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Re-Contextualizing Sahitya Akademi’s Objective:
A Critico-Epistemic Re-Evaluation of Akademi Award Winning Texts
-- Saswat S Das and Sandip Sarkar
The objective of establishing national identity in the period soon after de-colonization at the time of setting up Sahitya Akademi has over the years turned outdated and irrelevant. At the time of emergence of India as an independent nation, there was need for asserting cultural homogeneity of the country and that objective was sought to be realized through the awards presented by the Akademi. But as times rolled by, the objective was rarely observed in practice as evident in the works selected for the awards instituted by it. The paper examines three novels selected by the Akademi for its awards: Nirmal Verma’s The Last Wilderness (2002), Manik Bandyopadhyaya’s The Puppets’ Tale (2008) and T S Pillai’s Chemmeen (2004). The criterion which determined the quality of the novels was not regional specificity, but their over-reaching literary merit in portraying the cultural ethos specific to their region and language, although they occasionally reach out pan-Indian cultural ambience. The novels exhibit global contemporaneity and transcendental creativity.
© 2013 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Indian Diaspora: Dilemmas and Concerns
--C V Padmaja
The writers of the diaspora desired to keep alive their traditions in their writings; their basic inspirations are their memories of the past from the motherland. When the immigrants recollect their past, they are not only nostalgic about their memories but about their geographical place which is not only a geographical physical space but also the mentally conjured psychological cultural space. The paper attempts to show how an immigrant writer creates a third space in order to escape from the conflicting situation of choosing the host culture and the native culture as foundation for identity construction. In this new identity, s/he precipitates the past as well as present cultures, showing the diasporic literature as highly vibrant and expressive of the split self of an immigrant.
© 2013 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Beyond Silence: Shashi Deshpande’s
That Long Silence and Alternative Intercourse
--Ajit K Mishra
The paper examines how Shashi Deshpande’s That Long Silence generates a dialog regarding women’s speech to counter the silence that pervades the patriarchal culture which they inhabit. To achieve this goal, I have examined two ideologies—one grounded in patriarchy and the other grounded in female agency and dialog—to reveal the problems within the gender sphere. The assumption is that writing is a medium where writers can start creating spaces to speak and initiate opinions and dialog in the cultural sphere to help people reconsider society and the norms that determine their behaviors, worldviews, and roles within that society. But more important than literature’s function as a channel is the message that Deshpande shares with her readers, a message that she hopes will help the devoiced group come out of the spiral of silence created by the dominant speech.
© 2013 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Generation to Generation: Perennial Dread and Despair
in Chinua Achebe’s Beware Soul Brother and
Olu Oguibe’s A Gathering Fear
--Sunny Awhefeada
This paper explores the motifs of dread and despair in the poetry of two Nigerian writers of different generations. It argues that both poets write against the backdrop of an endless context of chaos and disorder occasioned by the caprices of history. The consequences of the frightening historical condition occasioned by military rule which both poets thematize are manifested in a negative connotation that coalesces into dread and despair. The older poet is Chinua Achebe, while the younger is Olu Oguibe. Achebe’s Beware Soul Brother and Oguibe’s A Gathering Fear are examined in this discourse as works of different generational alignments, but reflect the same historical temperament. What is foreground in both works is the seemingly unending condition of national disillusionment sustained by perennial chaos.
© 2013 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
A Sense of Mnemonic Odyssey: A Perspective
on Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending
--P Suneetha
The paper offers a comprehensive critical perspective on Julian Patrick Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending, that deservedly won the much coveted 2011 Commonwealth Man Booker Prize for fiction. Besides offering a piercing analysis of the text in relation to a mnemonic odyssey of Tony, the protagonist, this original piece of work presents a scholarly discourse on the rigorous exploration of ‘peripeteia’, a sudden reversal of the protagonist’s fortunes. The paper examines the nature of English character that exhibits conservativeness and lack of seriousness. It also gives new insights that would engage the existing perceptions on Julian Barnes especially in the creation of prose having a visceral power that clinically and precisely tracks in intensifying the protagonist’s re-immersion and also wading into a life as into the sea. It even competently addresses a new interaction between the global and the local writers like Ted Hughes, Henry James, and the French writers like Gustave Flaubert.
© 2013 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Tempestuous Turbulence in Shakespeare’s
Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth
--Mamta Anand
T S Eliot in 1930 said that to read Shakespeare is to know a pattern, which after all is the main thing. Shakespearean tragedies have always been influencing people to know the truth about life. Journeying through them is to realize that life is in the making. In this paper, a comparison has been made of the events that follow in the tragedies with those of the storms. Occurrence of death and devastation in the tragedies is examined and the storms highlight the central reality of pain in life. Storms and tragedies might look natural a phenomenon. But Shakespeare shows in tragedies the darker side of human existence, that of an enfeebled spirit dousing the beautiful life. Shakespearean hero is impacted by the overwhelming conditions as the storms run the creation dry of life. Regrettably, the hero turns out to be just a natural piece, and struck by reality of pain and consumed by his nerves, loses courage and fails everyone. He supremely lacks the undaunted spirit that permeates a spiritually cultivated being, pursuing the art of living.
© 2013 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
‘Nobility of Character’at Its Exalted Mood
in Abhijnanasakuntalam and King Lear
--GRK Murty
A drama, said Coleridge, “is not a copy, but an imitation, of nature” which indeed became the “universal principle of the fine arts”. Although a poet is said to be a ‘semblance’ maker of the natural ‘forms’, there is always an attempt to present imitation not as a distortion but as an universal representation, particularly with an emphasis on excellence. It is perhaps to capitalize on this felicity that Indian aestheticians introduced into dramaturgy the concepts of sadharanikarana—the process of universalization, and tanmayibhavana, the process of becoming one with the aestheticized universal being, for it is hoped to liberate a being from his/her narrow self and become one with universal consciousness or Being. Against this backdrop, Kalidasa’s Abhijnanasakuntalam, a play that ‘depicts the beauty of human life, the splendor of art and the glory of the senses’ true to the conventions of Indian dramaturgy, is being examined critically along with King Lear, a play written true to the Greek tradition by Shakespeare, who is known for his ‘unparalleled demiurgic fury’, to understand how these poets scripted their characters, particularly, heroes and heroines, to ‘enact’ their nobility and for what purpose.
© 2013 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
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