Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry
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‘Stories To Stay, Stories To Subvert’: The Role of Collective Communal Memory in the Native-Canadian Struggle for Resistance against Colonization
Full text linkThe indigenous communities of Canada have transmitted their traditional knowledge of survival from one generation to another through oral storytelling sessions since the pre-colonial times. This knowledge has remained encapsulated within their collective communal memory in the form of stories of ancestors, tales of tricksters, dream-vision narratives, ceremonial songs, and ritualistic recitals. But forces of Euro-Canadian colonization have encroached upon their right to autonomy through a coercive imposition of the colonizers\u27 language (English) and the colonizers\u27 medium of expression (writing) upon them. The starkly different consciousness of ‘history’ that governs the worldviews of the dominant and the dominated have only served to aggravate the imbalance of power even more. The late twentieth century has seen the literary productions of these communities’ strife to reclaim their cultural and thereby political autonomy by inscribing the ‘oral’ within the ‘written’ and reworking the semiotics of the foreign tongue, imposed upon them to incorporate the specific nuances of their traditional language-culture within it. By looking into Ravensong (1993) and Whispering in Shadows (2000) penned by writer-activists Lee Maracle (Salish) and Jeannette Armstrong (Okanagan) respectively, this paper aims to explore the subversive potential of this collective cultural memory in resisting the colonial atrocities, the erosion of identity and the political disempowerment that has plagued the Native-Canadian existence for centuries. 
Of Being and Belonging: Contextualising ‘Cosubjectivity’ in Easterine Kire’s When the River Sleeps
Full text linkEasterine Kire, a Naga writer from Northeast India, foregrounds a reconstituted community space where both the individual and the collective meet at a vantage point and non-human forms an integral part of human existence. Such strategic ways of representing the art of inhabiting in terms of valorising ‘cosubjectivity’ and blurring of the visible and invisible worlds continue to be a part of conceptualising and reclaiming ethnic boundaries as she integrates human and non-human in the space of the home. The representation of territoriality and community in her works challenges the conventional idea of the self and anthropomorphism as contextualised in her novel When the River Sleeps. What sets Kire apart is her deep engagement with the world of spirits and non-humans and her constant effort to widen and broaden the conceptualisation of ‘community’ to highlight the practices of collective identity in an inclusive space where mutual solidarity is constantly mediated, and ruptures and discontinuities are celebrated. The paper aims to address the complex nuances of Kire’s poetics of representation and contest the definitive conclusions about boundary formation and boundary spanning, thereby representing a fluid space of social and cultural encounter. As I proceed to argue, Kire’s representation of the idea and space of community is purely deconstructive in nature as she upholds an alternate spatial-cultural ethics, liminal to the core in When the River Sleeps
Digital Graphic Communities: Webcomics and E-Graphic Medicine in Combating Mental Diseases
Full text linkWith the onset of the millennial lifestyle and the technological revolution gaining pace-feeling of inadequacy, a constant need to be seen, poor body image, nuclear family structure, social anxiety, and, as Gen Z labels it, FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) has added significantly to the upsurge in mental illness. Contemporarily, with the lived experience of ‘quarantine’ gaining momentum during the pandemic and post-pandemic era, isolation has almost become life’s Suo moto mantra. Pandemic-necessitated isolation has greatly affected human interaction by limiting it mostly to a virtual interface. This turn of events has further complicated an already complex scenario of mental disorders – like depression, addiction, bipolar disorder, OCD, etc., stemming from an extreme sense of loneliness, insecurity and apocalyptic anxiety. This article enquiries into the ways in which Webcomics or Digital Graphic medicine narratives can help create a virtual literary community where the phenomenology of mental illness finds an empathic representation and serves as a platform for self and collective healing. Artists and illustrators like Debbie Tung, Christopher Grady, Allie Brosh, and Clay Jonathan have now taken to social media handles like Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, or other Webcomics platforms like Go Comics, StudyGroup Comics and Claycomix, etc., to share their stigmatised personal journey of mental illness with their readers and followers. Unlike the print media, digital readers get to respond to these comic strips and interact with the artist as well as one another by sharing their experience of viewing an artist’s rendition of their mental health trajectories. Amy Mazowita, while discussing the concept of a graphic care network, states that it is essential to offer a unique communicative opportunity for people and masses across various socioeconomic, political, and hegemonic entities: these networks offer users the comfort of anonymity besides offering a digital platform for legitimising their shared experiences of both collective and individual mental health realities (Mazowita)
Landscape of Altered Being: : Autopathography and Embodiment in When Breath Becomes Air
Full text linkAutopathography is described as an autobiographical narrative that revolves around the subjective experience of illness, often complementing or challenging the medical narrative of the disease. Since disease, by definition, affects the body of the organism, autopathographies concentrate on the broader phenomenon of illness. Illness is described as the overall impact of disease not simply on the body but on socio-cultural and personal systems relating to oneself. Paul Kalanithi’s narrative of lung cancer, When Breath Becomes Air, charts his life as a physician and patient; Kalanithi’s description illustrates that illness becomes an unrecognizable landscape of altered being. Using a phenomenological approach with concepts of embodiment, this paper attempts to re-ascertain the centrality of embodiment to the multiple aspects of our experiential reality. The reality we witness emerges from the embodied nature of our experience, making wellbeing and illness the context for everything. This paper elaborates on the thirdspace of autopathography as fundamental to making sense of the drastic alteration in one’s lived experience
How I Became a Tree. Sumana Roy. Aleph Book Company, India, Hardcover, Rs. 599: Yale University Press, 2021, 248 Pages, Hardcover, $25.00
No full textIn Philosophy of Nature (1842), G. W. F. Hegel has argued that plants are but a step to be dialectically sublated/ superseded by animals in the fulfillment of Spirit in nature. According to Hegel, plants are unable to preserve within themselves ‘the unity of selfhood’ (§350, 102) and ‘inwardly’ contain an independent individuality that ‘returns into itself’ (§349, 101), and, thus, they do not evince the subjectivity and inwardness that animals exhibit in nuce (102).The plant is a subordinate organism, destined to tender itself to its organic superior and be consumed by it. The plant’s tendency towards being-for-self gives rise to the plant and the bud/the flower, which are two independent individuals, and are not of an ‘ideal’ nature. Animal being consists, as Hegel avers, of these two posited in unity. The animal organism is, therefore, this duplication of subjectivity, in which difference no longer exists as it does in the plant, but in which ‘only the unity of this duplication attains existence’ (Hegel §350, 102). Goethe, in his The Metamorphosis of Plants (1790), sets out to show, however, in all these different parts of the plant — roots, stem, branches, leaves, blossoms, fruit — there is a simple basic life that is self-contained and enduring, and that all its forms are nothing more than exterior transformations of the identity of one and the same ‘primary essence’ (66, 70, 122). In Aristotle’s ‘ladder of nature’, the so-called scala naturae, or in the hierarchical universe as posited by the Greek Neoplatonists, that remained highly influential throughout the medieval and early modern periods, the inanimate beings as well as the plants, though having rudimentary neural nets and the capacity for primary perceptions, occupied the lowest level of the scale. The notion that plants are imperfect and ontologically lacking the characteristics that render animals superior, including movement, intentionality, or the ability to communicate, was to remain a philosophical tenet long after the Renaissance (Gagliano et al. ix). It is important to note that in The Power of Movement in Plants (1880), Charles Darwin, together with his son Francis, has used a neurological metaphor to acknowledge the sensitivity of plant roots when he proposes that ‘the tip of roots acts like the brain of some animals’, even though plants possess neither actual brains nor nerves (570-75)
Introduction: : Asian Perspectives on Semiotics
Full text linkBroadly speaking, semiotics is the study of sign systems and the process of signification. Viewing the world of meaning in terms of systems of signs and attempting to understand the manifold ways in which we interpret those signs has been the concern of philosophers since ancient times. As the study of philosophy became further subdivided in the modern era, the study of semiotics contributed to the establishment of various disciplines, notably anthropology and linguistics, and later, cultural studies and its offshoots. The study of semiotics now spans what we call the humanities and the social sciences and, importantly (though peripherally), has even branched out into the natural sciences in the field that is termed ‘biosemiotics’
Semiotic Travels: An Interview with Harjeet Singh Gill
Full text linkGill\u27s use of Abelard to critique dominant trends in European semiotics finds its parallels in his extensive work on Buddhist philosophers Dignāga and Dharmakīrti, who posed an alternative notion of the sign to that developed by the more celebrated earlier grammarians from the Sanskrit tradition, Pāṇini and Bhrtihari. He places these heterodox Indian and French traditions of semiotics in creative dialogue to cultivate a semiotic theory that is at once universal in its applicability while also allowing for multiple, non-dominant forms of thought and creativity to emerge. Consequently, his ideas provide a new way for semiotics that would be particularly relevant for scholars working in postcolonial Asia.
This interview is an abridged and edited excerpt taken from an interview conducted with Gill by Nishaant Choksi and Arka Chattopadhyay at a virtual seminar held at IIT-Gandhinagar on 31 March 2021. The entire recorded interview can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jb6fG3_hvqg. A special thanks to Shruti Nair for her assistance in transcription
Of Ravens and Owls: : A Methodological Framework for Historiography of Translation in Marathi
Full text linkKeshavasut (1866–1905), one of the earliest modern Marathi poets ‘translated’ the famous Edgar Allen Poe poem ‘The Raven’ into Marathi as ‘ghubad’ or the owl. Can the owl be an ‘equivalent’ for a raven? Can this process of transforming the raven into an owl be called translation? Whatever name you give for such a process of transformation, they definitely have played a crucial role in the development of the language of Marathi poetry towards the end of the twentieth century. Almost half a century later, the noted bilingual poet and translator Dilip Chitre (1938–2009) translated Baudelaire’s poem ‘The Owl ’into Marathi and discussed it by explicitly invoking the Keshasuta’s bird as well as Baudelaire’s fascination for Poe. Chitre called his translations of international modernist poets into Marathi ‘apabhranshas’. These apabhranshas’ were particularly influential and played a considerable role in the development of the language of modernist Marathi poetry. No history of literature or culture is complete if we do not take this process of transforming ravens into owls, the process of apabhransha, into account, as this is the process of artistic innovation and the process of reconstitution of cultural memory. In order to engage with the evolution of Marathi literature and culture, it is critical to move beyond the restrictive understanding of literature as a written or printed object, the notion which itself seems to be a translation of the colonial notion of literature. Literature and primarily poetry in India, implied performance, music, retelling, improvisation, and transmission of texts through oral traditions. Besides, it was constituted by intensive inter-medial, cross-lingual and cross-cultural intercourse, in short, by translational activity. We also need to revise our restrictive understanding of translation and equivalence as setting up of inter-lingual synonymy hounded by questions of fidelity and freedom. This restrictive notion of translation, too, seems to be a colonial import. We need a theoretical framework that allows us to see translation as an inter-medial, intercultural phenomenon inseparable from the questions of cultural memory, artistic innovation, and cultural change. The Soviet school of cultural studies, known as the Tartu Moscow School of cultural semiotics (or semiotics of culture), developed a full-fledged theory of culture under the leadership of Yuri Lotman (1922–1993) from the late 1960s which seems to have theoretically addressed these complex questions. In this paper, rather than merely providing a chronological account of the information regarding translation activity in Maharashtra, I intend to propose and lay out the methodological framework for writing and theorising the history of translation using the model of cultural semiotics
Signs and Differentiation: jaL and paaNi in Gujarati
Full text linkWe live in a world of signs and we have very little comprehension of the world outside the semiotic systems that we are exposed to. Signs, in different ways of representing the world, makes us aware about the world around us. Bhartṛhari talks about two functions of the sign, namely identification (prakāś) and differentiation (vimarś). Here, the first function allows the user to identify the object in a system and the second one allows the user to differentiate the object from other objects in the system. But, at times, we may have the same object having multiple representamen. The present paper attempts to present one such case of the same object, namely ‘water’ represented in Gujarati by two linguistic signs – jaL and paaNi. The present paper will primarily deal with the first and the marked sign – jaL and how it is used in Gujarati Sign system. The paper attempts to identify various domains in which the marked sign is used, its interpretant and very specific cultural significance. The analysis of compounding consisting of this sign, and the phrases in which this sign appears is offered. An attempt is made to understand the distinctive features and culturally and socially domain specific meaning through this semiotic investigation
The Pitfalls of Caste in the Wider Spectrum of Science: A Review of Science and Religion in India: Beyond Disenchantment
Full text linkScience and religion have traditionally been seen as two fundamentally polar fields. While religion has been posited as the domain of the cosmos, seemingly covering the arc of time from the creation of the universe till its ultimate demise, science has been the more stoic cousin, demanding a rigorous analysis of events based on a combination of empirical observations and theoretical analysis. Modern-day science can be seen as the descendent of the tumultuous socio-political-economic and scientific churning in 16th century Europe during the Renaissance. It was one of the many ways in which the emerging educated class challenged the feudal order of the Church and kingdoms and the conservative dogma they had propagated as religion. [...]