Creative Saplings
Not a member yet
504 research outputs found
Sort by
Exploring Antiquity and Modernity in Religio Medici by Sir Thomas Browne
Get PDFSir Thomas Browne was a physician, a man of science as well as a mystic and antiquarian exploring the mystery of Creation, God and the nature of human life. Religio Medici or the Religion of a Doctor (1635), reveals a symbiotic relationship between his rational and scientific mind and his religious beliefs. His mystic speculations and meditative reveries are triggered by his scientific study of anatomy and investigation of Nature, irradiated by a philosophic imagination and penned with a poetic eloquence and verbal felicity of a unique literary artist. Religio Medici is Browne’s spiritual autobiography, a defence of the dignity of individual beliefs, a diary of his soul, noting his spiritual predilections despite his secular calling as a physician. Written solely for his private understanding and satisfaction, the treatise has no didactic intention and ends with a robust affirmation of faith in God’s almighty power. Browne’s quest for knowledge is multidisciplinary: anatomy, physiology, botany, archaeology, geography, natural history, Holy Scripture, music, languages, the classical and the antiquarian. It is the quest for Truth, Janus-faced, where, as a man of medicine, he studies life and death, but then ‘physick’ leads to knowledge of self and the First Cause or God. For Browne, all the scientific study data are visible symbols of an invisible reality: Nature is, after the Bible, the second book of God, and scientific analysis of this universal and public manuscript, the laws of Nature reveal the infallible wisdom of God. Browne’s apologia for science is that the philosophical imagination can, by inductive reasoning from this empirical data, understand the Maker whom he describes as a pencil that never works in vain. Browne’s empirical studies establish his rational bent of mind and also fortify his mystical predilections. Explaining how man is an amphibian who can live in divided worlds simultaneously, he uses the minutiae of scientific analysis and connects the corporeal and spiritual essences, the body and soul being the colony of God. In the quest for truth man can use his diverse faculties of sense, reason and imagination, can embark, as Browne does, on an adventure in both science and religion. The scientist in him studies and deciphers ‘hieroglyphs’ of Nature, and the mystic in him celebrates this miracle and leads him to unshakable faith in God. Nature is the handiwork of God, the perfect geometrician, and its beauty reveals Him as the supreme artist.
The kaleidoscopic perspective of Browne, its metaphysical quality, its inclusive sensibility and a secular approach to diversity resonates with the contemporary mélange of globalization and multiculturalism, desirous of a rational middle ground with which to celebrate the joy and beauty of living
Love, Detachment & Hope in the poems of Nandini Sahu
Get PDFA Song, Half & Half by Nandini Sahu is a collection of her love poems, published in the year 2022. The collection consists of more than sixty poems, each encapsulating an essential flavour of life. The book embodies a heart in solitude, that is accidentally shaken up by the sweet and sour turbulences of memory. A thoughtful poet is always indebted to its memory, one who cherishes nostalgia and uses imagination to weave the thread of past events with a needle of creativity to produce art. Nandini Sahu is one such poet, she is emotional and passionate in her poems, and honest towards her readers. Her love poems are a collage of chronicles that speaks volumes about her journey, full of success, struggles and epiphanies that shaped her personality and character. She is a chronicler who delves into the ocean of life, full of varied experiences and offers a scintillating bricolage to her readers. This paper sheds light on those poems by Nandini Sahu, that explore the themes of detachment, existentialism and absence of feeling. It also examines the idea of belief in fate and the importance of speaking the truth, when surrounded by hardships of life. This dichotomy of hope and despair fuels the poetry of Nandini Sahu, and encourages its readers to live life in the face of defeat
Breaking the Silence: A Critical Analysis of Dalit Women\u27s Worldview in Urmila Pawar\u27s Motherwit
No full textThe Dalit group is among the most oppressed under the contentious but widely accepted social structure known as caste, but some Dalit women have experienced even worse subjugation. The perspective of oppressed Dalit women is examined in this essay. Not Dalit women in isolation, but rather Dalit women collectively. In doing so, Motherwit, a collection of short stories by Urmila Pawar, is the main subject of this essay. It aims to initiate a conversation about the worldview of Dalit women, which is situated at the nexus of gender, caste, and class. It also aims to address the worldview that has largely gone unchallenged in both the well-known Dalit and feminist discourses in India. The article has been divided into three sections. The first section provides a brief biography of Urmila Pawar and then discusses the rise of Dalit women writers, focusing on her collection of short stories Motherwit. The second section discusses the text\u27s themes, offers a commentary on how it uses language, and ends with a statement on Dalit feminism. Women from various castes and social classes may identify with Pawar\u27s feminism since it is not exclusive to any one lady
Editorial Introduction
Get PDFPoet, professor, critic and folklorist Nandini Sahu is one of the most important figures in contemporary Indian writing in English. The sky-high number of her readers, making her the Amazon’s bestselling author for 2022, is a testimony to the sea-deep quality of her works. A professor by profession, a poet by essentiality, and a folklorist to the core, Nandini Sahu has touched the life and soul of many, in many ways. Her poetic output, one after the other, showed us new lights in which to see truth––an unfabricated truth
Reading Past through the Present: A Comparative Analysis of Nandini Sahu\u27s Sita with Valmiki\u27s Ramayana through an Indic Perspective
No full textThe intellectual exercise is always related to either deconstruction of the meaning or embellishment of meanings by interpretation of a text. It has always been the intellectual rigour of the thinking human, to find out more and to make sense of it, at the same time. Ramayana, for me, has always been one text that has always stayed imminently relevant in my memory by the sheer virtue of its literary oeuvre and all the teaching it imparts, either metaphysically or metaphorically. For a long time, I have always yearned for an opportunity to write something about it or anything closely or even remotely related to it. And in the words of Tulsi, “everything happens according to Rama\u27s wish only”. I have finally been endowed upon with the opportunity to do so by expressing my opinions about Nandini Sahu\u27s Sita, a poetic memoir of the heroine of the epic in the first-person narrative
Navigating Gendered Landscape: The Power of Female Agency in Anuradha Roy’s The Folded Earth
Get PDFWomen’s agency refers to the faculty of women to make independent choices and take actions based on their own desires, beliefs, and values. However, women\u27s agency is not a uniform experience, as it can be influenced by factors such as race, class, ethnicity, culture, and socio-economic status. Various forms of discrimination and societal barriers can limit women\u27s agency, requiring efforts to address systemic inequalities and create inclusive environments that promote women\u27s autonomy and empowerment. Set in the remote Himalayan town of Ranikhet, Anuradha Roy’s The Folded Earth is an evocative tale that offers a sneak peek into the lives and experiences of the people living in the hills and explores their struggles and challenges. The story is narrated by its protagonist, Maya, a young woman who abandons her family to unite with the love of her life, only to lose him to a snowstorm. She moves to Ranikhet to begin a new life and closely witness the predicaments of the people, particularly women. The novel explores the diverse strands of love, memory, loss, ecological imbalance and its repercussions, capitalist greed, power politics, the patriarchal oppression of women, and the emergence of dynamic women who refuse to be subjugated. The proposed paper seeks to delve deeper into an array of issues faced by women that contribute to their subjugation and explores how the female characters battle the oppression and make a strong comeback by asserting their agency and autonomy, and even acting as an agent in uplifting others
Traces of Standpoint Theory in Select Poems of Kishwar Naheed
Get PDFThe fact is that South Asian nations have a history of keeping women from speaking up in public, but literature in the area does quite the opposite by serving as a voice for feminism. Kishwar Naheed, through the power of her pen, has contributed a lot to raising issues related to female subjugation and deprivation. The knowledge that results from situations and experiences that girls and women share is highlighted by the feminist Standpoint theory. The idea that our work—the activity in which we participate—shapes what we know and how we behave is central to Marxist theory, where this emphasis on experiences comes from. This study aims to identify the feminist underpinnings of a few poems by Pakistani-Urdu poet Kishwar Naheed. Her work is grounded in the experience of the subcontinent as a whole, allowing for a better understanding of the development of resistance against chauvinist revivals that impose their idea of a "submissive good woman" on subcontinental women. Her "transgression" poetry rejects the limitations imposed by a false, chauvinist spirituality and tries to sketch out the contours of the oppressed yet rebellious feminine personality