Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry
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The Other Senses: Preeti Monga. Roli Books, New Delhi, 2012, 228 pages, Paperback, ₹335
Full text linkThe word autobiography was coined by William Taylor in 1797 in The Monthly Review. This genre maps the recollection of truth, episodes, thoughts and experiences in the writer’s life. However, an autobiography coming from a disabled person encompasses much more than life experiences, as disability aggravates the challenges faced by a disabled individual. A. V. S. Jayaannapurna states that the “onset of 21st century brought to limelight the dreams and ambitions of individual,” and people began to express their subjectivity. This gave the individual a “spiritual space of freewill,” which Jayaannapurna describes as a “retrieval into self” (28). A psychologist can use the work as a guide to the writer’s mind to understand how disability and the dominant discourses about it may have direct or indirect bearing on the writer’s mind. Disability autobiography acts as an effective way of counter-discourse. It challenges the dominant ableist perceptions of that disability narrative that have contributed to portraying the negative somatic experiences in literature. It unveils or illuminates various issues that beset people with anomalous bodies, like human rights violations, stigma, and social and financial barriers. According to Causer, people who returned from wars and life-threatening diseases like polio and breast cancer spurred the autobiographical writings in such a way that nothing like this had happened before (1997). Until the 1950s, disability narratives were scant; whatever literature on disability was available was written by non-disabled writers based on their limited second-hand knowledge derived from myths, fiction and medical treatises. “The testimony of disabled people includes gritty accounts of their pain and daily humiliations — a sure sign of the rhetoric of realism” (Siebers 65). Autobiographical writing by disabled writers can inspire many disabled people to come out of their closets to share and assert their identity with pride. People, for a long time, relied on information about disability either in medical science or literary works, which was highly biased and heuristic. According to Thomas Causer, misrepresentation of disabled people could also be the cause of the lack of writing by the disabled about themselves. Thus, it becomes imperative for the marginalised to come up with transgressive autobiographical writing (Causer 5)
Mamta Kalia\u27s Aapki Chhoti Larki : (Your Young daughter)
No full textThe current issue of Sanglap carries the translation of the Hindi writer Mamta Kalia’s story, “Aapki Chhoti Larki,” as “Your Younger Daughter.” It focuses on the internal hierarchies and dynamics of power that exist within an Indian family and interrupts the idea of a prelapsarian state of innocence associated with Indian childhood. It is a story which also shows the structural violence against women within the family where women are not only victims but, through their perpetual circuit of oppression, often naturalise the socially accepted gender roles to become perpetrators by imposing such roles on younger and more vulnerable women. The story is about Turna/Tuniya Sahae, who is a girl in her early teens and is shown to be thoroughly exploited by her parents to perform domestic work. Her mother is seen to be already overworked by doing cooking and other household chores and needs the support of her domestic help, Collins, and younger daughter, Turna. The expected roles of women in the family become more laborious due to the caste rules, and we note how the domestic help Collins could perform all household chores except cooking because of her lower caste status. Turna’s mother not only exploits Turna’s labour and keeps her away from all kinds of childlike enjoyment but also fails to understand her adolescent sexual precarity, and we observe that when a neighbour makes an obscene remark to Turna as she goes to collect water. The story shows Turna’s father as a learned man who is into literature and cinema but is more absorbed in his own world of literary discussions and friendly gatherings than caring for the female members of his family. Turna’s college-going didi (elder sister) is celebrated in the family as an exceptional woman who is supposedly more modern and devoted to studying literature and philosophy and achieves good grades and awards. Therefore, she is spared from all domestic work and, as a result, turns self-centred and insensitive. Despite being a woman, her status in the family is like that of an elder son, with whom the parents have a lot of expectations and pride. The story is important to show such implicit violence during childhood is capable of lowering the self-esteem of a girl. The story shows how Indian parents are often blinded by a certain idea of academic success and undervalue different qualities and interests that may exist in one of their children, who is not a significant achiever. The story is significant as a critique of Indian society and the institution of the family often hailed as sacred and unquestionable.
 
Legacy of Maharani Sunity Devi: : A Vanguard of Progress and Social Reformation in and outside the Princely State of Cooch Behar
Full text linkThe nineteenth century is very much exceptional in the history of world as well as in India. It is the century when industrialization gathered momentum and when more powerful nations of the West established colonies for themselves in Asia and Africa. On the other hand, the Nineteenth century was in many ways also the age of women. The struggle for women’s rights in every sphere began to take shape from this period. In the nineteenth century things were changing in India too, especially in two provinces- Bengal and Maharashtra. In the history of Bengal, the nineteenth century is marked as a glorious chapter. The wave of renaissance touched almost every sphere of Bengali lives. The influence of this new spirit was amply manifested in various fields of the society such as education, religion, literature, politics and the like. The advancement of women’s education and the pressing campaign for the abolition of Sati were two basic objectives of the women’s movement in Bengal. This spirit of movement also touched the Princely State of Cooch Behar through Sunity Devi, the Maharani of the State and the daughter of Keshab Chandra Sen, celebrated Brahmo reformer of Bengal. Born and brought up in the midst of a Brahmo Family and society, her early age was marked by privilege and progressive thinking. Overall she is very liberal, but sometimes she became conservative. By heart she was an activist for womenfolk. An attempt has been made in this paper to explore the role of Sunity Devi in carrying out different types of reform programmes for women in the Princely State of Cooch Behar and how much she was instrumental in the struggle for women’s rights in every sphere, both in and outside the Cooch Behar State
Vicissitudes of Female Medical Education: : Emergence of Kadambini in Colonial Bengal
No full textWhen the issue of female education became consolidated with the progress of rapidly changing time of the period, general female education was given recognition and due priority annually in government reports. The question of adequate nursing in the Medical College Hospitals was both important and difficult and compelled the Hospitals to employ an inadequate number of nurses. The production of trained nurses opened the avenue for female medical graduates in Bengal. But they had to face hard confrontation with teachers of the Medical College itself due to the fact that so far women had been seen through the ‘male gaze’, now it seemed to be a topsy-turvy situation. Women could attain a space of their own and they could see the patriarchal society through their gaze, which was never acceptable to the society. The world of male hierarchy and domination was much afraid of an independent space for the women where Kadambini stands alone like an iconic figure. This article ventures to document the intellectual legacy of Kadambini in this context of patriarchal opposition to female medical education.
 
“A Private Woe”: Towards a Race-Sensitive Definition of the Everyday
Full text linkThis paper tries to find out an adequately race-sensitive definition of the everyday. It contrasts universalized ideas of the everyday as underlined by Rita Felski with specific instances of racist violence described in Audre Lorde’s biomythography Zami: A New Spelling of my Name. It illustrates Felski’s inadequacy in describing the everyday from the perspective of black experience of racist violence. It posits racist violence as a paradoxical phenomenon – it is mundane and everyday while disrupting the everyday. It then questions Andrew Smith’s assertion that the ‘black everyday’ is structurally impossible. The paper also challenges the position of the black individual in a binary of being triumphant or tragic, instead of being ordinary. Taking inspiration from scholars like Matthew F. Delmont, Saidiya Hartman and Christina Sharpe, this paper presents an alternative definition of the everyday, highlighting black people’s ability to recalibrate their everyday narratives despite racist violence, while also presenting definitions of ‘blackness’ beyond skin colour and violence and including the beautiful aspects of their cultural traditions. This paper then problematizes Felski’s assertion that the everyday is “secular” by engaging with the text and the biomythography as a genre
Textures of the Everyday: Ordinary Affects in Malayalam Memoirs
Full text linkMemoirs are short autobiographical compositions that are focalized around particular memories and/or experiences instead of aligning with normativities of chronology or historical progress. Historically, the privileging of everyday experiences over life histories configured memoirs as accessible forms of autobiographical composition for disprivileged groups such as women and the working-class (Nussbaum 149). A focus on affects, or states of being, facilitates an intensification of the sensory elements of our terrain, enabling the prioritization of its ‘texture’ (Sedgwick 17). The cultural theorist, Kathleen Stewart employs the term ‘ordinary affects’ to qualify this intertwining of the everyday and the affective and to facilitate an enquiry into the generative potential of everyday life (7). The habitual and the ordinary are privileged in the memoir, titled Aaru Nee (2018) composed by the celebrated Malayali writer and activist, Sarah Joseph. The paper analyses the linkages between the affective registers and Sarah Joseph’s autobiographical subjectivity in Aaru Nee
Exploring the ‘Everyday’ in Colin Wilson’s The Black Room and The Personality Surgeon: A Phenomenological Perspective
Full text linkThis paper attempts to explore and analyse the idea of ‘Everyday consciousness’ in Colin Wilson’s two fictional works, The Black Room and The Personality Surgeon from the perspective of the concept of ‘natural attitude’ put forth by Edmund Husserl. As psycho-physical and spatio- temporal beings, we perpetually remain held in the thrall of ‘everyday’. Husserl terms it as the ‘natural attitude – a state of consciousness where we act in naivety and unreflectiveness without paying attention to how consciousness functions while going through different experiences. Wilson typically calls this state as ‘robot’- a state of mechanistic consciousness where we hardly reflect back, but go on dragging through the routine of everyday existence. The ‘robot’ tends to reduce the amount of ‘conscious’ activity, thus making the reality shadowy and existence inauthentic. This phenomenological analysis is crucial in fetching us a recognition and understanding of the ‘everyday’ which has implications for how we ‘normally’ act in the ‘everyday’ and how it can be changed qualitatively.
Introduction: : Revisiting the Intellectual History of Women Thinkers: A Critical Study of Colonial and Postcolonial Bengal
No full textThis special issue of Sanglap intends to revive the lost voices of women thinkers from “the clutches of academic amnesia” (Chakrabarti ii) and to reorient the focus on the intellectual contribution of women in colonial Bengal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Critical discussions on the cultural and intellectual life in colonial Bengal often bypassed the intellectual investment of women who were trailblazers. This guest-edited issue of Sanglap explores the reasons behind this politics of marginalisation through different articles focusing on some of the remarkable women of colonial Bengal who intervened in the thought-scape with their lives and works
Rethinking the Literary World: : Prabhabati Debi Saraswati and Her Detective Novels
No full textThis paper, delving into the necessity to excavate the lost traditions of women’s thought in order to break down the patriarchal, monolithic notion of ‘intellectual tradition’, intends to look into the fictional works of Prabhabati Debi Saraswati (1905-1972) whose career of writing domestic novels spanned between 1920s-1960s. Prabhabati also created the first woman detective in Bengali detective fictions, a fact that critical discussions on the canon of Bengali/Indian detective fictions, which is considered to be a genre moving from men to men, conveniently forgets. Prabhabati’s first detective novel introducing her woman detective, Krishna Choudhury, was published in c.1950s. Beginning by situating the impulses that provoked women’s writing during the colonial era, the paper would engage in a brief discussion of Prabhabati’s domestic novels to understand the drift of thought and themes operating in her works. Then, the paper would introduce Prabhabati’s woman detective, Krishna Choudhury, and critically discuss Prabhabati’s venture, in order to comprehend the impulses, constraints and possibilities inherent in such a creation. This endeavour hopes to unravel how the women writers, writing within literary traditions which are associated with mass appeal, negotiate with the motivations and restrictions imposed upon her by the expectations of such literary genres. Prabhabati’s experimentation opened up the constrictions imposed by the genre for future experimentations and improvements, as is quite the case with the canon of Indian women’s detective fictions, which still stands critically unrecognized
“Doctor Miss Jamini Sen”: : A Journey from Privacy to Publication and Critical Appraisal
Full text linkThe present article is basically a tribute to Dr. Jamini Sen, one of the pioneering women medics who passed out from the Calcutta Medical College, and dedicated their lives to the service of humanity. Unlike her most famous predecessor, Dr. Kadambini Ganguly, Jamini Sen was not a ‘public figure’; she was rather of a reserved character and maintained her privacy almost with a religious zeal ‘not to be exposed’. Little was known about her life, work and legacy, before Chitra Deb mentioned her in the book Mahila Daktar: Bhin Graher Basinda, and some lesser-known prose writings of Kamini Roy, her elder sister revived and published from the School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University. That book contains some portions of Jamini’s own diaries and one essay, never published during her lifetime. In this article, an attempt has been made to reconstruct her life and work, and to translate some of her writings on the basis of those texts