Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry
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Protest Paradigm and Digital Platform: : Comparative Analysis of Reporting Dissents on X Accounts of Indian Media
Full text linkProtests are important political events with a major impact on society and may usher in important social changes. Studies suggest that for a protest to succeed, it often relies heavily on its media coverage. This paper identifies how the social media handles of Indian news media adhere to this. Borrowing the concept of “protest paradigm”, a set of normative practices followed by journalists while reporting protest events to decide which protests to cover and how to cover them. Using Content analysis of X (Twitter) posts about the Farmers Movement of Aaj Tak, India Today, ABP News, and NDTV for February 2024, this study tries to foreground whether the social media handles of mainstream media channels adhere to the protest paradigm. The findings suggest that Indian digital media are governed by the media system and strive to conform to the logic of political economy. Some digital media channels follow the sustainability approach to achieve that while some channels adhere to the protest paradigm to achieve immediate popularity by reinforcing societal prejudices
Tracing Hydrofeminism and Hydromentality in select Bengali Dalit Women’s Short Stories
Full text linkThis article applies the theoretical frameworks of Hydrofeminism, as articulated by Astrida Neimanis, and Hydromentality to five selected short stories: Ranu Biswas’ “Dhopadanga Beel” (1994), Kalyani Thakur Charal’s “How Many Scores Make a Thousand?” (2000), and Manju Bala’s “The Household Special” (2000), “Conflict” (2005), and “Discrimination” (2005). These narratives intricately weave water as both a sustaining and oppressive force, revealing its entanglement with caste, gender, and socio-economic hierarchies. Hydrofeminism, which considers water as a fluid embodiment of relationality and interconnected existence, underscores how bodies—especially marginalized ones—remain inextricably linked to aquatic ecologies. Meanwhile, Hydromentality exposes the systemic control of water, reflecting structures of power that dictate access, purity, and exclusion. The analysis reveals that water serves as both a witness and participant in the lives of the oppressed. From the life-sustaining beel in “Dhopadanga Beel” to the symbolic purification practices in “Discrimination,” water acts as a marker of socio-political realities. In “Conflict,” it encapsulates memories of love and loss, while in “The Household Special,” it becomes a contested space of exclusion and resistance. By integrating these theoretical perspectives, the article uncovers the paradox of water as both liberating and restrictive, highlighting its role in shaping marginalized identities. 
The Birth of the Anthropocene : by Jeremy Davies, First Edition, 248 pages. Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2016. ISBN: 9780520964334(e-Pub) Rs. 1923.75/-
Full text linkThis book provides a thorough analysis of the concept of the Anthropocene, examining its scientific foundations, historical roots, cultural implications, socio-political dimensions and conceptual opponents who refuse to acknowledge the human impact on the atmosphere of Earth as “an epoch-level physical transition” (7) and the beginning of a new geological era and feel that “the new word implies a bleak and narrow-minded picture of the world” (8) or assume the idea of the Anthropocene being “an anthropocentric conception” (76) of human ability to alter the nature of Earth permanently. Jeremy Davies, an academic from literary studies moves into environmental humanities and induces an interdisciplinary perspective to offer a comprehensive and critical review of the pivotal concept of the Anthropocene shaping contemporary discourses on human-environment relationship. He focuses on the convivial emergence of the humans and the environment as actors and reactors in the formation of a new geological age. To define this idea he writes, “Anthropocene epoch lets us understand the ecological crisis of the present day in the distant past.” (2). Davies problematises the scale of time in human historiography and pushes the notion of time towards a geological dimension unthinkable to a supposedly anthropocentric politics. Deep time is either universalised as an Olympian factor operating beyond history and politics in a fatalistic fashion or shelved for being the concern of the geologists, thus dividing the geological from the political
Digital Governmentality and the Algorithmic State: : AI Surveillance in Comparative Perspective
Full text linkThis paper examines the rise of digital governmentality as a dominant mode of governance in the age of artificial intelligence (AI), with a comparative focus on India and China. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s notion of governmentality and its contemporary elaborations, the study attempts to explore how AI-driven infrastructures mediate, automate, and intensify state and corporate power. The discussion situates algorithmic governance within broader histories of technological control—from the Frankfurt School’s critique of the culture industry to Stiegler’s analysis of teletechnologies—highlighting the deep entanglement of digital systems with both market logics and authoritarian imperatives. In China, the case of the Shawan Safe City surveillance system demonstrates the integration of facial recognition, behavioural analytics, and predictive policing into a comprehensive architecture of population management, particularly targeting ethnic minorities. In India, the deployment of facial recognition technologies (FRT) across law enforcement, civic administration, and transportation reveals a similar trajectory, though complicated by constitutional protections, judicial pronouncements, and a fragmented but expanding regulatory environment. A brief comparative analysis extends to Pakistan and Bangladesh, where distinct political economies and security priorities shape patterns of adoption, as well as to transnational corporate actors whose platforms serve as the backbone for both state-led and private surveillance. The study argues that digital governmentality fuses biopolitical control with the predictive and classificatory capacities of machine learning, creating a feedback loop in which technological suspicion justifies intensified surveillance, and surveillance produces data that sustains suspicion. Across cases, marginalized populations are disproportionately targeted, reflecting how algorithmic systems inherit and amplify historical inequalities. The paper concludes by underscoring the urgency of robust legal, ethical, and civil-society interventions to prevent the consolidation of an AI-powered security state that erodes autonomy, privacy, and democratic accountability
Representation and Digital Culture: : An Enquiry into Covid-19 Memes as Ideology Carriers
Full text linkIn the present times, digital culture is a double-edged sword. The internet, one of the prime components of digital culture, acts as a platform for both the percolation and questioning of dominant ideology. Such digital negotiations play out through a variety of channels, most notably the meme. Guided by the incongruity theory of humour, this paper proposes to investigate memes, particularly in their manifestation as jokes and circulated during the Covid-19 period, as novel and influential propagators of dominant patriarchal ideology. The incongruity theory suggests that the key contributor to humour is the perceived incongruity between the norm and the supposed aberration that deviates from the norm. In Covid-19 memes, such incongruity manifests in several ways related to gender roles and expectations. Consumed in safe spaces and in a seemingly innocent manner, these memes bring to light the deeply entrenched ideologies in society and their proliferation and circulation in times of technology. By investigating the incongruities that give rise to humour in the selected memes, this paper seeks to bring to the fore societal beliefs about the ‘standard’ and supposed ‘deviations’ from it as well as the consequences of such deviations in relation to gender and its prescribed roles. The investigation is carried out with the awareness that conventional channels of ideology percolation acquire new forms, visibility, and power in digital times. At the same time, there also emerges newer methods of subversion, a prime example of which is digital feminism. 
Eco-Horror, Abjection, and the Uncanny Presence of Water in "Floating Water"
Full text linkJapanese horror often scrutinizes the dichotomy between modernity and nature, and water is an emblematic, elemental power over which human beings struggle to maintain command. The overwhelming majority of Japanese horror films and fiction describe technology as a frail barrier between mankind and the untamable nature of the primordial world. In Koji Suzuki’s "Floating Water", water is not traditionally depicted as being pure or symbolic of renewal as is the situation in Japanese culture in general and literary traditions specifically. Rather, in "Floating Water", water is recast as a place of horror, contamination, and abjection. Water in Suzuki’s narrative is recast into an uncanny, haunted force that dilutes boundaries between the living and the dead. Drawing on the theoretical foundations of Julia Kristeva\u27s abjection theory and Timothy Morton\u27s dark ecology, this paper examines the ways in which water in "Floating Water" is made into a de-stabilizing force—one which does not mean birth or regeneration, but which erodes identity, bears traces of past violence, and responds to fears over environmental disaster and institutional failure within the Japanese context. This paper situates Suzuki’s work within the framework of hydropolitics and eco-horror, examining how the story critiques Japan’s historical relationship with water, from industrial pollution to natural disasters
“The fear of water”: : Understanding the Dalit Struggle for Water in Gautam Vegda’s “Hydrophobia”
Full text linkThe association of Water as a symbol of purity with the identity politics of the Dalits has often relegated their position to that of impure and untouchable. The tapestry of the Hindu religious texts has perceived water as a sacred entity, protected from the contamination of the ‘untouchables.’ The collective consciousness, firmly rooted in the mindset of the upper caste, has perpetuated the attitude of inequality and subjugation towards the Dalit community. The focus of the paper is to analyse how the struggle for water has defined the Dalit identity through a discussion of the Dalit poet Gautam Vegda’s poem “Hydrophobia” (2023). Vegda’s poem brings in the harsh truth of the precarity of the environmental casteism and its disastrous effects upon the Dalits, in existence in the 21st century. The autobiographical documentation of Dalit oppression, which the paper aims to address, gives rise to a need to cultivate a renewed Dalit consciousness within the domain of Dalit ecology, shifting the discussion from the dichotomy of purity and impurity towards an egalitarian eco-space. 
Representing Truths: : Digital Governmentality and the New World Order
Full text linkTruths are always produced and socially circulated—they do not have any intrinsic social or ethical values in themselves! That became the moral of postmodern thought by the end of the twentieth century. Such social dilemmas and erosion of the grounds of thinking—the parameters of making sense of the world—were facilitated by a series of thinkers such as Fredric Jameson, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Michael Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, among many others. Such change in the ways of perceiving realities also concerned the changing scenario of social and political situations across the world. The end of revolutions, the backstaging of global communism, the eruption of the neoliberal consumerist economy, the post-Fordist turn in capitalism gradually pushing out large-scale industrialization from the center stage of the world economy towards a more plastic, shape-shifting, and soft-skill-based service industry, the spectacle of the Iraq-America war, and finally the rise of postcolonial identity politics—all caused us to think and believe in the social construction of identities and meaning. The cult of reason gave way to the cult of signifiers. Across disciplines the principal modes of inquiry didn’t focus any more on the unraveling of truth through designated scientific, historical, or sociological processes only, but rather a discovery of hidden unconscious structures of power and a system of signifiers that makes meaning possible was sought. Amidst this incredulity towards all grand narratives, it became technologically possible to record, edit, and circulate sounds, letters, and still as well as moving images within the blink of an eye. The interruptive space between perception and making sense of the world in phonocentric as well as logocentric cultures vanishes under the new technologies of mediation. It is no longer required to ‘mis’-interpret or ‘mis’-represent an object or event. Rather, the object or the event could be manufactured after it has been written by the power-mongers—the political regimes in power and the big multinationals in the market. If the period between the 1990s and the early decade of the new millennium was a moment of perceiving truth as manufactured by ideologies, from the second decade of the twenty-first century we step into the era of post-truth, where the question of any particular discursive paradigm to produce truth gets overridden by the manufacture and circulation of multiple versions of truth through global teletechnologies
Translation and Race. Corine Tachtiris. Routledge, New York, 2024, 172 pages, Paperback, £39.99.
Full text linkFocusing on the aspect of race and racism in the practice of literary translations, the book Translation and Race by Corine Tachtiris, Assistant Professor of Translation Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, elaborates how racial discrimination has always been an integral part of translation practice throughout history till contemporary times, through its five main chapters and the significantly fitting introduction. The preface begins with the author’s experience of disjuncture that she felt twenty-five years before writing the book, as an undergraduate student, being a part of a group of students and faculties translating a book by a Black author whose culture was not very familiar to them. That feeling of unfamiliarity guided her to the understanding that race is but a construct — a concept that she remembers throughout her life and uses meaningfully in her book. She then draws opinions of scholars on capitalising the ‘b’ in Black and how their perceptions shape their respective ideas of race. After considering all the opinions, she agrees with La Marr Jurelle Bruce in his statement, “I use a lowercase b because I want to emphasise an improper blackness […] a blackness that is ever-unfurling rather than rigidly fixed” (Bruce 6). She supports Bruce’s opinion and discusses her opinion on “translation’s potential to unfix language through linguistic and cultural disjunctures” (Tachtiris ix). The author rejects norms in translation theories that are normalised by the mainstream but are actually rooted in White supremacy and chooses to rely on the translators’ joke of “it depends” by capitalising the ‘b’ only contextually. The preface, therefore, sets the tone of what the book primarily seeks to express later on
Precarious Self and/in the Dalit Everyday Social: ‘Passing’, Affect, and Alienation in Ajay Navaria’s Select Stories
Full text linkThe paper attempts to analyse the precarity of the Dalit self in the everyday social encounters with caste and its affective state of humiliation. With reference to selected stories from Ajay Navaria’s 2013 anthology, Unclaimed Terrain, the paper examines the notions of alienation in the urban, the techniques of ‘passing’ or caste concealment, and the affect of shame within the framework of everyday existence of Dalits. In studying these elements, the paper elaborates on how the self enters an unstable position in its formation and re-formation. In the modern urban space that is marked by alienation, anonymity allows an escape from caste based humiliation and discrimination. To escape humiliation, the Dalit self indulges in its preservation through the strategy of caste concealment and ‘passing’ as a non-Dalit in the everyday. However, the pervasiveness of caste uses new techniques of humiliation as seen in language, behaviour, and practices, to keep its hegemonic dominance intact. Thus, there exists an impossibility of escape from and in humiliation that further creates a psychological fissure. The Dalit subject is caught in the dilemma of identity assertion and identity concealment in its escape ‘from’ humiliation, and of inhabiting and escaping the self ‘in’ humiliation. The paper, with its study of Ajay Navaria’s stories that explore the everyday spaces of the urban, where Dalits, caught in the angst of city life learn to negotiate their identity; would further help analyse their psychological burden and how caste marks its control over the everyday and also, through the everyday