Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry
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Goopy Gayen Bagha Bayen:: The Latent Contours of Caste
Get PDFIn this paper I read a specific moment of GupiGayenBhaghaBayen (1968), a children’s fantasy film by Satyajit Ray, as an instance of everyday caste experiences. I imagine the contours of caste – lying somewhat covert yet significantly bearing on the diegesis of the film – through the structure of humiliation. The reading moves around few basic questions: how do we trace the real-discursive presence of caste in Bengal? How do we read the unassuming events of caste discrimination? This is a multi-layered film where Ray talks about the villages and people of Bengal depicting relationships, poverty, politics, kingship, war, magic and several other things. Caste based discriminations operate within this inter-sectional arrangement. It is never expressed in direct terms. I talk about the film as it hints at one of the ways caste has functioned in Bengal – inconspicuous-ordinary yet oppressive and humiliating
Translation Immoral? Contamination, Hybridity, And Vociferous Silences In Early Twentieth-Century Translations Of Sanskrit Erotic Poetry
Get PDFIn this paper I focus on a selection of early twentieth-century French, Italian, and English translations and second- and third-hand translations of the seventh-century Sanskrit anthology titled Amaruśataka, or “The hundred verses of Amaru”. The practice of comparing, collating, and inventively muddling different variants from earlier translations is the defining feature of these modern versions of the Amaruśataka, for most of their authors lacked the linguistic skills to access the original Sanskrit text. My aim is to follow and unpack the selective, comparative and combinatory process that produced each modern translation, bringing to the surface the creative rather than polluting force of this ‘translational contamination’. Paradoxically, it was often the hybrid, if not outright spurious, details of the modern versions that – acting as a litmus test of the aesthetic and moral preoccupations of their authors and projected readers – turned such texts into new and newly translatable originals
The Data Cycle: Teaching on the CBCS Syllabi during the Pandemic
Get PDFAs I sit here almost regretting my hasty promise to Arunima to write this piece, I am drowning in a virtual whirlpool of overlapping exam schedules, batch-wise email addresses and timings and uploading to portals and the only thing that I can say with any certainty about my experience as a college teacher under WBES during the pandemic academic year is that we are woefully understaffed. Not simply for the online mode of examination, but also for the new (running on its third year now) CBCS system, with its ambitiously wide syllabus and its multiple-component examination scoring system. This becomes increasingly apparent as we advance further into the system, with higher semesters unfolding and new batches coming in, leading to multiple semesters running simultaneously which results in a constant rush to meet multiple deadlines
From Campus to Home: Losing our Individual Space in the Pandemic
No full textThe day I had left the campus for home last year in March, little did I know that it would take another whole year to return to the place that gave me “my space”. With the unprecedented Covid-19 first wave in 2020 and the announcement of the nationwide lockdown, our Institution, too, vacated the students from campus.The lockdown made me come back to my family for a longer period, a habit that I had outgrown for the past eight years. On one hand, I was relieved to be with my elderly parents during a catastrophe but on the other hand, I felt a sudden encroachment on my individual or personal space.I missed the campus and realized that the residential campus provided me with a social life apart from academics. It provided me with a space for interaction, discussion, and debate that inspired self-growth and self-discovery. Through the years on campus not only did I learn about research methods or statistical procedures, but the place also nurtured me as a human being. My stay on campus acquainted me with students from varied backgrounds and cultures imbibing in me a sense of tolerance and empathy. A personal space that fostered in me the importance of free-thinking. I learned from the independent life to have a voice; a voice to raise in required circumstances and ensure accountability
``Fyataru and Subaltern War Cries:: Nabarun Bhattacharya and the Rebirth of the Subject
Get PDFNabarun Bhattacharya, the radical literary voice of Bengal demonstrates notions of dissidence and aesthetic Bolshevism. His fictive dissenting subjects, the fyatarus typify rebellious roles in a post-ideological era when complicity and conformity are rewarded as the norm. Nabarun`s literary crusade interrogates the status quo and composes counter-currents of subjectivities. As a revolutionary saboteur he redefined the mode of subaltern representation by scripting the prose of counter insurgency through literature. The present excursus pays homage to this noted maverick writer of dissidence and attempts an analysis of the singularity of Nabarun`s fictional domain with specific references to some of his best known fictional works which constitute and explicate his prototypical subaltern anti-heroes such as fyatarus and Choktars who emerge as brilliant metaphorisation of dissent and disgust at our contemporary socio-political praxis. While the popular literary trends of the day have colluded with the hegemonic narrative of global capital that prevents the litterateur to coronate revolutionary anarchism or insurgency, Nabarun has consistently caused epistemic tremors through his overt advocacy of radical violence and systemic change
Hydrocarbon Genre:: The Oil Encounter in Abdel Munif’s Cities of Salt and Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason
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This paper analyzes Abdel Munif’s Cities of Salt and Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason as illustrations of the ‘Hydrocarbon Genre.’ These novels narrate the socio-cultural-economic and ecological implications of the oil business on the Arab world. Munif and Ghosh, in these works, expose the dark underside of the petro-capitalist takeover of the Middle East. They not only point out the complicity of the Gulf’s elite in the resultant crisis but also delve in detail into the various forms of resistance to the new petro-capitalist order. This paper further attempts to establish these novels as a subversive retendering of the oil encounter from a marginalized native’s and an excluded migrant’s perspectiv
Personhood:: Fukuyama’s Caveats and Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go
Get PDFTogether, fiction and rhetoric not only illustrate grim possibilities, but also the processes and rationale by which they occur. Kazuo Ishiguro’s dystopian novel Never Let Me Go (2005) documents the lives of cloned children in twentieth-century England whose sole purpose is to provide organs to keep their human predecessors alive. While the children mature to become donors or caregivers to peers undergoing donation, nothing exempts them from death following repeated organ harvesting. However unnerving, the novel tells of potential realities associated with genetic engineering, a trend conservative political scientist Francis Fukuyama addresses in his work Our Post Human Future. This article endeavours to present Never Let Me Go as a fictional, yet an appropriate supplement to Fukuyama’s writing, incorporating new historicism and accentuating Fukuyama’s points of caution in Ishiguro’s novel. Through dissecting and discerning the complementary relationship of the two works, readers may garner enriched perspectives in debates on cloning and other forms of bioengineering
Robunism:: Introspecting the Conjunction of Human and Humane Mechanics
Get PDFThis paper is divided into two realms. The first portion aims at addressing the post-humanist developments that continually assay to evolve whilst ambivalently opining about the castaways of the world who are the end products of tech-chrysalis. Simultaneously, the second section tries to focus on those very machines that try hard and fast to aid the émigré and refugees. It also attempts to understand the conflicting positions of politics, technology and humanity
World Literature:: From the Politics to a Poetics
Get PDFThis article examines the place of world literature today. Starting with the current political context in Britain, the first part outlines a brief history of Weltliteratur via Goethe, Marx and Engels, and contemporary literary critics such as Pascale Casanova and Emily Apter. Using Samuel Beckett’s views and letters on nationalism and translation, the second part problematizes the centre and periphery model upon which most of these theories are based. The final part introduces Tagore’s contrasting view of visva-sahitya, which, as evidenced through Beckett’s position as a writer and translator of impotence, presents an alternative mode of perceiving world literature
A Postcolonial- Ecocritical Perspective on Modern American Literature
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This paper provides a postcolonial ecocritical perspective on modern American novel. It relates and examines aspects of ecological and human violence in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: The Evening Redness in the West (1985) and Anne Pancake’s Strange as This Weather Has Been (2007). The paper argues that while McCarthy represents examples of ethnic and racial violence and Pancake focuses on class violence, the two novelists articulate a particular awareness of the interconnections between economic and political hierarchy and different forms of ecological and human violence within different American contexts. The two novels, then, denounce the deterministic, colonial constructions of economy, power and knowledge in modern societies on the one side and the validation of antagonism and violence against otherness and difference on the other. The paper argues further that colonizing countries, as well as colonized countries, still suffer, at different levels, the discrepancies and contradictions within colonial culture and politics. The two novels expose the limitations of white Americans’ freedom, and equality within colonial and national frameworks. This paper specifically examines the psychological-mental challenges and changes of the fifteen-years-old female teenager, Bant in Strange as This Weather Has Been and the male teenager, the kid, in Blood Meridian as exemplifying how specific individuals and groups through their ecological awareness try to deconstruct such deterministic, colonial constructions of identity and violence