Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry
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Resistance and Street Theatre:: Democratizing the Space and Spatializing the Democracy
Get PDFThe present paper explores how the practice of street theatre by staging resistance not only exercises the right to resist but strengthens the democratic values and institutions. India’s independence and the acceptance of democracy were the results of simultaneous resistance against colonial power and the undemocratic, hierarchical, caste-class-ridden social structure. However, it didn’t end the phase of resistance. Values, such as resistance to injustice, anarchy, dominance and assertion of newly gained rights make democracy meaningful. Over the years the natures, aims, means, and modes of such values also change. Occasionally, it appears that the resistance has become unethical, technical, and ritualistic. Such developments however undermine the genuine and concerned articulations of resistance. The need is to strengthen the ethical, pragmatic, and representative deliverability of resistance. Thirst (2005), a street play by Telugu playwright Vinodini, stresses how street theatre could demonstrate resistance as a right and ethical duty. It puts rigours to show that resistance is not incidental, haphazard, and episodic but a sustained activity to achieve a durable goal of a democratic society as against the immediately bargained temporary goals. It argues constructively for distributive justice and decentralization in an organized, focused, and principled manner
Mum’s the Word: Heteronormative Indian Society and the Censorship of Single Unwed Mothers
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The right of single unwed mothers in India has not only been a widely debated topic but is also situated at the core of gender equality. Scholars have discussed the positionality of single unwed mothers in Indian society within the larger discourse of patriarchy. In this paper, I examine the materiality of the spaces within which the recent Supreme Court’s ruling on single unwed mothers can be implemented. I argue that the emancipation of single unwed mothers is contingent on macro social and institutional analysis. I situate my argument in the larger context of class mobility, social stigma and the neoliberal economic debate. In doing so, I also analyze the censorship of unwed mothers as a ramification of heteronormativity that aims to marginalize any other form of sexuality. In conclusion this paper by closely examining the censorship and stigma of single unwed mothers will shed new light on the rarely acknowledged larger issues of class mobility and neoliberalis
Why World Literature?:: Introductory Dialogues
Get PDFIn this issue, we acknowledge the phenomenal rise of world literature in current (Euro-American) literary studies. Although world literature as an object of study was revived in the 1990s, it was not till the last decade or so that scholars expressed such intense engagement with the issue
Namasudra Literature and the Politics of Caste in West Bengal
Get PDFThe paper examines the popular claim that West Bengal politics is ‘unique’ due to an absence of caste-based assertions in the post-colonial period. By taking Namasudra literature as the primary site, the paper argues that since the late twentieth century there is numerous literature written by low caste people in West Bengal on the issue of caste. These writings have created a literate Dalit public sphere operating at the grassroots level and mainly outside the framework of governmental party politics. One of the dominant themes of Namasudra literature is the visions of anti-caste utopia. By analysing a Namasudra writer and activist Manindranath Biswas’s texts Harichand Tattwamrita, the paper argues that Dalit’s writings on history don’t follow a linear or a mythical structure; rather, there is a political exigency for history, in which utopic past/future is often invoked through a logic of circularity and yet redemptive fulfilment of time
Caste and Gender:: Generalities of Experience
Get PDFThe ways in which the hegemony of the hierarchies of the caste structure are produced and continued are different from the ways in which the hegemony of man over woman is replicated in reproductive heteronormativity. The exclusion of the dalit and the exclusion of the non-normative sexualities work through different structural grids. Yet they intersect at certain spaces. The body of the woman is one very important place where this intersection occurs. Of course, these are logical and phenomenological processes at work at an abstract level. And definitely, these are not the only processes at work. The present paper focuses on, yet one more time, the woman\u27s body as the site where processes of caste and gender intersect. To do this, it reads a story in Bangla. In the process, the standpoints of caste and gender are seen to be constituted by their dissipated enunciations in the social. 
Maps of the Impossible: Six Contemporary Hindi Poets – Readings and Translations by Rajesh Sharma:: Autumn Art, 2019, Hardcover, ₹ 400, Paperback, ₹ 325.
Get PDFDrawn by the book\u27s jacket with the iconic image of self-immolating Thích Quảng Đức, theBurning Monk, one is reminded of another image, more recent and as chilling – that ofMohamed Bouazizi
Nabarun Bhattacharya’s Poems
Get PDFI don’t want to be a paperbackThrown away after you’ve read it, Pages coming loose from their bindin
Fyataru
Get PDFBe it Irfan or Mandol’s, whosoever’s country liquor-shack it is, there are days when there is no sense of control in anyone
Fyatarus in Spring Festival
Get PDFThough readers know it from the very initial stage, still it is repeated here that our favorite writer Nabani Dhar and his ex-model wife Meghamala Dhar lives on the 9th floor of the Himgiri Apartments in South Kolkata. Who hasn’t read Nabanida’s books “The Impotent”, “Shadow in Petticoat”, “Senility of the Saint”? Oh who hasn’t
A Home at the End of the World: Eritrean and Sudanese Asylum Seekers in Tel Aviv, Israel
Get PDFThis paper explores the ways in which national culture intersects with urban environs to produce multinational subjectivity. Specifically, this paper shows the activity of Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seekers in Tel Aviv, Israel, as particularly generative of the life world building of Southern Tel Aviv (known as Little Africa). Juxtaposing these spaces of urban life, this paper also looks at the Holot Detention Facility as a space of life as well, situating the asylum seeker along various, migratory paths towards citizenship. With the near-total recreation of African life, this paper examines the Neve Sha’anan neighborhood as supportive of the LGBT and migrant communities, evidencing the flourishing of national culture outside of traditional boundaries. Particularly, this paper looks at “The Prevention of Infiltration Law” to discuss ideas of “infiltrators” using frameworks from Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Jean-Luc Nancy and Achille Mbembe. Examining ideas of space, place, ethics, embodiment, law, the body, street art, border fences, architecture, and minimalism, this paper juxtaposes BLM (Black Lives Matter) and BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) from a transnational perspective of world-building, asking the question of where can one call a place, home