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The IUP Journal of English Studies

June' 08

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Articles

Shelley's Orientalia: Indian Elements in His Poetry

-- Jalal Uddin Khan

Shelley, one of the major English Romantic poets, was greatly influenced by the Indian thought that reached him through the works of the early English Orientalists of his time. Although his dream of personally visiting India had never materialized, his favorite readings included Sir William Jones's poems and essays on Indian subjects in 1770s, Captain Francis Wilford's essay, "Mount Caucasus" (1801), Sidney Owenson's The Missionary: An Indian Tale (1811), and James Henry Lawrence's The Empire of the Nairs, or, The Rights of Women: An Utopian Romance (1811). This paper provides an account of the influence of these works on some of Shelley's major poems (such as Queen Mab, Alastor, The Revolt of Islam, Prometheus Unbound, "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" and "Adonais") in their setting, style, and themes. As a revolutionary, Shelley was influenced by the forces of liberation and freedom suggested by oriental models as opposed to the hackneyed and overused neoclassicism of European literature. This paper argues how his was an attempt at a sympathetic understanding of India as a cradle of ancient civilization that knew no divide in terms of the so-called Western moral and racial superiority. His creative vision of India embraced an approach to integration as opposed to the Victorian reaction of mixed feelings. In fact, the Indian influence was not just a matter of stylistic embellishment away from the traditional but an indirect yet powerful means of attacking Western political system he so passionately rebelled against.

Critiquing Indian English Literature as New National Literature

-- Bijay Kumar Das

As the identity of literature depends essentially on nationality and not on language, it is untenable to argue that only regional literaturescalled `Bhasha Literatures' by G N Devyare the national literatures of India. Since these writers and Indian English literature writers face the same situation, both embody in their literary corpus the same Indian sensibility. Both are representatives of Indian literature. Usually, writers of Bhasha literature denounce Indian English literature as inauthentic and lacking in Indian sensibility. The present paper seeks to contest this charge, citing the contribution of writers like Vikram Seth, Shashi Tharoor, Amitav Ghosh and R Parthasarathi. Indian English writers like Kamala Das, Manoj Das and Jayanta Mahapatra are bilingual writers, and writers like Shashi Tharoor and Girish Karnad draw their plots from Indian epics like The Mahabharata. The author argues against bipolarity between Bhasha literatures and Indian English literature, as both are products of the same Indian mind and sensibility and constitute one `Indian Literature'.

Wetware Fiction: Cyberpunk and the Ideologies of Posthuman Bodies

-- Pramod K Nayar

This paper explores the ideologies implicit in the representation of posthuman bodies in William Gibson's cyberpunk fiction. It first outlines a taxonomy of posthuman bodies. It then isolates four major forms of the posthuman in Gibson: the laboring body, the repressed body, the disappearing body and the marked body. The laboring body is mostly gendered, and tends to project the work of the body. However, cyberpunk sees bodies as subservient to the capitalist cause, and hence, represent them as laboring bodies, whether male or female. The repressed body is one where the `original' tends to be subsumed under technology, and is placed under the control of devices and software. The disappearing body is one whose `original' form is altered through replacements and additions. Finally, the marked body links the human form to consumer culture with acquisitions of prosthesis and the desirable appearances. After this taxonomy, the essay moves on to discuss the politics of posthuman bodies in three realms: families, aging and citizenship. It explores the implications of `cyborg families', where traditional notions of a family are overturned through technological alterations. Cyberpunk does not offer anything other than expensive technology as a solution to agingas this essay notes in its discussion of the ideologies of aging in the posthuman age. Finally, it addresses the question of citizenship, and the changing ideas of the individual and community in the age of cyborgs, as they alter the landscape of politics itself. It thus, calls into question several of the hagiographic assumptions made about the advent of the new technologies.

Narrative Discourses on Purdah in the Subcontinent

-- Asha S

Purdah, the system of female seclusion, is a salient feature of Islam as a religion. It has visual, spatial and ethical dimensions. It is both a garment, concealing the Muslim woman from sight, as well as an ideology which demarcates the boundaries of the Muslim woman's space and defines her sexual morality. Originally instituted for the protection of the Muslim woman, the purdah has gradually degraded to an instrument of control and female subjugation and a system of total exclusion of the woman from public life. The institution of purdah has attracted the attention of sociologists as well as creative writers right from the period of colonial rule down to the present day. This paper proposes to examine the treatment of purdah in select subcontinental narratives either written in English or appearing in translation. The multiple facets of the purdah are analyzed in the light of the works written by Attia Hosain, Ismat Chughtai and Nadeem Aslam. The overt manifestations of the purdah and its metaphorical and symbolic ramifications are analyzed in the texts of these writers. This paper concludes that the writers dwell more on the restrictive and repressive aspects of purdah than on its protective aspects.

R K Narayan's `New Woman': A Feminist Perspective

-- Satyasree Y

A systematic analysis has been made in this paper to put R K Narayan's female protagonists in the right perspective highlighting his feminist concern. Starting from Savitri in The Dark Room (1938) to Bala in Grandmother's Tale (1992), Narayan's women characters grow stronger and show that the emergence of the `New Woman' is not a myth or a utopia. R K Narayan's new woman has certainly emerged, and she has left an indelible mark on the Indian psyche. However, this new woman is not imported from the West. Rather, she has emerged from the rich treasure of Indian culture. She has a strong base of Indianness and is deeply entrenched in values, traditions and ethos that are exclusively Indian in form and content. Narayan's new woman is bold, self-reliant and assertive. She struggles for freedom, asserts equality and searches for identity. In the process, she empowers not only herself but also her man. Narayan's new woman might not have brought earth-shaking changes, yet she has certainly showed that she is assertive, bold and strong, and is involved in bringing positive changes not only in her man but also in the society. Narayan had progressive ideas about women and this thinking reflects unambiguously in his fiction.

The Paradox of Cultural Globalization: Deterritorialization or Reterritorialization?

-- Lily Want

Despite the development of a global telecommunication infrastructure such as the Internet and communication satellites that have, needless to say, increased the flow of information between geographically remote locations and done away with the politics of boundaries in order to disseminate a universal version of knowledge and reality, one looks askance at scholars and observers who underscore the global homogenization of culture or those who see globalization as paving the way for a set of universal values. These scholars who adumbrate that the essence of globalization is its homogenizing dimension, imply that globalization is motivated by its overarching universal program to legitimize certain cultures and knowledges and suppress oppositional knowledges for the sake of augmenting power. But then, the culture that we perceive around us is more of a celebration of plurality or heterogeneity, rather than of specificities. It is then that we begin to realize that globalization, far from involving a loss of cultural diversity, has the potential to lead to pluralist notions of culture and identity. Hence, this paper is a modest attempt to establish how globalization contributes to the development and evolution of a national/local cultural identity, and how this cultural purity, in turn, emerges as an oppositional force to the unitary process of globalization, especially against the backdrop of postmodern and postcolonial perspectives, which are the artistic analogues and expressions of fragmentation and discontinuity with any universal or totalizing theory.

Myth: A Linguistic Narrative in Maxine Hong Kingston

-- Tessy Anthony C

A narrative is generally in verse or in prose. But within this, there can be an implicit literary narrative - the myth. Maxine Hong Kingston, living in multicultural America, makes use of the myth of the woman warrior to reveal her changing consciousness. Myths originated far back in the culture of oral societies. They moved from a silent existence to an oral form, and later to a written form to avoid erasure. Kingston's attitudes crystallize as a part of growth and maturation. A pointer to this is her use of the woman warrior myth. This is an archetype, and a verbal and visual sign. The woman warrior, Kingston, has become a word warrior, advocating peace. In The Fifth Book of Peace, she rewrites herself as a peace activist. It records her growth and individuation. She preserves her ethnicity using a Chinese myth as a tool to facilitate a new bicultural identity. This myth is re-modelled and repositioned. Kingston becomes a pacifist, advocating a global human community through artistic means. Myth is a language and a narrative which communicates very effectively. Through the narrative of the myth, Kingston consciously implies that nationality can transcend boundaries. Her cultural hybridity results in a plural consciousness, making her advocate one nation.

Deconstructing Authority in Dario Fo's Accidental Death of an Anarchist

-- Srirupa Chatterjee

Dario Fo's Accidental Death of an Anarchist (1970) is a sharp and hilarious satire on police corruption in Italy. Coming from one of the most popular, and the most widely and frequently produced playwright-performers of the 20^th century, the play explicitly critiques the politics of tyranny prevalent in fascist Italy. Focusing on a controversial incident, the death of a Milanese railway worker in a police interrogation room, Fo's play illustrates the atrocities of an authoritarian regime. The play reverts to the Italian tradition of medieval folk players and employs tropes such as `play within a play' and the figure of a `jongleur' to debunk the fascist narrative. While Fo's theatre is a clarion call for an egalitarian rearrangement of society, it does not blindly advocate the tenets of left-wing politics. Fo's avant-gardism lies in transcending the binary opposition between communism and fascism, and his political subversion inheres in the critique of all extremist ideologies. The paper seeks to establish that Accidental Death of an Anarchist deconstructs all existing political ideologies by radically questioning the corruption that has infiltrated into them.

Book Review

Dynamics of Colonial Transactions

-- Editor: Shafquat Towheed Reviewed by S S Prabhakar Rao

The prolonged engagement between Britain and India for over two centuries has resulted in interdependence through interactions in a variety of spheres. These transactions have led to a dialogic, two-way process, not always unwelcome. The present collection of studies under review, competently edited by Shafquat Towheed, is part of the Studies in English Literature series under the General Editorship of Koray Melikoglu. Most of the papers offer new insights into the complex web of relationships between the colonizers and the colonized from a postcolonial perspective. Special attention has been paid to some of the lesser known writers of the 18^th century - especially, women playwrights like Hannah Cowley (A Day in Turkey; or, The Russian Slaves), Elizabeth Inchbald (The Mogul Tale; or, The Descent of a Balloon) and Frances Burney (A Busy Day; or, An Arrival from India), and less known novelist like Marie Correlli (The Sorrows of Satan and Barabbas)