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Consent, Choice and Stage: the Ambiguous Presence of Women in the KPAC

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Ashwathi

PhD Scholar, CWS, JNU, New Delhi- 110067. ORCID: 0000-0001-6048-7859.

Email: ashwathip02@gmail.com

Volume 11, Number 3, October-December, 2019 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v11n3.04

Abstract

Women had already started marking artistic endeavors and hence situating their identity in their respective fields by the early twentieth century. The left political movements and the socio-cultural movements, which were the by-product of and the supporting source for the political movements, also ‘included’ women as their members. Plays and theatre were one of the important fields in this respect in Kerala. Women were given ‘consent’ to make their ‘choices’ to make public appearances and be associated with these movements. But who were the consent givers to these women? This paper would look at the concept of men’s consent and women’s choices through the KPAC theatre and the plays. This paper would problematize the question of the importance of men’s consent in women’s decision making and the choices that they make for themselves. This paper would try to see what role and how this act of men’s consenting has influenced the female members of the KPAC as well as in the shaping of the characters in the plays produced by them.

Keywords: Women, Consent, Men’s Consent, Choice

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Marginalised in the New Wave Tamil Film: Subaltern Aspirations in three films by Bala, Kumararaja and Mysskin

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Sreeram Gopalkrishnan

Symbiosis International University, sreeram.gopalkrishnan@scmc.edu.in, Orcid id https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9360-365X. Scopus id 56659374000

Volume 11, Number 3, October-December, 2019 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v11n3.03

Abstract

In the last decade a new kind of Tamil film was noticed, widely celebrated as new wave, neo-noir, ‘Madurai genre’ and even as a backlash to the ‘Rasigar Mandram’(Fan Clubs) Stars of mainstream cinema. The rise of such films was in itself an achievement considering the commercial stranglehold of the politico-cultural ecosystem in the Tamil film industry. The new directors moved away from the bubble of ‘mass scene’(grand super hero entry scene) appearances, political innuendos, super star ‘punch’ dialogues and fan club worship of pouring milk on opening day giant-size ‘cutouts’. What the new Tamil films did portray were marginalized, subaltern low-caste characters with aspirations built around grim storylines, expository dialogues and dark themes. This article endeavors to thematically analyse three ‘new wave’ Tamil films and trace the underlying strains of a new generation narrative drawn out from the dirty underbelly of ‘post-Dravidian Rajni-persona Superstar cinema’.

 Keywords: Tamil New Wave, Neo Noir, Marginalised, Film, Caste, Rajini-persona

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Review Article A Bengali Bride in the Land of the Rising Sun: Review of Somdatta Mandal’s The Journey of a Bengali Woman in Japan and Other Essay

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Translation of Hariprabha Takeda’s Bangomohilar Japan Jatra o Ananya Rachana

(Kolkata: Jadavpur University Press, 2019). ISBN: 978-93-83660-47-6; Rs.350.00

Reviewed by

Swati Ganguly

Professor of English, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan. Email: ganguly.swati@gmail.com

Volume 11, Number 3, October-December, 2019 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v11n3.02

The marriage of Hariprabha Basu Mallick, a young Bengali woman with Oemon Takeda, a Japanese national in 1907, Bengal, was exotic enough to be the stuff of fiction especially by those Indians who write in English. Unfortunately, very little is known about this rather unusual alliance except that Oemon Takeda had travelled in search of a job and had landed one as the technical supervisor in the Bulbul Soap factory in Dhaka owned by Hariprabha’s father Sashibhushan Basu Mallick, an entrepreneur who was a liberal Brahmo social reformer. Monzurul Huq, the editor of one of the Bengali editions of her memoir, has suggested that Takeda probably began going to the Brahmo Samaj to alleviate his boredom, to socialize. Apparently it is here that he is likely to have met Hariprabha and fell in love. These are all felicitous speculations and it is a pity that Hariprabha, who wrote about her travel to Japan, remained silent about their courtship (if any). Yet, the blossoming of romance between a Japanese man and a Bengali woman had a precedent: Okakura Tensin, a sophisticated Japanese art- cultural impresario and Priyamvada Devi, a very well known Bengali poet, who were contemporaries of Oemon and Hariprabha. Keep Reading

Sylvia Plath, the Well-Bred Malaise, and its Confession in ‘Daddy’

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S. Z. Abbas

Associate Professor, Department of English Language and Literature, Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University, Wadi Al Dawasir, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Email: s.abbas@psau.edu.sa

Volume 11, Number 3, October-December, 2019 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v11n3.01

Abstract

Writing confessional lyrics, which are highly subjective and intensely personal, needs an extraordinarily sensitive mind that tends to break down while systematically probing that narrow and violent area of experience between the viable and the impossible, transmuted into poetry. This was Plath’s “way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience.” Plath’s neurosis led her to commit suicide at the age of thirty-one, and since then critics have not been able to study her poetry away from her tempestuous life. The article studies a probable link between creativity and mental illness that Dean Keath Simonton calls ‘Mad-Genius Paradox,’ thereby floating a hypothesis that either it was Sylvia Plath’s writing that made her depressed and eventually influenced her decision to commit suicide or it was her depression and psychopathology that influenced her poetry, which resulted in her best collection Ariel. The article also studies her poem ‘Daddy,’ which is included in Ariel, hailed as “the Guernica of Modern Poetry,” more of a dying statement in a “controlled hallucination,” and concludes that Plath’s confessional mode, her psychosis, and her creative genius finds a zenith in the poem. ‘Daddy’ is a Freudian exercise where Plath finds her muse in her father while rejecting him and her ex-husband Ted Hughes as Fascists, who she adored as every woman does. The poem shows how the fall of the paternal ideal at the age of eight, resurrected in her matrimony with Ted Hughes, repeats itself, and therefore she should kill them both to be through.

Keywords: Sylvia Plath, Confessional Poetry, Mad-Genius Paradox, ‘Daddy,’ Trauma

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From Minimalism to the Absurd: “The Intent of Undoing” in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot

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S. Z. Abbas

Associate Professor. Department of English Language and Literature, Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University, Wadi Al Dawasir, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. s.abbas@psau.edu.sa

Volume 11, Number 2, July-September, 2019 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v11n2.18

First published September 30, 2019

Abstract

Waiting for Godot ushered in an era of Absurd drama that drew on not only modern thought about life but also the modern image of life. Samuel Beckett, unlike Sartre and Camus as playwrights, stripped the façade of the modern existence and laid bare the scene with the minimum in its real image. To project such a stark condition of human experience Beckett chose to present us the maximum with “mere-most minimum.” The message in Godot appears to be existentialist, which Beckett denied, for he asserted that if ever he read philosophy it was Descartes, who gave the dictum ‘cogito ergo sum,’ or “I think therefore I am,” something that reflects a positive undertone of the play. Minimalism of form and content thus becomes the vehicle of the Absurd in Waiting for Godot. Beckett becomes the pioneer of the minimalist art in modern drama and champions ‘linguistic gravity’ without any traditional structure of plot. There are series of incidents but they don’t amount to anything and even incidence maybe too big a word. The characters sort of improvise in order to fill the time. The dialogue is repetitious, illogical and nonsensical; the characterisation is sketchy and inconsistent. Although theatre is the most concrete literary form available, when you see Waiting for Godot you are definitely seeing a set that consists of a tree and a road and you see five actors impersonating five people. That much is concrete. But no fact or relationship about that place or those people is ever certain. All is questioned and all is in flux. Beckett is not presenting an argument toward the conclusion of existential absurdity. He is presenting images of absurdity.

Keywords: Absurd; Minimalism; Waiting; Godot; Beckett; Undoing

Morphological Classification of Dysphemisms in Artistic Discourse

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Olga N. Prokhorova, Olga V. Dekhnich, Elena S. Danilova, Vladislav A. Kuchmistyy, Ekaterina F. Bekh

Belgorod State University, Russia

 Volume 11, Number 2, July-September, 2019 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v11n2.16

First published September 30, 2019

 ABSTRACT:

Due to the wide-spread use of dysphemisms in contemporary speech, the topic of dysphemia has become extremely important. At the same time, research on this issue is clearly not sufficient to cover this phenomenon in full. This study pursued the following goal: to analyze the morphological features of dysphemisms within the framework of artistic discourse. The concept of dysphemism was described, and a classification of dysphemisms in contemporary linguistics was provided. Dysphemisms represented by different parts of speech were analyzed, enabling conclusions to be drawn about the features and frequency of dysphemism use. All results were illustrated with examples from artistic discourse. The research findings are summarized in the conclusion.

Keywords: artistic discourse, dysphemism, dysphemia, euphemism, classification

Review Article: Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Forest of Enchantments: A Saga of Duty, Betrayal, Integrity and Honour

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Sukanya Saha

Assistant Professor Department of English and Foreign Languages, SRM Institute of Science and Technology, Kattankulathur campus, Chennai, Tamilnadu. sukanyap@srmist.edu.in

Book Name: The Forest of Enchantments

Genre: Fiction

Author: Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers India

Year of Publication: 2019

Total Pages: 359

Volume 11, Number 2, July-September, 2019 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v11n2.13

First published September 30, 2019

 

…not all women are weak and helpless like you think. (111)

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni weaves the fabric of her Sitayan with strings essentially pulled out from Sage Valmiki’s Ramayan. She deftly accomplishes the dual task of adhering to the originality of this ancient text and introducing a renewed perception through which this epic could be reconsidered as base for moral standings. The images, characters, facts, and ideals of Ramayan are deep-seated in Indian consciousness and Banerjee infuses with it the enchanting quality of her storytelling to recreate them from Sita’s perspective. Her motifs are familiar yet molded to reverberate her stance. She adopted a novel approach anchored firmly in values inculcated through Ramayan. Her inversions often fringe on condemning lopsided judgements about moralities, yet she consciously eschews the prospects of remodeling the venerable narrative which the reader, yearning for happy endings, would have been thrilled to find though. Banerjee often stimulates a penetrating wish, a fond thought, about inverse turn of events during her narration. A sincere urge to experience the transformed fates of characters in Ramayan grows increasingly strong while reading The Forest of Enchantments. Keep Reading

Eating Well in Uncle’s House: Bengali Culinary practices in a bucolic Calcutta/Kolkata in Amit Chaudhuri’s A Strange and Sublime Address

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Rajarshi Mitra
Indian Institute of Information Technology Guwahati, Ambari, Assam. mitrarajarshi24@gmail.com

Volume 11, Number 2, July-September, 2019 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v11n2.12

First published September 30, 2019

Abstract:

Kolkata has had a long and troubled relationship with food and hunger, which has shaped Bengali food-practices in the city. From famine in the 1940’s to food-movement of the 1960’s, as food production dwindled, Kolkata saw a gradual decline of its economic fortune. In the 1970’s and 80’s, it was common to portray Kolkata as a failed postcolonial metropolis filled with starving millions. With this troubled history in the backdrop, this paper focuses on culinary experiences in Kolkata as reflected in Amit Chaudhuri’s novella A Strange and Sublime Address. The novella, in its bid to highlight the trivial and the mundane in Bengali life in Kolkata in the early 1990’s, portrays culinary experiences as epiphanic expressions of an introverted, inner existence. Chaudhuri describes food-practices in an attempt to preserve an esoteric food-system – a system that connects inner life with cooking, serving and eating of food. Bengali food-practices, I argue, appear in this novella as “edible chronotopes” (Krishenblatt-Gimblett) revealing a culture’s fascination with time and food. Through Bengali food practices the novella’s protagonist Sandeep mourns a deep loss he feels about his lack of connection to Kolkata and learns to cultivate a sense of reticence, which allows him to absorb the joy of merging with the life in the city in its banal and quotidian form.  I further connect Chaudhuri’s search for the inner self in culinary practices with his journey to what he terms “bucolic” Kolkata – a journey Ashish Nandy had termed “an ambiguous journey to the city”.

Keywords: city, food and hunger, culinary experience, post-colonialism, Amit Chaudhuri

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“I Identify Myself as Russian Although I Have Never Been to Russia”: Ways of Transferring Identity and Language to Children among the Russian-Speaking Population of the USA

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Tatyana Nikolaevna Yudina1, Maria Grigorevna Kotovskaya2, Maria Vladimirovna Zolotukhina3 & Dina Kabdullinovna Tananova4

1Russian State Social University, Moscow, Russia

2Institute of Ethnology and anthropology, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia

3National Research Nuclear University MEPhI and Russian State University named after ?.N. Kosygin, Moscow, Russia

4Russian State Social University, Moscow, Russia

Volume 11, Number 2, July-September, 2019 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v11n2.22

Abstract:

The main goal of the paper is to analyze ideas and practices  involved in the transmission of the Russian language and culture among members of Russian -speaking diaspora in the United States, mostly belonging to the two recent waves of immigration from the Soviet Union and Russia and residing in different parts of America. The bulk of academic publications for this paper were released in Russia with some from the US. Three methods were used: a questionnaire (80 questions, both open-ended and closed distributed via google form among middle-age and young members of the Russian -speaking community – 52 respondents), semi-structured interviews (a total of 20) and participant observation, primarily in Boston area and Ann Arbor, MI. When reflecting on affiliation with the Russian-speaking world the preservation of language and its transmission to future generations is viewed as the most important element of everyday life and aspiration for the Russian-speaking population regardless of their ethnic origin, religious beliefs, political preferences and social status. This attitude, perceived as critical for preserving cultural identity, appears to be true even for cases when such transmission did not prove to be successful.

Keywords: Russian language, the Russian diaspora, community, identity, the Russian-speaking world, integration, assimilation, everyday practices, traditions.

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Translation as a Cultural Dialogue between the East and the West: Re-reading ‘The Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech’ by Tagore

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Joyjit Ghosh

Department of English, Vidyasagar University, Midnapore- 721102, West Bengal. Email: joyjitghosh@mail.vidyasagar.ac.in

Volume 11, Number 2, July-September, 2019 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v11n2.21

First published September 30, 2019

Abstract

Rabindranath Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize for his English translation of Gitanjali in 1913. He was at once accepted by the Western people as one of their own poets. In the ‘The Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech’, Tagore, however, categorically stated that he must not accept the laurels as his ‘individual share’ because he represented the East and it was the East in him that gave to the West. Tagore always believed in a cooperation of cultures across the world. He was certain that he belonged to an age which bore witness to the meeting of the East and the West. The present paper while making an analytical study of ‘The Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech’ will try to establish that the objective of Tagore’s translation of Gitanjali into English was not merely to ‘rekindle’ the aesthetic delight which the poet once experienced during the composition of the work in Bengali but to create a space for a dialogue between two separate spheres of civilization – the East and the West.

Keywords: Culture, Dialogue, Meeting, Mission, Translation

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