The Creative Launcher

Exile as a Timeless Problem for Humankind – Mirrored Through Pre-Modern German and Other Literary Texts

2023-02-28T02:51:47+00:00

Tragically, human history has always been determined by the experience of being exiled. This has been discussed in historical documents and especially in literary texts throughout time. The present essay first reflects on the wide range of examples for this topic, and then illustrates it through a critical reading of the Old High German heroic poem, “Hildebrandslied,” and the Middle High German heroic epic, Nibelungenlied. Each time, the experience of exile is described in moving, horrific terms and utilized as a metaphor of the tragedy of the human existence. Insofar as these two medieval examples strike us as so timeless and universal, we can recognize here, once again, the great significance of medieval literature for the exploration of fundamental aspects in our lives, particularly in extreme cases.

Fruits of Migration: Seeing Punjabi Diaspora through its Stories

2023-02-28T02:51:45+00:00

Displacement for survival, perhaps since the inception of life on the earth, has been a marked feature of the animal kingdom—be it birds, mammals, reptiles, or human beings. However, these are only human beings who migrate not just for survival but also for a better life. In this very context, the present paper deliberates on the migration of Punjabis to England, America, and Canada through some of the short stories in Punjabi produced by the migrants settled in these countries. The stories have been taken from an anthology titled Punjabi Parvasian Dian Kahanian (The Stories from Migrant Punjabis), edited by Jinder and Baldev Singh Baddan. The selected stories bring forth the diasporic people’s desires, sometimes lust also, to enjoy the riches and the glamorous life of the western countries and their struggles for success in foreign lands. This literary response is a collection of mixed experiences. On the one hand, it exhibits bewilderment at the incompatibility with the new culture, a sense of alienation, and the sacrifices of health and ethics to reach prosperity; on the other, it brings forth how the migrants learn to explore themselves, gain independence (especially women) and shed their weaknesses and narrow attitudes in the new liberal environments. This study also includes the problem of illegal migration, the vice of greed behind it, the resultant fear and frustration, and how it results in turning humans into not-less-than-beasts.

Representation of Gender Violence in Jaishree Misra’s Afterwards

2023-02-28T02:51:43+00:00

Gender violence is one of the major social issues which needs proper attention. It is one of the worst crimes of human society. ‘Gender Violence’ is an umbrella term that includes a large number of crimes directly or indirectly posed against a person’s sexuality. Several crimes like domestic violence, marital rape, human trafficking, honor killing, and other such abuses are heinous realities of the contemporary Indian society. To a large extent, the trauma of gender violence is not only physical but also psychological. Sadly, it has remained neglected for a very long period. However, by the twentieth century, voices fighting against such issues have gained wide recognition. The literary representation of sexual violence in Indian English literature is a way of giving voice to silent unheard victims and is worth critical attention. Jaishree Misra is a contemporary Indian English novelist delineating various socio-cultural issues of the contemporary Indian society through her large gamut of literary works. Her novel Afterwards (2004) deals with the life of a woman named Maya, trapped in a loveless and suffocating marriage. This research paper attempts to study the textual representation of sexual violence in the contemporary Indian English fictions with special attention to the selected literary work.

The Unhealing Scars: ‘Her’ Narratives of Partition

2023-02-28T02:51:41+00:00

Literature reflects society in various ways. Displacement implies crisis of identity. The history of colonialism has occupied a large space in portraying the displacement of individuals across cultures. It has left a wound in everybody’s heart since driving an individual away from his/her native land is synonymous to deprive him/her of the right to breathe. Partition narratives form the part and parcel of displacement as a separate branch of studies. When a nation is fractured the trauma of losing one’s land creates a wound in the psyche and it has been contextualized by various writers during the pre and post phases of partition. They have focused on the physical, mental, social and above all the psychological wounds of individuals who have lost their native land. The documentation of partition narratives is of various layers and gender discourse is a significant component of this. Partition has revealed the hidden wounds of women’s bodies which have always been the site of oppression. They were abducted, raped, mutilated and they have been left as mere living beings. The present paper attempts to explore the effect of partition on women through the analysis of short stories written by Shobha Rao. Urvashi Butalia, Nivedita Menon, Kamla Bhasin have been extensively exploring the displacement of women in the context of partition and their narratives focus on the traumatic experiences of displacement and how that reduce their identities since they are merely considered as ‘bodies’. Shobha Rao, known as an American novelist immigrating from India has extensively focused on women’s oppression in various contexts. In the collection of short stories called An Unrestored Woman Rao is concentrating on the abducted women being returned to their own lands in the context of the Abducted Persons (Recovery and Restoration) Act in 1949. The proposed paper is going to examine Rao’s texts in the context of partition to trace the nature of displacement, trauma and quest to find their own identity.

Memory, Trauma and Partition: Reading Sunanda Sikdar’s Dayamoyeer Katha

2023-03-01T02:31:11+00:00

In recent years the scholastic emphasis on the refugee narratives, which conventionally focused on the loss of lives, homes and resources, is now reimagined as stories of survival and resurrection of people deprived of their homes. Nostalgia for a lost homeland often takes centre stage in refugee narratives. To be physically severed from a space internalised as the safest eternal abode and start afresh is a daunting task. Anchita Ghatak’s translation of Sunanda Sikdar’s Dayamoyeer Katha, A Life Long Ago narrates the life events of Dayamoyee, who chooses to revisit her past, deciding to write about the first ten years of her life in the East Pakistan village of Dighpait following the death of Majamda, a Muslim brotherly figure who sells his cows to come and meet her in India. The return to her childhood’s blissful land unearthed several hidden memories that brought the politics of religion, caste, class, and gender to the forefront. Without paying attention to her aunt’s continuous warnings not to mingle with the Muslim neighbours, Daya found it possible to eat, touch, and have fun with them in her childlike innocence. As the refugees arrive at Dighpait, her aunt remains unwilling to equate them with the native Muslim folk, the ‘bhoomiputra, the “sons of the soil”. Besides the narrator, we also have Snehalata, Daya’s aunt, her foster mother and a child widow. As she narrates how she grieved over the withdrawal of fish and other materialistic pleasures from her daily life rather than her young husband’s demise, we are reminded of the unfair austerity imposed on them in contrast to the elderly widowers who had no restrictions and even remarried occasionally. Characters like Modi bhabi, the woman who lost her mind as her childhood companion Suresh Lahiri left for Hindustan; Mejobhabi, wife of Khalek, who had to be ‘modernised’ to join her husband, now a senior army officer in Pakistan; Sudhirdada, the effeminate male whose murder portrays a show of power in the village, and Gouri, an instance of widow-remarriage needs scholarly attention. The novel further mentions Daya’s mother, the headmistress of a school in Hindustan, and Anita, a leading actress opposite Kishore Kumar, thus representing the educated, empowered women. The very moment of Daya deciding to write about her past is auspicious; it is the moment of finding one’s voice, of illuminating the horrors of the past, and the moment of triumph and healing. Dipesh Chakraborty mentions two aspects of memory: “the sentiment of nostalgia” and the “sense of trauma”, which pervades Dayamoyee’s narrative, but for her, it is equally therapeutic. The proposed paper looks forward to understanding Daya’s notion of her lost motherland and childhood and how the marginalised gender conceptualises home and rootedness. It proposes to analyse the politics of remembering, forgetting and retelling the stories from the point of the female subaltern who consciously buried her past and later chose to speak up, and in the process, portrayed a realistic picture of women during partition.

Interrogating Ralph Singh as Floating Signifier: A Study of Displacement and Diaspora in V.S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men

2023-03-01T02:31:08+00:00

Claude Levi Strauss coined the term 'floating signifier' by which he means “to represent an undetermined quantity of signification, in itself void of meaning and thus opt to receive any meaning” (Levi Strauss p. 56). Fundamentally, the term refers to the disorientation of the connection between the signifier and the signified in the Saussurian sense. Its reception as a non-linguistic sign is quite popular nowadays. This paper seeks to investigate the portrayal of Ralph Singh, the protagonist of V. S Naipaul’s novel; The Mimic Men (1967), and interpret all the possible factors that justify him as a non-linguistic floating signifier. Ralph Ranjit Kripal Singh or Ralph Singh is a Hindu born, lives in a fictitious Caribbean Island, Isabella. He later goes to England for his education, where he marries an English woman named Sandra. He comes back to Isabella and then travels back to England again. Ralph feels displaced from his real root to be a part of the country which he could not relate himself to and eventually metamorphoses into a ‘sign’. In the novel, wherever he travels, Ralph strives to make his life meaningful and significant. But every time his effort ends up in an insignificant way. So, throughout the novel, Ralph Singh behaves as a floating signifier but wishes to be signified. This paper also explores the relationship between displacement and diaspora, and its correlation to the floating signifier. The final purpose of this article is to ignite the discourse of the diaspora from an entirely different perspective.

Narrating Tales of Displacement: Fragmented Memory and Partition Stories

2023-03-15T03:46:53+00:00

For the children of families that have experienced partition, relating to roots and a place of belonging is never without complications. They tend to relocate themselves multiple times in physical places as well as mental spaces. Unfortunately, the final settling never takes place for them, neither in the new place, where the family relocates to, nor in the mind that is a storehouse of experiences of migration. They remain ‘in-between’ and continue negotiating between the past and the present through fragmented as well as tormented memories. This paper attempts to study the complexity of belongingness for those who have lived the experiences of the Partition and how this complexity continues across generations. This will be done through a methodology of writing personal narrative and reviewing testimonies of those who experienced the Partition, along with the members of their families. The primary sources for this paper are personal testimonies of the family members, community magazine Pothohar, the short story ‘Bhenji Parmeshri’ based on the oral tales narrated by the researcher’s grandmother, films Sardar Mohammad (2017) and Eh Janam Tumahare Lekhe (2015) and a testimony of Mohinder Kaur in the newspaper. The paper will evaluate the experience of those who suffered owing to Partition by connecting the contact points, like experience of migration, displacement of families, killing of daughters by their fathers etc. as depicted in the texts and testimonies taken for the study. Personally, the researcher’s grandfather, Harbans Singh lived for 102 years witnessing and participating in events around the Freedom Movement, the Partition of India, the 1971 war with Pakistan, the Emergency, the 1984 anti-Sikh massacres, and finally the recent pandemic (COVI-19). At all major incidences he suffered personal losses. While throughout his life, he kept narrating his experiences of the Partition and the eventual victims’ migration to India, but towards the end of his life, he refused to talk about it anymore. He became very selective in his choice of subject for a conversation. Nevertheless, his village and place of birth, never skipped him. Even in his dementia, any reference to his birthplace would attract his attention. The paper is an attempt to study how physical places become permanent fixatures and sites of memory that surface at a slightest trigger. These incidences are the deepest traumatic sites that never recover.

Typecasting Identity and Portrayal of Trauma in the Reel Rendition of the Northeast: A Cinematic Introspection through Select Bollywood Films

2023-03-15T03:46:50+00:00

Edward Said, in his seminal work Orientalism, opined that the colonialist thought process (the notion that the West is superior to the East) did not come to an end when the colonial rule ended, but continued in varied forms. The vision of the Northeast within the borderlines of India reiterates this idea when one envisions the area through the lenses of mainstream ‘Indo-Aryan' and ‘Dravidian' cultural practices. Often termed as a ‘conflict zone', the Northeast has always had a tense relationship with ‘mainland' India, due to the differences in opinion regarding societal and cultural practices, food habits, territorial squabbles, and religion. When it came to the representation part of the Northeast in various art forms, it almost always got moulded by the mainstream imagination, which had nothing to do with real life practices related to the Northeast, and Bollywood movies act as the perfect canvas for this. This paper would attempt to contextualize the (mis)representation of identity, challenges, contestation in the portrayal of Northeast, the evolution of the process ‘othering’ of the characters belonging to the region in the mainstream Bollywood films, like Tango Charlie (2005), Chak de India (2007), Mary Kom (2014), Pink (2016), and the recent web series Axone (2019). Incisively speaking, the paper would also gyrate around some major concerns like the problematic position of Northeastern consciousness amid the ideology of one-nation-one-language that has been perpetrated in certain ways since the Nehruvian times, typecasting characters while portraying them in popular Bollywood movies, casting actors belonging to the Northeast into stereotypical roles, bereft of variety, and ultimately how off-beat cinematic presentations in OTT platforms have poised thought-provoking questions as counter-narratives to mainstream Bollywood movies of the past.