jyotijnu@gmail.com

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

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n4.18

As a scholar of diaspora studies and having read a fair share of literature on diaspora, there is one question that I always ask before starting to read a book on diaspora: why is it important to know about diaspora? A related question is, important to whom? Why do we need to tell stories of those who have left? I determine the eminence of the book based on how far the author has been able to answer the above questions and Dharma in America doesn’t disappoint me.

Although every immigrant story is amazing, the Journey of Indians in America is distinctive on many fronts including education, income and entrepreneurship. Once “lost actors” are now “national assets” for both the host country and the homeland. Immigration to the United States from India started in the early 19th century when Indian immigrants began settling in communities along the West Coast. Although they originally arrived in small numbers, new opportunities arose in the middle of the 20th century, and the population grew larger in the following decades. As of 2019, about 2.7 million Indian immigrants resided in the United States (Hanna & Batlova, 2020). Today, Indian immigrants account for approximately 6 per cent of the U.S. foreign-born population, making them the second-largest immigrant group in the country, after Mexicans (Ibid).

The book by Prof Pankaj Jain, Dharma in America: A Short History Hindu-Jain Diaspora is an attempt to explore the role of Hindu and Jain Americans in education and civic engagements, medicine and healthcare and music with insights into role and challenges faced by the community. The book is arranged into seven chapters, including the Introduction and the Conclusion. The preface of the book starts with an interesting journey of Prof Jain of realising his ‘American dream’ and his experience of growing up in a Jain family. The preface instantly connects the reader with the journey of the author. Full-Text PDF>>

New Media, Urban Marginals and Gerontocracy in India: A Study of Older Adults in Kolkata

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304 views

Dr. Debarati Dhar

Assistant Professor, School of Communications, XIM University, Bhubaneswar, India. Email: dhardebarati@gmail.com

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

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n4.17

Abstract

My paper seeks to explore the linkage between new media and the Urban Marginals with special emphasis on the ageing population in Kolkata. Conventional use of media for ageing has made the aged population a passive victim to be duped by the media messages. Given the structural locations and positions, mass media is of no use where the considerations are for younger populations. Although the ageing population may be a marginal category keeping in view the larger media ecology, new media provides the potential to the aged population to be inclusive of urban governance provided they have access and availability. With the help of substantive details, my paper would seek to address the idea of ‘precarity’ associated with the aged population and their way of coping with such precarity with the help of new media in Kolkata. This paper would provide a select reading of samples (qualitative data) from different regions of Kolkata. Through substantive details my paper would provide insights about a vulnerable population, otherwise, neglected in the making of urban governance.

Keywords: New Media, ageing population, older adults, urban governance, mass media, Kolkata.

Television and Material Culture: Mediating the Temporal and Consumerist Practices in Pre-liberalised Kerala

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348 views

Benita Acca Benjamin

Research Scholar, Institute of English, Kerala University. Email: benitabenjamin47@gmail.com

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

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n4.16

Abstract

The introduction of television in Kerala was an event marked by the encounter between spatial practices, discursive structures and visual paradigms. As a result, it becomes important to contextualise television’s presence in Kerala in the socio-economic conditions that defined the region in and around the time when television was introduced. This would provide some seminal cues about the mutual imbrications between television and its politico-discursive context. The present paper tries to look into the ways in which television fashioned new spatio-temporal practices and embodied various consumerist tendencies in pre-liberalised Kerala to argue that television is an artifact grounded in the region’s cultural values and material aspirations. The first section looks at how television-viewing and the socialities formed around the act were ‘timed’ by television. In the second section, the paper studies the popular advertising strategies employed to market television as a ‘tamed’ object that is representative of the consumerist aspirations that defined the region.

Keywords: Television, Material Culture, Temporalities of television, Consumerist aspirations

Comic Memes and Sexist Humor in India: Tools for Reinforcement of Female Body-Image Stereotypes

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Deepali Mallya M1 & Riya Dennis2

1Assistant Professor (Department of English and Cultural Studies), Christ (Deemed to be) University, Bengaluru, Karnataka, INDIA. ORCID ID 0000-0002-7760-3593. Email: deepali.mallya@christuniversity.in

2Teacher, Oasis International School, Bengaluru, Karnataka, INDIA. Email: riya.dennis@eng.christuniversity.in

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

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n4.15

Abstract

Memes have been described as communicative and aesthetic practices that serve cultural, social, political purposes on a digital platform. Several studies, in the last decade, have attempted to study this digital aesthetic knowledge production as a powerful tool for political, racial, and gender-related discourses. Most often this knowledge is produced through comic multi-media texts. Many theorists believe that, digital media reinforces inequality, marginalization and such other social issues through the audio-visual-textual medium as much as it establishes the counter-discourses for equality, body activism, racial activism and the like. Speed and lack of censorship can be the cardinal reasons for the popularity of these memes. Among the mass-influencing gender-related memes are those encouraging fat-talk and body-image stereotypes. In the Indian context, ‘Tag a Friend’ memes is one such widely circulated meme which communicates body-shaming messages through sexist humor. It mainly targets the fat/colored/transgender women. The current study examines these memes using multimodal discourse analysis methodology. The paper attempts to investigate the revival/reproduction potential of color-shaming and body-shaming stereotypes via comic memes through Shiffman’s memetic dimensions. The analysis establishes that memes can be a prominent site for the re-production of the problematic ideology of body/color shaming even in the 21st century.

Keywords: Body-shaming, comic-meme, female-body, ideology, interpellation, Tag a Friend.

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Binge Watching to Binge Serving in India: Revolution, Regulations and Restrictions of Over-the-Top (OTT) Platforms

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511 views

Dr. Biranchi Narayan P. Panda1, Dr. Swayampabha Satpathy2 & Isha Sharma3

1Assistant Professor (Law), Xavier Law School, XIM University. Email: biranchi@xim.edu.in

2Associate Professor (English), Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, ITER, SOA. Email: swayamsatpathy@soa.ac.in

3Ph.D. Scholar (English), Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, ITER, SOA. Email: Ishaasharma25@gmail.com

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

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n4.14

Abstract:

Information technology has changed the living style of people in the last few decades by its evolution and revolution. So, ‘digitalisation’ is considered as very imperative in human history especially after the ‘industrial revolution’. With the changing paradigm, digitalisation has provided enormous space for the entertainment of Individuals through the Over-the-Top (OTT) video platforms on their demand. In India, the significant growths of OTT platforms have been noticed during the last decade with an increasingly growing number of consumers. With such huge demand, a surge of consumers in India, the OTT became a commodity rather than a luxury. Further, the demands of consumers & internationalisation open up its OTT market for domestic as well as international players. The OTT players like Hotstar and Jio Cinema has expanded a stouter position, whereas global players like Netflix and Amazon Prime have also extended progressively their market share in India. According to one report, the Video on Demand (VoD) industry is still at its emerging stage but the entry of 40 VoD companies in a span of just three years indicates the popularity and demand of such industry. This huge demand has exposed the concept of ‘Binge Watching’ in India as this platform provides on-demand, anywhere access, without a commercial break and unlimited access. However, these growing OTT players and online content have faced many controversies and fought legal battles in India due to the lack of regulatory mechanisms. This paper explores the emergence & growth of OTT platforms with their recent trends in India. Further, the paper specifically focuses on the regulatory regime of OTT platforms since the beginning and its current scenario.

Keywords: Over-the-top (OTT), Binge Watching, Digitalization, Video on Demand (VoD), Regulations & Legislations.

Culinary Transitions: Understanding the Kitchen Space through Advertisements

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388 views

Kashyapi Ghosh1 and V. Vamshi Krishna Reddy2

1Ph.D Scholar, IIT Tirupati. ORCID: 0000-0001-5394-6076. Email: hs18d504@iittp.ac.in

2Assistant Professor, University of Hyderabad. ORCID: 0000-0003-0383-6287

Email: vamshi.vemireddy@uohyd.ac.in

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

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n4.13

Abstract

The kitchen is a ubiquitous space in the Indian domestic life. Yet there hasn’t been a lot of academic discourses around it possibly owing to its mundane nature. In this article, I aim to look into the gendered nature of the space through advertisements. Advertisements are digital documents of everyday life This article deliberates on the notion that the kitchen space in urban India is undergoing a change in representation and participation. This change is reflected in the advertisements, created keeping in mind the perception of its viewers. The gendered segregation of work done in the home space have been deliberated by a number of scholars. This article problematises those viewpoints and challenges DeVault’s notion of “womanly conduct” through the narrative of the advertisements.

Keywords: advertisements, gender, kitchen space.

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Traces of Scheherazade in Margaret Drabble’s The Red Queen: A Transcultural Intertextual Reading

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310 views

Dr Bushra Juhi Jani

Al-Nahrain University, Baghdad. Email: bushrajani@nahrainuniv.edu.iq. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8981-7003.

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

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n4.12

Abstract

This paper examines the transcultural intertextual influence of Scheherazade, the legendary queen and the storyteller of The Thousand and One Nights, on Drabble’s The Red Queen (2004), which has a subtitle, “A Transcultural Tragicomedy.” It discusses how an appropriation of Scheherazade was utilized by Margaret Drabble in writing, The Red Queen. “But appropriation is what novelists do,” Drabble writes in the “Prologue” of her novel, adding, “whatever we write is, knowingly or unknowingly, a borrowing. Nothing comes from nowhere.” This paper is a syncretic reading of The Red Queen to show the universality of womanhood and cross-cultural parallels. In this novel, which is based on the memoirs of an eighteenth-century Korean crown princess known as Lady Hong or Lady Hyegy?ng, the protagonist comes from the history of the East, just like Scheherazade, “to retell [her] story.” Also like Scheherazade who narrates stories in order to live, the Korean Princess uses storytelling as a strategy for survival. Moreover, the intentions of the novel can be seen in a feminist tradition of historiographic metafictional re-workings of the Orient and the Arabian Nights.

Keywords: Margaret Drabble, The Red Queen, The Thousand and One Nights, Scheherazade, intertextuality, transculturality, historiographic metafiction

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Reading Tradition in Food: An Interdisciplinary Study of Bengali Food Writing

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Nilanjana Debnath

Assistant Professor of English, Koneru Lakshmaiah Education Foundation.

Email: njd.nilanjana1@gmail.com

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

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n4.11

Abstract

Food Studies has been a prominent part of Interdisciplinary Studies in the West from the 1980s and it is catching up in India as well. A close study of recipes and other forms of food writing can offer insights into the everyday culinary negotiations and the constitution of a cultural ‘tradition’ of taste. These insights of gastropolitics may help us better understand the functioning of subliminal hegemonic technologies and everyday resistance to the same. In our era of postcolonial globalization, where domination and subjugation happen through micro-politics of power, our readings of food writing may open new doors of reading and theorizing heritage and history.

Keywords: Food writing, recipes, cookbooks, Bengal, tradition, everyday, embodiment, taste.

History Contra Collective Memory: Collective Memory’s Finite Province

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385 views

Premjit Singh Laikhuram

Ph.D. candidate, Department of Cultural Studies, Tezpur University.

Email: premjit.laikh@gmail.com, ORCID iD: 0000-0001-9040-9288

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

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n4.10

Abstract

In the humanities and social sciences, with the rise of memory studies, there has been an important theoretical shift in how we engage the past. What used to be studied with the methodically elaborate field of history no longer seems adequate. With memory becoming an ever-present framework with which to look at culture, literature, social phenomena, politics, and the arts, a theoretical conviction has come to prevail that says collective memory is a larger framework within which history and other approaches to the past must be situated. This paper tries to address this theoretical conviction of conflating history with collective memory by arguing that collective memory cannot be a be-all umbrella term encapsulating historical representation or other approaches to the past such as tradition. It does so by uncovering the ground for such a conviction, during which a clearer view of the role of history and the limits of collective memory emerge. The investigation shows that indiscriminate application of the concept of collective memory in every approach dealing with the past makes the concept almost meaningless and betrays its two crucial characters, or limits: that of i) temporal finiteness and ii) fragmentariness. In so doing, it restores the vital role history plays in trying to get at the truth of the past. The article concludes by calling for deeper engagement with foundational conceptual and theoretical issues in collective memory research if it is to establish itself as a longstanding field of inquiry.

Keywords: Theory, cultural memory, interdisciplinarity, historical epistemology, cultural studies

Problematising Tribality: A Critical Engagement with Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar’s The Adivasi Will Not Dance: Stories

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573 views

Francis Ekka1 & Dr. Rosy Chamling2

1Research Scholar, Department of English, Sikkim University.

Email id: fekka.20mpen01@sikkimuniversity.ac.in, ekkafran@gmail.com. ORCID id: 0000-0002-2777-3121.

2Associate Professor, Department of English, Sikkim University.

Email id: rchamling@cus.ac.in. ORCID id: 0000-0002-4936-4767.

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

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n4.09

Abstract

Tribality simply means the characteristic features of various tribal communities and the qualities of being tribal. In the 1940s leading anthropologists like Verrier Elwin and G.S.Ghurye tried to theorize and categorize tribal identities. However, they were often accused of representing either a ‘protective’ or ‘romantic’ notions of tribality. One cannot determine the tribality of a person based on their features, dialects, food habits or geographical location. Tribality is said to bind the pan-Indian Tribal literature which is again problematic considering language which is considered as the useful indicator of any identity. Tribal Literature is a distinct form of writing to represent people, things and ideas in their cultural authenticities. The tribals essentially have an oral culture and thus when a tribal writer like Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar, a Government Doctor by profession, writes in the canonical English language, we will be tempted to probe if he seeks to ‘write in’ or ‘write back’ to the mainstream literary culture; or if his works can fit into the mould of minor literature, thereby making the seemingly personal an intensely political statement. This paper also aims to interrogate issues of tribal identity and their representation through a critical engagement with Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar’s The Adivasi Will Not Dance: Stories (2017).

Keywords: Adivasi, Tribality, Identity, Representation, Minor Literature

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