Volume 11 Number 1 2019

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

Human Rights and the Medical Care Narrative

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Neeraja Sundaram

Volume 11, Number 1, 2019 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v11n1.10

Abstract

This paper aims to find convergences in the field of Human Rights and Literature and the literary study of illness narratives. Both these fields of study focus on the emergence of a new kind of subject via the telling of stories that organize experiences of traumatic suffering. The central focus in Human Rights and Literary studies continues to be on the narration of atrocities ranging from genocide, torture and imprisonment to the condition of people inhabiting conflict zones. Literary studies of the medical memoir, a sub-genre of the autobiography, is similarly interested in the discursive processes and strategies through which individuals come to terms with experiencing and witnessing physical decline, death and impairment because of illness. I hope to show in this paper that narratives of illness can be productively situated within a Human Rights framework and will thus allow us to see these narratives as performing a crucial role in the social imaginary of rights and ethics in the context of medical care.

Keywords: medical memoir, Human Rights, narratives of illness, medical care

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Inhuman Rights: Components of Spectrality in Anil’s Ghost

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Jan Gresil S. Kahambing

Leyte Normal University, Tacloban City, Philippines, vince_jb7@hotmail.com, ORCID: 0000-0002-4258-0563

Volume 11, Number 1, 2019 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v11n1.09

Abstract

Human rights discourse in Ondaatje’s novel Anil’s Ghost is premised in the insistence of seeking responsibility for the deaths of the victims and viewing them within a shared sense of humanity. Although inserted with throwbacks, there is a linearity in the text that proceeds with Anil and Sarath seeking Sailor’s human identity. Taking an alternative from this linear fashion, this paper presents the discourse of rights within an inhuman or spectral turn. To do this, the paper exposes some components of spectrality or spectralizations in the novel, namely: 1) Plural and Re-SriLankanized Spectrality, 2) Good and Bad Spectrality, and 3) Delirious Spectrality, and how these reflect further the inhuman or spectral character of rights.

Keywords: Humanity, Rights, Anil’s Ghost, Spectrality, Inhuman

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The Violated Body: Human Rights in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People

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Deepak Basumatary

Assistant Professor, Department of English, Kokrajhar Govt. College, Assam, India. ORCHID: 0000-0002-6605-5608. Email: dbjustlikethatonly@gmail.com

Volume 11, Number 1, 2019 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v11n1.08

Abstract:

India’s history is interspersed with human rights abuses, particularly in conflict zones. Poverty, social hierarchy, institutional weaknesses, corruption, marginalisation of the various minorities/subalterns and an inaccessible justice system has to a large extent made India a democracy only in name and paper. Human lives in India are valued differently and human rights have become a far cry for people living in the margins. The story of the innocent victims of the Union Carbide Corporation (UCC) industrial disaster at Bhopal in 1984 is a testimony to this. The deaths and sufferings due to the diseases caused by this man-made (industrial) disaster sadly remain mere statistics in the pages of the nation’s history. Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007) is a narrative which exposes the human rights abuses of the poor, marginalized and disempowered people whose lives apparently matters less to the state. Sinha’s Animal is a metaphor of human rights abuse by the state and the society at large. Out of the countless number of stories that has emerged from the embers of this monumental disaster Sinha’s novel is significant, because it is a narrative that exposes the question of what it means to be human and the lack of (human) rights of the marginalized people. Animal’s People is an alternate history of India.

Keywords: democracy deficit, disability, discourse, grotesque body, grotesque realism, human rights, justice, marginalisation, narrative, normalisation, norms.

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Hanna Rambe’s Mirah of Banda as a ‘Quiet’ Narrative on Livability

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V. Bharathi Harishankar

Professor and Head, Department of Women Studies, University of Madras. Email: omkarbharathi@gmail.com

Volume 11, Number 1, 2019 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v11n1.07

Abstract

Hanna Rambe’s Mirah of Banda presents the life of the protagonist from the age of five to her twilight years, as a kidnapped child, nutmeg worker on contract, concubine of the Dutch master and cook in the modern Indonesian household. In the process, it captures the vicissitudes of her life against the historical background of the Dutch colonial era, Japanese occupation, Revolution and contemporary times in Indonesia. Read in this light, the text reveals a life of slavery and servitude with implications on an individual’s human rights as well as the precarious nature of the lives of the marginalised. The present study uses the framework of a ‘quiet’ narrative on livability to establish the moments of performativity in the text as well as to examine the idea of a life of dignity during crisis moments in history.

Keywords: human rights narrative, Indonesian history, precarity and performativity, quiet narrative, livability.

The Mythical Fall and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man: Mediations on Narratives of Violence and Human Rights

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Debopriya Banerjee

Post-doctoral Fellow, IISER Bhopal, M.P. Email: debopriya83@gmail.com

Volume 11, Number 1, 2019 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v11n1.06

Abstract

The spectacular impact of the fall of the twin towers of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, was felt in a wide variety of domains trying to grapple the political, literal, and figural ruins and reformulating a post-Holocaust trauma and memory studies. While the experience and representations of trauma have always been a potential site for the interface between the tenets of human dignity, justice and literary text, this incident has also brought to the fore the radical embodied politics of suicide missions. Drawing insights from the contemporary studies of human rights which focus on the paradoxical erasure of embodied human experience, this article explores how Don DeLillo’s novel Falling Man fictionalizes the conflicting embodied experience of the victim and the aggressor against the colossal visual impact of the fall of the towers.

Keywords: 9/11 and literature, embodiment, trauma, human rights, spectacle

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Staging the Human in George Ryga’s The Ecstasy of Rita Joe

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Saradindu Bhattacharya

Assistant Professor, Dept. of English Studies, Central University of Tamil Nadu. Email: saradindub@gmail.com

Volume 11, Number 1, 2019 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v11n1.05

Abstract

This essay examines George Ryga’s play The Ecstasy of Rita Joe for its literary and dramatic strategies of representation of the violation of the human rights of its titular subject. I demonstrate how Rita Joe embodies the discursive construction of the racialized native subject whose speech and actions, at the textual level, are very often at odds with the immediate theatrical setting of the play itself, while also bearing deeper contextual resonance with the backdrop of the colonial history of Canada within which her story unfolds. The essay examines how (a) popular racial stereotypes operate within the colonial institutions of law and administration, education and religion as the discursive grounds for the dehumanization of the native subject (b) the ‘criminality’ of the native subject becomes a logical outcome of, and further inducement to, the breach of her rights as human, and (c) the dramatic staging of the violation of the racialized, criminalized subject creates a space for her to articulate her own suffering and thus claim a resistive narrative voice as a human subject. I contend that Ryga employs theatrical techniques (such as voiceovers, stage setting and lighting, transition of scenes) and dramatic elements (like plot, character, dialogue and action) not only to represent Rita Joe’s systemic victimization and ultimate destruction within the colonial regime, but also to engage the audience in bearing collective witness to her trauma as that of a fellow human. In doing so, Ryga effects a narrative reconstruction and an empathic re-cognition of the colonized subject as human in her vulnerability to violence and her capacity to feel and articulate suffering, and thereby positions her narrative within a larger discourse of human rights.

Keywords: George Ryga, The Ecstasy of Rita Jo, human rights, victimization, colonized subject.

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Relationality, Resistance and Mimicry: Towards an Alternate Discourse of Violence and Victimhood from the North East of India

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Ridhima Tewari1 & Pragnya Parimita Chayani2

1Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Dharwad. ORCID: 0000-0003-3073-4948. Email: ridhima@iitdh.ac.in

2Ph.D. Scholar, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Dharwad. ORCID: 0000-0002-2406-2674. Email:  pragnya.chayani@gmail.com

Volume 11, Number 1, 2019 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v11n1.04

Abstract

The present paper seeks to complicate and contribute to the discourse around human rights (HR), specifically the violence inflicted, and the radical reconstructing of victimhood, by employing literary narratives from North-East of India. Such an attempt at broadening perspectives on HR is undertaken with the aid of Judith Butler’s analysis of relational nature of the self, as well as the reconceptualizing of mimesis in feminist and postcolonial thought (as discussed by Rey Chow and others). While Butler focuses on mourning and its transformative potential from narcissism to the outside/other, emphasizing on the primacy of the body, Rey Chow shows how theorists such as Luce Irigaray and Homi Bhabha have revived mimesis, employing it as mimicry for subversive purposes.  This paper utilizes literary responses from the North-East of India- poems written in the backdrop of military violence in these states- for arriving at an alternate set of responses to violence. Such responses question the very ontology of human rights- why some humans matter less, why some lives are always already neglected- while investigating the projection of sacrifice, victimhood, and the resistance that the mimic-victim provides from within the framework of subordination.

Keywords: Human Rights, Violence, Relationality, Mimicry, Resistance

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Victims or Agents: Self-perception of Dalit Women in Pan on Fire

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Pratibha

Ph.D Research Scholar, Dept. of English. Jamia Millia Islamia University. ORCID: 0000-0001-5698-6612. Email: pratibhabiswas85@gmail.com.

Volume 11, Number 1, 2019 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v11n1.03

Abstract

The autobiographical narratives by Dalit authors did challenge the ‘discourse of pity’ by non-Dalit writers, by transforming the recollection of what Cornel West has called “ontological wounding” of the self marked by constant humiliation (Geetha, 2009, p.93),  into representation of Dalit subalternity as a political act of resistance. Yet within the narratives of cultural revolt of 1970s by Dalit Panthers, Dalit women remain encapsulated in the role of either ‘the mother’ or ‘the victimized sexual being’, as pointed out by Sharmila Rege (2014, p. 336). Thus, she calls for re-conceptualization of critique of brahmanical hierarchies from a Dalit feminist standpoint.  A collection of narrated stories by urban slum-dwelling Dalit women, namely, Rukmini, Chhaya, Rakhma, Sangeeta, Mangala, Ashoka, Savitri and Leela –Pan on Fire: Eight Dalit Women Tell Their Story (1988), provides an incisive account of the Dalit life-world and views on issues like Dalit family organization, culture of poverty, childhood, puberty as experienced by Dalit women and their role in the community glimpsed through relationships with family members. As they recollect and re-evaluate the most significant incidents in their lives to articulate self perception, these women dispel the myth that Dalit women are hapless victims. Struggling to overcome deprivation, discrimination and abuse, they express agency in verbalizing a desire for action.  But what emerges as a characteristic in these narratives is a ‘self in flux’ marked by doubt, confusion and a gap between the self’s image of itself and its perception by society (Bhave, 1988).  The objective of this paper is to study the dialectics between the ‘self’ and the ‘community’ in these narratives, to elucidate Dalit women’s multifaceted and contradictory self-perception, implicated within the inter-dependencies of the community, with caste and gender as contextual co-ordinates.

Keywords: caste and gender, self and community, Dalit feminism, self-perception, Dalit women, Human Rights

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“I was an Eye-witness”: The Framing of Human Rights in Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Goražde

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Aldish Edroos

M. Phil Student, Department of English, Jadavpur University, West Bengal, India.

Email: aldish.edroos@gmail.com

Volume 11, Number 1, 2019 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v11n1.02

Abstract

Graphic narratives use the comics medium to enmesh and bring forth an existing culture of visual aesthetics, and representation into popular culture. Safe Area Goražde, a graphic narrative by the Maltese-American graphic journalist Joe Sacco is a collection of witness narratives from the 1992 Bosnian war. The text establishes a three-way dialogue amongst the state-sanctioned history of the geopolitical conflict, the representation of the subjects within the framework of a human rights discourse, and the affective accounts of trauma of the subjects as relayed to Sacco. This paper presents Safe Area Goražde as a graphic human rights narrative that problematises the categories of victimhood and historiography as established by existing political discourse. The visual culture of the medium enables Sacco to engage with these discourses in a complex manner not only without mitigating the importance of individual trauma, but also by facilitating a productive and safe space to negotiate memory through various textual techniques. Sacco places witness accounts of the Goraždans along with official state histories, and human rights discourses enabling the reader to receive all three narratives together. The reader is thus made aware of the systematic discursive, and physical erasure of the humanity of the Bosniaks, and their relegation into an ahistorical realm. The interaction between the frames, the gutters, the readers’ active participation in the narrative, and the author’s narrative itself assists Sacco in his task of constructing a diligent history of the subaltern. The paper argues for a need to see human rights frames and historical categories through interventions like Safe Area Goražde in order to examine them, rethink them, and engage meaningfully in the act of critique.

Keywords: Joe Sacco, Safe Area Goražde, graphic narrative, human rights, frames.

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