Dialogue: A Journal Devoted to Literary Appreciation

The Bhagavadgîtâ and the Poetry of Robert Browning

Nisha Indra Guru, Bhavatosh Indra Guru — Thu, 31 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0100

Srimad Bhagavadagita expounds discourses with regard to knowledge and lays down the injunction that only complete submission/transformation/ evolution of body into soul would bring into reality the liberation. Accordingly, the greatest impersonal standards set upon jñâna (knowledge), karma (action) and bhakti(devotion) would enable one to move from the multiplicity of experience to singularity of the Supreme Consciousness. Robert Browning a Victorian English poet practices in toto the epistemology set forth in Bhagavadagita in that time and again he would lay emphasis on 'liberation' by having come to terms with “Still one must lead some life beyond”, “Ride, ride together, for ever ride”, “A brute I might have been, but would not sink i' the scale”, and “My times be in Thy hands! / Perfect the cup as planned.

Caliban's Curse: M. NourbeSe Philip's “Discourse” as Challenge to White Hegemony

Aloka Patel — Thu, 31 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0100

African Caribbean writer, M. NourbeSe Philip in her poem “Discourse on the Logic of Language” counters colonial exploitation in the Caribbean by exploding various laws laid down by the European masters. This paper deals with the ways in which Philip looks at discourse as “both an instrument and an effect of power,” to use Foucault's words, and then dismantles the established formal structure of a poem as an oppositional strategy to challenge various ideological positions of white colonial masters.

Shashi Deshpande's 'The Duel': A Critical Perspective

Sumana Mehendale, Balkrishna Anjana — Thu, 31 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0100

Shashi Deshpande, born in Dharwad, a small town in the state of Karnataka in Southern India, is a renowned fiction writer. In her novels and short stories she makes gender central to her writing capturing the lives of ordinary women struggling in life. Her women characters try to explore the question of identity and existence as human being. They denounce the patriarchal set up and try to find meaning in human relationship. In the short story 'The Duel' the characters are anonymous. What the woman in the story requires is not the passionate intensity but something more than physical love, a love that can supply the emotional and psychic satisfaction to her. She wanted to find the answer to “Is life lived only on physical plane?” She suffers the boredom and reaches out in search of a union that is capable of transportation from physical limitations and bringing about celestial experience in human form. During the course of the story all shams and masochism are exposed and a new realization comes to the narrator in which he finds his mother in pure and undefiled image restored. The face he saw was innocent, a human being not a woman, “pure and undefiled” like his mother. His experience with that strange woman connects him to childhood and innocence. This paper attempts to present a critical perspective of the short story 'The Duel' on the basis of a close examination of the three building blocks of story as a literary for : action, character and setting.

Susheel Sharma's Unwinding Self: A Timeless Testimony to a Poet's Perspective

Shubha Dwivedi — Thu, 31 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0100

Indian English poetry in the twenty-first century has evolved and gained a distinct identity and even eminence. It is deeply nuanced just as the heterogenous society it represents and echoes. It has expanded its horizons as it has become more inclusive and diverse. It is constantly in dialogue with the land's socio-political cultural history and relates well to the quaint innocuous voices of the 'self'.With the growth of Indian English poetry's stature, Indian poets have gradually carved out a niche for themselves. The present study reviews Susheel Kumar Sharma's poetic journey over the last three decades, during which he has documented his "lived" and "felt" experiences with a degree of candour and efficacy. The poet has three anthologies to his credit and he courageously applies dialectics tomatters of faith. He submits to his conscience, explores the externalities, and internalizes the true spirit of his being. Susheel Kumar Sharma, a poet with a rationalist's mind and a sceptical sensibility continually engages with his world, culture, and most importantly, with himself. His poetic articulations freely draw on the culture, folklore, mythology, and contemporary reality of the land. His anthology is a distillation of the aesthetic, moral, and theological choices he made at pivotal points in his life. It's invigorating to read the poems of this anthology, which are infused with reflections on self-awareness and self-knowledge.

A Study of Feminine Perspective in the Novel Butterfly Burning

Jaya Chetnani, Rooble Verma — Thu, 31 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0100

The paper makes an attempt to study the feminine perspective in the novel Butterfly Burning .The novel was published in the year 1998. It was written by Zimbabwean writer Yvonne Vera (1964-2005). Set in the late 1940s, it is about the voice of the people under colonialism in Zimbabwe. Yvonne Vera has been one of the esteemed voices in the African literature that brought her characters to speak for themselves and for the righteousness. She has earned laurels for her characters not only in her novels but also in her short stories. Her creative works have earned her recognition and awards. Being a woman, the foundation of Vera's writing is women. Her novels are known for difficult subject matter and strong women characters. She has written about abortion, rape, infanticide and violence. Her works are read from the feminist perspective and are part of African studies known across the literary circles of the globe. The paper explores how Yvonne Vera focuses on the feminine issues in the novel and how she connects her readers with her characters in order to provide a new vision to the society.

Alice Munro's “Free Radicals”: A Tale of Grief, Guilt, and Survival

Meenakshi Shrivastava, Rooble Verma — Thu, 31 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0100

Life is like many coloured glass dome with innumerable shades of emotions. Several emotions remain unnoticed as they reside in dark recesses of the human psyche, even the expressed emotions have a lot that remains enclosed in the heart. Love, happiness, sadness are few that are openly expressed and recognised by the people, but emotions like Pain, grief, guilt are difficult to understand. They are disguised emotions wearing the mask of normality and indifference. A person going through some emotional pain or grief cannot be easily identified among people. These emotions stay for a longer time and affect the behaviour of the person. Alice Munro's stories' chief emotion is grief. She through her women characters exhibits various shades and degrees of grief. The characters in her stories encounter life's issues of pain and loss with stoic resignation. There is love for life at the center even when they are going through a tough phase of loss of some dear one. Alice Munro's story 'Free Radicals' is one such story with grief, guilt as prominent emotions in it; a story of an old woman recovering from illness and loss of her husband, and experiencing acute emotional pain and grief. On the surface level, she is back to her normal life and set in her new routine but deep inside her there is unbearable pain and agony which remain unexpressed. In spite of her lack of desire towards life she when unknowingly encounters a murderer desperately fights to live. The present paper is an attempt to study the way emotions of pain, grief, guilt and survival are expressed through narratives in the story 'Free Radicals'. Alice Munro 'the master of the contemporary short story ' is known for her unconventional narratives and her ability to show varied colours of women's emotions through it.

Analyzing Sibling Rivalry : Its Prevalence in English Literature

Ritu Saxena — Thu, 31 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0100

MC Graw – Hill concise Dictionary of Modern Medicine defines sibling rivalry as “the intense, emotional competition among siblings that pits one against the other to obtain parental affection approval, attention, and love”. Sibling rivalry is a type of competition or animosity among siblings, whether blood related or not. Sibling Rivalry is a fact of life has been since time immemorial. The sibling bond is often complicated and is influenced by factors such as parental treatment, birth order, personality etc. From a young age, children are sensitive to differences in parental treatment. Sibling rivalry occurs throughout the life span. Sibling relationships can change dramatically over the years. Siblings suffer in the form of discrimination, oppression, exploitation, degradation, aggression and humiliation. This sibling rivalry can be very frustrating and stressful to parents. It could be seen in every family. This paper thus attempts to discuss the causes and prevalence of Sibling Rivalry in literature.

Overcoming Profanity, Penance, And Piety: Stephen's Journey To Freedom In Joyce's Novel A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man And The Cinematic Adaptation Of The Same By Joseph Strick

Pradip Mondal — Thu, 31 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0100

Debate about faith and religion is one of the focal points of Joyce's famous novel A Portraitof the Artist as a Young Man (1918). Joyce's rejection of Irish Catholicism reflects the more universal tendency of the age: to replace any form of institutionalized religion with a more personal concept. Stephen is found to have a very big identity crisis, from being a God-fearing Catholic to a very hormonal teenager. When Stephen hears the 'hellfire sermon' preached breathlessly by the Jesuit Father Arnall, he feels remorseful of his own precocious sexual adventures. Hearing this sermon, Stephen decides to lead a life of “resolute piety”, trying to adhere rigidly to the rituals of the Catholic faith. Stephen comes up against the social, political, and religious institutions that want him to conform. But he discards them all for the artistic life, without being cowed by anyone.Strick's film adaptation nicely captures Stephen's vis-à-vis Joyce's ambivalent vision of Ireland. This paper is going to show from the Jungian perspective how Stephen overcomes the staunch Catholic doctrine of profanity, penance, and piety and finally undertakes an artistic journey to freedom.

K.S. Ram and Uma Ram, Bhulan Kaanda: The Amnesia Tuber (Trs). Chennai: Xpress Publishing, 2020, pp.135, Rs.200/- ISBN 978-1-64983-069-2

Ragini Ramachandra — Thu, 31 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0100

First published in 2012 by Sanjeev Buxy, "an acclaimed poet and fiction writer in Hindi", this unique novel, we gather was recently made into a feature film, which bagged ten national and international awards. But that the novel too should have earned the prestigious Premchand Samman in the year of its publication itself, i.e., 2012, should speak volumes for its merit.

An Introduction to the Study of Indian Poetics by M.S. Kushwaha and Sanjay Misra, DK Printworld, New Delhi, 2021, pp.168, Rs.325. ISBN 978-81-246-0959-0 (PB)

Ragini Ramachandra — Thu, 31 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0100

At the very outset the authors deserve to be heartily congratulated upon choosing to write on a topic like this in preference to a plethora of more fashionable and glamorous ones, imported from the west like post-modernism, post-colonialism, structuralism, poststructuralism, post-this and post-that with all their attendant jargon mouthed ad infinitum to the dismay of a true votary of literature who feels lost in a maze of these new-fangled theories formulated for their own sake. That two teachers of English should have come together despite a generational gap to invoke the glorious literary past of India, revive the present-day Indian intellectual's interest in his own Sanskrit heritage and re-connect him with his forgotten roots is a laudable endeavour indeed.

Girish Karnad, Rakshasa-Tangadi. Dharwada: Manohara Grantha Mala, 2018 Reviewed by C. N. Ramachandran, Formerly Prof. at Mangalore University, Mangalore

C. N. Ramachandran — Thu, 31 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0100

Robert Sewell, a civil servant in India, wrote A Forgotten Empire, in 1900, a historical narrative on the Vijayanagara empire. Owing to its framework of colonial discourse ('Vijayanagara: Hindu bulwark against Islamic onslaught' ) and his emotive language (“Never perhaps in the history of the world has such havoc been wrought, and wrought so suddenly, on so splendid a city”) the book became very influential. Literally, scores of stories, novels and plays in Kannada and Telugu were written faithfully following Sewell's model. However, after Sewell, since new sources and bakhairs came to light/ got translated into English, historians and scholars in the post-colonial period began to have a re-look at the Medieval period. Girish Karnad's latest play, Rakshasa-Tangadi, belongs to this tradition of postcolonial discourse. The brilliant play not only offers a new perspective on the battle of Rakkasa Tangadi but also does away with popular myths and legends about the decisive battle.

Interpreting Cinema Adaptations, Interrtextualities, Art Movements ; Jasbir jain; Rawat Publications; 2020; pp. xii+286; Rs 1295.

Purabi Panwar — Thu, 31 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0100

Interpreting Cinema Adaptations, Intertextualities, Art Movements is a collection of sixteen essays by Jasbir Jain that takes up the long journey of Hindi cinema from multiple perspectives. She takes up a theme like 'Constructing the Nation through the Semiotics of Difference', and discusses a few films which can be categorized under this. Some of these articles have been published earlier in a book she edited with SudhaRai. The growing importance of film studies can be gauged from her own words which hint at the purpose of such a study.To quote, 'Film making and film criticism are both highly advanced disciplines as they work with technologies, socio-political realities, histories of heartand histories of the world, and now film studies is a full-fledged discipline with several theoretical approaches…and has a strong foothold in serious academics.'

Archana Srinath. The Ecstatic Journey: Chitra Divakaruni's Woman, Child and Immigrant. Chennai: Emerald Publishers, 2020. Pp. 173 Price: Rs. 250/- ISBN: 978-93- 89080-47-6

Sudhir K. Arora — Thu, 31 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0100

The Ecstatic Journey: Chitra Divakaruni's Woman, Child and Immigrant, which consists of five chapters, namely, “A Survey of Indian Immigrant Fiction”, “The Diaspora Consciousness in Chitra Divakaruni's Short Stories”, “The Project of Acculturation in Divakaruni's Children's Fiction”, “The Struggle of Being Woman in Divakaruni's Novels” and “Conclusion”, is Archana Srinath's doctorate thesis in the form of a book. Archana Srinath rejects the Trishanku-like life for immigrants and offers her submission that immigrants can maintain the balance between two cultures and women are neither superior nor inferior but equal to men. She proves her stance by analysing and quoting from the works of the Indian immigrant author Chitra Divakaruni who is the Calcutta-born author, settled in the United States. Though Chitra Divakaruni started her career as a poet, she switched over to fiction because of her art of narration and the story element. The book for review highlights, as is clear from the title of the chapters, some important thematic dimensions like diasporic life, family, society, roots, child life and predicament of women's life in Divakaruni's works.

Killing Gandhi Living Gandhi, Edited by H. S. Chandalia and Mehzbeen Sadriwala, Yking Books: Jaipur India (2020) Rs. 1495.

Siddhartha Singh — Thu, 31 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0100

Gandhi is relevant in every time and space and this book, an outcome of a national seminar and a festschrift in honour of Pro. Mukta Sharma, try to live Gandhian vision of truth, action and non-violence through varieties of research papers, ranging from articles on Kasturba Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Film studies, Gandhian impact on literature and his education system, untouchability, religious, social, economic and human values in his thoughts etc.

Manas Bakshi, Man of the Seventh Hour. Gurgaon (Haryana, INDIA): The Poetry Society of India. 2019. Pp. 160. Rs. 390.

Basavaraj Naikar — Thu, 31 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0100

This long poem in seven chapters or hours is philosophical and reflective in nature. The first chapter entitled 'Victory' shows how man or mankind came into existence for the first time in the universe in the form of Adam and Eve and how he keeps on wondering at the cosmic rhythm of day and night, the diverse beauty of Nature, the mystery of cosmos and how he desires to control the life around him with his intelligence and ability.

Pluralism is embedded in the very origin of Human civilization : Prof. Harish Narang

H. S. Chandalia — Thu, 31 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0100

Prof. Harish Narang, formerly Chairman of School of Languages, Jawahar Lal Nehru University in his address stated that pluralism is embedded in the very genetic structure of the human species. He said that the idea of imposing one thought, one religion and one way of life is not natural. It is against the very history of the growth of human civilization. He said that this is an established fact that whether Black, White or Coloured – all reces of human beings have their origin in Africa. It was later that they migrated to different parts of the world and evolved differences due to geographic reasons. He said that insistence on following one ideology and promoting one political party is anti – democracy. The beauty of democracy lies in respecting differences and celebrating diversity. He was speaking as the chief guest at XVII Annual Conference of Rajasthan Association for Studies in English held on 28-29 Nov. 2020. The theme of the conference was Plurality is Unity: Exploring Humanity and Celebrating Individual Identities through Literature in Translation.

The Dialectics of Faith and Non-Faith: Kierkegaard to Sartre

Jasbir Jain — Thu, 31 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0100

The present paper sets itself the task of exploring the role of the declining faith in religion and the gradual erosion of unquestioning faith in the formation of modernism- an aspect to which hardly any attention has been paid at all. Discussing two texts- Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling (1843)which preceded both Darwin and Marx and Sartre's play Men Without Shadows( 1944), it proceeds to analyze Fear and Trembling in some detail as we are allowed to have alook into Abraham's doubts and his wavering attitude towards his son, who he has been commanded to sacrifice alongside the whole moral question of obedience and transparency. Will God save his son or does He mean him to go along with the command? In Sartre's atheist and Communist world, the dilemma is repeated with an altogether different ending, The boy's ability to endure torture is doubted by his sister who resorts to the safer course of killing him. These are issues of faith, morality and trust, Both the texts are contextualized in different social and political conditions yet both struggle with the idea of faith and nonfaith over a span of nearly a century in entirely different worlds. In the background is Albert camus's concept of the absurd, which perhaps is a cause for obedience to a seemingly immoral command.