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Palate Tales, Kitchen Truths: Coming Home to Cooking in the Time of Covid

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Ananya Dutta Gupta, Ph.D 

Associate Professor, Department of English, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan. Email: ananya_duttagupta@yahoo.co.uk

   Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s25n0

Abstract:

“Palate Poetry, Kitchen Truths: Coming Home to Cooking” is a long essay comprising non-didactic philosophical reflections on the wisdom of home cooking attained over the first three months spent in Covid-19 lockdown.  I make a case for home cooking and home eating as an experiential strategy that can, mutatis mutandis, alert us to ontologies and knowledge systems that resist the seeming inexorability of neoliberal, millennial urbanised living. I do so without holding forth any normative rejection of technology and other exigencies of modern living; and gesture instead towards an inclusive paradigm where machines can be applied towards a promotion of food making and food sharing that is ethical, cosmopolitan, community-minded, ecologically aware, and yet forward-looking. The auto-ethnographic methodology covers both the analytical prose and the interspersed poems it provides a discursive matrix for. I found myself planting these poems (and accompanying images of food from my kitchen) at strategic moments in the argumentation so as to allow the reader, experimentally, a detour and respite from the critical density of the prose. I suppose I am experimenting with the possibility of treating of the same subject in different mediums and then gathering them back into the fold of the personal, reflective essay.

Keywords: Poetry, auto-ethnography, Cooking, Pandemic, technology.

 

Understanding colonial masculinity and native bodies: Rereading the discourse of homoeopathy as a feminist form of medicine

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339 views

Anjana Menon

PhD Research Scholar, E-mail: anjanaabhinavmenon@gmail.com, https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0423-8959

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s8n2

Abstract

A body can also be read as a site for the production and maintenance of social power. In colonial India, western biomedicine often acted to reinforce the reason/nature split and made manifestations in dualistic divisions between mind/body, and men/women. With the advent of the ‘masculine’ western biomedicine, the indigenous population lost the authority and autonomy over their self-knowledge and social power of their bodies. Thus, Homoeopathy found a space in the spiritual discourse of Indian nationalism as a ‘feminine’ element. This paper is an attempt to analyse how the rhetoric on homoeopathy was effectively employed to redress the grievances of masculinity in health care unleashed by the British state. The study lays stress on power imbalance within the practitioner/patient relationship, the exclusion of social concerns from the biomedical model, and the trivialisation of knowledge within the clinical encounters.

Keywords: Colonial power, masculine body, medical encounters.

Rethinking the India-Bharat Divide vis-à-vis COVID-19: Implications for a Sociolinguistics of Health Communication

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Ajit Kumar Mishra

Associate Professor, Dept. of Humanistic Studies, Indian Institute of Technology (Banaras Hindu University) Varanasi, India Email: akmishra.hss@iitbhu.ac.in ORCID: 0000-0003-4839-1699

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s8n1

Abstract:

Language plays an important role in the dissemination of critical health information across human societies. Taking a cue from the sociolinguistic nuances of the role of language in society, this study probes the India-Bharat divide in the COVID-19 scenario as a potential hurdle to the sense making practices necessary for successful health communication. By delving into the dichotomous linguistic relationship between India and Bharat, this study contends that in order for this sociolinguistic dichotomy to be resolved and health communication to be effective, it is important that all concerned must be in control of the same code. The study raises questions ranging from challenges for health communication with respect to the linguistically diverse population in the country, access to reliable health information, to the problem of incomprehensibility as a barrier to the availability of proper health information. Through qualitative content analysis of the COVID-19 health information terminology mediated through popular Hindi news channels during the first phase of lockdown in India and the corresponding outcome reports across digital platforms, the study analyses the India-Bharat divide and suggests sociolinguistic strategies that can tacitly turn the structural pluralism into an organic pluralism making heath communication in India smooth and discernible.

Keywords: COVID-19, comprehensibility, India-Bharat divide, health communication, sociolinguistics

The Fear of Camp Life: Understand the Spatial Reality and Formation of Discourse

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364 views

Joydip Dutta

PhD Scholar, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India, E-mail: joydipdaju@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s7n2

Abstract

The paper makes an existentialist analysis of refugee Camps in West Bengal that came into being after the Indian Partition in 1947 when the state received a large number of asylum seekers from the-then East Pakistan. The objective of the paper is to discuss the construction of Camp life in terms of the affect of fear. Camps have been largely interpreted as the active agents of rehabilitation, space of political movements or supplier of informal labourers. The principal enquiry here however would be to interrogate if the camp is home for the refugees or it has a separate existential reality in the face of fear which goes beyond the questions of rehabilitation. Borrowed from Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) the concept of fear in this paper does not indicate any specific character or definite future. Rather, fear unfolds as an ‘affect’. In West Bengal, construction of the Camp by the government was presupposed for rehabilitation of the refugees from East Pakistan (Bangladesh). Hence, in-itself a Refugee Camp functioned to control the population by its norms, rules, and regulations. On the other hand, it was constructed as temporary shelter for the refugees. Therefore, the temporal character signifies how Camp constitutes the refugees through ‘care’ and how they encounter reality in that situational condition. The paper will not focus on fear as only as detrimental to the life of the refugees. Rather, it tries to show how the affect of fear may also unfold the possibility of that space by engaging with the elements of speech, silence or listening that constitutes the discourse of Camp. The paper would explore how as a temporary shelter of the refugees, Camp life has been constructed as a discourse in terms of spatial boundary and limits. Coopers Camp in Ranaghat, West Bengal here is taken as a case study to explicate the discourse of camp life in the light of fear and ontologically address the refugee question in post-Partition subcontinent.

Keywords: Refugee Camp, Fear, Affect, Space, Rehabilitation, Experience

Partition of Bengal: a Posthumanist Study of Select Literary Works

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1.1K views

Indra Sankar Ghatak

PhD Research Scholar, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. E-mail: indrasghatak16@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s7n1

 Abstract

The Indian Partition ushered in one of the most historical migrations in human history where millions had to change their native affiliations. This event led to the formation of two nation-states (India and East Pakistan) out of a single cultural geography and the drawing of boundaries (Radcliffe line) disrupted the emotional, cultural and spatial link of the people with the native countries. Selected short stories from Bashabi Fraser’s Bengal Partition Stories and the memoirs in Adhir Biswas’ Border: Bangla Bhager Dewal encapsulate the variegated experiences of the dislocated during 1946-1955, who were sabotaged by fellow Bengalis in the name of gender, community (bangal-ghoti), and religion. This paper looks at select samples from the collections mentioned above and correlates them with the history of the period. It raises the question “of which ‘human’ is the posthuman a ‘post’?” (Ferrando, 2019, p. 9) The narratives from the Bengal partition capture the phenomenon of border crossing which had led to fluid identities (refugees/migrants/infiltrators) as individuals had been deterritorialized and reterritorialized. The migrant bodies symbolize an anthropogeographic entity that had been exploited severely, and the refugees present themselves as the cultural metaphor in order to capture the traumatized and ambivalent condition of post-national human beings.

Keywords: partition, posthuman, identities, boundaries, cultural.

The Contemporary Dystopian Reality of Slavery and Modern Capitalism in Octavia Butler’s Parable Novels

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451 views

Cr Patricia Mary Hodge

Research Scholar, Department of English, NEHU. E-mail: patclhodge93@gmail.com, Orcid id: 0000-0002-3786-8060

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s6n5

 Abstract

Critical dystopia as an analytic category for historical enquiry explores contemporary reality and its specificities in time and space. It functions as anagnorisis or recognition of the dystopian realities in the present through its generic mode of familiarising the heightened dystopian elements of the text as possible evolutions of current oppressions. This paper suggests that this anagnorisis through comparison and extrapolation is limited and needs to consider how the text ironically reveals the absence of historical specificity through its comparison of the contemporary present and the imagined future. Instead, specificity is replaced with a linear historical trajectory where dystopia occurs cyclically in metamorphosed forms within a fixed, yet evolving power-structure. This projects the nature of the dystopia in the text part of an evolutionary process, not a product of its historically specific period. Through the interrogation of how the legally abolished system of slavery is historically shifted into the future hyper-capitalist market system in Octavia Butler’s Parable novels, this paper will reveal how the anagnorisis of the novels functions to locate dystopia as present and evolving in a historical trajectory of cyclical structural repetition. This familiarisation of the historical event of slavery in the novels posits the dystopian text’s anagnorisis as not simply the recognition of dystopian elements specifically in the present but broadens it to the recognition of the historical evolution of those same human atrocities that appear to ‘resurge’ in dystopia.

Keywords: Slavery, capitalism, dystopia, anagnorisis

Re-orientalism in Shauna Singh Baldwin’s The Selector of Souls

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337 views

Urvashi Kaushal

Sardar Vallabhbhai National Institute of Technology, Surat. E-mail: urvashikaushal6@gmail.com, Orcid Id. 0000-0002-6774-6849

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s5n5

Abstract

In his seminal work Orientalism Edward Said destabilized the Euro-American practice of constructing, approving and disseminating a stereotypical image of Asia as exotic backward called the ‘Orient’. This paper takes Said’s concept of Orientalism as a premise to highlight ‘self–orientalism’ or ‘re-Orientalism’ as a growing trend in South Asian diaspora writers, especially since the turn of the 21st century. It utilizes the idea of orientalism and reads Shauna Singh Baldwin’s The Selector of Souls against the grain to accentuate the reification of Indian culture into a commodity and homogenisation of complex cultural differences in multicultural India for the consumption of the West. In its effort to find answers for this growing trend, it analyses the nexus between location and commodification of literature produced by diaspora writers.

 Keywords: orientalism, re-orientalism, new-orientalism, neo-orientalism, diaspora writers, commodification.

Negotiating Scottish ‘distinctiveness’ (?): Unmasking the British Conquest and the Construction of Empire in the 19th Century Indian Subcontinent

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343 views

Subhashis Pan

Ph.D Research Scholar, Sidho-Kanho-Birsha University, Purulia, WB. Email: subhashis.pan6@gmail.com, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9178-3607

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s5n2

 Abstract

India in the 19th century encapsulates a very different and contesting Scottish dimension to the expansion of British Empire. The Scottish legacy in the field of British colonial enterprise has been blurred over the time. Scotland, which was once a colony of the English, was incorporated in the Great Britain in the Union Act of 1707. But distinction between Scottish and English was never made. Thus, in the field of literature we do not find distinct Scottish identity of the contributors like- Walter Scott, R. L. Stevenson, Adam Smith, Thomas Carlyle- to name a few. They are placed in the ‘English literature’ without due emphasis on Scottish background and influence. Similarly, the common notion of the British imperial enterprise has masked the contribution of the Scottish administrators working under the British. Now, in the context of India when we talk about ‘Scottish Orientalism’, we need to focus on the already blurred identity of being ‘Scottish’ in the dominant English field. The Union Act (1707) between England and Scotland produced a space for the Scottish people to participate in the British imperial enterprise. This paper focuses to unmask the role of some of the Scottish scholar-administrators working under the British for a distinctively Scottish contribution to the expansion of the British imperial activities that helps to explore the nature of the intellectual and religious engagement. The study offers a distinctive Scottish Orientalist school as Scottish participation of empire remains open ended and it argues for a complex assessment of Scottish individuals who though shared some philological and philosophical interests and assumptions, nevertheless diverged in many other respects.

Keywords: Empire, hegemony, Orientalism, Scottish-distinctiveness, Scottish Orientalist school

Policing Immigration: A Study of Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander

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347 views

Aratrika Mandal

IIT Kharagpur, mandalaratrika@iitkgp.ac.in, ORCID id- 000-0003-0465-3642

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s5n1

Abstract

The present paper looks at the representation of inter-national mobility and immigrants in select works from Swedish author Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander series. Mankell’s works are set in Sweden,  a country where despite exceptionally inclusive foreign policies lies fault lines within its very social exceptionalism. This challenges the complete denouement that  is conventionally observed in the genre of detective fiction. Sweden’s geographical proximity with the Baltic countries makes its national boundaries porous, which enables the covert extremist factions to surface and function globally. Illegal human trafficking, followed by the absence of any restriction in compliance with the social welfare state allows one to blend in better, despite the rising anti-immigrant sentiments across the nation in the more recent years. This paper studies the underpinnings of geographical features in the constant run and chase, and how these boundaries are breached by the severity, rigidity, and interdependency of these morally fractured underground networks. Mankell’s Faceless Killers (1991) reveals nascent xenophobia provoked by the neo-Nazi remnants, which is supplemented by local projection of immigrants. These boundaries are further abused in The White Lioness (1993) which has Russian and African fugitives operating deeper networks of extremist groups that manifest an inexistent national security. The paper will reflect on the idea of an immigrant figure as potentially a victim, as a criminal. Finally, an engagement with the physical aspects of the represented urban spaces will facilitate a discussion on the (il)legality of immigration which punctures the welfare state now close to collapse.

Keywords: crime fiction, immigration, refugee, world literature, Swedish fiction

Seeking theory-practice relations between humanities and fine-arts through practice of painting

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303 views

Asmita Sarkar

PhD Candidate, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Email: asmita.sarkar@srishti.ac.in, ORCID ID 0000-0002-2024-5553

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s1n5

 Abstract

In recent years different art and design institutions around the world are increasingly looking at developing programs that are research intensive. Along with this trend, doctoral programs that are art and design practice based are becoming progressively common. There are several debates around the nature and significance of art and design practice as research (Sullivan 2005 Borgdorff, 2010, Eriksson 2010). Many have doubts about the exact nature of knowledge contribution made by these PhD theses.  One distinct aspect common to all these programs is that these consider creation of art or design artefacts a part of the research process. This paper will discuss some theoretical view-points and philosophical speculations such as discourse on material of art, performance embodiment, cultural-scientific knowledge behind creation of artefact. The aim is to show that the process oriented and performative aspects of art-practice can come into a meaningful dialogue with traditional humanities. In the present article the author/artist has drawn from the writings of art-historian James Elkins (2000) and philosopher Merleau-Ponty (1964,1993,2008)   to analyze her own work and devise a methodology of artistic research. The proposed methodology consists of two theoretical lens that are used to contextualize artist’s work: phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 1993, 2008) and elements of auto-ethnography (Alvesson 2003).  Thus, this paper develops a methodology that contextualizes artist’s intensely personal process of creation and critically evaluate this process. The result is a methodology of artistic research that can be a bridge between creative performance and critical research.

Keywords: phenomenological research, process and performance in humanities research, methodologies of practice-based research.

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