Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry
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Saadat Hasan Manto, "Yes Master"; Kala Sajeevan, "How to Overcome a Bad Day"
No full textIn the translation section of the current issue of Sanglap we are publishing a short story and a poem. Translating from different languages is an important political act, particularly when it comes from different languages of a multi-lingual and multi-ethnic country like India. India, apart from housing cultural and linguistic diversities, contains various forms of inequalities across class, caste, or gender. However, translations may indicate certain recurrent and analogous patterns of violation and suffering, especially for people from the margins. One of the translated works here is a short story by the celebrated Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto. Manto has been a master storyteller of people from the lowest rung of society. In the Urdu story “Yes Master” the childlike simplicity of Manto’s language has been translated effectively by Asma Rafiq which relates to the protagonist Qasim – a ten year old boy serving as a domestic help in a household. The title of the original story was Qasim, after the protagonist. But the translator chooses to rename it, holding up the irony in pronouncing the agreement “Yes Master.” The agreement, it is obvious, has been extorted from the boy, who we see in the story, is overworked and has no respite. The story depicts the performative possibility of denial through repeated forceful affirmation. The only way to get freedom from relentless service, we see in the story, is in having a wound. The accidental wound makes the boy realize the path of freedom. Not having his fingers perhaps becomes a form of resistance to his condition of relentless enslavement. “Yes Master” – becomes the voice of affirmation as well as denial in a condition, where saying “no” was impossible
Notes on Queering Immigration History
Get PDFImmigration histories are distressingly straight. Diasporic stories are often built on carefully curated mythologies. Particularly so if these communities have a formidable contingent of upwardly mobile middle classes. The problem is compounded when it comes to working on immigrant communities of colour. Facing marginalisation and erasure on almost all sides, all that is left is the rather restrictive category of victimisation that reinforces a recurrent invisibility. While different queer demographics are indeed becoming popular subjects of study in recent times, histories of immigration and queerness remain generally unintegrated as disciplinary sub-fields. The predominance of cultural studies and formidable theoretical frameworks that underpin modern queer studies deter many historians, especially those trained in a more empiricist British historical tradition; while on the other, the dense lexicon of queer studies require a degree of familiarity that is not easily accessible to those not themselves queer or specialists in queer studies. This is not to deny the lack of sufficient engagements with queer historical topics in most British history centres; very recently the Royal Historical Society’s ‘LGBT+ Histories & Historians Report’ (2020) has only confirmed what a lot of us already knew. LGBT staff, students and studies are yet to be mainstreamed within standard pedagogic practice; they remain uneasily situated
Sri Lankan Conflict and Tamil Nadu: : Terror, Bare Life and Necropolitics
Get PDFThe long and violent Sri Lankan Tamil conflict had its most severe impact on its closest neighbour Tamil Nadu, as exemplified by the violent response of the LTTE to the atrocities of the Indian Peace Keeping Force by the assassination of the ex-Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi at Chennai. By exploring the ramification of the suicide bombing of Rajiv Gandhi through the protracted trial and sentencing of Perarivalan (one of the three accused in the case, others being Santhan and Murugan), and the detailed reading of a contentious article that analyzes the causes for the failure of LTTE and addresses the polarization after the genocide, this essay argues how the specter of the suicide bombing is still haunting the Tamil psyche by underscoring its centrality for regional politics and media. By drawing attention to the figure at the heart of that specter Dhanu, the female suicide bomber who assassinated Rajiv Gandhi, this essay seeks to address the specificity of justice in the context of the Sri Lankan Tamil conflict and its bearing on bare lives
Reading Terror in Literature:: Exploring Insurgency in Nagaland through Temsula Ao’s These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone
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For some places, literature can hardly go beyond the bondage of terror. North East India, which has suffered since the independence on accounts of sovereignty, language, and ethnic influx, and seen unimaginable levels of violence and atrocity perpetrated both by the military and the insurgent bodies, finds little beyond terror when its literary writers try to explore its history and culture. This paper would like to study Temsula Ao’ collection of stories in context of the contentious history of Nagaland. Set in the 60s and 70s, when the Naga claims of separate territory and sovereignty were widespread in the hill regions, Ao’s stories explore the issues such as military violence, stolen adults, unmindful destruction of innocent lives and private and public property, etc that have tried to strangle life in Nagaland. In course, it also seeks to define and complicate the term insurgency. Many of Ao’s stories are woven around simple wit and humour which seem to bind the multi-ethnic Naga communities together. I argue that this might be one way of moving beyond the bondage of terror and foster a communal memory that has shared and survived those moments and remember them with the community’s everyday way of living life
Little Rebellions:: Demands, Transgressions, and Anomalies in the Kamtapur Struggle
Get PDFDuring the last years of 1990s and the beginning of the millennia, North Bengal was shaken from its mundane reality right into a middle of a rebellion. With tears of history and warcries of the present, Kamtapur movement revealed itself. In this paper I have tried to locate the social, political, and ideological inclinations that are present within the movement. On one hand my paper intends to critique the presence of what can be called Kochbehar nationalism based on the memory of a pre-independence princely state, on the other hand I am also critiquing the trends and aftermaths of Leftist politics that has been assimilated into the movement itself. While the presence of these two different and to an extent contradictory political thoughts are present within the movement; I have also taken up these new trends in the lights of anarchist tendencies which put more importance on quasi-separations from dominant power centres than class-determinism alone, of course followed by a goal for local empowerment
Academic Publishing On Student Debt:: Homo Academicus Americanus
Get PDFThe recent call for a critical university studies from the American Studies Association speaks to a growing body of criticism about university corporatism, specifically its "colonialization" through, and production of, student-debt. The subject centralizes constraints upon academic freedom vocationally and discursively, yet little focus has been on the role of the academic as a participating member of such an institution. The tacit significance of the role of the intellectual within colonialization should be explicitly juxtaposed with the unique position of the academic within the university, and new questions of discursive resistance can be interrogated by reviewing the relationship of the academic and the university, the academic and academic publishing, and academic publishing and the university. Although the theoretical and legal dependencies of academic criticism are paradoxically defined by their academic "discipline," the historical turn in both the role of the university, as a globalizing industry of student-debt culture, and the turn to a critical university studies, lends the American academic to be situated as the resistant subject in an unprecedented crisis of discourse. A review of "academic publishing" on Americanized student-debt teases out and introduces an arising crisis
Subjectivity and the “Shocking”: Walter Pater:: Oscar Wilde and Ethical Limits of Pleasure
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The article analyzes the “shocking” and so-called “immoral” as a response to the institution-imposed methods of surveillance. This leads to the initiation of discourses over behaviour or actions which may not be unethical but which may be questionable in terms of social propriety. Moreover, the “shocking” may be seen as persistent attempts at the formulation of subjectivity -the “performative self.” These ideas are analyzed with reference to Foucault\u27s perspective on the issues and briefly in the context of the late Victorian Aesthete culture spearheaded by Walter Pater and later, Oscar Wilde, the quintessential “dandy.” Their texts Marius the Epicurean and The Picture of Dorian Gray are read with the question of ethics and hedonism in mind, also relating the same to their fascination with classical Epicureanism
Nabokov, Cinemathomme
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Vladimir Nabokov famously detested psychoanalysis. He loathed what he regarded as the crudeness of the psychoanalytic imagination and its seemingly universalizing narratives that would track everything back to a single Oedipal source. In Ada or Ardor, Nabokov\u27s parody of the Joycean writer, Nabokov nevertheless offers a template for the future of psychoanalytic reading practices in a 21st century characterized by an all-pervasive Imaginary. In this reading, incest provides Nabokov with the conceptual figure for an enjoyment that did not submit to the paternal cut, which floods into the Symbolic through his hybrid literary-cinematic style. Creating a sinthome of an infinite book from the letters of his name, here Nabokov, as cinemathomme, offers himself pre-eminently as a thinker for what Jacques-Alain Miller has called today\u27s "great disorder of the real"
Natural Order and Wise Synthesis:: Sovereignty-Violence-Varṇa in the Arthaśāstra and Aurobindo
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The Dalit Panthers Manifesto made the claim that a revolutionary transformation of Indian society was necessary because of its systemic character—i.e., a form of systemic violence that “survives the ever-changing forms of power structure” from premodernity (“Hindu feudalism”) into and beyond the anticolonial struggle. This article aims to analyze two such systems of sovereignty-violence-varna, one in a premodern and the other in an anticolonial treatise, the Kauṭīlya’s Arthaśāstra and Aurobindo Ghose’s essays “Indian Polity” in The Foundations of Indian Culture. This article investigates how these visions of Indian polity—rightly ordered distinction; wise, stable synthesis—each necessitate two sovereign violences of varna: what, in complementary analyses, Walter Benjamin called lawmaking and law-preserving violence, and what Geroges Dumézil identified as magical and juridical sovereignty (of raj and brahman, respectively). By analysing two iterations of the sovereignty-violence-varna system, this article suggests that Brahmanic political theology might be better understood not as primarily based on inclusion/exclusion as in an Agambenian understanding, but rather on relations of opposition and complementarity. 
The Emergence of Rupkatha as a Literary Genre in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Bengal: : A Historical Enquiry
Get PDFThe indigenous rupkatha collections that appeared in the late nineteenth and early twentieth Bengal, while purporting to be written transcriptions of an oral tradition, were effectively creating a new literary tradition distinct from the oral storytelling traditions that existed in the region. This paper will investigate the historical circumstances of its emergence, particularly the intersectional politics of Bengal’s colonial encounter with Europe and the emergence of a nascent nationalist consciousness that laid stress on indigenous culture. This paper will argue how the emergence of the Bengali rupkatha as a literary genre was interrelated with the widespread popularity of the European fairytale, and as an indigenous literary genre was intended to contrast and compete with the Western literary genre. The circumstances of its emergence in turn shaped the popular ideas associated with the genre and determined the way generations of readers approached and interpreted the texts