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Indian
Writing in English: Some
Issues
-- E
Nageswara Rao
It
has been over two centuries since Indians first adopted
a new languageEnglishas a medium of their creative expression.
But it is only in the last two decades that this new
writing or literature in English has witnessed a flourishing
phase with a spurt in the number of publications and
some of its practitioners getting prestigious international
literary awards. In this scenario, writers, readers,
critics and the academia can no longer be indifferent,
as they have been earlier, to this emerging and vibrant
trend. This article raises some thought-provoking questions
about the nomenclature in vogue for this body of literature,
the "authenticity" of the Indianness of some
of the practitioners and the legitimacy of the use of
the term "diaspora" for all and sundry; and
dispels some widely prevailing myths about the quality,
status and validity of "Indian Writing in English".
©
2006 IUP . All Rights Reserved.
Writing
the Nation the "Other" Way: Sara Joseph's
Alahayude Penmakkal
--
C B Sudhakaran
Assuming
that the nation is a cultural signification and a discursive
formation, this article attempts to evaluate the role
played by narrative literature in the construction of
a form of resistance against the post-modern forces.
This is done with the help of an analysis of the Malayalam
writer, Sara Joseph's novel Alahayude Penmakkal
(The Daughters of Alaha, 1999). It thus challenges and
rewrites the conventional modernist forms of historiography
and concepts of nation formation. The subaltern perspective
from which the novel is narrated, uses the decentred
collective subjectivity of a provinciality (rather than
the individualist subjectivity of the high modernist
novel), which is identified with the wretchedness of
the earth to narrate how masses of the marginalized
"other" have been consciously excluded from
the bourgeois narratives of the nation by the "knowing
subject" of the modernist historian. What is narrated
in the novel, the article argues, is the nether side
of the history of civilization. The article uses insights
of the conceptualizations of Walter Benjamin, Antonio
Gramsci, Frantz Fanon, Homi Bhabha, Fredric Jameson
and Partha Chatterjee, among others.
©
2006 IUP . All Rights Reserved.
Amar
Chitra Katha and the Construction of Indian Identity
-- Pramod
K Nayar
This
article looks at the most popular comic book in IndiaAmar
Chitra Katha (The Immortal Pictorial Book). It demonstrates
the manner in which different notions of India are constructed
in the series. It focuses on the regional, communal
and gender identities that Amar Chitra Katha
constructs through its textual and visual representations;
and pays attention to the ideological subtexts underpinning
the representations of gods, demons, women, kingdoms,
and the nation in the comic book. It suggests that an
Aryan, the upper class/caste Hindu identity, is often
projected as a secular `Indian' in the series. Differences
of region, language and culture are either elided or
exoticised in the series. It attempts to propose other
frames in which this cultural icon can be located and
read.
©
2006 IUP . All Rights Reserved.
Vikram
Seth's From Heaven Lake: A Site of Places, People,
Culture, Customs and Art
--
Tanushree Nayak
Travel
facilitates the optimal discovery of the locale, the
environs and the ethos of the places visited. It also
results in "imploration"of one's self. It
is indeed a quest for the real self beneath the multiplicity
of trivia dominant in a quotidian existence. Vikram
Seth, an Indian writer in English, undertook such an
exploratory travel from his cozy place in Stanford to
his roots in Delhi, through China, Tibet and Nepal.
His sharp eye, occasionally marred by his poetic style,
recreates the magic, the mystery and the misery of the
places he visited. This article traces the explorations
and the experiences of human warmth and emotional empathy
felt by the author for his hosts and self-fulfillment.
©
2006 IUP . All Rights Reserved.
Wading
through Specificities: Translating Contemporary Telugu
Texts into English
-- Alladi
Uma and M Sridhar
Translation,
an avid and frustrated practitioner once said, is forever
impossible and forever necessary. Among the major languages
of India, Telugu has suffered from the meager efforts
to take its literary treasures to the larger international
readership through competent translations. Translation,
particularly of the texts produced by the hitherto neglected
"dispossessed" groups of the society, poses
several challenges. The authors discuss the problems
of putting across the dialog in the stories of writers
like Yendluri Sudhakar and the culture-specific texts
in the poems of Prasada Murthy and Karra Vijaya Kumari
and the solutions, necessarily tentative, provided by
them.
©
2006 IUP . All Rights Reserved.
Translating
Bhakti: Versions of Kabir in Colonial/Early Nationalist
Period
-- Akshaya
Kumar
Multiple
translations of Kabir right from the pre-independent
nationalist to the present globalized era have engendered
new semantic possibilities to the enigmatic poetic output
of the saint-poet. The early colonial Indologists took
up the task of translating the bhakti poet, Kabir,
primarily to underline first the fissures within Hinduism,
and then to appropriate him within the reformatory rhetoric
of Christianity. Translated on the margins of an official
project of orientalism, Kabir, to begin with, was translated
more as one among the poets of the Sikh holy text, Adi
Granth, than as a poet in his own right. If Trumpp's
endeavor was to translate Kabir as a poet writing within
the canonical Hinduism, the effort of Macauliffe was
to forge a poetics of distinction, through which he
could translate Kabir as counter-canonical poet. Ahmad
Shah in his translation accords an independent status
to Kabir, yet in his translation of Bijak, he works
within the parameters of Biblical idiom and tone. Tagore's
translation is an endeavor to retrieve the saint-poet
from colonial appropriations as he reinvents the poet
in the advaita tradition of the Hindu philosophy.
A textual analysis of various translations of Kabir
from 1860 to 1917 is undertaken in this article to bring
out the dynamics of appropriation of the discourse of
the saint-poet during the colonial period to the specific
agenda of the translation or the sponsoring agency.
©
2006 IUP . All Rights Reserved.
Life
of Pi : A Confluence
of Interfaith
-- V
M Aniamma
The
binding link, though occasionally fragile, among all
religions, is the perennial aspiration for union with
Godhead or salvation of the soul. But today's world
is ravaged by religious intolerance and strife. In this
context, the Canadian novelist, Yann Martel, stresses
the urgency of religious harmony in his intensely moving
novel, Life of Pi. Pi Patel, the chief
protagonist of the novel, careers through the entire
gamut of the religious practices of multiple faithsHinduism
(into which he was born), Islam and Christianity (which
he picked up and welcomed unreservedly)and lives a life
of glorious synthesis, fully realizing the oneness that
lies beneath all the apparent dissensions, made much
of by pseudo-secularists. The ethos of integration
would hopefully provide a corrective course to the modern
world.
©
2006 IUP . All Rights Reserved.
The
"Unmuting" of the African-American:
An Approach to Mark Twain's Fiction
-- K
Kishori Nayak
The
treatment of a segment of humanity in America, earlier
derisively called "the Negroes" and now a
little more considerately "the African-American",
has had its vicissitudes in the societal hierarchy.
Literary treatment has not been substantially different,
either. This article examines the portrayal of the Negro
as well as the Black-White relations in the American
society of the 19th century. The author takes
a close look at the characters of Jim in Huckleberry
Finn, Tom in Pudd'nhead Wilson and Jasper
in Which Was It? and demonstrates that Twain
shows greater sympathy for the disadvantaged in his
latter fiction, which presents the protagonists becoming
increasingly self-assertive and even belligerent. In
the early stages, Twain remained somewhat neutral in
his assessment of the racial scenario but as he grew
older he became more empathetic with the sad spectacle
of racial segregation and exploitation in the nation
of "equal opportunity."
©
2006 IUP . All Rights Reserved.
Mystical
Theology in Annie Dillard's Holy the Firm: A
Critique
-- P G
Nirmala
This
article is an attempt to place Annie Dillard's complex
metaphysical work, Holy the Firm, in the context
of Christian theology and mysticism. Holy the Firm
attempts to enter through art and the power of languagethose
realms of human experience that are inaccessible to
ordinary perception. This article examines the role
of suffering in spirituality as the book turns out to
be an in-depth study of human suffering and the redeeming
power of God. The reader is shown a glimpse of the point
where matter and spirit, terror, and beauty intersect.
Taking a real life incident of a little girl, whose
face is burnt beyond recognition in a freak airplane
accident, the narrative focuses on how God's grace can
transform even the most grotesque of facts into something
spiritual. The article examines the visionary experiences
of Dillard, which turn out to be mystical in content.
Her affinity to the medieval Christian mystic, Julian
of Norwich, is also examined here.
©
2006 IUP . All Rights Reserved.
Interview
In
Conversation with Stanley Crouch
--
Nibir K Ghosh
One
of America's most provocative social critics, Stanley
Crouch, was born in Los Angeles, California on December
14, 1945. Encouraged by his mother, Crouch began writing
at the age of eight. He attended the East Los Angeles
and Southwest junior colleges, but has no degrees. His
writings have appeared in Harper's, TheNew York Times,
Vogue, Downbeat, The Amsterdam News, The New Republic,
The Partisan Review, The Reading Room, and The
New Yorker. He has served as an Artistic Consultant
for jazz programming at Lincoln Center since 1987 and
is a founder of the Jazz department known as Jazz at
Lincoln Center. His collection of essays and reviews,
Notes of a Hanging Judge, was nominated for an
award in criticism by the National Book Critics Circle
and was selected by the Encyclopedia Britannica Yearbook
as the best book of essays published in 1990.
©
2006 IUP . All Rights Reserved.
Book
Review
English
in India: Loyalty and Attitudes
--
Annika Hohenthal
©
2001 M S Thirumalai. All Rights Reserved. IUP holds the copyright for the review. |
