The South Asianist Journal
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First Will and Testament - by Debasish Lahiri
Full text link(excerpt from the review) I have been reading Debasish Lahiri’s’s poetry over the past few years as he has sent me his poems in a steady stream from Kolkata where he lives and writes, and from his various journeys in India and to the west and the east, and I have been struck by their many-layered intensity. It is a pleasure now to see his first collection in the public arena, reaching out to a wide readership. Like his many physical journeys, Debasish’s poetry embodies the metaphoric journeys a poet artist makes through his imagination, journeys that are metaphysical and philosophical, embodying a quest that moves into the inner recesses of the creative process and outwards in a pledge to comprehend and will life’s experiences to be transformed and translated into verse. There is a certain anguish and agony evident in the process as the poems are carefully gathered and sectioned into seven parts, which reflect a journey that has been arduous but worthwhile
Ethnocracy or republic? paradigms and choices for constitutional reform and renewal in Sri Lanka
Full text linkThis articles considers the recent constitutional reform process in Sri Lanka and offers two analytical models for explaining the options for choice and change
Layered homogeneities: Madhusudan Dutt and the dilemma of early Bengali theatre
Full text linkOwing to its colonial tag, Christianity shares an uneasy relationship with literary historiographies of nineteenth-century Bengal: Christianity continues to be treated as a foreign import capable of destabilizing the societal matrix. The upper-caste Christian neophytes, often products of the new western education system, took to Christianity to register socio-political dissent. However, given his/her socio-political location, the Christian convert faced a crisis of entitlement: as a convert they faced immediate ostracization from Hindu conservative society and even as a devout western modernized could not partake in the colonizer’s version of selective Christian brotherhood. I argue that Christian convert literature imaginatively uses Hindu mythology as a master-narrative to partake in both these constituencies. This paper turns to the reception aesthetics of an oft forgotten play by Michael Madhusudan Dutt, the father of modern Bengali poetry, to explore the contentious relationship between Christianity and colonial modernity in nineteenth-century Bengal. In particular, Dutt’s deft use of the semantic excess as a result of the overlapping linguistic constituencies of English and Bengali is examined. Further, the paper argues that Dutt consciously situates his text at the crossroads of different receptive constituencies to create what I call layered homogeneities.
‘We suffered the most’: Sikh refugee perspective on Partition
Full text linkThe partitioning of British India in August 1947 into its principal successor state, Hindu-majority India, and newly formed Muslim-majority Pakistan, like many of the now infamous partitions of the twentieth century, did not take place without considerable humanitarian turmoil. Indeed a communal genocide of provincial and district minority populations, together with a huge transfer of population to and fro the two dominions, preceded, accompanied and followed the official Partition. This paper focuses upon the ‘memory’ of this episode as held by one of its participant groups—the Sikh refugees—who migrated from the territory of prospective/realised West Pakistan into truncated India. This paper contends that the Sikh refugees have sought to convey, through their memory of this episode, that ‘their people’ were the foremost victims of Partition. This is both in terms of the associated violence and the long-term material consequences deriving from being driven out of their ‘homelands’
Shyam Benegal\u27s Zubeidaa: memory as \u27voice\u27
Full text linkThe demolition of the Babri Masjid in December 1992 and the Mumbai riots that followed in its wake in January 1993 motivated Shyam Benegal to respond to his feelings for the minority community. His empathy for the minority was triggered mainly by the violence he was personally witness to at the crowded streets of Tardeo where his office stands. He saw a Muslim bakery being set on fire by an angry mob. His response brought in its wake three films in quick succession – Mammo, Sardari Begum and Zubeidaa, a family trilogy relating to the stories and journeys of three women from Muslim families. All three films defined Benegal’s concern with marginalized women. The three central women characters in these films were marginalized thrice over – one because being Muslim, they were part of a minority group in India; two, as Muslim women, they were a minority-within-minority within their own communal group; and three, because they were women, per se. Within the first area of marginalization, they were targets of oppression that is the fate of Muslim women by virtue of the ideologies and philosophies of Muslim faith. Though these three areas of the oppression of Muslim women come across lucidly, subtly yet strongly in all three films, it is not the victimization that interested Benegal but rather, the strength and the power that lay hidden within these women, waiting to be tapped, drawn out and executed across the span of their respective lives. The aim of this paper on Shyam Benegal’s Zubeida is to show how the filmmaker has made imaginative, aesthetic and emotional use of ‘memory’ reconstructed from erased history as ‘voice.’ Memory reconstructed from archives like a family album, a forgotten/hidden roll of film containing a song-dance sequence, diaries written by the woman whose strident and vocal ‘voice’ has been reconstructed from the past. Oral accounts offered by the woman’s mother Faiyyazi to her grandson Riyaz, reveals Zubeidaa’s ‘voice-as-it-was’ in the present. It tries to discover how cinema as language, medium and agency, makes it possible to reconstruct erased memory of the past through the memories of people in the present and agencies of the past
Veiling the modular: literary language and subjective nationalism in Sinhala radio song of Sri Lanka, 1957-1964
Full text linkThis article examines ‘intratextuality’ of Sinhala-language radio songs and the socio- historical and institutional forces behind the production of these songs. The purpose of the article is to reflect on the conception of nationalism as elaborated by historian Manu Goswami. According to Goswami, nationalism is a globally transposable ‘module’ that social agents since the mid-nineteenth century have used to assert the uniqueness of their nation. In this article, I argue that this conception is illuminating because of its sensitivity to sub-global or global configurations that factor into the celebration of local particularities. And yet emphasizing the ‘doubled’ form of nationalism as simultaneously local-and-global should not overlook the way in which the particular, in the form of literary language, has the power to veil the global or ‘modular’ formations, the very formations that have set the parameters for celebrating the local. Using three Sinhala radio songs as examples, this article suggests that such veiling can become a crucial feature of ‘subjective’ nationalism. Subjective nationalism refers to the articulations of nationalism made through written and spoken communication and the effects of these discourses on the public consciousness.
Traditional governance in transition among the Yimchunger Nagas of Northeast India
Full text linkThe Yimchunger Nagas are among the seventeen ‘official tribes\u27 of Nagaland state in India, and largely inhabit the remote Tuensang and Kiphire districts bordering Myanmar. Yimchunger village governance, as with many of their Naga neighbours, has been noted for its sophistication despite a long historical association with inter-village raids and head-taking practices. Village elders - or Kiulongthsürü -, have traditionally performed what might constitute the legislative, executive and judicial functions of administration. The village, as the prime political entity in relation to its neighbours, is a unit mediated through patri clan membership, genealogies and institutions. The close-knit administrative structure, underpinned by unwritten clan laws, contributes to community stability, and these older systems remain largely in place and active. Modernising processes, as in minority societies across Asia, have introduced significant change, initially under the aegis of British \u27non-interference\u27, and subsequently under the policies of the Indian state. More recently, initiatives such as the Nagaland Communitisation Act of 2002, have sought to incentivise local governance structures to accommodate development goals by transferring ownership and management of education, health, and infrastructure responsibilities to village committees. This essay serves as a brief overview of Yimchunger social polity, and addresses these shifts in brief, with attention to continuities and discontinuities in traditional practices.
Migrant mothers, family breakdown, and the modern state: an analysis of state policies regulating women migrating overseas for domestic work in Sri Lanka
Full text linkThis paper aims to critically examine the Family Background Report Circular (2013) and analyse its implications as a policy document from a feminist perspective. The paper then draws from a research study conducted in four districts to ascertain the response to the policy as well understand impact of the implementation of the policy on the lives of migrant women workers and migrant-hopefuls.
Hindu heroes and Muslim others: an analysis of the portrayal of Partition in Kamal Haasan\u27s Hey Ram (2000), Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra\u27s Bhaag Milkha Bhaag (2013), and M. S. Sathyu\u27s Garam Hawa (1973).
Full text linkWith reference to their portrayals of Partition, I discuss the value of Kamal Haasan’s Hey Ram! (2000), Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra\u27s Bhaag Milkha Bhaag (2013), and M. S. . Sathyu\u27s Garam Hawa (1973) as historical resources. I emphasize how the ‘othering’ of Muslims in Hey Ram! and Bhaag Milkha Bhaag finds expression in terms of masculinity and Indian patriotism. Drawing on Vasudevan’s (2002) critique of Hey Ram!, I argue that Kamal Haasan does not offer viewers sufficient distance from the film’s Hindu-extremist protagonist, thus curbing their ability to critique the Hindutva historical narrative portrayed. Further, Haasan’s intended dismissal of this Hindutva narrative of Hindu loss and Muslim murder falls short due to its portrayal of the film’s central Muslim character as relatively effeminate and in need of Hindu paternalism. Similarly, Muslim-Hindu relations (as well as national anxieties about Indian identity and culture) are configured through a play between masculinities in biopic Bhaag Milkha Bhaag, as commented upon by Kumar (2014). Through a track-and-field victory in Pakistan, Milkha redeems the emasculation caused by his flight from the Punjab during Partition. I discuss Garam Hawa as a counterpoint to Hey Ram! and Bhaag Milkha Bhaag, both of which I read as mostly congruous with secular official historiography. In addition to presenting the perspective of members of the Indian Muslim minority that stayed behind after Partition, Garam Hawa digs up financial and sentimental motives for belonging in India that are absent from the official historical narrative of Partition
Semi-authoritarianism and democracy in Sri Lanka, 2004–2015
No full textThis four-part exploratory essay examines the nature of the state and democracy in Sri Lanka between 2004 and 2015 through the lens of four issues central to the discipline of comparative politics: state formation; economic growth and political development; derailment of democracy; and democratic transition. Section one explores whether the insights found in English-language scholarship about the state and state building hold relevance for the nature of the state in Sri Lanka between 2004 and 2015. The second section inquires into the relationship between economic growth and political development in Sri Lanka. Section three considers the ways in which democracy was compromised during the reign of Mahinda Rajapaksa’s regime. Lastly, the fourth section investigates whether the 2015 democratic transition from Mahinda Rajapaksa to Maithripala Sirisena was an elite- or mass-driven process