Paper short abstract:

This paper will focus on two South Asian writers, Attia Hosain and Imtiaz Dharker. Hosain wrote her novel about India after her expatriation to England in 1947, and Dharker, a Pakistani Muslim brought up in Scotland, wrote most of her poems, after moving to Bombay in later life.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will focus on two South Asian writers, Attia Hosain (1913-1998) and Imtiaz Dharker (born 1954), the former an Indian novelist and the latter a Pakistani poet. Hosain's Sunlight On A Broken Column is set in pre-Independence India and captures an era characterized by the dissolution of traditional feudal, as also patriarchal, affiliations and marked by the uncertainty of the transition from colony to sovereign nation. Her novel is a fictional rendering of her childhood and early adult life in an old landowning conservative Muslim family that emblematizes the encounter with Anglicization and the conflicts of political change. Imtiaz Dharker was born in Glasgow to Pakistani parents and currently works in Bombay. Her books of poetry, Purdah, Postcards From God, I Speak For the Devil and The Terrorist At My Table, capture the poetic consciousness of an immigrant/ emigrant, and trace the experiences of feeling both rooted and alienated 'here' and 'elsewhere', two constantly evolving and unstable entities. She cognizes her transcontinental world in multifarious ways, some of which engage with issues of female repression in orthodox Muslim families, racism, cultural alienation and several others. What is interesting for the purposes of comparison in this paper is that Hosain wrote her novel depicting a childhood in India at a time of great political discord after her expatriation to England in 1947, the year of Independence, and Dharker wrote most of her poems, about growing up Muslim in Scotland, amongst other things, after moving to Bombay in later life.

Paper short abstract:

I propose to look at the ways in which Jugni asserts, reinvents, or alternately struggles, given its ‘glocal’, post-colonial residence in exile. Jugni may loosely be called a kind of Punjabi qissa (folk-tale tradition), with its history and origins numerous and speculative. Each of these speculations, however, emanate from varying degrees of authority and ownership. These multiple ‘definitions’ may even be daringly read as the many Punjabs singing it from its various ruptures.

Paper long abstract:

I propose to look at the ways in which Jugni asserts, reinvents, or alternately struggles, given its 'glocal', post-colonial residence in exile.

Jugni may loosely be called a kind of Punjabi qissa (folk-tale tradition), with its history and origins numerous and speculative. Each of these speculations, however, emanate from varying degrees of authority and ownership. These multiple 'definitions' may even be daringly read as the many Punjabs singing it from its various ruptures.

Jugni is an enigma of Punjabi culture, and yet, familiar to all. It is a trope, a tale, and the teller. In that, it is both text and meta-text. It is evoked, as well as it speaks. Therein, it is both song and singer. It represents in its being. And thus, it becomes a 'performative outpouring'; where in the embodiment of Jugni's vibrant persona is exhibited art's impulse to address and heal the fissures of Punjab's identity and history.

The formulaic frame of the qissa, with a set refrain, amenable to topical content(s), lends it a vigor where the compulsion to make a comment on the topicality it speaks of is fore-grounded. The satire is contained within the community, as well as bursts at its seams, Jugni being the quintessential traveler. Since her comments come from her travels, they can move across landscapes of time and space, making it encyclopedic as well as parochial, invocative and subversive.

Jugni treads between past and present, incident and its narrative, which I seek to review through it's many renditions, in folklore as well in current mass-media.

Paper short abstract:

This paper will explore the ethical dimensions of Babel (2006), the third and final film of the Death trilogy, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will explore the ethical dimensions of Babel (2006), the third and final film of the Death trilogy, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu. The interlinked nature of violence, represented through fragmented yet connected narratives, has been one of the major motifs in the trilogy, collapsing various social realities, each with its class aspirations, assumptions about gender, and racial prejudices, thus leading towards a critique of larger structural disparities. In Babel, the effects of a single accidental act of violence disperses through a globalized network, constituted by structures of power, which manifest themselves at the level of media representation, legal mechanisms, and racial/cultural assumptions. There is a to-and-fro movement between a nexus of power-structures and interpersonal relationships, and the ethical antidote offered is a kind of humanism, thus simultaneously collapsing assumptions about the Other and revealing the problems with legal/media/psychosocial constructions within a globally hierarchical order.