Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry
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W.E.B Du Bois, B.R. Ambedkar and the History of Afro-Dalit Solidarity
Get PDFCaste is not a category, exclusively endemic to Indian society, rather, it typifies universal forms of social stratifications premised on racial, religious, ethnic and colour based segregation. In fact W E B Dubois, the celebrated Black civil rights crusader used the word ‘caste’ while diagnosing the cause of racism in Jim Crow America. DuBois and Ambedkar share a lot of commonalities, both were renowned observers of specific modes of social division prevalent in their individual societies, they spearheaded historic social mobilisations and evinced wonderful capacities to internationalize issues of caste and race as universal forms of social systems of discrimination to be abolished for ever. Both knew each other, communicated to each other and shared a collective vision for social justice. A conjunctive study of DuBois and Ambedkar will throw new light in Ambedkar studies by foregrounding unexplored histories of Afro-Dalit solidarities that had significant connection to postcolonial studies and international struggles for peace
Obscurity of Camp Life:: Is the Language of Camp ‘Passivity to Write’?
Get PDFThe paper would talk about how the existence of refugee camps in post-partition Bengal was very purposive and it was the immediate assistance given to the people whose way of life was disrupted by the sudden event of Partition. In Bengal the experiences of camp has an ontological distinction with regard to the question of caste. This paper will look into the obscurity of camp life with regard to its mode of silence. The understanding of silence is incorporated here from the seminal book by Martin Heidegger Being and Time to analyze the existential ontological foundation of language. The paper will try to interpret how in such spatio-temporal circumstances the being of lower caste refugees expresses themselves or their passivity to write. Maurice Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster gives us a new direction to think of silence. It will be attempted here to explicate whether the silence of the camp creates a possibility to disclose the dominant discourse of the political subject of the refugee
Of Harps and Vīṇās: Translating ‘Tone-Values’ in Tagore’s Songs
Get PDFRabindranath Tagore’s English translations of his Gitanjali secured him global influence and a Nobel Prize in 1913, but without effective acknowledgement of many of these poems’ prior musical existence, as songs. Subsequent retranslations have done little to correct this, and for historical reasons connected to the epochal transition from Romanticism to modernism around the First World War, translators have also tended to abandon the verse structure of the originals, “level down” the characteristically “high” diction of Tagore’s poetic idiom, and stick to a literal representation of individual images in the text. However, historical practices of translation from the early twentieth century, including those of Tagore himself, were much freer with literal meaning, aiming primarily to communicate a poem’s original emotional “effect” or aesthetic “essence” (rasa) – above all when a poem was to be sung in translation. Drawing on my own translations of Tagore, this paper looks at the consequences of taking such an approach today
World\u27s Last Communist
Get PDFThe incident will take place in 2020. This story proves that it is possible to write what will happen seventeen years from now
Autoimmunity and the Irony of Self-Definition:: Translating the Economy of Terror
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In order to avoid descending into the state of nature, the sovereign takes over the appearance of the state of nature itself – the animality that is primordial to the constitution of this legal framework, the animality of primitive force. This is the autoimmunity of the modern state which in order to provide security to its subject, to save them from going down to the state of nature, unleashes violence – it kills in order to protect. The principle of the modern state is to produce killable entities or antibodies within. This paper would attempt to address the philosophical tension: how far can animality be effectively confined or killed and does it come back to haunt the being? If behind the power of the sovereign is the founding violence, the animal force which makes one obey, the traces of that original moment continue to haunt the sovereign. However this paper would argue that one has to be responsible to the animality within to deal with the crisis of autoimmunity. It would end with a certain idea of the literary that can encounter this moment of crises, deferring the mute indefinable and non-representable terror
Latin American Literature and Criticism of Universal Humanism:: The Case of Cortázar’s “House Taken Over”
Get PDFIn the following essay, I propose that Latin American literature is not a fictitious space of evasion. But rather, it is a space that mirrors violent realities, power abuses, and concrete administrations of justice and power through narrative imagery. I use Julio Cortázar’s classic short story “House Taken Over” to exemplify how Latin American literature is capable of depicting social and political truth of humanistic ideology that posits itself as universa
Samuel Beckett’s ‘The Way’ and Stirrings Still:: Analysing the Self from ‘Schopenhauerian Buddhist’ Perspective
Get PDFThe article discusses the idea of the self in Samuel Beckett’s late short prose writings. The nature of the self, presented in disintegrated and essenceless form in Beckett’s works, responds powerfully to the category of world literature through their crossing of cultural boundaries. Beckett read the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer and Schopenhauer in turn, was influenced by the Eastern philosophies of Buddhism and the Vedas. The essential characteristic of the presentation of the self in Beckett’s writings, when filtered through Schopenhauer’s understanding of the Eastern philosophy, leads to what Beckett called ‘an intellectual justification of unhappiness’ and the understanding of the ‘veil of Maya.
Heidegger Contra Lacan:: The Cut and the Development of Two Theories of Subjectivity
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The question of the subject and subjectivity is being broached with a new urgency as Neuroscience, Biology, artificial intelligence research, and post-modern philosophies are all trying to understand and model human consciousness. Consequently, the understanding of consciousness is becoming more complex and the traditional conceptual hegemony of the unified, individual, Knowing Self posited by Western metaphysics and science is becoming increasingly precarious. Following some introductory comments on the conventional Western subject this article will focus on specific ways Heidegger and Lacan develop theories of subjectivity that constitute exceptions to the traditional theories. Examining these two radically divergent theories of the subject, it will be shown how one method for re-modelling the idea of the subject is through the integration of internal divisions or cuts. Heidegger’s Dasein and Lacan’s thinking of subjectivity diverge from the traditional philosophical subject on the basis of a differing relation to the cut or split that bars them from any objective self-knowledge. First, looking closely at the development of Dasein in Being and Time (1927), this article will show how particular instances of cutting or splitting distinguish Dasein as a radical break with the traditional subject of philosophy. Next, this article will look at how Lacan refines Freud’s revolutionary work on subjectivity and the splitting of the mind by examining how in his recently translated (2017) fifth seminar, Formations of the Unconscious (1957-1958), Lacan expands Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex and psychic development to develop a more complex and dynamic notion of subjectivity. Both Heidegger and Lacan develop subjects that differ from the traditional subject and from each other through integrations of cutting or internal division that entail different relations to history and language. Moreover, tracing out how these subjects are conceived in relation to processes of cutting or splitting brings about a new manner of modeling subjective positions vis-à-vis knowledge, self-consciousness, and community. Ultimately, the developments from the philosophical subject to Dasein and Lacan’s subject indicate how increasingly verisimilar theories of human subjectivity can be developed on the basis of increasingly complex relations and integrations of structural splitting
Caste in/as Humanities:: Unsettling the Politics of Suffering
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From the time of early travel narratives on South Asia by western tradesmen, orientalist scholars like William Jones, Max Muller, narratives written by Christian missionaries like Mead or Caldwell or the denigrators of ‘oriental societies’ like G.W. F. Hegel and concerned critics like Karl Marx to much of our postcolonial socio-political struggles, ‘caste’ has been perceived as either an elusive, resilient hydra-headed monster or a unique feature of the Hindu society that pre-empts competition that western modernity brings about. However, caste could be read both diachronically as well as synchronically, as a historical formation as well as a structural imperative. This makes any easy understanding of the question of caste impossible. Textual evidences are not enough, neither are the various archaeological resources, as we know that each historical moment is also constituted by the logic of synchronicity and structure which produces its own form of aphasia and silence. This introduction to the Special Issue of Sanglap on ‘Caste in Humanities’ would show how question of caste is also about silence and therefore requires incessant and seamless re-textualization
Undecidable Spaces:: Rethinking Caste and the Technologies of Abandonment in Manoranjan Byapari
Get PDFOrganization of space in a modern urban locale is apparently secular and unmotivated by any divine or religious principal. Yet it always functions on the basis of exclusion. Simultaneously the dread of the excluded returning to haunt the stability of the city structures its organization of space. In this paper we shall see how the pre-modern system of Casteism has similarities with as well as difference from the modern democratic system of governance across the world and its distinct form of abandonment. It shall also be suggested how abandonment becomes an indispensible technique through which a governmental apparatus comes into existence both in pre-modern Caste Society in Indian subcontinent as well as modern democracy. This work shall focus on Bengali Dalit author Manoranjan Byapari, coming from Namashudra, a Dalit subcaste in Bengal to show how autobiographical form of writing resurfaces the quintessential question of caste pushed back in modern normative arrangement of space