Postcolonial - Page 3

Spatial Imaginings in the Age of Colonial Cartographic Reason: Maps, Landscapes, Travelogues in Britain and India by Nilanjana Mukherjee

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London and New York: Routledge, 2021, xiii+300 pp., $160.00 (hardbound), ISBN 9780367749583

Sutapa Dutta

Gargi College, University of Delhi. Email:  sdutta.eng@gmail.com

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

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n4.25

Nilanjana Mukherjee’s book looks at construction of space, leading from imaginative to concrete contours, within the context of the British imperial enterprise in India. Fundamental to her argument is that colonial definitions of sovereignty were defined in terms of control over space and not just over people, and hence it was first necessary to map the space and inscribe symbols into it. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, imperialism and colonization were complex phenomena that involved new and imminent strategies of nation building. No other period of British history, as Linda Colley has noted, has seen such a conscious attempt to construct a national state and national identity (Colley 1992). Although the physical occupation of India by the British East India Company could be said to have begun with the battle of Plassey (1757), nevertheless the process of conquest through mediation of symbolic forms indicate the time and manner in which the ‘conquest’ was conscripted. Full-Text PDF>>

The (Un)governable City: Productive Failure in the Making of Colonial Delhi, 1858-1911 by Raghav Kishore

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Orient Blackswan. pp. 276, Rs. 895.00 (Hardbound), 2020. ISBN: 9789390122981.

Dr. Nilanjana Mukherjee

Assistant Professor, Department of English, Shaheed Bhagat Singh College, University of Delhi. Email: nilanjana.mukherjee@gmail.com

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

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n4.20

Delhi has always been a crucible of political disquiet, and the seat of manifold state and aesthetic desires to order, control and design the city. Even at this moment, we find ourselves before a ubiquitous impulse to change the appearance of the city through the Central Vista Project which proposes to cater to needs of increase in government office space. There are layers to the city and obvious enough, it is not monolithic. The vestiges and architectural remnants of subsequent ages narrate the relentless saga of power, domination and settlement. A historical analysis of the spatial structures reflects the reasons behind its physical organization. To talk about colonial designs within this very broad spectrum is but, only a brief moment in a longue duree of human settlement in this region. Yet, it is necessary to understand the spatial synchrony, for much of it is what we have inherited today and this is what shapes our experiences of this city even at present. Raghav Kishore’s The (Un)governable City (2020), makes an intervention in this corpus of historical analysis with his impeccable research and endless forays into the archives. This is a welcome addition to studies in the field of urban development of Delhi, with Pilar Maria Guerrieri’s Maps of Delhi (2017) being one precursor, which painstakingly curates maps of Delhi from the precolonial times, to the modern municipal Master Plans to contemporary digital mappings. Kishore unearths curious details from local sources and twines those with debates among colonial policy makers and personnel to highlight issues of political ideology, statecraft and governmentality. This volume juxtaposes notions of policing, control and accessibility with debates and discussions on sanitation, traffic, communication, railways and the building of military cantonments, which are significant if we think of the British rule in India as a garrison state, heavily dependent on the easy mobility of its military forces. The success of the control was conditional on the ability to gather up huge military forces to curb parallel sporadic outbursts at their very onset. The broadening of roads, regulation of quarters and delimiting encroachments and concerns over connectivity, were carefully thought out strategisations towards the goal of containment and territorialisation. Full-Text PDF>>

Transnational Spaces in Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason

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Ajay K. Chaubey

Assistant Professor (English) & Head, Dept. of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology, Uttarakhand, India. ORCID ID 0000-0002-6413-798. Email: kcajay79@gmail.com.

Volume 13, Number 3, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n3.43

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This essay maps the unmapped nuances of transnational/cultural spaces in Amitav Ghosh’s debut novel, The Circle of Reason (1986; 2008) which underscores the inter-territorial itinerary of Alu, the protagonist, who after being accused of being a terrorist, runs from Lalpukur, near Calcutta (now Kolkata) to Goa to Al-Ghazira, a fictional gulf-state and finally to Algeria. The novel, Bildungsroman in nature and thematic treatment, poignantly deals with James Clifford’s idea of ‘assimilation’ (of) / ‘travelling’ cultures, geo-political boundaries and hybridization of language. The rationale of the paper is to deconstruct the binaries—tradition and modernity; oriental and occidental cultures; and emigration and immigration, which are, to me, the themes of the narrative of the novel. Ghosh has dexterously intertwined the cultural matrix of different spaces in the novel to show how in this age of mobility, open economy and transnational migration, transcultural awareness is all to value.  This essay also traces the trajectory of mobility in the age of fluidity and underpins patterns of movement which affect cultural orientations, sensibilities, and, consequentially, creative expressions.

Keywords: Spatial shifting, Homi K Bhabha, James Clifford, and multiple identities.

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Relocating Colonial Women in Resistance: An Interpretation of Rabindranath Tagore’s Nastanirh and Chaturanga

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T. K. Krishnapriya1, Dr Padma Rani2, Dr Bashabi Fraser3

1Junior Research Fellow (UGC), Manipal Institute of Communication, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal, India; Email: krishnapriya.t1@learner.manipal.edu; ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5795-1275

2Director & Professor, Manipal Institute of Communication, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal, India; Email: padma.rani@manipal.edu

3Professor Emerita of English and Creative Writing, Director, Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies (ScoTs), School of Arts & Creative Industries, Edinburgh Napier University, Edinburgh; Email: bashabifraserwriter@gmail.com

 Volume 13, Number 3, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n3.38

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The Colonial Bengal of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was a place of contradictions. For instance, despite certain evident advancements in the resolution of the women’s question, some of the emancipatory attempts of the period marked a rather dubious account of women’s liberation as patriarchal underpinnings hegemonized the efforts.  Amid this complex backdrop, the colonial women’s position is further jeopardized by the western feminist scholarship that contrives colonial third world women as perennial victims and beneficiaries of emancipatory actions from the West. The paper attempts to relocate the colonial women and their resistance by negotiating the fissures in their construction. This study, informed by bell hooks’ (1990) postulations on margin and resistance, simultaneously seeks to form a bridge between the experiences of marginalized women beyond borders. Rabindranath Tagore’s Nastanirh (1901) and Chaturanga (1916) are chosen for close textual reading to examine the experiences of colonial women.  The author’s women protagonists often embody the social dilemma of the period. Tagore’s Damini and Charu exist in the margin of resistance whilst Nanibala occupies the margin of deprivation.  Significantly, Charu and Damini traverse the precarious “profound edges” of the margin to imagine a “new world” free of subjugation. Thus, the resistance offered by these women subverts the predominant conceptions of victimhood of colonial women, and it enables them to be posited as active agents.

Keywords: Tagore, hooks, Colonial Bengal, Resistance, Agency

 

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Bimala in Ghare-Baire: Tagore’s New Woman Relocating the “World in Her Home”

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Ayanita Banerjee (Ph.D)

Professor-English, University of Engineering and Management, New-Town, Kolkata. West Bengal. Email: abayanita8@gmail.com

 Volume 13, Number 3, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n3.37

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The character of Bimala in Tagore’s Ghare- Baire or The Home and the World as a symbol of struggle for the liberation of Bengali woman as well as Bengal remains at the centre of scholarly discussion since the publication (1916), translation (1919) and the film adaptation (1984) of the novel. Bimala, the main protagonist of the novel is presented as a native Indian woman who gets western education and lives a modern lifestyle due to her marriage. She has conflicting attitudes, feelings and thoughts which recur randomly in the narrative. The paper focusses on the character of Bimala and interrogates the location of her agency with respect to the rising Swadeshi movement and the political excesses on one hand and her relationship with Nikhil and Sandip on the other. On a further note, reflecting on the political and epic underpinnings of Bimala (caught between the gradual and the radical approach to Swadeshi), the paper intends to stretch beyond her “situation” (the apex of the triangular relationship) and explore her self-realization at the end of the novel. Bimala, the woman set between the option of choices between the ‘motherland’ and the ‘two-men’ gradually transgress from the shackles of her naïve identity to become the beset New Woman. To explore Tagore’s rewritten epic of a woman (epitomized in real life as the New Woman), we need to discuss how the writer helped shaping the image of the New Woman through his conscious evoking of Bimala in the role of Sita, Nikhil in the role of Rama and Sandip in the role of Ravana. In response to the popular inscriptions of Bharatmata, Tagore allegorises the iconographic representation of Bimala resembling the “divine feminine strength (Shakti)for creation and (Kali) for the cause of destruction.” (Pandit 1995,217-19).

 Keywords: Zenana, Epic battle, (Re)location, Bharatmata, New-Woman.

Who Remembers those “Undocumented Minors”? Locating the Genealogy of the Oppressed in Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends

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Indrajit Mukherjee

Assistant Professor, Dept. of English, Nistarini Women’s College, Research Scholar, Vidyasagar University. Email ID: perfectindrajit.mukherjee@gmail.com

 Volume 13, Number 3, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n3.35

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We can always look upon the intersection of history and events as an exciting façade, full of deceptions, half-baked truths, and awkward reconciliations in the framework of cultural studies. The Mexican author Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends (2017) attempts to trace the evolution of a set of social, political, and cultural circumstances that are pregnant with significance in the traumatic past of millions of Latin-American children refugees in the United States. First, the article will unpack how Luiselli’s impalpable domain tries to connect the unresolved experiences of the violent wounds of those children’s deportation and dislocation from Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico with their unfortunate encounters in the foreign land. Second, it will attempt to dismantle, disrupt, and deconstruct the construction of America as a heteroglossic space around the challenges of those displaced children by displaying some questions addressed to them at the immigrant court. Finally, the proposed paper will critically scrutinise how this non-fictional work follows the creeping imperialist approaches of the United States through the hazes of childhood recollections, making a heartfelt appeal to everyone to halt discrimination, racial hatred, and poisonous ignorance. Applying Agamben’s idea of the homo sacer, such a study will bring to the fore the dialectics of postcoloniality in the United States, where undocumented children’s claims to identity formation and self-determination processes would be at odds with the more comprehensive national identity in contemporary times.

Keywords: History, Refugees, Heteroglossic, Imperialist, Homo Sacer, Identity.

Refugees from South Asian Islamic States at the footsteps of Global North: Reading Moshin Hamid’s Exit West as an Anticipation of Postnational Future

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Minakshi Paul

Assistant Professor of English, Kandra Radhakanta Kundu Mahavidyalaya. Email: mp951204@gmail.com

 Volume 13, Number 3, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n3.34

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 One of the essential aspects which have been perpetually constituting and reconstituting the tumultuous geopolitical space of South Asia is its interface with the Global North. An inherent element of this interface materializes in terms of the rapidly escalating proportion of the displaced population from the Islamic South Asian and Central Asian countries afflicted with intense political tensions seeking shelter in the Global North regenerating the ground for the imperialist exclusionary politics in a newer manifestation. Considering the tensional position of the Islamic communities in global politics, British-Pakistani writer Moshin Hamid’s novel Exit West (2017) provides a platform for exploring the plight of the refugees from Islamic states of South Asia in the fortress regime of Global North who are denied being assimilated either in their home state in Global South or in the host countries of the Global North thus problematizing their political status. Corroborating Giorgio Agamben’s dismissal of national borders, Hamid deploys the trope of magical doors in his novel that instantaneously delivers the protagonists to different nations rendering the geopolitical borders meaningless. As the concerned conference aspires to obviate the thick smog of western critical theories which fail to address the local issues and local cultural experience, the present paper in this context examines the novel as an aesthetic and poetical account of the hostility and resentment of the indigenous population and assimilated citizenry towards the refugees, the primal loss of their psychic experience of ‘home’ challenging the ‘ethnonationalism’ and the right-wing populism of the western nations invoking the readers to acknowledge the truth of ‘Postnationalism’. This paper thus attempts to diagnose the methods of negotiating the tensional correspondence between Global North and Global South on account of these refugees with contested political and social identities imploring the readers to reexamine the gaps in the complacent, coherent identity of South Asia as a geopolitical unit.

Keywords: South Asia, Refugee, Postnationalism, citizenship, Global North

 

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The Duality of Arab Israeli Identity and the Politics of Survival in Sayed Kashua’s Let it Be Morning

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Neha Soman1, V. Suganya2 & Dr. B. Padmanabhan3

1ICSSR Doctoral Fellow, Department of English, Bharathiar University, neha.efl@buc.edu.in,  https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3900-3607O

2Research Scholar (PhD), Department of English, Bharathiar University, suganya.efl@buc.edu.in, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0989-2653

3Assistant Professor, Department of English, Bharathiar University, padmanabhan@buc.edu.in, https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7395-126X

 Volume 13, Number 3, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n3.33

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This essay closely reads the Arab Israeli author Sayed Kashua’s Let It Be Morning to construe the complex survival trajectories of the Arab minority in Israel’s plural society. Kashua discusses the relentless struggles of Arab Israelis, caught in-between their social identification with Israeli citizenship and Palestinian nationalism. The novel captures the subjective and collective consequences of Israel’s ethnic democracy on the Arab community and demonstrates the social patterns in which Arab Israelis perceive, experience, and respond to systematic social segregation. This essay, through its interpretation of Arab Israeli experiences, manifested in the novel explores the conflict of contested minority identities through the Saidian discourse of orientalism and Anderson’s imagined communities. The nature of intra-communal rivalry among the minority groups for survival is also of interest to this study as the narrative locates the behavioural changes observed within the Arab community due to the negative environmental circumstances. The study also posits the sociological aspects of reinforcement theories to construe human behaviour in politically challenging environments.

Keywords: Israel, Arabs, Communal living, Reinforcement, Survival, Behaviour, Coexistence

Abstract Knowledge, Embodied Experience: Towards a Literary Fieldwork in the Humanities

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Nobonita Rakshit1 & Rashmi Gaur2

1Doctoral Student, Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Roorkee, India. nrakshit@hs.iitr.ac.in, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8584-862X

2Professor, Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Roorkee, India, rashmi.gaur@hs.iitr.ac.in

 Volume 13, Number 3, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n3.31

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The paper attempts to read the representation and (re)creation of Sundarbans into the narrative structure of the three works of Amitav Ghosh- The Hungry Tide (2004), Gun Island (2019), and Jungle Nama: A Story of the Sundarban (2021) through the idea of ‘literary fieldwork’ that the paper develops by putting these literary narratives in conversation with the fieldwork narratives. Drawing from Puri and Castillo’s (2016) concept of “humanities fieldwork” and Ghosh’s (2016) idea of sensuous recognition and identifying the literary texts as primary data for fieldwork, the paper brings home a new reading practice which here qualifies not only the role of Ghosh, the literary ethnographer but also the natives of Sundarbans who narrate their own testimonies of the place and their politics of survival. Their embodied experiences of Sundarbans are embedded with the author’s literary experiments in the texts to advance the place of fieldwork in literary studies and redefine the ideas of fieldwork in the humanities in general. In other words, the paper dwells upon the author’s creative response in portraying the difference between the abstract knowledge of the Sundarbans and the embodied experience of the place that offers literary fieldwork within which it accommodates the points of view of the author, the natives, and the readers and thus, changes the conventional practices of perceiving fieldwork in humanities.

Keywords: Sundarbans, literary fieldwork, humanities fieldwork, sensuous recognition, literary ethnography.

 

 

Resistances to Autobiography: The Indian Experiment with life-writing

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Sanghamitra Sadhu

PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Cotton University, Guwahati, Assam & Former Fellow at Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. Email: sadhusanghamitra@gmail.com

 Volume 13, Number 3, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n3.30

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The article underlines that the epistemology of the self and the practice of life-writing in India marks a departure from the Western conventions and modes of expression. Although there are resistances to autobiography from the Western theoretical standpoint, the genre meets with a twofold resistance in postcolonial milieu in its negotiation with the Indian metaphysics of self. Autobiography in decolonising India negotiates complex pathways between an ardent adherence to Indian epistemology and a potent resistance to the Western modes of writing the self. In a framework to understand the phenomenon of resistance implicit in autobiography in general and the internal resistances to autobiography manifest in the genre during decolonisation in particular, the article argues that such resistances within the genre have redefined the very idea of the self in writing, generated a nuanced notion of the self in narration, as well as challenged the process of writing the self in decolonisation.

Keywords: autobiography, postcolonial life-writing, hybridity, decentering, decolonisation, India

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