There is usually a glaring mismatch between lofty ideals and manifest reality.
Sometimes, even the ideals may be suspect or turn obsolete over time. The objective in founding an institution like the National Academy of Letters (Sahitya Akademy) may have been inspired by anti-colonialism in post-independence India, but in course of time the posture may have become obsolete in the context of increasing globalism. The objective, for instance, of promoting one culture amidst the diversity of cultural groups might have looked fine during the 1950s, but it is essentially the diversity of disparate cultures that characterizes the Indian subcontinent. And a look at some of the award winning novels shows that it is in their cultural specificity that their literary merit lies. The emotional trauma experienced by diaspora is a major thematic concern of sensitive writers belonging to the first generation and the succeeding generations. The dread and despair perpetrated by military rulers in countries like Nigeria is a continuous gory spectacle affecting the perception of generations of poets like Achebe and Oguibe. The relationship between climatic changes and the events in Shakespeare’s tragedies can throw new light on them from an interesting perspective. Nobility of character exhibited by individuals is similar, despite superficial variations in language, race, color and even time. One can observe such nobility in persons like Sakuntala and Cordelia, immortal creations of Kalidasa and Shakespeare. We offer in this issue insightful exploration of these and other concerns.

In the first paper, “Re-Contextualizing Sahitya Akademi’s Objective: A Critico-Epistemic Re-Evaluation of Akademi Award Winning Texts”, the authors, Saswat S Das and Sandip Sarkar, argue that the novels which received the national awards do not reflect the presentation of specific cultures aimed at fostering unity. In novels, like Nirmal Verma’s The Last Wilderness, Manik Bandhyopadhyaya’s Puppets’ Tale and T S Pillai’s Chemmeen, it is their cultural diversity that constitutes their literary merit. There is no artificial steamrollering into a mosaic of cultural uniformity. The novels present a glocalized contemporaneity and pulsate with lived experience.

C V Padmaja, in her paper, “Indian Diaspora: Dilemmas and Concerns”, traces the responses of Indian diaspora to their host country, and the differences owing to the gap in generations. While the first generation immigrants try to keep their traditions inherited from their native country, the latter generations try to create a mental space whereby they attempt to assimilate into the host culture. The resultant cultural synthesis ends up in multiculturalism. The author discusses the problems of what she calls ‘traditionalist diaspora’ and ‘assimilated diaspora’. But in spite of their efforts, most of them remain on the periphery and are outsiders.

Ajit K Mishra, in his paper, “Beyond Silence: Shashi Deshpande’s That Long Silence and Alternative Intercourse”, discusses the continuing oppression of women in the male-dominated society touchingly presented by Shashi Deshpande in her novel, That Long Silence. In the patriarchal society, women are devoiced and are confined to silent acquiescence. With the denial of access to speech, women are mute and submit themselves to domination to adhere to the traditions handed down. Lack of self-certainty stifles their urge to express emotions and opinions. In the novel, Shashi presents the position of Jaya, who initially accepts hegemonic silence but eventually adopts resistance. She breaks out of the ideal of fidelity through her extramarital linkup and escapes aporia, the inability to speak up. Her attempt at finding a route for self-expression, however, is of dubious value.

The magnitude of devastation caused by military dictator and civil war in Nigeria and its continued effect on the psyche of poets through generations is examined by Sunny Awhefeada in his paper, “Generation to Generation: Perennial Dread and Despair in Chinua Achebe’s Beware Soul Brother and Olu Oguibe’s A Gathering Fear”. The author examines the presentation of the horror as evoked by Chinua Achebe in Beware Soul Brother and Olu Oguibe in A Gathering Fear. Though the poets are separated by decades in point of time, the bitterness felt by them consequent on the dread and despair of the holocaust is of the same intensity and poignancy. The maladies of military rule have been powerfully presented by both the poets. The recurring motif of the poems studied is the poet’s perennial disillusionment with the nation’s fractured evolution in the post-colonial period. The poet touchingly presents the jet bomber as a bird of death.
P Suneetha, in her paper, “A Sense of Mnemonic Odyssey: A Perspective on Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending”, examines Julian Barnes’s novel The Sense of an Ending as recollection of the past of the protagonist Tony. The author brings out the ‘peripeteia’, sudden reversal of fortunes, one encounters in the tragedies of Shakespeare and of Greek dramatists. Tony goes through a mnemonic odyssey of his past life as a young student in the company of his friends, as well as revisiting the later part of his life. Barnes is particularly critical of British conservativeness described by E M Forster as “slowness of feeling.”
The similarity between the course of tempests and the events in a Shakespearean tragedy is explored by Mamta Anand in her paper, “Tempestuous Turbulence in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth”. The author focuses on great tragedies like Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth. Examining the tragedies from a fresh perspective, the author locates the features of tempest—like ‘front,’ ‘anti-front,’ ‘eye of the storm,’ ‘vortex’ and ‘period of occlusion’—in the incidents in the plots of the plays. The flaw in the temperament of the tragic hero, for example, is identified with vortex. The study observes that the tempestuous incidents have a powerful impact on the audience.

Similarities in nobility of attitude and character defy the limits of time and place.
GRK Murty brings out, in his paper, “‘Nobility of Character’ at Its Exalted Mood in Abhijnanasakuntalam and King Lear”, the essential goodness animating the conduct of individuals, examining the identical responses in trying circumstances, portrayed by Kalidasa and Shakespeare in their plays, Abhijnanasakuntalam and King Lear. Dushyanta and even Lear exhibit traces of nobility once their misunderstanding is cleared. But it is the women, Sakuntala and Cordelia, who gloriously demonstrate the virtue of exalted nobility. The author, with copious quotes from the original Sanskrit play and the Elizabethan play, establishes the cultural universals inspiring the two peaks of dramatic excellence.

-- S S Prabhakar Rao
Consulting Editor