Gender Studies - Page 9

Psychosocial Impacts of War and Trauma in Temsula Ao’s Laburnum for My Head

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210 views

Raam Kumar T.1 & B. Padmanabhan2

1PhD Research Scholar, Department of English and Foreign Languages, Bharathiar University, E-mail: raamkumar.efl@buc.edu.in. ORCID: 0000-0003-0694-8671
2Assistant Professor, Department of English and Foreign Languages, Bharathiar University, E-mail: padmanabhan@buc.edu.in. ORCID: 0000-0001-7395-126X

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s16n4

 Abstract

Violence constantly carries trauma and suffering to combatants as well as non- combatants identically. It also brings enmity and negativity to everyone both emotionally and physically. The cause for any conflict does not emerge from single motive but depends on multiple factors like socioeconomic conditions, marginalisation, discrimination, political power and sometimes even environmental elements. In recent times, the conflicts often emerge among various regional groups rather than states. North Eastern part of India is one of the hotspots for such ethnic conflicts and violence. The major motives for bloody conflict between Indian Army and the underground armed rebels are perceived political imbalance and desire for a separate nation. Even the common civilians are forced to join the rebel groups without knowing consequences. Temsula Ao is one of the prominent English writers from Nagaland who through her moving narratives brings out the existent misery of conflict in her native land. The aim of this paper is to study the psychological impact of domestic violence over the combatants as well as non-combatants whose lives are inseparably intertwined with violence and bloodshed. Though violence is considered as typical condition of human nature most of the time it leads to unbearable trauma and misery. This paper also attempts to interpret the representation of women from the marginalised Ao community who finds difficult to preserve the customs and moral values in spite of regional revolt.

Keywords: Psychological imbalance, Domestic violence, Aggression, North East India

Women and Agency in Bankim’s Rajmohan’s Wife and Tagore’s The Home and The World

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415 views

Manju Dhariwal

Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, The LNM Institute of Information Technology, Jaipur. ORCID: 0000-0002-1579-1218, Email: manju@lnmiit.ac.in

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s16n3

Abstract

Written almost half a century apart, Rajmohan’s Wife (1864) and The Home and the World (1916) can be read as women centric texts written in colonial India. The plot of both the texts is set in Bengal, the cultural and political centre of colonial India. Rajmohan’s Wife, arguably the first Indian English novel, is one of the first novels to realistically represent ‘Woman’ in the nineteenth century. Set in a newly emerging society of   India, it provides an insight into the status of women, their susceptibility and dependence on men. The Home and the World, written at the height of Swadeshi movement in Bengal, presents its woman protagonist in a much progressive space. The paper closely examines these two texts and argues that women enact their agency in relational spaces which leads to the process of their ‘becoming’. The paper analyses this journey of the progress of the self, which starts with Matangini and culminates in Bimala. The paper concludes that women’s journey to emancipation is symbolic of the journey of the nation to independence.

Key Words: Swadeshi, Nationalism, Female agency, Patriarchy, Liminality

Unraveling the Social Position of Women in Late-Medieval Bengal: A Critical Analysis of Narrative Art on Baranagar Temple Facades

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264 views

Bikas Karmakar1 & Ila Gupta2

1Assistant Professor, Government College of Art & Craft Calcutta. bikaskarmakar@gmail.com

2Former Professor, Department of Architecture & Planning, IIT Roorkee. ilafap@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s16n2

Abstract

The genesis of the present study can be traced to an aspiration to work on the narratives of religious architecture. The Terracotta Temples of Baranagar in Murshidabad, West Bengal offer a very insightful vantage point in this regard. The elaborate works of terracotta on the facades of these temples patronized by Rani Bhabani during the mid-eighteenth century possess immense narrative potential to reconstruct the history of the area in the given time period. The portrayals on various facets of society, environment, culture, religion, mythology, and space and communication systems make these temples exemplary representatives for studying narrative art. While a significant portion of the temple facades depicts gods, goddesses, and mythological stories, the on-spot study also found a substantial number of plaques observed mainly on the base friezes representing the engagement of women in various mundane activities. This study explores the narrative intentions of such portrayals. The depictions incorporated are validated with various types of archival evidence facilitating cross-corroboration of the sources. The study sheds light on the crucial role played by women in domestic spheres and their engagement in social activities. The portrayals act as indispensable visual evidence for a holistic understanding of the life of women in Late Medieval Bengal. However, with the passage of time, the temples have been susceptible to the processes of decay necessitating the need for conservation and urgent restoration of this invaluable heritage site.

Keywords: Terracotta temples, Baranagar temple facades, women of Late Medieval Bengal, narrative art, Murshidabad temple architecture.

 

Understanding Women-Nature Dynamics: Eco-consciousness as a Quest for Identity in Selected Texts from Assam

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340 views

Paloma Chaterji

Research Coordinator in Organic Studies at M.G.gramudyog. E-mail: chaterjipaloma@yahoo.in, ORCID: 345382637

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s15n1

Abstract

My paper will explore the constantly changing dynamics of women-nature relationship through social and cultural history of Assam. I will gradually explore the eco-consciousness and the changing principles of my subjects as I shift my focus from the Shakti cult, to the Vaishnavite, to the modern urbanised subjects of the texts. The women characters in these texts will be the primary focus of this study as I begin to explore how they struggle to recognize their individual identity and how their association with nature comes as a response to accommodate what has been rendered passive by patriarchy. I will reflect on how the ever ideal and nurturing image of nature is problematic. The place-specific behavior of the characters in my study will offer a better vision of how women combat the ever presence patriarchal horrors through interaction with nature. Such an interaction reveals how nature actually makes women conscious of their individuality. This study will convey how free spirited nature helps these women overcome their limited space laced with patriarchal beliefs of selfless nurturing where the self is denied. Building on postcolonial critics like Chandra Mohanty, I would like to explore the discursive limits set by the processes of homogenization to which Assamese women have been subjected by a range of texts. This paper will explore the changing configurations of these limits and their implications, especially with regard to their interpellation in patriarchy. Through gendered readings of representative texts like Indira Goswami’s The Man from Chinnamasta and The Moth Eaten Howdah of the Tuskar and Mitra Phukan’s The Collector’s Wife, I will try to dismantle the essentialist binaries of nature/culture, men/women. Finally, this paper aims to dilute the ‘feminine’ and the ‘masculine’ principles and looks beyond the gynocentric essentialism of both nature and women.

Keywords: Nature, Gynocentrism, Eco Consciousness, Patriarchy, Postcolonialism

Resisting Sexual Colonization, Reclaiming Denied Spaces: A Reading of Tattooed with Taboos: An Anthology of Poetry by Three Women from Northeast India

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314 views

Anindya Syam Choudhury1 & Amrita Bhattacharyya2

1Associate Professor, Department of English, Assam University, Silchar, Assam. ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0365-9663. Email: anindyasyam@yahoo.com

2Assistant Professor, AISER, Amity University, Kolkata, West Bengal. ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6529-3842. Email: arushi.asmi13@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s13n4

Abstract

In the pervasiveness of the dominant male voices in literature, the resistant female voices have traditionally got drowned. This has made the act of identification and foregrounding of the works of women an important political act, enabling women to gain agency by focusing attention on the silences and taboos on their bodies, sexualities, desires and pleasures thereby disrupting the hegemonic patriarchal establishment. It is in this context that this paper attempts to make a reading of Tattooed with Taboos: An Anthology of Poetry by Three Women from Northeast India, a collection of seventy-seven poems which tries to understand what it means to be a woman in a society fettered with the shackles of patriarchy. The resistance in the anthology (first published in 2011), complied by poets who hail from a peripheral province in the Indian nation-state, begins with the cover design, which powerfully foregrounds a picture of the hem of a phanek (a traditional sarong-like dress worn by women in Manipur), which, because of the norm created by the social matrix of the patriarchal Manipuri society, is regarded as inauspicious and untouchable for the menfolk because of its association with the body of the woman. The paper endeavours to explore how the picture of a vilified piece of dress, symbolising the social control of women’s bodies, becomes in the hands of these women poets potent cultural capital as they go about resisting in/through their poetry the sexual colonisation of their bodies and the smothering of their desires by a patriarchal society. In this context, the paper attempts to look at how the poets in this anthology try to re-historicise the pain, sufferings and trauma inscribed on the ‘abject’ bodies of women by questioning the existing discourse and trying to find a new way of viewing/writing their bodies. This endeavour on the part of the poets, as this paper tries to show, leads them to express a desire to trespass into spaces usually denied to women in the personal and the public.

Keywords: Abject bodies, Northeast India, poetry, resistance, sexual colonization

Negotiating Alienation and marginality in the Selected Verses of Indo-Guyanese Poet Mahadai Das

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268 views

Renuka Laxminarayan Roy

Assistant Professor, Department of English, Seth Kesarimal Porwal College, Kamptee. ORCID: 0000-0002-2714-160X. E-mail: royrenuka80@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s13n3

Abstract

 Indo-Caribbean literature opens a new vista of study of successful female poets and writers who have contested a literary space for themselves in the arena of West Indian literary discourse. These female writers have boldly denounced any legacy of Eurocentric literature and established their independent school of writing. The emancipation from ‘colonial possessiveness’, (July,1993, p. 80) (a term used by Ramabai Espinet in her writing) and a frantic effort to find new roots in the land of exile are the unique features of Indo-Caribbean literature. A rich cultural heritage, ancestral art, exotic cuisine, customs and costumes are the marks of exclusive oriental culture that is distinctly imprinted in their literature. Indo-Guyanese poetess, Mahadai Das (1954-2003), a prolific poetess of South- Asian descent in her collection of poetry I want to be a Poetess of my People (1977) presents an unparalleled account of the Guyanese people’s journey from immigration to independence. The episodes of violence, mutilation and physical abuse gave Indo-Caribbean female writers a new ability to articulate their woes of immigration and annihilation. The images like sailing back to India, the torments of indentureship and exile as well as racial and political turmoil in the land are interwoven together to form the prime content of their work. These female writers battle the fear of female authorship, since their voice had been long suppressed owing to the monopoly of male literary artists in the mainstream West Indian literature. The present paper proposes to study the theme of alienation and marginality as reflected in the selected verses of Indo-Guyanese writer Mahadai Das.

 Keywords: Indo-Guyanese literature, immigration, racial and cultural conflict.

Reconceptualising Female Disordered Eating and Body-Image Perceptions: A Gynocentric Trajectory Through the New-media

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256 views

Deepali Mallya M

Assistant Professor, Christ (deemed to be) University, Bangalore, Karnataka. ORCID ID: 0000-0002-7760-3593. Email: deepali.mallya@christuniversity.in

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s12n6

Abstract

Depriving the body from eating and developing a phobia about food is a vital attribute of the neurotic ailment, Anorexia Nervosa. Conspicuously, this is labeled as a female disorder. Various studies have examined that the germination point of this disorder is substantially based on the social presumptions such as, “Thin is beautiful.” In the psychoanalytical sense, this can be a response to ‘lack’ or ‘deficiency’ communicated through Lacanian Symbolic Order. This ‘lack’ unconsciously drives the female to look or become ‘thin.’  As proven in the various studies, this disciplinary project is marked by unattainability. Hence, this desire only ensues in female dejection and shame; further, it also restores her ‘deficiency.’ Nevertheless, in the last decade, new-media tools may have transformed the dynamics of female bodily-presumptions and their disordered eating. Various body-positive new-media handles seem to have deposed the Lacanian ‘lack’ and the ‘Symbolic Order’ only to replace them with an unrestrained and real female language. In this lieu, the paper theoretically critiques the Lacanian notions of female ‘Lack’ in the new-media domain. This study attempts to reconceptualise the trajectory of disordered eating and the female body-images from the twentieth century through the twenty-first century (i.e., with the augmentation of new-media).

Keywords: body-image, disorder-eating, female-language, Lack, new-media, Symbolic-order

Gender, Religion and Nationalism: Locating Muslim women in Indian Nationalist Discourse in Momtaz Shah Nawaz’s The Heart Divided

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293 views

Suma Chisti

PhD Research Scholar, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Kharagpur, E-mail: chisti.suma000@gmail.com, ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7304-7481

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 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s12n5

Abstract

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century colonial India, with the dramatic changes in socio-political scenario the nationalist discourse in India was significantly reshaped. And with the rise of a new nationalist discourse in India, the position and representation of women in Indian nationalist discourse was rethought and redefined – first, because of the rise of Goddess-centric nationalist rhetoric and secondly, the nationalist leaders’ promotion of and call for women participation in the freedom movement. Historian, critics and social scientists find women liberation movement, social reform and cultivation of feminist discourse in India intertwined with the rise of nationalism or national movement in the country. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century India witnessed the emergence of nationalist concepts of “New Women”, “Modern Indian Women” or “Mother India”. And the rise of these ideas substantiates both the subjective and objective position of women in Indian nationalist discourse. But so far as the position or representation of Indian Muslim women in Indian nationalist discourse is concerned, it has always been difficult to address the issue. While addressing this problem of the position of Indian Muslim women in Indian nationalist discourse some more points and facts need to be taken into account– first, the rise of Two Nation Theory which demanded a separate country for the Muslims of undivided India; secondly, the emergence of the secularist trend of Indian nationalism; thirdly, the significant rise of Hindu nationalism and fourthly, Muslims’ exceptional adherence to the practice of women seclusion due to their religious sentiment. In her novel The Heart Divided (1957) Momtaz Shah Nawaz, a Muslim woman writer of the undivided India, addresses all these concerns. In the novel she tries to figure out a definite role and position of Indian Muslim women in the nationalist discourse of colonial India during anti-colonial movement. My paper tries to explore the position of Muslim women in Indian nationalist discourse through a critical reading of the said novel. It attempts to find out how Muslim women had both the subjective and objective position in Indian nationalism during the freedom struggle. It also tries to address whether the nationalist terms like “New Women”, “Mother India” or “Modern Indian Women” are applicable for the Indian Muslim women.

Keywords: Nationalism, New Women, Muslim Women, Gender, Religion, Two Nation Theory

Women in Popular Korean Drama: In Need of Embracing ‘Cyborg’ Feminism

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537 views

Kamna Singh

Assistant Professor of English, Punjab Engineering College, Chandigarh. E-mail: kamnasingh@pec.edu.in

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s12n4

 Abstract

Women in Korean television dramas are depicted as modern, multifaceted, feminine and feminist. However, while rich, varied and complex on the surface; the female characters reveal their identities as remaining bound by traditional notions of what it means to be female, albeit a feminist female. Previous studies in this area are few and far between and do not focus on recently aired shows. As Korean dramas play a vital, conscious and subconscious role in shaping the individual and society, such research is the need of the hour; more so as the global popularity of these dramas has made them the unofficial cultural ambassadors of Asia. Through the lens of Donna Haraway’s feminist theory, this paper applies qualitative textual analysis to selected Korean dramas aired in the summer of the year 2020. It finds that female characters in these shows need to embrace what Haraway calls ‘cybernetic identity’. Using the symbol of the cyborg which is gender-neutral, these characters need to embrace ‘multigenderism’ without concern for what ‘category’ this will put them in, thus allowing their self-expression without the binary constraints of being ‘male’ or ‘female’ or the fear of being ‘something in between genders’. This research aims to further Gender Studies and inspire depictions of characters devoid of any preconceived notions in Korean dramas.

 Keywords: Postmodern Feminism, Haraway, Korean Drama, Qualitative Textual analysis

Beyond Postcoloniality: Female Subjectivity and Travel in Jamaica Kincaid’s Among Flowers

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234 views

Subarna Bhattacharya

Assistant Professor, Department of English, Symbiosis College of Arts and Commerce, Pune, E-mail: subarna.bhattacharya@live.com

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s12n3

Abstract

In feminist studies, the relation between gender and travel has been addressed in many important critical discourses. Feminist critics have pointed out that travel writing had for long remained oblivious about women’s travel, one reason being that travel was, forever, a masculinist exercise. Underlining the gendered aesthetics of travel writing, feminist criticism has read women’s travelogues as interesting sites of struggle between repeating the normative patterns of male travelling and casting an ‘alternative’ gaze. However, reading women’s travel writing simply as feminist narratives against their masculinist counterparts can be an oversimplification, as it may mean ignoring the deeper complexities underlying the texts. Being an autobiographical form, travel writing creates textual spaces where the formation of selfhood happens through a constant negotiation of the ‘self’ with the ‘world’, not only in terms of gender, but also other subject identities like race, class, and culture. In this context, my paper proposes to read Jamaica Kincaid’s Among Flowers. A Walk in the Himalaya (2005), as a female travel writing, where the question of gender intertwines with her non-white, ex-colonial, diasporic identity during her travel in Himalayan Nepal. My focus would be on examining the writer’s narratorial self as a female agency, influencing, and negotiating her postcolonial identity. The paper will try to address how the travelogue functions as a register of female experiences, while Kincaid, as a post-colonial black traveller, negotiates her position within the existing imperialist paradigm of white travelling.

Keywords: travel, travel-writing, gender, feminism, postcolonialism

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