Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry
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“Shakunakharas":: Translating the Ritual Folk Songs from the Central Himalayan Region of Kumaon
Full text linkThe oral culture of the Central Himalayan region of Kumaun survives mainly due to its folk songs, which represent the true spirit of Kumauni life by reflecting the daily struggles, beliefs and superstitions, customs and rituals, and the popular legends and myths of the region. However, there are a variety of folk songs which are sung on specific occasions and have a particular social function. In the following paper, we have attempted to present the translations of some of these popular folk ritual songs called the Shakunakharas
At the Crossroad of Decolonial Studies: : The Gaze of a Woman in a Travel Narrative in Colonial Bengal
Full text linkBased on a close study of a travelogue written by a Bengali woman named Hemlata Sarkar in the first decade of twentieth century and a few journal entries by another woman, Dr. Jamini Sen, who composed them while working as a doctor, this paper wants to argue how these otherwise innocuous and effusive pieces are steeped in deep meditations on society and culture in South Asia, thus effectively giving birth to a new idea of South Asia premised on commonalities and similarities across difference and alterities. What is at stake in this discussion is the question of what new perspectives the ‘gaze of a woman’ can bring in the field of decolonial studies. In liberating these women from the narrowed optics of a woman writer who carries her ‘home’ to visualize and wonder about ‘otherness’, this paper wants to see them as epitomizing a serious discourse on social thinking from a decolonial angle
Revisiting the Intellectual Legacy of Chandrabati: Ramayana from Sita’s Perspective
No full textChandrabati’s Ramayan, or The Ramayan of Chandrabati, is a translated work by Nabaneeta Dev Sen, a woman writer and thinker from Bengal. She completed the manuscript of Chandrabati’s Ramayan just a year before her passing away, and it was published posthumously in 2020. This review of one of her major translated works is a way of paying respect to the distinct literary-academic tradition that she created within the Bengali intelligentsia
Everyday Anthropocene and Multispecies Kinship in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island
Full text linkThe term ‘everyday’ typically denotes the routine, mundane aspects of day-to-day life, embodying notions of normalcy, ordinariness, and familiarity. From this perspective, it stands as an antithesis to the unusual, strange, and extraordinary. However, the Anthropocene era—our current geological epoch marked by significant human impact on Earth’s geology and ecosystems—has radically transformed our understanding of the ‘everyday’. In this epoch, the everyday no longer signifies a realm of predictability and relatability; rather, it encompasses new environmental realities that are bizarre and unprecedented. Therefore, contemporary literary fiction is challenged to redefine its approach to realism to aptly reflect the altered everyday experiences of its characters within the Anthropocene context. This paper examines Amitav Ghosh’s novel Gun Island (2019) as a literary manifestation of the ‘everyday Anthropocene’, a concept that recognises the Anthropocene not as a distant or abstract epoch but as an immediate, lived reality. The paper argues that the novel advocates for multispecies kinship as a vital survival strategy within the daily realities of the Anthropocene
Interview with Geraldine Forbes
Full text linkProfessor Geraldine Forbes is the Distinguished Teaching Professor Emerita, State University of New York, Oswego. As a pioneering persona in the fields of women’s studies and women’s history in India, Professor Forbes charts new avenues in exploring the lives and works of women in India and imparts historical visibility to women’s issues from the perspectives of women. For the last fifty years, her path-breaking contributions as a dedicated researcher of women’s history have inspired generations of scholars in the field of women’s studies in India. Her seminal books, such as Women in Colonial India and Women in Modern India, and numerous research papers have been an enriching oeuvre for women’s studies researchers. A well-known feminist historian of international repute, Geraldine is known for her dynamism, her keen interest in new research in women’s studies and the warmth of her character. Her humanism and sensitivity are truly remarkable.
This interview is an attempt to revisit the journey of Professor Geraldine Forbes as a woman thinker in the arena of women’s history. We are really indebted to Geraldine for giving us the time and space to respond to our queries. We met Prof. Geraldine Forbes in the apartment where she stays in Kolkata on 11 March 2024 at 11:00 a.m. Our meeting lasted for about one and a half hours, and the following is the output of our conversation
A Study of Everyday Aesthetics and (De)Alienation in Wim Wenders’ Alice in the Cities
Full text linkThis article is a study of Wim Wenders’ Alice in the Cities (1974) where it attempts to explore the aestheticization of everyday images that Wenders weaves into the cinematic narrative of the film. The article examines how the aestheticization renders the everyday as a site of psycho-political transformation through the intertwined relational concept of ‘alienation’ and ‘de-alienation’. In its first section, the article will attempt a discussion of Wenders’ film aesthetics and the dialectical relation of the cinematic and the photographic images central to it. The article will also explore Wenders’ technique of defamiliarization as a method to critically highlight the transformative potential of everyday. In the second section, the article will examine how the everyday experiences generate the psycho-political alienation inevitable under conditions of post-war capitalism and its attendant modernization. Since this film navigates through different registers of everyday modernity and its impact on the consciousness of its characters, the article will borrow the philosophical insights and sociological approaches of Henri Lefebvre, Walter Benjamin, Georg Simmel who have attempted to theorize the experience of everyday in the context of modernity. It will also follow Nick Malherbe’s political reading of the psychological concept of alienation through a synthesis of the Marxist political praxis and Lacanian psychoanalysis. In the final section the article will investigate the subtle de-alienation that the film maps along the progress in the plot, the character graphs and through its visual regime of the everyday aesthetics in an endeavor to affirm Lefebvre’s hypothesis that the everyday has enormous transformative and emancipatory potential
The ‘Everyday’ in the Context of Japanese Cultural Anti-Modernism: A Case Study of Isao Takahata’s Anime My Neighbors the Yamadas
Full text linkWith the opening up of Japan’s borders to the West in the mid-nineteenth century, after about two hundred years of self-isolation, and its eventual defeat in World War II, Japan rushed into an age committed to conscious modernization. The goal was large-scale economic growth, with success depending on the construction of the middle-class ‘salaryman’. In keeping with Lefebvre’s understanding of the modern ‘everyday’ and its ‘everydayness’, the Japanese bourgeois society found itself caught up in an urban ‘everyday’ of anxiety, loneliness and mental depression. This article seeks to highlight anti-modernist voices which look for a ‘rehabilitation’ of this ‘everyday’ by taking recourse to traditional Japanese aesthetic principles. The article points to the distinctly nuanced Japanese approach to the difference between the ‘regular’ and the ‘grand’, such that the ‘everyday’ and the ‘non-everyday’ is appreciated as one and the same. The article critically looks at Isao Takahata’s anime, My Neighbors the Yamadas, to underline the question of success of such Japanese anti-modernist manoeuvres within the domain of a commodified popular cultur
Writing Orality as a Postcolonial Strategy: A Reading of Janice Pariat’s Boats on Land
Full text linkLike other tribal communities, the oral tradition forms an integral part of the communities of North East India. With the advent of the English missionaries and the introduction of the written script, the oral form was generally identified with the illiterate and even the uncivilized. However, orality is now perceived as an important link between the past and the present and a form of preserving community values through writing. Interestingly, for many writers of North East India, written literature introduced by colonialism has become an effective tool for reviving the oral tradition, thus further preserving the authenticity of tribal communities. Hence, writings from this region in recent years often engage with themes of orality in their narratives in order to reclaim their ethnic identity and retrieve their pre-colonial history and values. ‘Writing orality’, then, becomes an effective strategy in rebuilding tribal practices and values in the midst of westernization, advancement in digital technology, and capitalism in contemporary society. The paper aims to examine the interaction between orality and writing in Janice Pariat’s short story collection, Boats on Land (2013). It looks at how the stories in this collection disrupt the hierarchy of the textual over the spoken, a binary that Pariat believes is a colonial construct. The paper aims to show how the valorization of the Khasi oral tradition in the text challenges the pre-established dominance of written literature. 
Analysing the Role of Memory in Oral History with respect to Urvashi Butalia’s The Other Side of Silence
Full text linkPartition historiography of India based on oral narratives has tried to break the silence of affirmation created by the History of India. By adding plurality to the voices of the narrator, Urvashi Butalia through her book The Other Side of Silence (1998) shatters the authoritarian voice of a single historian. Memory of the survivors and the witnesses of the ‘great’ partition of 1947 is used as the sole defense to prove that history is a dialogue between the past and the progressively emerging future. Butalia’s work of non-fiction is therefore an account of the experiences narrated orally by survivors, who are now caught between the two national identities- one created by the memories they cherish before partition and the other stamped on them after the trauma of partition. The essay aims to present the challenges faced by this oral account of history, narrated through the faculty of individual memories with all its fallacies. It therefore eliminates the elevated status enjoyed by History as a branch of literature. It further discusses in detail the reliability of memory as a source of information. Ironically, the essay also helps to prove that historiography is just another method of storytelling embedding within itself opinions, individual interests and preferences
The Aspect of Memory in Oonya Kempadoo’s All Decent Animals and Buxton Spice
Full text linkOonya Kempadoo, a Caribbean novelist of mixed racial and cultural heritage, has harnessed the power of memory in her novels. Her fresh approach and representation of Caribbean life provoke a sense of familiarity even in the most distanced reader, owing to the inclusion of true-to-life representations of socio-cultural experiences. The facets of diversity, socio- political relations, familial ties, and psychological implications are explored in the novels. In this paper, the study will focus on the instances of collective cultural memory, individual memory, material memory, and socio-cultural memories surrounding displacement in All Decent Animals (2013) and Buxton Spice (1998). Existing at the intersection of diverse, melismatic ethnic groups, the novels under consideration pulsate with dynamic portrayals of characters, experiences, and events. The microcosmic representation of multiculturalism as observed in the novels shall also be examined through the lens of memory studies, while also exploring the ways that memory manifests itself as a palpable construct