{"title":"Goopy Gayen Bagha Bayen: The Latent Contours of Caste","authors":"Ritu Sen Chaudhuri","doi":"10.35684/jlci.2019.6108","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35684/jlci.2019.6108","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":183557,"journal":{"name":"Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry","volume":"85 2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129319149","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Play of Semiotic Repetition and Intertwined Semiotic Agency: Ba in the Reciprocal Singing of Chinese Mountain Song","authors":"Gaku Kajimaru","doi":"10.35684/jlci.2022.9102","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35684/jlci.2022.9102","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":183557,"journal":{"name":"Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry","volume":"86 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117282573","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
S. Sree, Sakthi Prem, Ph. D. Scholar, P. T. S. Kohila
Fortunately, there will always be a necessity for stories, and therefore, there will always be an audience. The act of reading is one of the most defining features of civilisation. Stories, whatever form they may adorn, have always been the guiding beacon of intellectual growth in society. It adds culture to everything that is deemed as the human condition. It is a constructive process where knowledge is gained and modified at a rapid rate. As Rosenblatt notes, reading is an opportune time where there is a transfer of both efferent or factual and aesthetic or pleasurable information from the text to the reader. Thus, reading can be collectively considered a transactional event where the reader and the text turn into an amalgamated entity. “By its very nature, engagement in the literacy act assumes an active reader whose interpretations are not stagnant but continually shaped by the influx of new information” (Almasi 315). When it comes to defining reading communities, it is more often formed by a group of people that share a selective interest in reading. It is incepted as a culture of literacy. Participating in the act of reading as a community certainly paves the way for a holistic understanding of the world and society at large. Any community or circle of readers binds themselves as a group simply due to a single aspect, and that is the text. Such a group is not forged by any formal rules. Surely it is a matter of shared preferences. The neurological engagement offered by the process of reading is quite an interesting topic to focus on. Contemporary research on reading communities embellishes the idea that reading can truly act as a tool to build empathy. “In other words, reading fiction lights up the brain in ways that mimic the neural activities of the experience you’re reading about. For example, if you read a well-written passage about a character hiking through the wilderness, your brain reacts as if you’re on that hike. If you read a passage about a character drinking lemonade, the part of your brain that activates when you taste something sour lights up. You might even start salivating” (Kidera). The simulation caused by fiction can profoundly educate the reader. If a reading community chooses to deal with fiction that exposes them to the cruelty of slavery, the members of this reading club may probably reach a point of empathising with the enslaved as they will be moved by their narrative. This will certainly sensitise them to never commit such inhumane acts in real life. They will be educated to never indulge in racism. Keeping the same in mind, can readers be educated about death? Literary fiction has long been quintessential in defining what it truly means to exist. Death has to be endowed not only as the end of life but also as a very important part of it. People do not really contemplate much about understanding death, and this begs the analysis of a book club dedicated to comprehending the stark macabre side of life. Bringing tog
{"title":"The Embodied Reader and Experiential Death: EmergingReadership for ‘Brooksian’Fiction","authors":"S. Sree, Sakthi Prem, Ph. D. Scholar, P. T. S. Kohila","doi":"10.35684/jlci.2023.9205","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35684/jlci.2023.9205","url":null,"abstract":"Fortunately, there will always be a necessity for stories, and therefore, there will always be an audience. The act of reading is one of the most defining features of civilisation. Stories, whatever form they may adorn, have always been the guiding beacon of intellectual growth in society. It adds culture to everything that is deemed as the human condition. It is a constructive process where knowledge is gained and modified at a rapid rate. As Rosenblatt notes, reading is an opportune time where there is a transfer of both efferent or factual and aesthetic or pleasurable information from the text to the reader. Thus, reading can be collectively considered a transactional event where the reader and the text turn into an amalgamated entity. “By its very nature, engagement in the literacy act assumes an active reader whose interpretations are not stagnant but continually shaped by the influx of new information” (Almasi 315). When it comes to defining reading communities, it is more often formed by a group of people that share a selective interest in reading. It is incepted as a culture of literacy. Participating in the act of reading as a community certainly paves the way for a holistic understanding of the world and society at large. Any community or circle of readers binds themselves as a group simply due to a single aspect, and that is the text. Such a group is not forged by any formal rules. Surely it is a matter of shared preferences. The neurological engagement offered by the process of reading is quite an interesting topic to focus on. Contemporary research on reading communities embellishes the idea that reading can truly act as a tool to build empathy. “In other words, reading fiction lights up the brain in ways that mimic the neural activities of the experience you’re reading about. For example, if you read a well-written passage about a character hiking through the wilderness, your brain reacts as if you’re on that hike. If you read a passage about a character drinking lemonade, the part of your brain that activates when you taste something sour lights up. You might even start salivating” (Kidera). The simulation caused by fiction can profoundly educate the reader. If a reading community chooses to deal with fiction that exposes them to the cruelty of slavery, the members of this reading club may probably reach a point of empathising with the enslaved as they will be moved by their narrative. This will certainly sensitise them to never commit such inhumane acts in real life. They will be educated to never indulge in racism. Keeping the same in mind, can readers be educated about death? Literary fiction has long been quintessential in defining what it truly means to exist. Death has to be endowed not only as the end of life but also as a very important part of it. People do not really contemplate much about understanding death, and this begs the analysis of a book club dedicated to comprehending the stark macabre side of life. Bringing tog","PeriodicalId":183557,"journal":{"name":"Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry","volume":"93 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115373859","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reading the Disnarrated: Traumatic Memory, Disrupted Communication, and the Crisis of Modernity in Jeet Thayil’s Low","authors":"Nitika Gulati","doi":"10.35684/jlci.2022.8202","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35684/jlci.2022.8202","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":183557,"journal":{"name":"Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130514480","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction: Asian Perspectives on Semiotics","authors":"N. Choksi, J. Khatri","doi":"10.35684/jlci.2022.9101","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35684/jlci.2022.9101","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":183557,"journal":{"name":"Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133921792","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Dubbed the "Summer of Love," the summer of 1967 found U.S. youth coming together for music, sex, and drugs, but more importantly, coming together for an escape from and opposition to dire circumstances of social unrest, including the Vietnam War and the civil rights conflicts that abounded in the 1960s. [...]the topics at the forefront of intellectual and broader societal thought in the 1960s are some of the very same topics we wrestle with today. Antiintellectual disdain for experts and critical thinkers has reappeared as documented in Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason (2008), Russell Jacoby's The Last Intellectuals (2000), Tom Nichols's pre-Trump-era essay, "The Death of Expertise" (2014), and David Masciotra's "Anti-Intellectualism is Back" (2020), which reprised Hofstadter's work in reference to attacks on Dr. Anthony Fauci and the development of COVID-19 vaccines in the U.S. Climate change is a current critical topic, but has an important history in the album's 1967. A 2015 poll was conducted by The Carbon Brief, in which members of the last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change chose an article by Manabe and Wetherald (1967), written in the Journal of Atmospheric Sciences from the same year as Reynolds's album, as the most influential paper on climate change research and the first to demonstrate the effects of carbon dioxide on global temperatures through a computer model (Pidock 2015).
1967年的夏天被称为“爱的夏天”，美国年轻人为了音乐、性和毒品聚集在一起，但更重要的是，他们聚集在一起，逃离和反对社会动荡的可怕环境，包括越南战争和20世纪60年代充斥的民权冲突。[…20世纪60年代知识分子和更广泛的社会思想前沿的一些话题，正是我们今天努力解决的一些话题。苏珊·雅各比的《美国非理性时代》(2008年)、拉塞尔·雅各比的《最后的知识分子》(2000年)、汤姆·尼科尔斯在特朗普时代之前的文章《专业知识的死亡》(2014年)和大卫·马西奥特拉的《反智主义又回来了》(2020年)中再次出现了对专家和批判性思想家的反智鄙视，其中提到了对安东尼·福西博士的攻击以及美国新冠病毒疫苗的开发。但在1967年的专辑中有着重要的历史。《碳简报》(The Carbon Brief)在2015年进行了一项民意调查，上届政府间气候变化专门委员会的成员选择了Manabe和Wetherald(1967年)在《大气科学杂志》(Journal of Atmospheric Sciences)上发表的一篇文章，该文章与雷诺兹的专辑同一年发表，是气候变化研究领域最具影响力的论文，也是第一篇通过计算机模型证明二氧化碳对全球气温影响的论文(Pidock 2015)。
{"title":"Malvina Reynolds Sings the Truth:Psychoanalytic Truth, the Post-Truth Era, and History as a Series of Psychoanalytic Sessions","authors":"Nathan Fleshner","doi":"10.35684/jlci.2022.8203","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35684/jlci.2022.8203","url":null,"abstract":"Dubbed the \"Summer of Love,\" the summer of 1967 found U.S. youth coming together for music, sex, and drugs, but more importantly, coming together for an escape from and opposition to dire circumstances of social unrest, including the Vietnam War and the civil rights conflicts that abounded in the 1960s. [...]the topics at the forefront of intellectual and broader societal thought in the 1960s are some of the very same topics we wrestle with today. Antiintellectual disdain for experts and critical thinkers has reappeared as documented in Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason (2008), Russell Jacoby's The Last Intellectuals (2000), Tom Nichols's pre-Trump-era essay, \"The Death of Expertise\" (2014), and David Masciotra's \"Anti-Intellectualism is Back\" (2020), which reprised Hofstadter's work in reference to attacks on Dr. Anthony Fauci and the development of COVID-19 vaccines in the U.S. Climate change is a current critical topic, but has an important history in the album's 1967. A 2015 poll was conducted by The Carbon Brief, in which members of the last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change chose an article by Manabe and Wetherald (1967), written in the Journal of Atmospheric Sciences from the same year as Reynolds's album, as the most influential paper on climate change research and the first to demonstrate the effects of carbon dioxide on global temperatures through a computer model (Pidock 2015).","PeriodicalId":183557,"journal":{"name":"Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125752406","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The recent criticisms against Swachh Bharat Abhiyan and its attempts to glamorize the broom has brought to attention again the recurring yet unsolved problem of the exploitation of Dalits, specifically those engaged with manual scavenging. Practicing ‘untouchability’ and casteist discrimination today may not be so direct or based on blind reliance upon ‘ancient’ religious texts. This paper, too, is not directly about Ambedkar, Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, colonial modernity and the signification of ‘ancient’ religious texts, or democratic egalitarianism and the fissures of citizenship rights, but about all of these, and more. In other words, this paper is about embodiment, entanglements, corporeal figurations and latent tendencies that enable caste to take new directions: in this case, the recent discourse of justifying untouchability via hygiene. At its most elementary level, the paper is about the idea of touch and the paradoxes of touching, however, from a reduced (or may be said, limited) perspective, i.e., normalization of hygienic bodies. Emphasizing on the idea-matter embrace that shape the sedimentation of caste, the paper, therefore, travels with various approaches, otherwise marked as sociological, historical, and philosophical, so as to establish from diverse registers the vagueness of any such attempt at justifying untouchability. The specific focus remains the same throughout, reading the contingencies and paradoxes that shape the constitutive vocabulary of caste: purity, touch and body.
{"title":"Why all the Fuss about Purity?1: Un/Touch-abilityand the Paradox of Hygienic Bodies","authors":"S. Saha","doi":"10.35684/jlci.2019.6104","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35684/jlci.2019.6104","url":null,"abstract":"The recent criticisms against Swachh Bharat Abhiyan and its attempts to glamorize the broom has brought to attention again the recurring yet unsolved problem of the exploitation of Dalits, specifically those engaged with manual scavenging. Practicing ‘untouchability’ and casteist discrimination today may not be so direct or based on blind reliance upon ‘ancient’ religious texts. This paper, too, is not directly about Ambedkar, Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, colonial modernity and the signification of ‘ancient’ religious texts, or democratic egalitarianism and the fissures of citizenship rights, but about all of these, and more. In other words, this paper is about embodiment, entanglements, corporeal figurations and latent tendencies that enable caste to take new directions: in this case, the recent discourse of justifying untouchability via hygiene. At its most elementary level, the paper is about the idea of touch and the paradoxes of touching, however, from a reduced (or may be said, limited) perspective, i.e., normalization of hygienic bodies. Emphasizing on the idea-matter embrace that shape the sedimentation of caste, the paper, therefore, travels with various approaches, otherwise marked as sociological, historical, and philosophical, so as to establish from diverse registers the vagueness of any such attempt at justifying untouchability. The specific focus remains the same throughout, reading the contingencies and paradoxes that shape the constitutive vocabulary of caste: purity, touch and body.","PeriodicalId":183557,"journal":{"name":"Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry","volume":"71 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122290943","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
There have been many changes in the last decade in the politics of West Bengal. One of the crucial changes has been the decline of the left parties and the rise of the Trinamool Congress (TMC) in power in 2011 state assembly elections. There has been another change with regard to caste, which attracted many scholars’ attention. Compared to other states, West Bengal politics was described as ‘unique’ both by academicians and political leaders; and this uniqueness lies in the absence of a visible electoral mobilization along caste lines. However, in present times, electoral mobilization in Bengal is quite frequently seeing caste as a ‘visible’ idiom in politics. Scholars like Praskanva Sinharay reads this assertion as a ‘new’ idiom of politics shaped with the TMC leader and the present Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s active participation in the ‘Matua Mahasangha’ (the foremost Matua religious organization) (Sinharay 26). Moreover, this castebased political activism seems to be multiplied with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) becoming the main opposition to the TMC. It is the BJP, in the present period, which successfully bifurcated the Matua vote by its decisive stand on the refugee question and its appropriative politics on the issue of caste (Bagchi), (X).1 Whereas, scholars like Partha Chatterjee, Uday Chandra and Kenneth Bo Nielsen etc., argued that there has been a continuous relevance of caste as an idiom of political and social organization at the ‘local’ level in Bengal. It is worth noting that most of the scholars consider the reason behind the dearth of successful caste-based mobilizations to be rooted in the history of partition of Bengal. The ‘unique’ nature of politics in West Bengal lies in the fact that politics (as ‘party structure’) is dominant vis-à-vis the question of the social (structure) (Chatterjee, Historicising Caste in Bengal politics). As Ranabir Samaddar argues, the focus of the governmental practices on developmental and anti-poverty programs, cemented the party structures at the local level which were nonetheless dominated by upper caste leaders (Samaddar 79). Thus, continuous functioning of caste discrimination could never get translated into political mobilization at the formal domain of politics in Bengal. Therefore, these second set of scholars are skeptical about the ‘new’ nature of electoral politics as claimed by scholars like Sinharay. Even if TMC as the ruling party did polarize the Matua support in West Bengal in the 2011 state assembly election, as Partha Chatterjee argued, it had not “... as yet— meant a reassertion of the autonomy of local social institutions. Rather, the Trinamool Congress, in the districts of Southern Bengal where it is now dominant, appears to be keen to adopt the Left Front model of the dominance of the political over the social and exclude the Communist Party of India— CPI(M) from local power” (Chatterjee, Historicising Caste in Bengal politics 69).
{"title":"Namasudra Literature and the Politics of Castein West Bengal","authors":"Rajat Roy","doi":"10.35684/jlci.2019.6107","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35684/jlci.2019.6107","url":null,"abstract":"There have been many changes in the last decade in the politics of West Bengal. One of the crucial changes has been the decline of the left parties and the rise of the Trinamool Congress (TMC) in power in 2011 state assembly elections. There has been another change with regard to caste, which attracted many scholars’ attention. Compared to other states, West Bengal politics was described as ‘unique’ both by academicians and political leaders; and this uniqueness lies in the absence of a visible electoral mobilization along caste lines. However, in present times, electoral mobilization in Bengal is quite frequently seeing caste as a ‘visible’ idiom in politics. Scholars like Praskanva Sinharay reads this assertion as a ‘new’ idiom of politics shaped with the TMC leader and the present Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s active participation in the ‘Matua Mahasangha’ (the foremost Matua religious organization) (Sinharay 26). Moreover, this castebased political activism seems to be multiplied with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) becoming the main opposition to the TMC. It is the BJP, in the present period, which successfully bifurcated the Matua vote by its decisive stand on the refugee question and its appropriative politics on the issue of caste (Bagchi), (X).1 Whereas, scholars like Partha Chatterjee, Uday Chandra and Kenneth Bo Nielsen etc., argued that there has been a continuous relevance of caste as an idiom of political and social organization at the ‘local’ level in Bengal. It is worth noting that most of the scholars consider the reason behind the dearth of successful caste-based mobilizations to be rooted in the history of partition of Bengal. The ‘unique’ nature of politics in West Bengal lies in the fact that politics (as ‘party structure’) is dominant vis-à-vis the question of the social (structure) (Chatterjee, Historicising Caste in Bengal politics). As Ranabir Samaddar argues, the focus of the governmental practices on developmental and anti-poverty programs, cemented the party structures at the local level which were nonetheless dominated by upper caste leaders (Samaddar 79). Thus, continuous functioning of caste discrimination could never get translated into political mobilization at the formal domain of politics in Bengal. Therefore, these second set of scholars are skeptical about the ‘new’ nature of electoral politics as claimed by scholars like Sinharay. Even if TMC as the ruling party did polarize the Matua support in West Bengal in the 2011 state assembly election, as Partha Chatterjee argued, it had not “... as yet— meant a reassertion of the autonomy of local social institutions. Rather, the Trinamool Congress, in the districts of Southern Bengal where it is now dominant, appears to be keen to adopt the Left Front model of the dominance of the political over the social and exclude the Communist Party of India— CPI(M) from local power” (Chatterjee, Historicising Caste in Bengal politics 69).","PeriodicalId":183557,"journal":{"name":"Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130447110","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The meaning of camp is pivotal to understand the life of the refugee along with geopolitical ordering and the strategy of governance in present time. In the recent years, specifically in the subcontinent, the concept of camp has emerged as a tool or destination for this particular category of people. Basic concept of the camp is largely articulated through the question of refugee which is deeply connected to the Partition of India in 1947. In the same proposition the question of caste has been framed in the context of Bengal. Yet, the same question could be thought of in different manners in the same context. The question of caste could be addressed through anthropological, sociological or historical ways of understanding vis-à-vis the structure of the Hindu society. (Bose; Sanyal) This paper aims to think the question of caste spatially where Partition is seen as the ruins of past experiences. Therefore, camps considered here are not only thought of as concentration of the refugees, but it also indicates the phenomenon of caste in Bengal and explores the meaning of camp considering this reality. Later we will explicate how the existence of camp produces a distinct type of discourse which may help us to understand the question of caste in another dimension. Here the concept of camp is sociologically defined as a qualitative direction in which the concept, desire and kind of being is determined (Gasset 14). However, the paper does not consider camp as quantum of masses of the refugees (Agamben “We Refugee” 114); rather it has a specific qualitative character in which it excluded them. The reality of the camp articulated here comes from the exigency of the refugee influx after the Partition of India in 1947 and we are quite far from its systematic history. Refugee camp methodologically is conceived through the ‘language in the words’ which can be interpreted by its expression and unlike physical existence, the camp is looked at spatially. If we try to understand the phenomenon of the refugee, spatial intervention directs us to investigate the ‘as such’ regarding its existence; otherwise it can help us only to interpret the camp ontologically. The discourse of social stratification or the question of caste has largely directed the concept of equality, rights and the concepts of pure and impure. Such type of conceptualization is articulated through the experiences of discrimination of caste where historical events have been prioritized. In Bengal, Partition represents a major event in which caste consciousness plays a distinct and separate role compared to other parts of India. Spatial interrogation will direct us to the experience of caste in terms of the temporal existence of refugees and we will look forward to address the question phenomenally.
{"title":"Obscurity of Camp Life:Is the Language of Camp ‘Passivityto Write’?","authors":"Joydip Datta","doi":"10.35684/jlci.2019.6105","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35684/jlci.2019.6105","url":null,"abstract":"The meaning of camp is pivotal to understand the life of the refugee along with geopolitical ordering and the strategy of governance in present time. In the recent years, specifically in the subcontinent, the concept of camp has emerged as a tool or destination for this particular category of people. Basic concept of the camp is largely articulated through the question of refugee which is deeply connected to the Partition of India in 1947. In the same proposition the question of caste has been framed in the context of Bengal. Yet, the same question could be thought of in different manners in the same context. The question of caste could be addressed through anthropological, sociological or historical ways of understanding vis-à-vis the structure of the Hindu society. (Bose; Sanyal) This paper aims to think the question of caste spatially where Partition is seen as the ruins of past experiences. Therefore, camps considered here are not only thought of as concentration of the refugees, but it also indicates the phenomenon of caste in Bengal and explores the meaning of camp considering this reality. Later we will explicate how the existence of camp produces a distinct type of discourse which may help us to understand the question of caste in another dimension. Here the concept of camp is sociologically defined as a qualitative direction in which the concept, desire and kind of being is determined (Gasset 14). However, the paper does not consider camp as quantum of masses of the refugees (Agamben “We Refugee” 114); rather it has a specific qualitative character in which it excluded them. The reality of the camp articulated here comes from the exigency of the refugee influx after the Partition of India in 1947 and we are quite far from its systematic history. Refugee camp methodologically is conceived through the ‘language in the words’ which can be interpreted by its expression and unlike physical existence, the camp is looked at spatially. If we try to understand the phenomenon of the refugee, spatial intervention directs us to investigate the ‘as such’ regarding its existence; otherwise it can help us only to interpret the camp ontologically. The discourse of social stratification or the question of caste has largely directed the concept of equality, rights and the concepts of pure and impure. Such type of conceptualization is articulated through the experiences of discrimination of caste where historical events have been prioritized. In Bengal, Partition represents a major event in which caste consciousness plays a distinct and separate role compared to other parts of India. Spatial interrogation will direct us to the experience of caste in terms of the temporal existence of refugees and we will look forward to address the question phenomenally.","PeriodicalId":183557,"journal":{"name":"Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry","volume":"83 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123096244","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In its powerful diagnosis of Dalit disempowerment, the ‘Dalit Panthers Manifesto’ emphasises the continuity of Dalits’ exploitation and domination by the hierarchical “varna system [and] caste system” from premodernity to the time of its drafting in 1973. According to it, “Untouchability is the most violent form of exploitation on the surface of the earth, which survives the ever-changing forms of the power structure” (Dalit Panthers 142). The violence of Dalit oppression has endured political changes from the feudal period through the Moghul and British empires to the anticolonial struggle and the period of India’s independence as a sovereign state: “The present Congress rule is essentially a continuation of the old Hindu feudalism which kept the Dalits deprived of power, wealth and status for thousands of years” (141). The Manifesto is evidence that at least some Dalits understood that the violence they faced—varṇa—was the product of a durable political system, one ancient yet still present; that, because it was not an accident of one or another period of rule or a contingent feature of one or another type of regime, this system demanded a revolutionary response, for only a revolutionary transformation of Indian society could change this violence essential to its politics.
{"title":"Natural Order and Wise Synthesis: Sovereignty-Violence-Varṇain the Arthaśāstraand Aurobindo","authors":"Jimmy Casas Klausen","doi":"10.35684/jlci.2019.6102","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35684/jlci.2019.6102","url":null,"abstract":"In its powerful diagnosis of Dalit disempowerment, the ‘Dalit Panthers Manifesto’ emphasises the continuity of Dalits’ exploitation and domination by the hierarchical “varna system [and] caste system” from premodernity to the time of its drafting in 1973. According to it, “Untouchability is the most violent form of exploitation on the surface of the earth, which survives the ever-changing forms of the power structure” (Dalit Panthers 142). The violence of Dalit oppression has endured political changes from the feudal period through the Moghul and British empires to the anticolonial struggle and the period of India’s independence as a sovereign state: “The present Congress rule is essentially a continuation of the old Hindu feudalism which kept the Dalits deprived of power, wealth and status for thousands of years” (141). The Manifesto is evidence that at least some Dalits understood that the violence they faced—varṇa—was the product of a durable political system, one ancient yet still present; that, because it was not an accident of one or another period of rule or a contingent feature of one or another type of regime, this system demanded a revolutionary response, for only a revolutionary transformation of Indian society could change this violence essential to its politics.","PeriodicalId":183557,"journal":{"name":"Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115363161","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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