Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry
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“The Test of Knowledge” (1919) by Rabindranath Tagore
Full text linkSection-Editor Samrat Sengupta writes:
In the present issue of Sanglap, we are publishing the essay “Vidyar Jachai” by Rabindranath Tagore from his collection of reflections on the state of education in Bengal titled Siksha. Translating this essay in a journal titled Sanglap (which means dialogue) holds enormous significance not only by its content but also as a critical reflection on the ambiguous relationship between colonial pedagogy and the act of translating cultures and Dr. Saptaparna Roy has carefully chosen the essay and undertaken this challenging work. Critical discourses have always functioned upon the clearing of ambiguity but are also built upon ambiguity itself, particularly when it creates contradictions and liminality in different cultural spaces. On one hand, translation engages in a dialogue, but it also announces a failure of conversations. Tagore’s present essay focuses on the colonial mimicry of the western knowledge paradigm in Bengal. While in postcolonial scholarship, such discussion has become a cliché, there are some salient points made by Tagore that demand attention. While the essay written in 1919 can be cited as an antecedent to the major anti-colonial pedagogues like Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, or N’gugi wa Thiongo, the work written in Bengali primarily addresses the second or third generation English-educated natives of Bengal – the foster grandchildren of T. B. Macaulay, who introduced English education en masse in Bengal. It does not obsessively discard the relevance of reading English writers and thinkers but becomes suspicious of our ways of reading them. The essay is a commentary on syllabus making and framing of knowledge rather than a polarisation along the East-West binary. The strategies of reading and dissemination of knowledge through a framework adopted from the West is something that Tagore proposes to reconsider. Unlike veteran nationalists like M. K. Gandhi or Bal Gangadhar Tilak, he was not proposing an outright rejection of Western epistemology for a purely “Indian” one but harping on the necessity of a strategy of reception where “wherever the material is sought, the responsibility to examine is in one’s own hand.”
The translation of this essay in the present moment is an act of writing back to the postcolonial debates on pedagogy and knowledge system, which, even in its act of rage against the worlding of the critical discourse by the erstwhile colonies, adopts a framework born and cultivated in the west. The word “jachai” in the original title of the essay means testing and possibly suggests the intellectual framework derived from the west for testing knowledge. But “jachai” may also mean verification, and Tagore tries to verify the colonial episteme itself in the essay. The essay connects with Tagore’s well-known text “Totakahini” or “The Parrot Story,” where an average Bengali learner in the colonised education system is described as a parrot who is tutored to mimic what is being said by the pedagogue. We have been “practicing handwriting by tracing on a specimen script,” and that causes an intellectual failure. The essay can continue the critical dialogue on colonial pedagogy in the present moment by understanding the ways of adopting critical discourses from the west in the Indian classroom without considering the historical and political situatedness. In the age of AI and ChatGPT, knowledge becomes anything that has greater visibility and archiving and is controlled largely by countries with better economic and cultural resources, and we still feel the need to ask, like Tagore – “but will this be how things turn out forever?
Art as Storyteller: Scroll Paintings of Naya Village as Mnemonics of Cultural Memory and the Changing Modes in Digital Proliferation
Full text linkScroll painting and narrating tradition has been present in India from ancient times. The picture showman tradition consisted of displaying painted scrolls and narrating the story in the form of singing. For centuries, patachitras have dispersed mythical oral narratives in villages and towns of Bengal and have played an essential part in creating Bengal’s cultural identity. Just like other Indian knowledge systems, the narration as a part of the performance is retained in memory and passed over generations. Patachitra of Pingla had chronicled the religious as well as the political and social happenings throughout the history and thus occasioned the remembrance of cultural memories. Pingla patachitra has survived the Western cultural invasion and has been carried to future as symbolic of cultural identity through digital proliferation. In the digital age, devoid of performance, patachitras have got new meanings as standalone painting pieces, yet they function as agents of cultural memory that represents the culture itself. The paper aims at a holistic understanding of the modes of storytelling and cultural preservation by Naya village patachitra through the lens of Memory Studies
The Popular Tale : A Study on Retention and Deconstruction of Collective Memory in Duffer Brothers\u27 Stranger Things and Bisha Ali\u27s Miss Marvel
Full text linkIn On Media Memory; Collective Memory in New Media Age, cultural memory is described as “a version of past, defined and negotiated through changing socio-political power circumstances and agendas" (qtd. in Bosh TE 3). The popular entertainment of every age is obliged to incorporate elements of cultural memory in it to remain popular. The paper seeks to interrogate the role played by the integration of cultural memory in the popular American science fiction web series, Stranger Things, and the latest production of Marvel Cinematic Universe, Miss Marvel. The Stranger Things series, written and directed by the Duffer brothers is set in the mid-1980s. The age is recreated through certain elements that constitute cultural memory. They are placed within the context of the Ukraine crisis which urgently necessitates anti-Russian narratives in American popular entertainment. Miss Marvel appeared as a fresh wind in MCU, questioning the collective mistrust towards the Pakistani Muslim community and addressing the scars of partition as well as migration in third-generation Pakistani-Americans. The two web series featured on Netflix and Disney Hotstar are compared and contrasted to elucidate how popular entertainment can act as a soft power for the retention and deconstruction of cultural memory
Narrativising Community, Surviving Contagion: Orality in Véronique Tadjo’s In the Company of Men
Full text linkThis essay is a meditative reflection on the critical, creative, and narrative labour involved in making the community “real” as a part of contemporary lived and temporal experiences of modernity. I analyse the crucial role that fiction plays in realising the community. Taking Amitav Ghosh’s provocation regarding the “derangement” of normative notions of realism as the starting point, this essay re-examines the place of orality in the contemporary African novel. Chief among its claims is that orality and realism are companionate terms. The deployment of oral forms provides a more expansive view of reality that is otherwise unavailable within capitalist conceptions of time and linear development. In the essay, I read Véronique Tadjo’s ‘Ebola’ novel In the Company of Men (English trans. 2021) as an invitation to the community in the wake of the devastation struck by deadly diseases such as Ebola and COVID-19. I argue that Tadjo organises a literary imagination of community and solidarity as the basis of a collective reckoning that is yet to come. In this sense, the book operates as a “portal,” fashioning both a cultural memory of collective survival (from human and nonhuman perspectives) and raising an urgent, anticipatory call for more expansive forms of imagination facing the future.
The Embodied Reader and Experiential Death: Emerging Readership for ‘Brooksian’ Fiction
Full text linkNarratives being the cornerstone of societal development will never go out of fashion. The act of reading will naturally be a part of highly developed cognitive beings. In this paper, the ideal reader is replaced by the embodied reader. The neurocognitive implications of the narratee will be analysed to uncover the fact that reading is quite similar to using a VR headset to play video games. The reason behind a good book being a favourite pastime for many is due to the ability of fiction to be experiential. Understanding fiction as a catalyst for neural engagement and triggering sensory-motor neural movement will be used to understand the true nature of the reading community. In addition to this close-up analysis of the embodied reader, the psychological response of such a reader when coming across a text that highlights the theme of death will also be analysed using the findings of terror management theory (TMT). 
In Search of the Fragments of Recollection: Cultural Memory and Identity in Select Travel Narratives of Tahir Shah
Full text linkCulture, memory, and identity are intricately connected terms. Memory is not just an individual experience but plays a prominent role in the establishment of both individual and cultural identity. Jan Assmann, in his essay “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity”, has defined cultural memory as “the characteristic store of repeatedly used texts, images, and rituals in the cultivation of which each society and epoch stabilizes and imports its self-image; a collectively shared knowledge of preferably (yet not exclusively) the past, on which a group bases its awareness of unity and character” (15). Storytelling is a universal act of preserving the cultural aspects of a community. The works selected for the present study are The Caliph’s House and In Arabian Nights written by the travel-writer Tahir Shah. This paper intends to analyze the connection between cultural memory and cultural identity as presented in the selected works from two levels. Firstly, it studies how the author reaffirms the cultural identity of Morocco by exploring the cultural elements and the art of storytelling, and secondly, how he ascertains his personal identity through his explorations and experiences as a traveller
Travel Culture, Travel Writing and Bengali Women, 1870-1940. Jayati Gupta. Routledge, India, 2020, 290 pages, Hardcover, Rs. 995: Reviewed by Arindam Goswami
No full textTravel Culture, Travel Writing and Bengali Women, 1870-1940 by Jayati Gupta focuses onthe travel writings by Bengali women from the undivided Bengal province during the colonialperiod. The book is one of its kind as it forwards the unheard voices of these women, mostof whom have never gained prominence in the field of travel writing study. One of the centralreasons for such oblivion is the male predominance over the genre of travel writing, astravelling was often considered a male prerogative. Patriarchy has always imposed differentrestrictions upon the movement of women. The allocated space for women, according to thepatriarchal notion, is the home, and henceforth women have always been associated withimmobility and domesticity. On the contrary, freedom, recklessness, and a fondness foradventure have always been the best and ideal attributes of a man. Then there is no wonderthat the earlier travel narratives that survived through the ages were predominantly malenarratives where women had little or almost no role. But they were not completely absentfrom the texts either. In each period, numerous women travellers travelled as companions totheir husbands or father, but the accounts of their experience of the journey have often beendismissed as “quotidian and self-congratulatory” (Gupta xviii). It was only after the lateeighteenth century, as observed by Carl Thompson, when tourism flourished and becamemore widespread, that the opportunity for women to travel for pleasure and recreationalpurposes increased (169). Women started to travel and publish their travel accounts. Butmost of these accounts are predominantly Western travel accounts. As Mary Morrisobserved, “[E]arly women travel writers were women of the upper class in European society,invariably white and privileged” (Morris, quoted in Siegel 2)
The Bamboo Queen By Abani Kumar Baral : Translated by Anjali Tripathy
No full textEditorial Comments
Samrat Sengupta
Associate Professor, Dept. of English
Sidho-Kanho-Birsha University, India
The present issue of Sanglap is housing the translation of the Odia short story “The Bamboo Queen” by Abani Kumar Baral, an academic and creative writer from Odissa with a Marxist orientation. The story deals with the complex question of caste, class, gender, and the crisis of subaltern women belonging to the community of nomadic acrobats, performing feats on the streets and roaming from place to place. The women playing on bamboo sticks and swinging freely above the ground, as represented in the story, suggest the ambiguous spatial relationship they share with mainstream society and their precarious existence. The game is supposedly a surviving trace of performative cultures that predates literacy and connects with other nomadic communities of the world, like the gypsies who roam from place to place and lack a permanent foothold in the mainstream sedentary society. The homelessness of this community in the story takes a more complex turn when we see the predicament of women from this community. Women, as such, are always and already loosely connected to their home and society in a patriarchal culture, and in the story, we find the three sisters, Jhampa, Labanga, and Sita, being forced to perform their feats before the male gaze for the livelihood of their parents. Their loose attachment is evident from the language in which the protagonist of the story, the middle daughter Labanga is described as performing balance on the Bamboo stick – “she sits with swinging legs, singing as if she is the daughter of the sky.” Her scene of unbelonging and unstable relationship with the earth is evident. Incidentally, the act of balancing is also significant since a woman is forced to strike a fine balance in society for survival; like the sisters had to bear with men trying to touch their bodies and still perform in a smiling face, they had to perform for the livelihood of their parents without much complaining. The natural state of unbelonging of this nomadic community described in the story as living “in tents in mango groves, under big trees or verandas of small schools” gets doubled when it comes to women who cannot even belong fully in a personal relationship. The objectification of Labanga is manifold. Not only do the outsiders who watch her performance subject her to their sexualised male gaze, but she is also used as a source of income by her own father by showing her body in tight clothes while performing, thus relying upon her physical charm. In the story, we see that she cannot have faith in any man on earth and have a stable relationship. Even her romantic relationship with the orphan drum player boy (Dinu) of her performance team is ambiguous and unstable as a sense of impermanence pervades her vision as she cannot rely on any men. She remains the queen of the Bamboo, on which she dances with the chanciness of falling and swings in a dangerous way. The language of the story is, at the same time, realistic and symbolic and suggests a sense of pervasive instability for Labanga. The wandering boy Dinu who lacks a fixed religious or caste identity, fails to be a dependable companion for her. The sense of a subaltern woman dazed by her double marginalisation of the outside mainstream community that objectifies and sexualises them and the patriarchy within her own community in intimate spaces and relationships makes her permanently groundless and precarious. The wandering community performing on bamboo sticks is found across India, and this story, in translation, can find similar resonances across the different regions of the country. The translation can also be a general commentary on subaltern women in India and their nature of alienation in mainstream society as well as within their own families and community. 
Ghiñn: A Reading of Disgust as a Literary Device in Subimal Mishra’s Short Fiction
Full text linkDisgust is universal to humans across the globe in its broader aspects and localised and individualistic in its specific locus and formations. In general, the emotion of disgust is that it works as an anchor against existential dread, the anxiety of death (angst), and the fear of loss of meaning (abject). It is disgusting to look at rotting bodies or slimy, sticky, throbbing, odorous things because it reminds us of the insignificance of life itself. Objects of disgust are rude organic and cosmic reminders of our very anthropocentric and vainglorious conceptions of the self as Being-in-the-World (In-der-Welt-sein). However, disgust is also deeply embedded with networks of social and political power and is used as a tool in encounters with the other. The other target of this disgust could be from the categories of other gender, race, caste, class, and sexualities. This paper tries to engage with a few of those categories in order to understand how disgust as an emotion has both an existential and socio-political charge in-itself. It then tries to analyse Subimal Mishra’s works through the lens and posits the possibility of using disgust as a literary device
Introduction
Full text linkEverything that we see on this earth is an imitation, be it a human being, animal, or plant; each of them is a memory of something/someone who already existed. Memory studies is a multidisciplinary field of knowledge that engages in understanding the ability to use memory as a tool in remembering/forgetting the past. Memory studies as a branch of knowledge began its presence by forging concepts of cultural memory to demand special focus from scholars of anthropology, education, literature, history, philosophy, psychology, and sociology, among others. Discussing the way memory studies began growing, Roediger and Wertsch write that, “Over the past few decades, collective memory has become a topic of renewed interest in the humanities and social sciences and is now a key part of emerging interdisciplinary activity in ‘‘memory studies’’ (Roediger & Wertsch, 2008). French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1925, 1941) contributed immensely to this field of knowledge and his significant work “Social Frameworks of Memory” in 1925 holds great importance. For a long time until Maurice Halbwachs published his notable work "On Collective Memory" (1925), in which he analysed that ownership of memory need not be an individual but the individuals as a collective unit, be it family, society or community and the memory is operated thus by a community. He distinguished between autobiographical memory – memory of those events we ourselves experience; historical memory – memory that reaches us only through historical records; history – as the remembered past which is no longer important to our lives; and collective memory – the active past that forms our identities. Also, Halbwachs characterised shared memories as effective markers of social differentiation. “Collective memory is not history, though it is sometimes made from similar material. It is a collective phenomenon but only manifests itself in the actions and statements of individuals […] it often privileges the interests of the contemporary” (Kansteiner 2002)). Cultural memory conserves the heritage that involves an act of remembering