I am an Associate Professor at The LNM Institute of Information Technology Jaipur. My research areas are South Asian Literature, Diaspora Studies, Cultural Studies and Digital Humanities Address: The LNM Institute of Information Technology Jaipur
The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Mar 9, 2021
Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Night (2008) is a perspicacious commentary on the violence, exile and di... more Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Night (2008) is a perspicacious commentary on the violence, exile and dispossession that have wrecked the lives of ordinary Kashmiris since 1947. Peer compellingly ruminates on the gradual loss of the Kashmiris’ belongingness in the last few decades that eventually curtailed their sense of individual and collective selfhood. The present article aims to analyse how Peer’s memoir emerges as a crucial intervention in focusing on the othering of Kashmiris in postcolonial India. This article will examine how Peer’s personal story shapes his creative expression of homeland and uncovers the gradual stymieing of Kashmiri Muslim citizenship and identity under Indian statehood, perhaps most alarmingly manifested in the abrogation of Article 370 in 2019. This article will look at how Peer’s narrative interrogates the predominating imaginations of Kashmir as the other in the pan-Indian psyche and engages with the inherent "ambivalence" of the nationalist discourse of India. Accordingly, the article will also study how Peer positions Kashmir as a "heterotopic space" that transcends any form of monolithic comprehension. In so doing, Peer’s memoir emerges as an alternative and autoethnographic chronicling of the Kashmir story undercutting the dominant assumptions, reinforced by the Indian nationalist project. Pertinently, the concepts of "ambivalence" and "heterotopia" are drawn from the theoretical perspectives of Homi Bhabha and Michael Foucault, respectively.
The current ecological crisis in India must be traced back to its origins because, similar to Wes... more The current ecological crisis in India must be traced back to its origins because, similar to Western beliefs and practices, colonization of the natural world is fostered and justified. Materialistic creed, techno-culture, enlightenment principles of human progress, and industrial developments successfully exploit the resources of nature and threaten the existence of rivers, lands, and their flora and fauna. As a result, the lower sections of society, including the deprived and marginalized tribes, bear the inevitable outcome of this exploitation of nature, and the tribal are pushed into socio-cultural and economic decline. The condition of the tribal people and their environment find best expression in the works of Mahasweta Devi, one of the most famous journalists, social activists, and creative writers of West Bengal. After witnessing the pitiful condition of the tribes of Western, Central, and North-East India, she decides to delineate their livelihood, and naturally their relat...
Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Night (2008) is a perspicacious commentary on the violence, exile and di... more Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Night (2008) is a perspicacious commentary on the violence, exile and dispossession that have wrecked the lives of ordinary Kashmiris since 1947. Peer compellingly ruminates on the gradual loss of the Kashmiris’ belongingness in the last few decades that eventually curtailed their sense of individual and collective selfhood. The present article aims to analyse how Peer’s memoir emerges as a crucial intervention in focusing on the othering of Kashmiris in postcolonial India. This article will examine how Peer’s personal story shapes his creative expression of homeland and uncovers the gradual stymieing of Kashmiri Muslim citizenship and identity under Indian statehood, perhaps most alarmingly manifested in the abrogation of Article 370 in 2019. This article will look at how Peer’s narrative interrogates the predominating imaginations of Kashmir as the other in the pan-Indian psyche and engages with the inherent "ambivalence" of the nationalist disco...
ABSTRACT Palestinian American writer Susan Abulhawa’s novels Mornings in Jenin (2010) and The Blu... more ABSTRACT Palestinian American writer Susan Abulhawa’s novels Mornings in Jenin (2010) and The Blue Between Sky and Water (2015) capture the experience of the Palestinian community following Israeli occupation and the expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland. This article explores the ways in which Abulhawa shows the dismantling of the national sovereignty of Palestine as having thrown the citizenry of the Palestinian Arabs into a state of disarray. Drawing on theories of nation, nationalism, and nostalgia, it discusses how Abulhawa’s protagonists have recourse to cultural memories of the homeland to conceptualize and rebuild their disrupted subjectivities. Analysing the important role of nostalgia in perpetuating love of a lost territory, it argues that, for Abulhawa, the yearning to return is fundamental to the social connectedness and nationalist struggles of the dislocated Palestinian Arab community.
The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Mar 9, 2021
Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Night (2008) is a perspicacious commentary on the violence, exile and di... more Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Night (2008) is a perspicacious commentary on the violence, exile and dispossession that have wrecked the lives of ordinary Kashmiris since 1947. Peer compellingly ruminates on the gradual loss of the Kashmiris’ belongingness in the last few decades that eventually curtailed their sense of individual and collective selfhood. The present article aims to analyse how Peer’s memoir emerges as a crucial intervention in focusing on the othering of Kashmiris in postcolonial India. This article will examine how Peer’s personal story shapes his creative expression of homeland and uncovers the gradual stymieing of Kashmiri Muslim citizenship and identity under Indian statehood, perhaps most alarmingly manifested in the abrogation of Article 370 in 2019. This article will look at how Peer’s narrative interrogates the predominating imaginations of Kashmir as the other in the pan-Indian psyche and engages with the inherent "ambivalence" of the nationalist discourse of India. Accordingly, the article will also study how Peer positions Kashmir as a "heterotopic space" that transcends any form of monolithic comprehension. In so doing, Peer’s memoir emerges as an alternative and autoethnographic chronicling of the Kashmir story undercutting the dominant assumptions, reinforced by the Indian nationalist project. Pertinently, the concepts of "ambivalence" and "heterotopia" are drawn from the theoretical perspectives of Homi Bhabha and Michael Foucault, respectively.
The current ecological crisis in India must be traced back to its origins because, similar to Wes... more The current ecological crisis in India must be traced back to its origins because, similar to Western beliefs and practices, colonization of the natural world is fostered and justified. Materialistic creed, techno-culture, enlightenment principles of human progress, and industrial developments successfully exploit the resources of nature and threaten the existence of rivers, lands, and their flora and fauna. As a result, the lower sections of society, including the deprived and marginalized tribes, bear the inevitable outcome of this exploitation of nature, and the tribal are pushed into socio-cultural and economic decline. The condition of the tribal people and their environment find best expression in the works of Mahasweta Devi, one of the most famous journalists, social activists, and creative writers of West Bengal. After witnessing the pitiful condition of the tribes of Western, Central, and North-East India, she decides to delineate their livelihood, and naturally their relat...
Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Night (2008) is a perspicacious commentary on the violence, exile and di... more Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Night (2008) is a perspicacious commentary on the violence, exile and dispossession that have wrecked the lives of ordinary Kashmiris since 1947. Peer compellingly ruminates on the gradual loss of the Kashmiris’ belongingness in the last few decades that eventually curtailed their sense of individual and collective selfhood. The present article aims to analyse how Peer’s memoir emerges as a crucial intervention in focusing on the othering of Kashmiris in postcolonial India. This article will examine how Peer’s personal story shapes his creative expression of homeland and uncovers the gradual stymieing of Kashmiri Muslim citizenship and identity under Indian statehood, perhaps most alarmingly manifested in the abrogation of Article 370 in 2019. This article will look at how Peer’s narrative interrogates the predominating imaginations of Kashmir as the other in the pan-Indian psyche and engages with the inherent "ambivalence" of the nationalist disco...
ABSTRACT Palestinian American writer Susan Abulhawa’s novels Mornings in Jenin (2010) and The Blu... more ABSTRACT Palestinian American writer Susan Abulhawa’s novels Mornings in Jenin (2010) and The Blue Between Sky and Water (2015) capture the experience of the Palestinian community following Israeli occupation and the expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland. This article explores the ways in which Abulhawa shows the dismantling of the national sovereignty of Palestine as having thrown the citizenry of the Palestinian Arabs into a state of disarray. Drawing on theories of nation, nationalism, and nostalgia, it discusses how Abulhawa’s protagonists have recourse to cultural memories of the homeland to conceptualize and rebuild their disrupted subjectivities. Analysing the important role of nostalgia in perpetuating love of a lost territory, it argues that, for Abulhawa, the yearning to return is fundamental to the social connectedness and nationalist struggles of the dislocated Palestinian Arab community.
Negotiating Margins: African American and Dalit Writings, 2014
Critically applauded as one of the most influential African American writers, Toni Morrison in he... more Critically applauded as one of the most influential African American writers, Toni Morrison in her oeuvre unflinchingly renders a polemical discussion of oppression and empowerment. The present paper seeks to study her most recent novel Home (2012) as aptly adding to her fictional continuum in capturing the tribulations of black man in the face of various institutionalizations. We focus on how Morrison’s novel presents Frank Money, a Korean War veteran, as a subaltern figure who is unwittingly trapped in the complex nexus of violence. Money’s guilt-stricken and traumatized consciousness while debunking the pathological stereotyping of black man as inherently bestial also lays bare his deep psychic conflicts triggered by white America’s state-sanctioned violence. Accordingly, the paper discusses how this novel powerfully registers the insidious interplay of dominant ideologies of manhood and power that is complicit in social deterritorialization of black men. Emphasizing this aspect, the essay also intends to discuss the imperialistic aggression of capitalist America which the novelist creatively orchestrates through the subsumed history of 1950s and the Korean War. As part of this critique, the paper also posits that Home in dramatizing Money’s redemption not only offers a corrective vision to black man’s psychic marginalization but also powerfully confronts the hegemony of violence in American political abstractions. In so doing, Morrison unmistakably invokes a political stance that interrogates the overwhelming paradigms of capitalist America.
The philosophy of colonial modernity inspired by the epistemology of Western Enlightenment has fo... more The philosophy of colonial modernity inspired by the epistemology of Western Enlightenment has fostered a dualistic view of the human and non-human world, in which the former has been accorded a position of privilege and power to signify, while the latter is marginalised as silent and subservient ‘other.’ This ‘othering’ has been instrumental in perpetuating a capitalist episteme of progress and aggravating varied forms of environmental injustices. The present article explores Rohan Chakravarty’s comics as the first of its kind in the realm of Indian comics to deliberate critically on the politics of ecological ‘othering’ that results from capitalist modernity and the discourse of ‘Anthropocene.’ The article argues that Chakravarty’s comics subvert the dominant epistemologies of capitalism and probe the necessity of re-centring the margins inscribed by Western capitalist parameters. Drawing insights from Fricker’s theories of ‘epistemic injustices,’ this study contends that a reversal of dominant thinking and epistemic expressions is needed to challenge the commodification of ecology and the non-human world. Chakravarty’s comics, in attributing a distinctive voice and agency to the world of environment and animals, assert the essentiality of acknowledging the ontological value of all forms of planetary life and prioritise the notion of collective well-being.
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