Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature
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M. Rajagopalachary and K. Damodar Rao, eds. Postcolonial Indian English Fiction: Decentering the Nation
Full text linkGender and Identity Politics: Arupa Patangia Kalita’s Felanee (The Story of Felanee) and Rita Chowdhury’s Ei Samay Sei Samay (Times Now and Then)
Full text linkThis paper explores how two contemporary women writers in Asamiya refract the question of identity politics through a gendered prism in a multiethnic and multilingual landscape of the Brahmaputra valley in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. The period since the late 1970s has been one of intense sociopolitical movements, armed rebellions and state supported armed repressions in large parts of northeastern India. While a few women (including the writer Rita Chowdhury (1960-) discussed in this paper) have been at the forefront of some of these movements such as the Assam Movement (late 1970s and 1980s), women in general have been at the receiving end of the violence unleashed both by armed rebels fighting against the Indian state as well as by the state’s armed machinery. An understanding of this context is crucial to conceptualise the terms through which we shall approach the texts Felanee (2003) and Ei Samay Sei Samay (2007) as both texts are situated in conflict-ridden times. While Rita Chowdhury’s Ei Samay Sei Samay draws on the author’s experience of being closely involved in the Assam Movement, Felanee spans a time period which saw several movements and rebellions, sometimes running parallel to each other as ethnic groups increasingly claimed nationhood within or outside the political borders of the Indian state. Finally, the article gestures towards another issue – the question of whether writers in Asamiya engage with identity politics differently from Northeast Indian writers writing in English. While most writers writing in English have received critical attention, I believe it is equally important to understand how writers in the vernaculars have engaged with similar questions
From Islamic Feminism to Radical Feminism: Roquiah Sakhawat Hossein to Taslima Nasrin
Full text linkThis paper examines four women writers who have contributed through their writings and actions to the awakening of women in Bangladesh: Roquiah Sakhawat Hossein, Sufia Kamal, Jahanara Imam and Taslima Nasrin. The first three succeeded in making a space for themselves in the Bangladesh tradition and carved a special niche in Bangladesh. All three of them were writers in different genres – poetry, prose, fiction – with the last best known for her diary about 1971. While these iconic figures contributed towards women’s empowerment or people’s rights in general, Taslima Nasrin is the most radically feminist of the group. However, while her voice largely echoes in the voices of young Bangladeshi women today – often unacknowledged – she has been shunned by her own country. The paper attempts to explain why, while other women writers have also said what Taslima Nasrin has, she alone is ostracised
How Indian is Indian English?: Indian Words in Registers of Indian English
Full text linkThe rising status of English as a world language has led to the emergence of several non-native or new varieties of English, with Indian English being a major new variety. Much work on Indian English has focused on establishing the Indianness of the language. As Kachru points out, studies of Indian English consider “linguistic interference and the Indian cultural context as essential for the understanding and description of the Indianness in this variety of English†(The Indianness of Indian English 391). Other early research on the Indianness of Indian English includes Verma, Dubey, Hosali, and Bhatt, to name just a few. The work represented by most previous studies on Indian English, which focus largely on the nature and degree of difference of Indian English from external norms, does not, however, provide a clear picture of the system underlying Indian English. The current study focuses on the Indianness of Indian English, but tests Kachru’s claims regarding the progressive Indianisation of Indian English. The first part of the study is an empirical investigation of Indian words in three spoken and three written registers of the language from a corpus compiled in the year 2000 and earlier, and identifies distinct semantic categories of words in the registers. Based on the results of this first analysis, the second part of the study analyses the occurrence of Indian words in a smaller corpus of a register of written Indian English compiled in 2016. The first part of the study shows that there are marked differences in the degree of Indianisation of Indian English among different registers, and the second part of the study shows that with respect to the register studied, written Indian English seems to be undergoing a process of un-Indianisation
Range of Use, Nativisation and Acceptability in Malaysian English
Full text linkMalaysian English grammar is claimed to contain localised, non-standard features that exist alongside exonormative counterparts. Taking diffusion of such features as an indicator of nativisation, this study argues that this process is influenced not by proficiency and language use alone, but also by the uses to which the language is put, i.e. range of use. One way to prove this is to measure diffusion of features among proficient speakers whose ranges of use vary considerably. In this paper, I present findings from a survey of acceptability of 11 deviant grammatical features adapted from Bautista (2004) and 28 divided usages adapted from Lee and Collins (2006). Comparing two groups of proficient speakers – one of wide range users, and the other of non-wide range ones – the study found that the wide range users tended to have more liberal attitudes towards non-standard grammatical features than their non-wide range counterparts. Given the high acceptability levels shown by these acrolectal speakers in formal contexts, the findings suggest that such speakers bear some influence on the nativisation of these features as well as their pathways to standardisation.Â
Pradipta Mukherjee and Sajalkumar Bhattacharya, eds. The Diasporic Dilemma: Exile, Alienation and Belonging
Full text linkFemale Subjectivity through Body Dressing and Positioning in Malaysian Advertisements
Full text linkMost feminist studies on the topics of dress and the female body have been carried out within the context, as well as from the perspective, of the West. Malaysia as a multiethnic country that is at the same time open and exposed to the effects of globalisation offers an interesting case study on the representations of diverse women’s imagemaking and their implications on gendered subjectivity and selfhood. Body dressing and positioning are among the powerful means of representation that construct the subject in a way that furthers the self-advantaging ends of the advertiser. Dress and body-related texts are excerpted from Malaysian print advertisements in selected English dailies for close semiological and discourse analysis in the context of the dominant twin ideologies of patriarchy and Islam. Drawing on a broad feminist theory, the analysis reveals two diametrically opposite overarching themes of oppression and empowerment. Discussion related to these themes addresses the Malaysian context of cultural norms of fashion discourses and the underpinning economic motivation
