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Negotiating Feminine Autonomy and Identity: Diasporic Anxieties
in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices
-- Swathi Krishna S
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices (1997) explores issues of ethnic autonomy and feminine identity through its protagonist Tilo, an Indian immigrant in America, who is endowed with magical abilities to conjure the power of spices which she uses for healing people at her grocery store in Oakland, California. Tilo’s fate comes to represent the complex socio-political debates surrounding cultural assimilation and racial othering in contemporary America on the one hand, and a woman’s struggle against Indian tradition and patriarchy, on the other. In order to befit the gender roles prescribed by consumerist America, Tilo frames an exotic identity for herself selling mystical spices and practices from India and accordingly becomes the site of confluence of tradition and modernity in the novel. The chief problematic in the narrative, however, lies in the fact that in America while Tilo is free to help others transcend pain and seek autonomous identities, she herself remains confined by and rooted in Indian patriarchal culture and tradition which wield complete control over her mind and body. The present paper, by employing postcolonial and transnational discourses vis-à-vis diasporic femininity, attempts to explore how Tilo negotiates and subsequently attains an autonomous identity in Divakaruni’s novel.
© 2014 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Interstices Outgrowing the Narrative in the Select Fiction of Jhumpa Lahiri
--K Narasimha Rao
Jhumpa Lahiri skillfully presents her fictional creations with gaps that explore the divergent concerns of the postmodern and postcolonial times evolving into meta-narratives. She has a place of distinction among a new generation of women writers who are ceaselessly on a quest for the multiple consciousness and the process of diasporic identity formation. While interrogating these spaces they mediate with the historical discourses such as: tradition in exile and the cross-pollination of cultural symbolism and try to relocate the spaces they come to inhabit. This paper aims at studying the interstitial outgrowths in her fictional world: The Namesake, Interpreter of Maladies, and Unaccustomed Earth as the expression of her poignant self, conveying myriad possibilities of centering the subaltern that surpass the fluid geographies and stern cultures.
© 2014 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Transnationalism and the Survival of Postcolonialism: A Critique
--Madhumita Roy
Although the process of nation-state formation has been critiqued by postcolonial theorists, nation-state paradoxically serves the basic unit of postcolonial identity formation and politics. However, the pervasive global consumer culture, in its operating mechanism, is effectively obliterating the physical boundaries between the nationstates and giving birth to deterritorialized, cultural transnational communities. The purpose of this paper is to enquire the effect of transnationalism upon postcolonialism as a discourse—whether the loss of nation-state and the greater and more urgent threat of global consumer culture are making the concerns and the protestations of postcolonialism obsolete, and if so, how and what can be done to reincarnate postcolonialism, which remains a viable tool to resist any totalizing agenda upon lived experiences.
© 2014 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Power, Position and Agony in Harold Pinter’s One for the Road
--Vairavan C and S P Dhanavel
This paper attempts a Foucauldian analysis of power, position and agony in Pinter’s One for the Road (1984). Pinter was a leading British political playwright in the 20th century. In his plays, he focused on the political situation and distinguished between power-haves and powerhave nots: the oppressor and the oppressed. In the play One for the Road, he brings out the impact of power and position on people, leading to their agony. Through the course of the play, he describes different dimensions of power. The aim of this study is to discuss how Pinter has depicted the abuse of power and position, causing agony by the totalitarians controlling and subduing the people, from a Foucauldian perspective.
© 2014 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Elements of Syncretism in Nayantara Sahgal’s Mistaken Identity
--N Pratheeba and G Baskaran
In the novel Mistaken Identity, Nayantara Sahgal rivets her focus on syncretism, a phenomenon that is very delicate, especially in a country having a diversified culture like India. Her concern for a united nation caught within the clutches of a multicultural society is brought to the limelight. The humanistic values interspersed with her plea for the mingling and amalgamation of the divergent features of the various religions prevailing in this subcontinent are given prime importance. The novel Mistaken Identity is set in the twilight years of the British rule in India. Sahgal yearns for a fairytale solution in which the various discordant multicultural elements coalesce to synthesize a unique, harmonious and syncretic mosaic which binds the different groups together. The protagonist, Bhushan, serves as the mouthpiece of the novelist in this regard. He pleads for the acceptance of the fusion of the various cultural aspects which ultimately leads to an interwoven culture in which the various entities are inseparable. This paper attempts to reveal the unique cultural panorama reflecting the unique secular and syncretic mosaic that can prevail in the human landscape of a multicultural society.
© 2014 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
India’s Romance with Monsoon Rains:
A Peep into Poetic Expressions and Personal Experiences
--GRK Murty
For aeons, monsoon rains have been descending in India with an amazing spurt of life-giving energy at the appointed time “like a king in pride of power” duly accompanied by “the lambent flashes of lightning …and the reverberating thunder” (RS1 2.1) that is hailed by mankind “as the royal cavalcade is acclaimed / by crowds of suppliants.” For, it is on varsha, rain, that “impregnation in the entire universe” rests—varsha makes their “earth a comely courtesan / attired in the green silk of grass / wearing silver ornaments of sprungup mushroom / ruby of purple colored worm of moist fields” (RS 2.5). For Indians, varsha, as Kalidasa had aptly adored, is “praninam pranabhutah” (RS 2.28)—the lifebreath of all that live. Besides, nothing was so romantic to the Sanskrit poets as the patter of rain shower—an ordered filigree of sound that stirred them to muse. Indeed, India has so much to be thankful to monsoon, for in it, all its existence recycles year after year. This paper is an attempt to trace the evocation of rain in the works of Indian literature like Kalidasa’s Ritusamhara and Valmiki Ramayana.
© 2014 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
An Analysis of Indian Poetic Tradition: Sri Aurobindonian Perspective
--S Rukmini
Sri Aurobindo considers literature an expression of spiritual experience of a writer and a vehicle of a superior power which helps a poet to open himself to the experience of infinite consciousness. Sri Aurobindo regards poetry as something divine, the function of which is to encapsulate the spiritual truths a poet experiences as a seer. He further says that with a supramental thought leading to a supramental life alone can a poet reveal a poet’s ‘inner being’. He assigns poetry a spiritual or psychic value and effectiveness of a psychic or spiritual character for he opines that in all ages spiritual seekers have expressed their aspiration or their experiences in poetry or inspired language and it has helped them and others. He has rightly comprehended the ancient Indian poetic tradition that says, kavayah satyasrutah and kavayah satyadrutah, which means the poet is the one who visualizes and experiences the truth. V K Gokak compares Sri Aurobindo to Ved Vyasa. Sri Aurobindo stands unique in connecting himself to the hoary poetic tradition of the Vedic Rishis. The predominant spiritual element of his poetry has kept many a reader at bay. It is very unfortunate that some of the modern critics and poets in India have passed harsh judgments on his poetry. It is due only to their failure to understand and appreciate the poetic tradition in which he was working. Their sensibilities, which are forged in the smithies of western critical traditions, have made them insensitive and incapable of appreciating his contribution to Indian poetry in general and English poetry in particular. The present paper discusses the reasons for their insensitiveness and their incapability of appreciating his poetry by drawing a comparison between Indian poetic tradition and English poetry and the influence of English poetry on Indian poetic tradition.
© 2014 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Racism in George Orwell’s Burmese Days
--Isam M Shihada
Thie paper examines the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized and the disastrous impact of British colonialism on both of them in George Orwell’s Burmese Days. The paper focuses on how the British colonialism of Burma fostered racism, racial boundaries and ethnic divisions. It tries to show how racism was used as a tool by British colonialists to keep the colonizer’s identity, sense of superiority over the colonized, maintain racial boundaries and instill feelings of inferiority in order to control the colonized natives. It also highlights the role of the European Club in maintaining racial superiority of the colonizers and serving as a social and psychological refuge for the colonizers in the declining days of the British Empire. The study concludes that Orwell’s Burmese Days renders a sharp critique of the British colonialism, its tools of oppression, exploitation and racism and deconstructs the so-called civilizing mission by British colonialists in Burma by exposing its hypocrisy. Postcolonial theory forms the basis of this analysis.
© 2014 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Integrated Elements of Sex and Sensuality in the Poetry
of Robert Browning: A Critical Approach
--Sanjay Shrivastava
Browning’s greatness lies in the fact that he has sailed against the current. The current or cult of the 19th century was to avoid love for morality; the writers and philosophers of his age considered that the love of a man or a woman or physical love or love of any kind that is related from a man to woman or vice versa is a hindrance to achieving some spiritual heights, while other Victorians considered the body as an obstacle in the path of spiritual emancipation. Robert Browning gave proper significance to the claims of body and justified it with the help of his poetic creations. The present paper is an attempt to critically focus, assess and estimate the integrated elements of sex, sensuality, and the claim of flesh as an eternal human physical need in his most celebrated poems.
© 2014 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Masculinity Subverted and Redefined in the Works of Mahesh Dattani
--Rajorshi Das
What do we mean by masculinity? Is it synonymous with the social construct of maleness? Or is it a more diverse and complex psychological process that differs from time to time, person to person and region to region? Perhaps there can be no fixed paradigm of masculinity and hence what is considered as being masculine in one culture may not be so in another. This is best exemplified in the plays of Mahesh Dattani (1958- ), the only Indian dramatist in English to have won the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award. His plays not only subvert but also demand a new definition of masculinity that goes beyond the traditional tenets of patriarchy. This paper compares and contrasts some of the key aspects of manliness in Western and Indian cultures through the dramatist’s three plays Dance Like a Man (1989), Seven Steps Around the Fire (1998) and On a Muggy Night in Mumbai (1998).
© 2014 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Nadine Gordimer: Ceaseless Crusader Against Apartheid – A Tribute
--S S Prabhakar Rao
Nadine Gordimer, who passed away at the age of 90 in Johannesburg, South Africa, on July 13, 2014, was a fearless crusader against apartheid. Born on November 20, 1923, in Springs, Transvaal, she was the daughter of a Jewish couple. Her father was a watchmaker, who felt superior at least to some black people, but her mother had empathy with black children, for whom she ran a crèche. As her mother suspected a weak heart troubling Nadine, she kept her out of dancing classes. But her awareness of racial discrimination commenced even when she was a child. “I went to Convent of Our Lady of Mercy,” she recalls, “but there was no mercy for blacks. I went to dancing classes, blacks were not allowed. The library, which was precious to me, blacks were not allowed. It impinged on my consciousness. I began to ask why.” Her mother’s excessive care, bordering on posssessiveness, led her to a life of isolation from her classmates and she found reading and writing as an antidote to her loneliness. Her first short story was sent to a college magazine and to her surprise was accepted. A little later, The New York Times encouraged her stories by publishing her stories.
© 2014 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Book Review: A Passionate Offering
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