Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry
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COOKING THE WAY TO MY HERITAGE
Full text linkDuring this past year of lockdowns and self-isolation, the kitchen has become a focal space inmany of our homes. While some have been baking up a storm or beginning their sourdoughjourneys (both of which I am guilty of), I have also been using food to reacquaint myself withmy roots. This journey began when my partner gifted me Prakash K SivanathanSivanathan’s NiranjalaM EllawalaEllawala’s Sri Lanka: The Cookbook (2017).The husband and wife co-authors are Sri Lankan Tamil and Sinhala, respectively. Withover 100 recipes consisting of mains and desserts, the cookbook is a visual delight packed withstunning images of not only food but Sri LankaLanka’s people and landscape. The cookbook includesa detailed glossary of spices and herbs. I was pleasantly surprised by the wealth of vegan andvegetarian recipes which are reflective of a diet rich in grains, legumes, coconut and rootvegetables. The authors are chefs by trade, but their recipes are reflective of hearty homecooking. Being a Malaysian Sri Lankan Tamil myself, I can attest to the authenticity of theTamil recipes in Sri Lanka: The Cookbook some are staples found in my mummum’s and aunties ’kitchens back home
“Improbabilities abound”: Daphne du Maurier’s Rule Britannia and the Speculative Political Future
Full text linkContextualising Daphne du Maurier’s Rule Britannia (1970) in what I tentatively identify as a speculative books boom of the late 1960s and 1970s, this paper posits that speculative fiction as a literary category is both a broad and hybrid one, but one that is often used synonymously with science fiction. Following this observation, this paper explores the effects of du Maurier’s amalgamation of genres and intertextual resonances on the mood of suspicion, unease and desolation that pervades this speculative work. This article explores how Rule Britannia‘s uneasy mood speaks to an equally troubled cultural moment for Britain. Rule Britannia interrogates cultural and national symbols at a moment of concentrated cultural and national anxiety. Examining what it means for du Maurier to write an invasion narrative for Britain in 1972, when British identity is at a cultural and historical crossroads, this paper argues that du Maurier takes a hard look at Britain in its post-war context, drawing attention to its perceived failings, its weakened global status and its shifting national identity. Du Maurier imagines a coloniser-turned-colonised invasion narrative for a previously powerful country coming to terms with post-war economic strife, bankruptcy, Cold War global tensions and the process of decolonisation
Critiquing Humanism
Full text linkThe word “humanism” is associated with the revival of classical antiquity in 13th -15thC Italy. “It involves,” as Nicholas Mann writes, “the rediscovery and study of ancient Greek and Roman texts, the restoration and interpretation of them and the assimilation of the ideas and values that they contain” (2)
Reclaiming and Asserting Human Rights in Testimonio Genre:: A Critical Study
Full text linkThe relationship between the stories embedded in literature and human rights has been replete with paramount importance. The narrative genre that has explored the confluence of human rights and literature is testimonio. Testimonio is the emotionally overcharged record of the self because it documents pain and suffering, humiliation and oppression. Testimonio is a medium through which the author expresses his/her experiences and at the same time works as an agent of articulating the collective experience. Testimonio narratives of collective suffering and emancipation urge readers to locate and analyse the situation of the oppressed community. The writers act as witnesses who reveal the conspiracies and mechanism of the perpetrators of violence, thereby initiating advocacy and activism on behalf of the oppressed people. Originated in Latin American countries the narrative genre testimonio articulates numerous struggles to restore human rights. The paper explores how the testimonio genre can be employed as a powerful narrative to initiate social change
Reading and Resistance in the Works of Nabarun Bhattacharya
Full text linkThis paper looks into the ways in which eminent Bengali writer Nabarun Bhattacharya used reading as a tool of resistance. Examining his novels, short stories, essays and short journal entries, it attempts to highlight how Bhattacharya used his vast and varied reading as a source of his radical political stance
Translating Worlds: Migration, Memory and Culture. Editor(s). Susannah Radstone and Rita Wilson: London: Routledge, 2020. Paperback. £120.00, eBook. £25.89
Full text linkSusannah Radstone and Rita Wilson\u27s latest anthology explores the burgeoning field of migration studies in relation to translation and culture
Actants in the ‘Object Donor List’:: New Materialities of Martyr Ephemera Archives in the Liberation War Museum of Bangladesh
Full text linkAn official process of the naming of ‘martyr’ by the National Freedom Fighter Council or inclusion of a person’s name in the list for martyr awards in Bangladesh depends on or at times is supplemented by enlistment in the ‘Object Donor List’. Here, martyr ephemera are enlisted and updated on the official website of the Liberation War Museum in the capital city of Dhaka in Bangladesh. Ephemera are minor, transient objects of everyday life. An exploration of martyr ephemera as concretely studied actants thereby recognizes the sacrifices of common people rooted in a democratic object ontology. This study rethinks the post-human identity of the dead martyr and the post-death identity of the more-than-human martyr through the human, non-human and interjectional materialities of actants. Not expected to exist beyond the martyr’s lived moment in history, martyr ephemera will be specifically used to challenge the premises of materialities of the post-human and the post-death. Donated by families and relatives of martyrs coming from various regions, or officials associated with the martyrdom process of an individual, containing personal belongings, paper documents, photographs, print media, they evoke new narratives of an archive in the framework of posthuman museum practices. These narratives are structured around the social intra-active agency, the political affect of the body-politic, spatial actants of the everyday cutting across classes and the space of the museum and the ongoing intra-active agency of actants as ephemera. New materialist modes and mediums will enable a rethinking of the human, the non-human, the more-than-human and its intra-active agencies to assess how they comprise a people’s narrative of the 1971 Liberation War martyr legacy. These narratives are an attempt to initiate new materialisms into the domain of martyr ephemera studies.
 
New Materialism and the Question of Anthropos
Full text linkOne of the most crucial features of new materialism is its critical stance towards the philosophies of linguistic or poststructuralist turn. It argues that too much emphasis on language has pushed the question of matter and materiality into oblivion, and by ascribing agential role to language it has foreclosed any possibility of approaching matter’s autopoietic capabilities. Since language has historically been thought to be the privileged domain of anthropos, new materialist thought is by right non-anthropocentric. But despite their claims to the contrary, it often appears that a significant section of new materialist scholarship finds itself mired into the humanist paradigm. This article is divided into two segments. The first segment explores how the nonhumanism that new materialist theses espouses functions through an additive approach that subscribes to metaphysical notions of human and nonhuman, leaving the constitution of these categories intact. The second part takes up the works of Vicki Kirby and delineates how a radical nonhumanism that renders the human/nonhuman binary untenable can still be possible from a new materialist premise
Sexual Cultures and Imaginations of Justice in Anvita Dutt’s Bulbbul (2020)
Full text linkThis paper locates Anvita Dutt’s Bulbbul, a Hindi-language film released on Netflix in 2020, within the contentious cultural milieu of contemporary public discourse on issues of sexual violence, the need for legal reform, and extralegal modes of testimony. It reads the multiple imaginations of justice as redressal for gendered and sexual violence offered within Bulbbul through its delineation of four intertextual formations: child bride, widow, avenging woman, and devi (goddess). In doing so, it considers the manner in which Bulbbul offers a speculative space at the limits of judgement and sentence, which emerges out of the need to go beyond proceduralist concerns and address the possibility of desire as a legitimate axis for women’s self-expression
Exploring the Interactions between Sexuality, Law and Gender in Early India: : A Case Study of the Mānavadharmaśāstra
Full text linkThis paper seeks to analyse and decode the numerous precepts/legal codes on sexual crimes and their respective punishments, as gleaned from the Mānavadharmaśāstra. The central concern is to delve upon the manner in which the three important categories of Sexuality, Gender and Law/ethics intersected with each other, and what does a combined analysis of these manifest, regarding the socio-cultural system of Early India. A close reading of the text reveals that before the prescription of punishments for crimes like adultery, male sexual assault and female sexual assault, its composer Manu takes into due consideration both the offender and the victim’s caste, class, gender, and other important categories, like, mental and physical condition, age, frequency of the crime, etc. In fact, the present study reveals that these categories have a direct bearing on the public and private nature of repentance, or the penance (prāyaścitta) and punishment (daṇḍa) binary. However, the very idea of criminalizing sexual activities, even where the consent (anumati) of the participating individuals is involved, something we find extensively in the Mānavadharmaśāstra, points towards a larger aim, which in my understanding was an attempt to control the sexual desire of the populace at large, and impose psychological control or ‘self-censorship’. A closer reading of the text reveals that unbridled sexual activity was discouraged even within the socially and ritually sanctified institution of marriage. And while legal techniques were employed to control sexual interactions outside marriage, a range of social solutions or norms were prescribed to encourage and convince people of the benefits of exercising self-control over their desires. A gendered reading is therefore bound to offer some fresh insights on the socio-psychological and legal aspects at work in the construction and representation of sexuality in the Mānavadharmaśāstra