Indian Literature

The many travels of Dopdi Mejhen: Women, borders and the Indian state

by Abhijit Roy

Essay to be published in a collection tentatively titled 'Women & Literature: Different Faces Different Voices' ed. Nandini Jana and Swati Mitra, Stree, Calcutta. (forthcoming, 2012)
                                                             

Extract:
The grand discourse simultaneously legitimizing coercion and communicative rationality in dealing with... more Extract:
The grand discourse simultaneously legitimizing coercion and communicative rationality in dealing with the forces threatening the state apparatus is the statist discourse of ‘security’. While coercion is endorsed in the name of security for the citizens, the communicative (and reformative) modes of negotiation with the ‘other’ are apparently also for the security of the outlaw, enabling the state to pose as ‘democratic’ or sensitive to the rights of both the ‘citizen’ proper and the outlaw willing to be part of a citizenizing process. It doesn’t take much strain to identify the imbalance in such apparently symmetrical propositions: the right and privileges of the citizen proper are unquestionable and due, while the same on the other side of the line are debatable and a matter of generosity. Brutal state repression can then be justified by the double logic of citizen’s security and parallel “humanitarian” negotiation. In a majoritarianist system that is Democracy, the project of communicative rationality and reform in the negotiation with a minority group, parallel to coercion, would therefore always more successfully legitimize state violence than contradicting it.

Reconstructing the history of exile and return: A reading of Dom Moraes's The Long Strider

by Sayan Chattopadhyay

published in Journal of Postcolonial Writing 48.1 (2012); 79-91

Throughout his life the celebrated Indian English poet Dom Moraes had suffered the dilemma of being doubly exiled. His... more Throughout his life the celebrated Indian English poet Dom Moraes had suffered the dilemma of being doubly exiled. His Eurasian origin had exiled him both from his motherland India as well as from an England which he vainly tried to make his home. This article focuses on his last book, The Long Strider (2003), co-authored by Saraya Srivatsa, where Moraes revisits this idea of exile and homecoming through a double narrative relating the fascinating history of an Englishman named Tom Coryate who actually “walked” from England to India in 1613 to visit the court of Jahangir. This is interwoven with Dom Moraes’s own journey tracing the footsteps of the pioneering Englishman. Apart from exploring the manifold routes of and movements between home and exile, this travelogue/history/fiction also offers interesting insights into key postcolonial concerns such as the colonial gaze, the process of narrativizing the Orient, and the process of constructing history. The article looks at the relationship between Moraes’s text and the long tradition of “postcolonial” narratives of exile and homecoming scripted in India since the 19th century, when a profound sense of cultural displacement had been brought about by colonization. It also analyses the changed dynamics of the process of homecoming that The Long Strider presents in the context of the last few decades, when repeated ethnic clashes and mass killings seemed to put the very idea of India under erasure.

Reading Places: The Geography of Literature

by John Thieme

Text of a paper originally delivered as the Sir D.O. Evans Memorial Lecture. University of Wales, Aberystwyth, March 2008.

A discussion of place in literature, which draws on cultural geography and which particularly focuses on novels by... more A discussion of place in literature, which draws on cultural geography and which particularly focuses on novels by Amitav Ghosh and R.K. Naryan.

Vijaydan Detha and Folktales of Rajsthan

by dev pathak

Journal fo folklore research: In International Journal of folklore and musicology

Perso-Indica: a critical survey of Persian works on Indian learned traditions

by Audrey Truschke

Issue 5.2 Performing Arts and South Asian Literature, Editorial

by Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings

Issue 5.2 Performing Arts and South Asian Literature, Table of Contents

by Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings

9.1 Chotro: Adivasi Voices and Stories Table of Contents

by Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings

Women and Modernisation: A Study of Non-fictional Writings by Bengali Women in Nineteenth Century Bengal (Abstract to the Paper)

by Shantanu Majee

This paper was read at the UGC Sponsored National Level Seminar organised by Jogamaya Devi College, Kolkata, in collaboration with Asutosh College, Kolkata, on 2nd of December, 2011.

Women have never lived in a separate world of their own and until quite recently their very existence was merely a... more Women have never lived in a separate world of their own and until quite recently their very existence was merely a necessary and indispensable appendage to that of the male population. Hence, formal institutional education for women in the nineteenth century was supposed to have been for the purpose of producing ideal female companions for the more English educated men folk of the nation-in-making. But even as the bhadralok reformers were planning to introduce education for women, many women were secretly learning the powers of the alphabets and spreading their ideas in the form of writing. This paper proposes to indulge in a case-study of the non-fictional writings of such authors as Jnanadanandini Devi, Swarnakumari Devi, Krishnabhamini Das, Kamini Roy, Sarala Devi Chaudhurani and others, who used to publish profusely in the leading periodicals of their age. The paper might also look into the practice of publishing such monthly magazines for women as the 'Bamabodhini Patrika' (1863-1923), which were manufactured to replace the dearth of reading materials particularly suitable for women, wherein the women critiqued the system and unabashedly talked about subversion even to the point of praise. The paper shall argue to illustrate the idea that the life-histories of such women suggest an alternative discourse to modernity by indulging in a dialogue with the patriarchy and the nation.

“Noticia summaria do gentilismo da Índia”. IN: Presença Portuguesa na Ásia, coordinated by Fernando António Baptista Pereira. Lisboa: Fundação / Museu do Oriente, 2008, pp. 86 – 87.

by Rui Oliveira Lopes

In press: Indian Manuscripts

by Dominik Wujastyk

Author's pre-publication, pre-edited draft.
© Dominik Wujastyk, 2011.
To appear in: Jörg Quenzer and Jan-Ulrich Sobisch (eds.),
Manuscript Cultures: Mapping the Field (Berlin: De Gruyter,
scheduled for November 2012). Studies in Manuscript
Cultures, volume 1
http://www.degruyter.de/cont/fb/ph/detailEn.cfm?id=IS-9783110225624-1

Short general introduction to Indian manuscripts, their numbers, scripts, writing materials, cataloguing, and use in... more Short general introduction to Indian manuscripts, their numbers, scripts, writing materials, cataloguing, and use in textual criticism.

Asini senza cuore

by Vermondo Brugnatelli

Published in: R. Arena, M.P. Bologna, M.L. Mayer, A. Passi (eds.), Bandhu. Scritti in onore di Carlo Della Casa in occasione del suo settantesimo compleanno, Alessandria, Ed. dell'Orso, 1997, pp. 605-616 [ISBN 88-7694-243-2].

[Paper in Italian]
Starting from the analysis of a widespread tale, this paper deals with the traditional way of... more [Paper in Italian]
Starting from the analysis of a widespread tale, this paper deals with the traditional way of regarding some parts of the body as the seat of different moral qualities and affections within North African culture and elsewhere. In particular, Berbers tend to ascribe (irrational) love to the liver and rational mind to the heart.

Il tema del giardino e della foresta nella letteratura indiana medievale

by Alessandro Grossato

‘Cartographical Revisionism in the New Literatures in English’, in Oriental Prospects: Western Literature and the Lure of the East

by John Thieme

Published in Oriental Prospects: Western Literature and the Lure of the East, DQR Studies in Literature 22, ed. C.C. Barfoot and Theo D’haen, Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1998: 226-37. Hard copy. Offprint available from author.

Amitav Ghosh Encyclopedia entries

by John Thieme

A general entry on Ghosh for the online Literary Encyclopedia. I have also contributed records on each of Ghosh's novels from The Circle of Reason to Sea of Poppies to the Encyclopedia: www.litency.com    Preview pages available -- full text available for subscribing libraries.

All in the same boat

by John Thieme

Review of Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies -- published in The Literary Review (UK), May 2008, p. 49.
'Wordy Wallah',review of second part of Ghosh's "Ibis" trilogy published in The Literary Review (UK), June 2011, p. 55.

Introduction to Nissim Ezekiel: Collected Poems

by John Thieme

Second Edition, New Delhi: OUP, 2005: pp. xix-xxxix.
A 6,000 word critical introduction which re-evaluates Ezekiel’s place in the modernist canon of Indian poetry in English.

The Cultural Geography of Malgudi

by John Thieme

Published in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 43, 2 (2007): 113-26. Electronic and hard copy -- for subscribing libaries. Individual articles through Sage journals. My book R.K. Narayan, Manchester UP, 2007, looks at the cultural geography of Narayan's fictional world more generally.

A comment by Narayan on the “false geography” of his “imaginary town” provides the departure-point for a discussion of... more A comment by Narayan on the “false geography” of his “imaginary town” provides the departure-point for a discussion of Malgudi, which argues against the frequently held view that it is a metonym for a quintessential India, or South India. Taking its cue from the cultural geographer Doreen Massey's assertion that “The identities of places are always unfixed, contested and multiple”, the paper contends that Malgudi is a multifaceted and transitional site, an interface between older conceptions of “authentic” Indianness and contemporary views that stress the ubiquity and inescapability of change in the face of modernity. It argues that Malgudi is far more than a physical locus, viewing it as an episteme that incorporates numerous ways of perceiving India — social, spiritual, mythological and psychological among them. Focusing on Narayan's representation of heterotopias, it considers the demarcations between “pure” and “polluted” space in The English Teacher , the simultaneity of different layers of Indian culture in The Financial Expert and the contrast between Malgudi and a larger Indian world in The Painter of Signs.

Global Positioning in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide

by John Thieme

Paper delivered at the Voice and Vision Conference, Université Paris III, Sorbonne Nouvelle, May 2008. Published in Muse India, 24 (2009).

Amitav Ghosh

by John Thieme

Published in A Companion to Indian Fiction in English, ed. Pier Paolo Piciucco, New Delhi: Atlantic, 2004: 251-75.