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Subverting Androcentrism and Voicing the Silenced in Kavita Kane's The Lanka's Princess
Get PDFThe retelecast of Ramayana is presumed to have garnered the record as one of the most viewed television series with about 7.7 million viewers worldwide. Mythologies in India are closely intertwined with the socio-cultural aspects of the people, dictating the way the society functions. Such a massive reception of the mythsafter years of their origin only reiteratesthe significance and influence of mythologies even today. The retelling of mythologies is not a current phenomenon, as evident in the presence of the different versionsof Ramayana and Mahabharata.From films, dramas to television series, the two narratives have provided the blueprint for artists from all fields to explore and re-imagine them.The most significant change, however, occurred in recent times with the emergence of the often marginalized section revisiting the two grand narratives, the most prominent being Feminists and Dalits, and give space tothe often marginalized characters that are assigned the role of the 'other.' Writing and Reading are often considered political. The meaning-making process and what is being told or what is omitted is governed by the hegemonic control of the one in power. Mythology is typically considered as the avenuefor Men. Women represented in the epics hardly play a significant role. The omission of the voice of the women like Supernekha, Draupadi, Mandodari, Sita, Urmillafrom the grand narratives becomes all the more vivid as they representthe voice of the sidelined or marginalized. The right to form history belongs to the one ruling. In this case, it is the patriarchal setup that allows only for the androcentric viewpoint in the process relegating all the other possible views. In this vein, using an overarching lens of Feminism, the paperattempts to see Kavita Kane's The Lanka's Princess, from the viewpoint of the often voicelesscharacters to dismantle the binary structureand subvert Androcentrism
Art as the Commentary of Life
Get PDFLiterature has always been a mighty weapon in bringing reality to surface. It is the reflection of mirror in the form of print that actually ushers to forefront the reality of life. The main aim of art is to revolutionize the world in general and society in particular. “Art for the Sake of Life” generally refers to the notion that art makes us understand the conduct of everyday life. Although art encompasses literature yet it is more than that because it deals with every aspect of our life. It is the way to justify the grim realities of life while beautifying them. As a famous writer James Baldwin accords that “one can’t write a line without a message”. Art is a way of expressing oneself. Many people use it to express boundless emotions and thoughts, from turbulence to euphoria to bewilderment that everyone has within the heart, mind and soul. The authors have discovered an escape through art to seek meaning via truth, not just for the sake of art, but for the sake of life. Writers tweak the image of specific challenges so that a reader can see them through the same lens. George Bernard Shaw also avows that “For art’s sake alone I would not face the toil of writing a single sentence”. So, an artist should be moralist encumbered with a reforming zeal. Thus “Art for the sake of life” is a maxim that should be applied to all art; art with style, sophistication, pathos, and psychological resonance. It is not thus for the art’s sake rather it is for the life’s sake or social sake. Art is a medicine or elixir of pain which makes life bearable. The main aim of this paper is to showcase how art in general as well as in particular is only for life’s sake and not for art’s sake. Art thus has a cosmic phenomenon with a universal impact
Merging Identities: A Study of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies
Get PDFJhumpa Lahiri’s characters in her short story collection Interpreter of Maladies keep wandering between the two worlds- one in their homeland and the other in the country where they choose to live and die. Lahiri records the emotional journey of characters seeking love and searching their identity beyond the barricade of nations, cultures, religions and generations. Mr. Kapasi is an interpreter of maladies and the malady of Mrs. Das is to be an unfamiliar person to her family’s culture, as Lahiri herself is an erudite interpreter of maladies- both social and emotional. Since, Mrs. Das is undertaking a second migration, she turns to be an interpreter like Mr. Kapasi whose job interests her so much. The characters’ longing to belong to either or both the habitats, their urge to de-stress the distress of alienation by searching an identity in their native heritage add value to the writer’s creative intensity. She illustrates her characters sprouting in the centre of a new crossbreed culture, the Indo-American awareness as Lahiri herself, the true representative of the second generation Indian in America
A Comparative Study of Magic Realism in Works of Neil Gaiman and Angela Carter
Get PDFSince the release of Gabriel Garciá Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Magical Realism has been in favour as a narrative style or genre in adult fiction. The representation of the genre in children’s and juvenile literature, on the other hand, is a recent trend; the components of the genre have been tracked and proven to be genuinely important in the interpretation of current children’s fiction, such as David Almond’s Skelling (1998). The aim of this paper is to look at the elements of magical realism in Neil Gaiman’s Coraline and Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus works in this respect
“Why I Write”; Corresponding Elements in the Poetic Discourse of Jibanananda and Wordsworth
Get PDFIn his Bengali treatise on poetry named Kobitar Kotha/Why I Write there is evidence of vernacular poet Jibanananda (1899-1954). Jibanananda was familiar with the poetic cannons of European poetry. He emphasizes, in his treatise on poetry, on “experience” along with “imagination” as intrinsic to the creative process of poetry. The affinity of English Romantic poet William Wordsworth’s (deliberation on nature of Poetry and the definition of a Poet in Preface to The Lyrical Ballads and Jibanananda’s two articles on the same subject-Kobitar Kotha/The Story of Poetry and Keno Likhi/Why I Write is remarkable. This paper seeks to identify some areas of commonality in this sphere
Cultural and Historical Identity in Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke: A Postcolonial Perspective
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Amitav Ghosh is a prominent writer of present times. In his writings, Ghosh deals with the effects of colonialism on contemporary societies and cultures. By depicting the modern postcolonial situation, he problematizes the dominant discourse of culture and history. My paper proposes to examine and explore the cultural and historical identity in River of Smoke from the perspective of postcolonialism. He is considered an iconic figure in English Literature owing to his singular and unorthodox perception of history. Historical identity is a reservoir of past events and incidents. One of those historical incidents is the Opium War (1839-42), which has been dealt extensively by Amitav Ghosh in River of Smoke (2011) in sequential manner. In his fiction, Ghosh meticulously deals with many things: the troubled legacy of colonial knowledge and discourse about formerly colonized societies and ideas, the ambivalent relationship to modernity of the so-called developing or ‘Third World’, and the formation and reformation of identities in colonial and post-colonial societies. The main purpose of this research paper is to examine in detail about the postcolonial traits with specific reference to the Indian diaspora
The Trauma of Being a Woman: Oppression of Women in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things
Get PDFAll around the world violence against women occurs daily. In India also women are subjected to oppression and humiliation in several ways day by day. Indian women are mainly oppressed because the country is built around a patriarchal mind set. Patriarchy is a social system in which each and everything in the family is controlled and decided by the males. They have the roles of political leadership, moral authority and property ownership. The patriarchal idea is that a woman’s only duty is to serve her father, brothers and her husband. Arunhati Roy’s The God of Small Things is a novel which is set in a patriarchal society. Breaking laws, forbidden relationships, the changing social order, oppression of women etc. are its main themes. This novel shows how differently men and women are treated according to the unwritten social norms. Women who stand against men and society are considered as the other and they will be punished accordingly. The present article analyses how Roy portrays an unpleasantly difficult situation of Indian women against the setting of Ayemenam, a southern Indian state of Kerala where the chain of relationships are very complex which traps the female characters subjecting them to repeated suppression
Save the Indigenous Teaching and Learning: ELT
Get PDFThis paper explores not only the care of the indigenous in nativity of teaching of English Language and also advising the methods for language learners and language teachers, the methods where all learners do have some access for cognitive knowledge of intellectual development in language. The learners according to GT method to use their cognitive faculty to memorize grammatical rules, vocabulary lists, translation and reading comprehension and many more. This paper doesn’t explain all the rules but principal characteristics of GT method, it suggests GT method importance. It unravels the focus learning through cognitive system which is a real thinking as native speakers do. The word indigenous here meant the nativity of EL, the teaching of educated native speakers of ELT which second language teachers cannot faithfully do the same but there are absolute qualities can be gained from native speakers learning. There are hundreds and thousands of software technologies that teach English Language. Information and communication technologies (ICT) refer to technologies that provide easy access to information through telecommunications. This includes the internet, wireless networks, cell phones, and other communication mediums. Learning EL through ICT is a half-backed knowledge. All developed countries they setup and use digital learning. Here thanks to technology but if the curriculum is not designed with the standard approaches and the methods of ELT, surely a wrong learning enter! Even it leads to kill the language standards due to unnecessary globalized jargon. Globalization is one of the many terms virtually quotidian in present times discourse
Parsi Consciousness in Rohinton Mistry’s Fiction
Get PDFRohinton Mistry is one of the most celebrated new wave fiction writers of Indian writing in English. Mistry is a well-known name for his heritage fiction and Parsi consciousness. As being a Parsi, Mistry seems to be more concerned with his community and its diminishing numbers like their symbol bird vultures. Parsi is one of the most educated communities all around the world and famous for their sense of charities yet with each passing year this one of the oldest religious communities is facing the threat of extinction; and this threat put each and every Parsi writers on their toes to preserve their culture through their writings, and the fiction of Rohinton Mistry is also no exception to this thought. Mistry tried his level best to put Parsi life as it is with their core consciousness and dilemmas on paper.  
A Postcolonial Reading of D.H Lawrence “Snake” and Gwendolyn Brooks “We Real Cool”
Get PDFPostcolonialism is a term that has been exposed to thorough studies and has broader interpretations than is frequently thought of. It designates a period that came into being after colonialism from its prefix “post”, but it also deals with the period before and during the period of colonization. Postcolonial theory is one principal narrative that explains all forms of oppression. Colonialism was constructed on the hegemony of the Eurocentric where the Western culture is at the center of all civilizations and the non-European lands are at the periphery and considered to be the margins. All the cultures of the world are placed in such a manner that they are before or after other civilizations. This results in a building of series of binaries like the Self and the Other, Centre and Margin, Culture and Nature. The study has as findings that the colonial structure and education presented by the colonialist as superior in D. H. Lawrence “Snake” and Gwendolyn Brooks’ “We Real Cool” are being question and criticized by the same people they try to influence, hypnotize and brainwash