A relic of the past, colonization is but an albatross still hanging around the necks of the ex-colonized. It has had its heydays giving way to post and post-postcolonialism, however, its presence can still be felt in some form or the other across the world. It is ironical but true that certain seeds of colonization have borne the fruit long after the colonies became free, language being one. It left behind a remnant that became a legacy, a prized possession-the English language. English language's journey from the classes to the masses has been very interesting while at the same time controversial. Seeped as it has into the very core of an average Indian's life force, it is guilty of usurping its very Indianness. Even after seventy-two years of independence, the Indian minds seem to remain imprisoned by this very potent tool of colonization. The present paper, thus, seeks to study the problematics of English vis-a-vis the Indian mindset and its impact on the society.

The paper attempts to unravel Manju Kapur's The Immigrant that relentlessly branches out relatable episodes by putting forth a transparent portrayal of diasporic dislocation of identity and culture. The paper explores the cultural association of oneself with one's own habitat by peeling off layers after layers of the feelings of loneliness and being uprooted from one's own cultural milieu. The usage of the adjective "diasporic" in the title of the paper embodies an "immigrant" who migrates to other countries in search of better opportunities, eventually submitting oneself to the language, culture and social traditions of the host country.

This paper studies the role of body as a trope of reversal and negotiation through the figure of a male pregnant body in Devdutt Pattanaik's The Pregnant King (2008). The narrative posits the body in a zone that lies beyond the normative boundaries. Body being material in nature redefines itself by exceeding its boundaries and thus becomes a significant trope to embody reversals and negotiations. For this, it takes insights from Mikhail Bakhtin's observations on the notion of the body in his discussion of carnival and grotesque realism. Pattanaik's narrative maps the reversal that emerges in a non-dominant space by keeping the body in the center of discussion. It widens the notion of the materiality of the body by positing the male body in the experience of childbirth. It also brings the embodied experience into consideration: the experience of the lived body. Both the materiality of the body and its lived experience are brought into focus as distinct features of the body. The experience of the lived body is put at disjuncture with the materiality of the body in the narrative. Thus, the narrative celebrates this excessive nature of the body.

Studies on travel writing in India are gaining momentum currently. People traveling to the nooks and corners of India or abroad and exploring geographies and ethnicities with their customized itineraries, visions and missions, and perspectives, are adding to its blossoming. The socioeconomic and political constraints of the past that hindered travels and writings consequent to them, are fast diminishing in the globalized world with increased knowledge, technology, awareness and above all, appetite for exploration. Overcoming the taboo and stigma attached to traveling and anxieties of physical discomforts, the travel enthusiasts are gauging the width and length of the evolution of the human race on earth. Deepankar Aron's travelogue is a tribute to the deep cultural connect that India shared with China and East Asia along the silk route, evident through similarities in manners of worshipping, ceremonies, customs, grottoes, cave temples, and of course statues of the omnipresent Buddha. The paper identifies the canons intrinsic to travel writings with Deepankar Aron's On the Trail of Buddha: A Journey to the East as its primary source for discussions, and argues why travel writing must be included in curricula alongside core literature courses in higher education.

This paper analyzes indigenous Noongars' demolished lives through the protagonist, Bobby, explaining the Australian Aboriginals' history and culture and exploring the relationship between Aboriginal people and white settlers in Kim Scott's That Deadman Dance. It also focuses on the displacement of Aboriginal children and what psychological pain both family and children faced as a result of separation, leading to a long-lasting struggle of hopelessness and fragmentation in their lives. Scott shows the loss and dispossession through his characters, giving sensitive evidence of their hearty association with the nature and beauty of the Australian landscape. Bobby, a street dancer, connects Aboriginals and settlers acting as a mediator for white settlers' establishment thinking that they are guests. However, the settlers totally disrupt the Aboriginals' life. The paper studies how the white settlers dismantle the Aboriginals' rich culture of dance, environment and livelihood, and also how their collective voice is suppressed in their own native land.

This research project combined Rogers and Freiberg's (1994) experiential learning theory with Schon's (in Visser, 2010) reflective practice to construct an interactive curriculum design and apply it to a cross-cultural communication course, in which English was used as a medium of instruction (EMI), at a vocational university in Taiwan. Qualitative and quantitative research methods were combined to collect student data (including online and written responses) at different stages to explore whether the instructional design model improved students' critical thinking skills. Furthermore, the students' English proficiency and knowledge construction were assessed. The results of the students' written and online reflective feedback indicated that despite some students demonstrating improved critical thinking skills, the improvement was nonsignificant. This was related to the method with which the instructor led the reflective activities and the types of topics that dominated the discussion. Furthermore, a comparison of the pretest and posttest data revealed that this experiential learning-based teaching model effectively enhanced students' English proficiency and content knowledge acquisition.

Contemporary discourse of 'new Indian women' corroborates representation of feminine self-interrogating cliches arising out of the interaction between tradition and modernity. This study addresses the issues relating to the changing status of Indian women to 'new Indian women' and the roles played by the new Indian women over a substantial period of time. Citing examples of protagonists from Manju Kapur's fictional oeuvre, the functional aspects of the new woman are studied. Kapur's new women are young Indian women who do not accept traditional roles conferred by domestic space, home (tradition) passively; instead, they seem to be (re)traditionalizing their strategies of domestic responsibilities. This study reveals that Manju Kapur's novels present the changing image of Indian women, who keeping pace with the ever changing India, are moving away from traditional portrayals of enduring, self-sacrificing women toward confident, assertive and aspiring individuals.

This paper is a critical reading of the mnemic mode of representing, remembering and disseminating a community's history through visual archives and oral performance as represented in Amitav Ghosh's River of Smoke (2011). In the novel, Ghosh imaginatively characterizes Deeti, the matriarch of the La Fami Colver community, as creating a visual archive of her community's movement from the inland plains of various parts of Eastern India to the Mauritius. That the visual archive-called Deeti's Memory-temple-is not informed by a lithic logic (which was one of the governing principles of the modern European archival processes of the time), but is, instead, determined by embodied and performative acts of reliving memories is central to this paper. By moving away from a textual archive of memory and instead, paying attention to creative visual narrative forms, Deeti's mode of archiving, it is argued, is an illustration of other non-narrative traditions of archival methods already in place in Indic traditions. The paper highlights the imperial cosmopolitan vision that characterized European modes of assimilation of knowledge being countered by Deeti, enabling a discursive movement from technologies of memorialization to a cultural memory.

This paper endeavors to identify the role of ideology in domesticating the unruly protagonist of J D Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield. Althusser's educational and familial apparatus, which are the hallmarks of his ideological state apparatus, play an undeniable role in guiding Holden to the right path of life and, therefore, applying himself. As the best representative of educational apparatus, Antolini, a Christ-like figure, provides tutelage for Holden in the absence of his Broadway-investing father. Holden, through idealizing Phoebe and Allie, also reveals an acute sense of belonging which characterizes him as a sibling-fixated protagonist. However, Holden behaves in such a way that it leads him to be stigmatized as a 'madman' and is eventually consigned to an asylum, another example of Althusser's RSA (i.e., Repressive State Apparatus). Overall, we propose that Holden Caulfield, being subjected to the Subject, is 'the caught in the rye' not 'the catcher in the rye'.

Women's choices have always been curtailed because of the societal constructs of shame associated with the presence of her female body. This silencing of her voice and negating her embodied presence have been a perennial tool used by the society to maintain its patriarchal hegemony. The paper explores how society views female sexuality and her own acknowledgement of her body and her desires and constantly tries to stifle her voices under the veils of sobriety and propriety. It further investigates the spaces of the zenana as not merely being patriarchal ones to constrict her presence; rather, the zenana could act as spaces of negotiations with the dogmatic society, moulded with imagination and acts of deviation and defiance.

A meticulous glance at the history of crime fiction reflects that the genre has gained its strength by insidiously planting and nurturing masculine heritage. However, this study negates the idea that the genre of Indian crime fiction is essentially a male domain by primarily exploring the ways in which the genre has been appropriated by some of the contemporary female writers in deliberating upon issues related to gender within the Indian context. The way in which women writers have reworked on the conventional image of the sleuth, thereby using the genre as a vehicle for subversion against the crimes to which women are constantly subjected, forms a major part of this article, which includes a detailed analysis of Deepanjana Pal's Hush a Bye Baby: The Cradle will Fall, and Sujata Massey's The Widows of Malabar Hill.

Language speaking anxiety is a multidimensional phenomenon that deals with learners' psychology in terms of their feelings, sense of worth, and confidence. Many second language theorists such as Ellis (1985), Krashen (1988), Gardner (1993) and Arnold (2005) have recognized the vital role of anxiety in the language learning process. According to them, every second language learner suffers some form of language anxiety regardless of their age, experience with the language, the type of language learning setting and location. The present study investigated ESL learners' language speaking anxiety from a holistic perspective. It adopted mixed methods research design and examined four major areas of language speaking anxiety, viz., ESL learners' anxiety levels, factors responsible for speaking anxiety, anxiety-provoking classroom activities and strategies to reduce such anxiety among the learners. The findings of the study revealed that young adult ESL learners experienced language speaking anxiety at three levels-high, moderate, and low.

Students learning English via distance education encounter emotionally wearying barriers (Hurd 2000). This paper highlights qualitative data from a bigger study investigating students' Emotional Intelligence (EI) and their distance education. 238 students completed a questionnaire with the Schutte's Self-Report Inventory, generating their EI scores, demography, and views about the English course. 18 respondents chosen based on their EI were interviewed. The qualitative data were analyzed, classified, and generated using grounded theory and content analysis. This paper showcases a case study to illuminate how a low EI student grappled with her experiences in learning English and how EI interventions in English language and distance learning programs could help students overcome the adversities.