Volume 13 No 4 2021 - Page 3

Dr. Souradip Bhattacharyya

Assistant Professor, Amity Institute of English Studies and Research, Amity University, Kolkata. Email: srdp007@gmail.com, sbhattacharyya@kol.amity.edu

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

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n4.47  

Abstract

This article deals closely with the relation between the ability and state of being alive. It asks an elemental question: what does the word ‘life’ remind us of? While ‘life’ may generically be defined as the ability to do all that signifies the act of living, a more political way of defining ‘life’ would be to consider it as the medium of being alive as human or, an individual person’s existence. The generic definition of ‘life’ given above may suffer from reductionism if ‘ability’ is interpreted as a thing-in-itself, natural to mankind as an inherent, embedded process. This article, therefore, aims to analyze life by stepping out of this biological method of understanding and concentrates on the socio-economic and cultural nexus in which the ability to do is produced. It has chosen cinema as a medium of analysis because cinema does not dwell in a (cinematic) utopian space of its own, but it represents reality as much as it affects reality through the audio-visual experience of the audience.

Keywords: life, ability, performance, subject, death

Akaitab Mukherjee

Assistant Professor, School of Social Sciences and Languages (SSL), Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT), Chennai, India. ORCID id: 0000-0001-6410-9898. Email: akaitab.mukherjee@gmail.com

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

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n4.46  

Abstract

In her book A Theory of Adaptation Linda Hutcheon uses the term “transcultural adaptation” to illustrate different context in which literary or other cultural texts are adapted. This relocation of text through adaptation often adds multiple interpretations or alters textual politics. Hutcheon further argues that transcultural adaptation can transform the text in unpredictable direction. The paper seeks to explicate eminent Bengali film director Rituparno Ghosh’s (1961-2013) Shubho Muharat (The First Day of the Shoot, 2003) which is influenced by Agatha Christie’s (1890-1976) novel The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side (1962). The essay untangles Ghosh’s strategy to add Indian socio-cultural background in the western text. He expresses authorial intensions when he re-narrates of the novel on screen. The paper argues that the transcultural adaptation creates a “Third Space of enunciation” where the auteur uses the traits of detective film and repeats authorial intention. Following Janet Staiger’s reinterpretation of auteurism the essay argues that duplication of authorial impulse is Ghosh’s “technique of the self”.

Keywords: Transcultural adaptation, Film Authorship, Third Space of enunciation, Detective Film, Rituparno Ghosh

Richik Banerjee

State Aided College Teacher, St. Paul’s Cathedral Mission College, University of Calcutta, PhD scholar (English), Amity University, Kolkata, banerjee.richik@gmail.com, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0851-284X

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

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n4.45   

Abstract

The ontology of time and space has always been a subject of materialist prospectus bearing a halo effect of ‘modernity’ and ‘progress’. The enquiry into the sign of modern is a mechanical category of production where substantial copies of ‘progress’ have religiously been equated with a break from the past. This breaking away from the centre (soul) is, of course, associated with a desire for the non-native design. Simultaneously, the past becomes historicized as primitive dangers while the present/‘modern’ morphs into a non-past spectacular diffusion. Satyajit Ray reloads his artillery of the cerebral one last time in his masterpiece titled, Agantuk (The Stranger), where he pits the idea of a spectral past having an agency to redo the class binary against the totalitarian time(s) in a modern urban space which prides itself on the abuse of power-as-civility. Ray introduces a nuclear family of three (a married couple and their son) where the protagonist, Manmohan Mitra, returns as an archived data in the body of a forgotten relative. His entry into the house ruptures the canny knots of the ‘home’ where the director exposes limits of the modernized time. This paper tries to analyze how Ray uses the motif of ‘travel’ in its cinematic cloth to critique the ingestion of global progress as nothing but an accumulation of fallen spectacles that commodify both a subject who is consuming the object-in-time (progress) and also the object that is all the time getting alienated from its own subjective merit. Mitra becomes the mouthpiece of the director for conveying the paradoxes of time-as-capital in the burgeoning of speculative modernity.

Keywords: modernity, progress, primitive, home, time

Debanjali Roy¹ & Tanmoy Putatunda²

¹Assistant Professor, School of Languages, KIIT Deemed to be University, itsmeanjee@gmail.com, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2496-6091

²Assistant Professor, School of Languages, KIIT Deemed to be University, tanmoy.putatunda@gmail.com, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9698-9487

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

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n4.44   

Abstract

Appearing in the singular short story “A Scandal in Bohemia” in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series, the character of Irene Adler has been adapted and reconstructed in subsequent literary and visual media. Twenty-first century screen adaptations have swivelled upon postfeminist re-appropriations of the character and overt sexualisation of the ‘body’, thereby engaging in reassessment of the Irene-Sherlock relationship and problematizing gendered presentations of the character. Locating Irene in a heteronormative space, such narratives have attempted to revise the image of the cross-dressing ‘adventuress’ through varied portrayals which seemingly broaden her scope by means of her deliberate transgressions of fixed gender tropes. This article, by taking into account the gendered power-play embedded in three popular twenty first century screen adaptations of the text, namely, the films Sherlock Holmes (2009) and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011), CBS’s Elementary (2012-2019) and BBC’s Sherlock (2010-2017), scrutinizes the dilemma of presentation of Irene Adler through the lenses of sexual dynamics and gendered performances.

Keywords: Gender dynamics, Sexuality, Body, Subversion, Adaptation, Performances, Identity

B. Abhijith

Research Scholar, Department of Cultural Studies, The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, E-mail: aabhinov.91@gmail.com, ORCID id: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8394-612X

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

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n4.43   

Abstract

This paper traces a particular moment in the recent history of Malayalam Cinema when a shift in the representation of the private sphere was attempted. In the period after 2010, a set of new Malayalam films carried a shift in terms of aesthetics and narrative techniques and went on to unfold in a full-fledged manner by the end of the decade. The paper would look at Chappa Kurishu (Head or Tails, 2011), one of the early movies of this tide to shed light on the remarkable shift it achieves in representing the scenes of romantic and erotic intimacy on screen. As the narrative of the movie centers around the fight over a smart phone that ensues between two strangers in the city of Kochi, it gets entangled with questions of privacy, class and contest over the urban spaces.  Bringing to the discussion contestations over the meanings of public and private manifested in certain urban-based movements in recent times like ‘Kiss of Love’ protests, it is argued that Chappa Kurishu can be read as a response to the contradictions arising out of the emergence of new subjects in the wake of urban transformations and the conflicting cinematic publics of multiplex and single hall theatre. The formal transactions between cinematic form and video form, the paper suggests, is one of the ways in which Chappa Kurishu attempts to respond to this situation in a way that signals the transitional position of the spectator subject.

Keywords: Malayalam Cinema, Voyeurism, Privacy, Video, Film Form

P. Muhammed Afzal

Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani (BITS Pilani), Pilani, Rajasthan, India-333031. ORCID ID: 0000-0002-9989-6251. Email: muhammed.p@pilani.bits-pilani.ac.in

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

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n4.42   

Abstract

Situating the Malayalam film Amma Ariyan in the context of radical Left politics in Kerala during the “long 1970s”, this paper argues that Left-wing cultural productions during the period offered a melancholic vision of history that sustained a utopian imagination. In popular discussions, the 1970s is seen as a period of “misguided adventurism” and defeat, and the nostalgia for the period is treated as a paralyzing, backward looking attitude.  Drawing on contemporary scholarship on Left melancholy, nostalgia, and utopia, this paper looks back at the 1970s from a perspective where melancholia is a stance that offers a critical vision of the past as well as the future. This paper argues that the “failed heroes” in Left-wing cultural productions in the 1970s refused to “resign themselves to … the inevitable and ‘natural’ character of the most monstrous inequalities”. This “refusal to be realistic” has been very central to the sustaining of a utopian imagination which acquires more significance in the context of the perceived reactivation of “communist desire” in the contemporary times.

Keywords: Amma Ariyan, Radical Left, Left Melancholy, Malayalam Cinema, Kerala

Rakesh Ramamoorthy

Assistant Professor, Department of English, Mar Ivanios College (Autonomous), Kerala, India. Email:  rakeshmoorthy@gmail.com, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2355-1054

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

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n4.41  

 Abstract

This essay examines the ways in which two popular cricket movies from India — the Hindi movie Iqbal (2005) and the Tamil movie Jeeva (2014) — validate the tenets of “roll-back neoliberalism”  (Peck and Tickell 2002), an ideology that calls for the withdrawal of State-regulatedwelfare mechanisms in favour of free market capitalism. The protagonists of these movies are talented cricketers from underprivileged backgrounds, and they are excluded from regional and national teams by corrupt cricket board officials. This essay critiques a common story arc that these narratives share: the protagonists are quintessentially neoliberal entrepreneurial subjects who overcome the marginalization through adept exploitation of commercial potential of the sport. The argument is that the discursive delegitimization of State intervention in cricket, and the concomitant framing of the free market as a progressive and inclusive entity, are disempowering for the cricketing public. While a State-regulated sporting culture does have its exclusionary aspects, this essay contends, contrapuntally, that the neoliberal validation of the free-market rationale can be problematic in that it absolves the State of the responsibility of fostering an inclusive cricketing culture. This study thus offers a contingent and strategic endorsement of the Indian State’s intervention in the nation‘s cricketing cultures.

Keywords: Indian cricketing nationalisms, neoliberalism, caste and cricket, Iqbal, Jeeva