issue vi | mar

Transcription

issue vi | mar

COLDNOON: TRAVEL POETICS
(INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TRAVEL WRITING)
| POETRY – RESEARCH PAPERS – NONFICTION |
ISSUE V | MAR ‘13 | 2.2
ED. ARUP K CHATTERJEE
COLDNOON: TRAVEL POETICS
(INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TRAVEL WRITING)
| POETRY – RESEARCH PAPERS – NONFICTION |
Coldnoon envisions travel not as flux but instead as gaps in
travelling itself. Coldnoon means a shadowed instant in time
when the inertia of motion of images, thoughts and spectacles,
comes to rest upon a still and cold moment. Our travels are not
of trade and imagining communities; they are towards the
reporting of purposeless and unselfconscious narratives the
human mind experiences when left in a vacuum between
terminals of travel.
First published in New Delhi India in 2013
Online ISSN 2278-9650 | Print ISSN 2278-9650
Cover Photograph, Arup K Chatterjee
Cover Design, Arup K Chatterjee
Typeset in Arno Pro & Trajan Pro
Editor, Arup K Chatterjee
Assistant Editor, Amrita Ajay
Contributing Editors: Sebastien Doubinsky, Lisa Thatcher, G.J.V. Prasad, Sudeep Sen,
K. Satchidanandan
Copyright © Coldnoon 2013. Individual Works © Authors 2013.
No part of the publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or copied
for commercial use, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent
acquirer. All rights belong to the individual authors, and photographer.
Licensed Under:
Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Mar ‘13, 2.2) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported
License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com.
http://www.coldnoon.com/copyright/Coldnoon_TravelPoetics_Mar’13/2.2.html
Jawaharlal Nehru University
New Delhi 110067 India
www.coldnoon.com
Contents
Editorial
1
Poetry
December 2012 – Shoshannah Ganz
Four Poems – Kelly Ann Jacobson
Four Poems – Jean L. Kreiling
Three Poems – Fahredin Shehu
Five Poems – Mohan Rana
Three Poems – Ronojoy Sircar
Three Poems – Manash Bhattacharjee
Four Poems – Jenny Morse
7
8
13
18
24
28
34
42
50
Nonfiction
“This is my home”: Reading Migration in Anjan Dutt’s Bow Barracks
Forever – Mitali Gangopadhyay
A Twice-Born Canon and its Reifiction: The Indian Hill Writings of
Emily Eden, Fanny Parkes, Frank Smythe and Eric Shipton –
Arup K Chatterjee
Travel Without Moving: Ireland as An-Other England in G.B Shaw’s
John Bull’s Other Island – Osmond Chien-ming Chang
Studying Alternative Protest in Cyber Space: Through the Prism of
the Pink Chaddi Campaign – Sapna Dudeja
56
Contributors
97
Editorial Board
57
67
77
86
100
Coldnoon: Travel Poetics
EDITORIAL
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ISSUE VI | MAR ‘13
Editorial
Chatterjee, Arup K. “Editorial.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 2.2 (2012): 1-6. Web.
http://www.coldnoon.com/pdf/Coldnoon_TravelPoetics_Mar’13/Editorial.pdf
Licensed Under:
"Editorial" (by Arup K Chatterjee) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
http://www.coldnoon.com/copyright/Coldnoon_TravelPoetics_Mar’13/Editorial.h
tml
First Published in www.coldnoon.com
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EDITORIAL
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Editorial
Dear Reader,
No institution of art codifies travel as paradigmatically as architecture. While
the persona of the traveller encodes its experiences in architecture, the
traveller’s being both conceives and perceives it. Architecture, to the travelling
architect, is a seeing before seeing. This dual-act of seeing – seeing something
exterior to oneself as a manifestation of the interior, and the self as a reflection
of it – is evidenced in Le Corbusier’s diary notation in his Le voyage d’Orient,
wherein he finds himself doubting the authorship of his own conception: “Is it
I who dreams, or is it my narrator carried away by his imagination?”. Given
that Corbusier’s doubt is part of his travel narrative while sojourning in
Istanbul, the extant landscape of the city could not have originated in the
author’s dream. However, in his expressions on the architecture, in question,
the architect-author undergoes a duality between his being and his becoming
within which the moment of the architectural encounter is contained. The
shaping of his dream and the becoming of the dreamer are at two terminals of
the quiescent architectural form that inspires this division. Further, the
architectural codification by the travelling persona is not in priority or in
sequence to the being of the architecture. The codification precedes or
succeeds merely an epistemological amendment in the architecture.
Architecture always is; it only becomes. In other words, whether with the
bricks and lime, the design and the scaffolding, or without, the atmosphere in
which architecture is to become always prevails. The traveller manifests his
experienced phenomena in the architecture he codifies, and the atmosphere he
inflicts it upon. In codifying his travel – in the hermeneutics of his conception
or perception – he brings it to solidification; travel comes to a rest in
architecture. The nomad, inebriated by the phenomena of his own travels,
pursues a migration into the realm his architecture. Nomadism gives in to
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migration; any effort by the traveller to reconcile these two states – of the
nomad and the migrant – is an incentive to cultural imperialism. The memory
of the superiority of his nomadic state over the sedentary class brings the
aspiration of migration to relapse into a sedentary nomadism, or a nomadism
of the architecture. Henceforth, the architect rests with the powerful
movement of the nomad, calling forth nomadic intelligence of his homeland –
a state he had in the past deterritorialized from – or his several states of
departure. A reterritorialization of the travelling architect in this site of
migration is also a reterritorialization to the site from which he has emigrated.
The agency to move nomadically, in situ, comes from his architecture in which
the emigrated and the migrated sites are reconciled. Consequently, the native
atmosphere, if such an indigenous space were historically possible, is
deterritorialized, with the new epistemological order of architecture.
Architecture is solidified nomadism; it does not itself move; it moves the seer.
Architecture has a language; language has architecture. In talking the
language of travel, Coldnoon has been trying to construct an architecture of
travel. It is a new way of looking at architecture, not to mention, a new way of
looking at travel. To complicate the matter, and to add another, perhaps,
would-be-useful term to the dictionary of literary theory, the Coldnooner
dwells in the architexture of travel. The texture of language, the aesthetic
appeal of its syntax, and so forth, gives in to an immediate prejudice about its
becoming, about that which is to unfold from within its confines. It could be a
prejudice regarding the syntax used (archaic or modern, semi-archaic or postmodern), the accent, the writing or the font, the ink or the colour, the size of
the alphabet, or, as definitely the case in this editorial, the deficiency of extant
language in the language user necessitating the coinage of new language.
Language, thus, is indivertible from its architecture. In fact, the latter precedes
language.
Language always undergoes inflexion; it is constantly moving, and
moving its users and recipients. The arch-texture of language is never too
sanctimonious. It has its necessities and vicissitudes of interpretation. To delve
into this morass and exhume the architexture of travel is the job of the traveltheorist, or the architext, to who belongs the ordering the hermeneutics of
language into that of a travel text. It is at once a resting phase upon a
Coldnoon, and simultaneously a congress of many journeys in language. Take
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EDITORIAL
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these three tenses, for instance – “I was”, “I am”, “I will be”. It is a brief
exemplification of the English tense. There is a pretense to every tense used in
the above; there is the possibility of a specification, and further specifications
in every tense. A tense can be further tensed – contracted – to occupy less
space. It only needs more language, and an inflation of the virtual space, that is,
the space of the mind or the space of the blueprint of this architecture which is
the sheet of paper or the computer screen, or the recorded time inside which
the tense is codified. To pretend is to move before moving. There is always an
extension, a stretching of the mover, in this state of tense. Consider the
following: “I was at…”, “I was at ease before…”, “I was at ease before
disease…”, “I was at ease before disease came to our town…”, “I was at ease
before disease came to our town to blemish our joy…”, and so on. What is the
logic of the series? One can be. One can be at ease. One can be at ease before
disease; conversely, one can be at disease before ease. Ease and disease are
states of being, nay they are the very locations where the language user resides
during the event of his becoming – eased or diseased – a becoming that is
specified to have occurred in a town. This town presumably has joy, which has
its own colour or non-colour. Any blemish upon it comes with this
presumption. And, the series can continue endlessly. It can draw architecture
on architecture. In the example that I have charted, being – in a state or
territory – becomes a function of language. And, the very language becomes a
function of the architecture of that state. To be is to be in nature, to imitate
nature. Being is counterpoising against nature. So, architecture is the blueprint
of the stylistics of a territory and the aesthetic ordering of itself against the
natural space it is imposed against. Also, it is that into which the natural space
has been imposed. To say that the travelling architect may follow his
architecture – in his aesthetic perception – as noted above, is to gainsay the
solidity and objectivity of architecture. Its form, therefore, is permeable. Or,
any re-interpretation of architecture is preconditioned by travel. So, it is the
traveller alone who marks and re-marks the body of architecture seeking a
formal subjective negotiation in the meaning of his amorphous travels. In the
end architecture becomes the site of negotiation between the travelling
personae of two or more worlds.
With that complex array of dogmas, let us as always, enter traveller.
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Happy Coldnoon,
Arup K Chatterjee
March, 2013
New Delhi
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Reference
Le Corbusier. Journey to the East. Ed. and trans. I. Žaknić. Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1987; originally published as Le voyage d’Orient. Paris: Editions
Forces Vives, 1966.
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POETRY
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Poetry
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SHOSHANNAH GANZ | December 2012
ISSN 2278-9650
December 2012
(In India on a Train from Mumbai to Pune)
by Shoshannah Ganz
Ganz, Shoshannah. “December 2012 (In India on a Train from Mumbai to Pune).”
Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 2.2 (2012): 8-12. Web.
http://www.coldnoon.com/pdf/Coldnoon_TravelPoetics_Mar’13/ShoshannahGan
z.pdf
Licensed Under:
"December 2012" (by Shoshannah Ganz) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed
License.
http://www.coldnoon.com/copyright/Coldnoon_TravelPoetics_Mar’13/Shoshann
ahGanz.html
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KELLY ANN JACOBSON | Four Poems
ISSN 2278-9650
December 2012
(In India on a Train from Mumbai to Pune)
by Shoshannah Ganz
I. Eternal student
shoe shine boy
Guatemala
gasoline eyes
unfocussed
on the future
stumbling steps
shoe shine man
Mumbai
eyes moving
gracefully
across ancient Hindi text
Yogic wisdom posture
legs crossed
I gaze back
Guatemala I
angry eyes down
teva brand sandals
stumbling
I smile now
eternal student
of dirty streets
the page turns
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Mumbai minute
passes by
II. Pilgrims
Funeral? Pilgrimage?
All in white.
A shrine?
A body?
Was the man face
down on the platform
by the train
dead?
Birds migrating?
Pilgrims flocking?
Women hover
bend over
prostrate body.
III. Clean Water
The sky begins to blue again
out of Mumbai smog
brown tilled earth
beside railroad ties
green gardens
cows
flowering bushes
garbage
so much plastic
now. eternal.
in nature poems.
memorial to progress.
Mel, the Canadian
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private pilot tells us
the biggest change
in 20 years is bottled
water.
IV. By the Railroad
Tin roofs
held down with
big rocks
and tents made
of plastic bags.
It reminds me
of camping and
I wonder about
falling in love
by the railroad
tracks.
V. Iconic India
They seem to be hanging
out the train doors
in iconic India pose
not because of crowding
but just because
that is what
men in India have
always done.
I want a picture
because it seems
as familiar to me
as McDonalds
and Starbucks.
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Here where curry
is comfort food.
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Four Poems
by Kelly Ann Jacobson
Jacobson, Kelly Ann. “Four Poems.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 2.2 (2012): 13-17. Web.
http://www.coldnoon.com/pdf/Coldnoon_TravelPoetics_Mar’13/KellyAnnJacobs
on.pdf
Licensed Under:
"Four Poems" (by Kelly Ann Jacobson) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under
a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
http://www.coldnoon.com/copyright/Coldnoon_TravelPoetics_Mar’13/KellyJacob
son.html
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Four Poems
by Kelly Ann Jacobson
London
I want to preserve the city in amber,
though the streets are tangled webs.
There is a suited man in the park,
two lost travellers, and we walk
the claustrophobic aisles to the Eye.
He wants to pay, but I’m learning.
The pod rises like a blown bubble,
and the whole world is before me.
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Trastevere
I arrive first: student on leave,
suitcase full of ripped-cover classics.
My sister, a worldly stranger,
kisses my cheek and says Ciao!
Within a day: my first disco,
a dark room near Santa Maria
where bodies melt like silver.
Rome burns, and I am aflame.
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On the Arno
My father leaves us by the river
to hunt for images. My sister,
almost naked, lounges in the sun.
We drink boxed wine with straws
and confess sins; at the verdict
she wears movie star glasses,
and I cannot recognize her eyes
behind the tinted gaze.
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Piazzale Michelangelo
We look down on our shared city
like farmers, tree green and towers
too tall for travelled legs to climb.
Father’s finger clicks, and I stare
at the part of town where last night
our waiter, singing English in my ear,
led me outside and kissed me.
I told no one, not even myself.
We buy salted peanuts and sip
mango nectar, and my father
preserves me in a bed of Irises.
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JEAN L. KREILING | Four Poems
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Four Poems
by Jean L. Kreiling
Kreiling, Jean L. “Four Poems.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 2.2 (2012): 18-23. Web.
http://www.coldnoon.com/pdf/Coldnoon_TravelPoetics_Mar’13/JeanLKreiling.pd
f
Licensed Under:
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ing.html
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Four Poems
by Jean L. Kreiling
Southern Comfort
(Charleston, South Carolina)
Not far
from the Monument
to the Confederate Defenders,
the pastel façades of Rainbow Row
defend elegance.
Less than a block
from the marker
commemorating the Ordinance of Secession,
the Circular Church
commemorates unity.
At the City Market,
lowcountry craftsmen weave and sell
sweetgrass baskets,
while other vendors sell
knickknacks made in China.
Each wrought-iron railing
and horse-drawn carriage
invokes a complex history
and insists
on the dignity
of those who remember.
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The English and Their Queen
(State Opening of Parliament, London, November 2009)
The Coldstream Guards play Elgar; golden braids
adorn the coats of horsemen on a route
that once bore kings whose rule was absolute,
and now this Queen for more than five decades.
Though powerless, the jeweled crown never fades:
its legend lives, sufficient to recruit
these regiments of riders, every boot
and buckle shining in precise parades.
The tourists gather, though a gray sky spits,
and locals, too, seem wide-eyed, just as ready
to see, through veils of rain, a regal glow.
Do they remember courage in the blitz?
Do they admire her posture, straight and steady
despite her age? Why do they love her so?
It hardly matters why they love her so.
One Englishman explains that they respect
her diligence, her promise to protect
their heritage. As P.M.’s come and go,
she stays, her subjects proud to rank below
her gray-haired eminence, so often decked
in someone else’s jewels. You can’t elect
your living history, star of this show.
Well, yes, but this is more than civic pride
or national nostalgia. Pageantry
makes public a more visceral emotion:
pale faces light up, and it seems I’ve spied
on private depths, bared inadvertently:
a rainless realm of reasonless devotion.
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The Sand at Horseshoe Bay
(Bermuda)
Pink as babies’ ears,
paler than the first moment
of a virgin’s blush,
the sand cushions our flesh in
tiny coral skeletons.
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Gaudy
(Route 301, Central Florida)
Like gawkers at a train wreck, mesmerized
and yet appalled, we read the exclamations
on gaudy billboards: fireworks advertised
each mile or so, followed by exhortations
against abortion (bible-bolstered pleas)
and offers of free o.j. (where they think
we’ll overspend on fruit or tasteless tees) –
we really ought to buy, or pray, or drink.
For fearlessly bizarre variety
it would be hard to beat this tacky trail:
one hand-made sign hawks “GUNS & JEWELRY,”
another hollers “MOUNTED BIRDS FOR SALE.”
Not far from Starke, a few miles south of Lawtey,
around the fourteenth or fifteenth red light,
two signs tout fudge; another warns the naughty
of speed traps – oddly, laudably forthright.
We cringe as roadside clutter blares and glares,
but candor probably beats coy restraint
in highway marketing: selling your wares
to drivers may require this Day-Glo paint.
And as the local color, unrefined
but functional, implores us to consume,
a kindred icon, expertly designed,
appears ahead: the golden arches loom.
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FAHREDIN SHEHU | Three Poems
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Three Poems
by Fahredin Shehu
Shehu, Fahredin. “Three Poems.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 2.2 (2012): 24-27. Web.
http://www.coldnoon.com/pdf/Coldnoon_TravelPoetics_Mar’13/FahredinShehu.
pdf
Licensed Under:
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http://www.coldnoon.com/copyright/Coldnoon_TravelPoetics_Mar’13/FahredinS
hehu.html
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Three Poems
by Fahredin Shehu
The Womb of Art
It appears that I’m back,
several centuries;
to realize why Farsi poets had such a passion.
It seems I’m here to once again taste
that flavor; where mundane and
divine are delicately spreading; the nuances
as in Isfahan carpets.
It looks like the tune is sending me
as time machine back to the birth of secret
of nightingale to a rose; manifests
at the blast of the moment
It tells that I must come again,
to pass the bridge 33; the resemblance
of Kinvad.
It seems I have word no more,
to compare “Here” and “There”, and
finally got muttered.
Under the Shade of Huge Oleander
(Isfahan, Iran)
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Crossing the border again and again
Going beyond the heavy clouds
Even there the silence is zooming
Somebody awaits; a polite host
A noble who knows
The life’s tunnels where I see light
Are long and curved; the path I lead
Shall give model for the seeker
Being a plant sometimes; is a feeling that
Is only understood by a Nightingale
As the story unfurls, as a rainbow carpet,
It seeks the ear so it may nestle in the heart
While I seek a morsel of light
And a leaving of traces of fragrance
So the rest may follow and perhaps
Conjoin…
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The Rain in Beirut
Last night and today
Blessings of the Lord Bless-Rain
To wash off the sin of the sinner; I
Walking on the shore; listen to the palm leaves
And the waves that brings the chopped
Wings of the Algae
If I would have the silken voice of Fairuz
I would sing Beirut, Beirut too
And if I would have the Soul of Gibran
I would write “your Lebanon and my Lebanon”
While I reckon the loneliness of the Lighthouse
Well; I’m just a mere traveler; descrying
The Miracle of the Orient
For so many times I observe
The demanding eyes of the Host; as he wants
To realize how Beirut looks
From the eyes of the Guest
He is unable to do this; just as I’m able
Even to describe it
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MOHAN RANA | Five Poems
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Five Poems
by Mohan Rana
Rana, Mohan. “Five Poems.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 2.2 (2012): 28-33. Web.
http://www.coldnoon.com/pdf/Coldnoon_TravelPoetics_Mar’13/MohanRana.pdf
Licensed Under:
"Five Poems" (by Mohan Rana) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a
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na.html
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Five Poems
by Mohan Rana
A Country of My Own
There they had memorized forgetting alone
There was no country of my own; I was uncalled for,
Neither some promise to wait upon,
The wind rambles daily by the hours
Banging its head against doors and windows,
I rinse the drawers, all its contents; as if nothing was there
Objects in this room; as if I also were an object
Not finding my own wishes, save an endless quest
Holding my pulse, I search my country on the maps
Gathering directions from the shadows of sun
And all I got was a fistful of doubts
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Chameleon
Changed so many names, colours per terrain
Changed appearances per dialect per mannerisms
And often took my proverbs to the barber
Learned some curses, yet while tossing on bed those words of misery abound
Toss the coin, this trick never fails
Bell the cat with a paper chime; I advise myself in dreams
Hailing revolution, misleading the wind wheel
Toppling over the slopes of spring, I am the autumnal descent
Will I remember in the changing colours and tribes
This borrowed time that lives my life in my sighs
Even while reciting I often forget how to speak the truth
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The Incoming Past
Future, whose deferral,
Is in the knowledge of being
Life bursts forth across the door
As the mind flounders in speculation
Without or within
This way or the other
Bolted or ajar!
Who has been waiting for me there
Who have I been waiting for
I am yet to reach the answer station
A step towards the door
Is the loss of a step behind
Frankly, my truth is not the key
Frankly, it is neither a lock
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Delhi Reconnaissance
I have been running; the distances grow
I just fell short by a distance of 6900 kilometres
I keep running to find someplace near
The window seems too far for my Delhi Reconnaissance
And my destination is ever lagging behind
Visions of yesterday have blurred by now
As I truss myself in a new bedrock
Untying my laces, for naked feet to run
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Snowman
Their curious wandering eyes staring at the white skies
Suddenly startled as they fell on the park slopes
On a suspicious figure
Between the trees
I recoiled
Seeing them
As though
They
Were reborn as aquatic beings
Was it my fear turning them into icy sentinels?
They must wonder
That behind the lens
Of this camera, a Snowman marks their move!
Fear is ignorance
Truth is fear
And ignorance, truth
All poems of Mohan Rana have been translated by Arup K Chatterjee
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RONOJOY SIRCAR | Three Poems
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Three Poems
by Ronojoy Sircar
Sircar, Ronojoy. “Three Poems.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 2.2 (2012): 34-41. Web.
http://www.coldnoon.com/pdf/Coldnoon_TravelPoetics_Mar’13/RonojoySircar.p
df
Licensed Under:
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rcar.html
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Three Poems
by Ronojoy Sircar
All I Can See are Your Eyes in Rear-View Mirrors
In between
a space of hundred(s)
lies(,)
a page of
absent regret(s)
(as I rummage through your trash broken reels,
cigarette smoke, bottle caps
and ash)
And the I,
right here,
waits
for
your eyes,
(turning towards your past)
to look through the rear-view mirror
towards
the me in the backseat,
half asleep
in someone else’s car
speeding past yours
as you turn left
on route 7
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missing
me
speeding past
you
in the time
it takes
to
say
goodbye
Goodbye
(For Prabuddha & Shahid)
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Impatience
Sometimes,
it's just trying to
avoid
walking into
yourself changing,
into
someone else.
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Parentheses
“Because we separate
It ripples our reflections
Because we separate
It ripples our reflections”
(The thumb was lost forever
As he clasped his fist
A r o (it) u n d
Closing the half-open door
to his dreams
While she gave him
Her
Hand
To hold
And a leather belt, she found on the ground
To chew on
As she flipped the switch
And the television came on
With laughter dispersed with white noise)
Blinking helped (I think)
(It helped clear and fog the vision at once
demystifying the mystery that was his own reflection
on the television screen)
Mirrors speak the truth when no one is looking
(for truth)
The door, coming loose of its hinges,
Swung out wildly, dropping the weight of their memories [ON TOP OF
THEM]
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She was singing a song
He couldn’t possibly understand
Although he tried to picture that inky blue night she sang the same song once
before and the tears
stopped
forever,
Lost, perhaps,
Somewhere between the crystal sharp memory of stars dying all around them
as the cigarettes burnt themselves out into the ground,
Trailing smoke
Near her lips
gently parted
Breathing out syllables of lost houses and silent winking windows,
Images catching their own form(lessness) in smoke
reflected in her eyes,
Caught in their own perversions,
Their own subversions,
The politics of their looks
Silently sinking into the night sky, as his third eyelash
Cutting across her images
got caught
Between his left eye and the bridge of his breath
Out in the open
For everyone to look at and wonder
what her eyes, looking up
at him and the stars
at that moment
(memories, both,
fading)
were saying?
Focused on that one damned lash
Which she would be forced to remember by the sheer power of the depth of its
invisibility
To him
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Her fingers
Crept closer
To the point where his vision would begin to blur
The very fabric of intimacy,
and flicked
Darkness away,
and all that was left
was
Smoke
and incomplete images
left to fill
the blank noise
with inky blue skies of dying stars and parted lips
Within him.
As he came around
To a room with a glass sheet stretched across a steel frame
Half frosted
From the outside
With people walking past it
Stepping in and out of outlines
They thought they had left at home
Walking around like murder scenes;
Lines being drawn out, and
worn out each time
by the visibility of recognition
In eyes, equally worn out by
Windows
Half open
Letting in the cold hard wind
of December evenings.
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For the very next moment she walked back in
Emerging from within cigarette smoke and ineffable melodies
of blurred fingers, dying stars, parted lips and an inky blue night you wouldn’t
have believed
and
never
left
again.
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MANASH BHATTACHARJEE | Three Poems
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Three Poems
by Manash Bhattacharjee
Bhattacharjee, Manash. “Three Poems.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 2.2 (2012): 42-49.
Web.
http://www.coldnoon.com/pdf/Coldnoon_TravelPoetics_Mar’13/ManashBhattach
arjee.pdf
Licensed Under:
"Three Poems" (by Manash Bhattacharjee) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed
License.
http://www.coldnoon.com/copyright/Coldnoon_TravelPoetics_Mar’13/ManashBh
attacharjee.html
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Three Poems
by Manash Bhattacharjee
Reading Sebald
World, take a backseat.
Do not disturb.
I am reading Sebald.
Hush.
Trees with eyes flit by
My blind face.
I hurriedly drink
Evanescence.
Sebald slows me down.
I am a caterpillar
Of existence. I crawl in
Green fear
Towards the blade’s edge.
I think of the dead.
Some graze my mind.
Others run amuck.
The dead haven’t died.
Yet.
I read Sebald. The sun turns
Into a snowball.
Time holds up a crystal
Of half-lies.
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I keep turning the pages.
Night, the ghost, descends
On horseback.
I follow echoes of hooves
Drowning in the sea.
Writing is not the speaking
But the hearing
Through steel against steel.
And life is an inverse
Journey by train
Where the wheels of memory
Run over you.
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Wedding in Muvattupuzha
It wasn’t the road which took us
To Muvattupuzha.
It was the avalanche of trees
Improbably lined.
You wondered if a god did it
Secretly overnight or a band of
Mad gardeners toiling
Against sloth and poverty.
The trees did not point towards
Any address. They
Gestured towards an unknown
Fairy tale.
Our ride ended
At the foot of a house. It was
More dream than body, more wings
Than pillars.
The gate’s reckless heart was open
Wide as we walked in
Rousing cobblestones from sleep.
Menfolk like cheerful coconuts welcomed
Everyone at the door. We exchanged names
In hurried gestures of forgetting.
Till we met the father who hid
Grapes in his mouth and wore a face
Older than his tongue.
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He was a fable who could charm
A tavern full of strangers.
A beehive of womenfolk were
Making haste to ensure the food pacified
The appetite of gods.
Aroma from the kitchen seized
Our attention as the mother of fish and
Spices gently greeted us.
The artist who sketched the house
Peered from a photograph like
An oak tree. Invisible drawings flowed
In his beard.
An avalanche of relics caused a
Giddiness impossible to hold without
A glass of spirits.
We climbed the stairs with liquid
Expectations and discovered the smallest
Bedroom in the world.
The bar on the terrace overlooked
An ancestral tree. Its trunk was more
Drunk than I could be that
Wet afternoon.
I was young Basho on the bar stool
Watching the rain pour over a monotonously
Beautiful landscape.
The sun beat the clouds just
Before oblivion. We climbed the church
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Stairs and witnessed a wedding
Under the rainbow.
Old hymns of youth rang
Solemnly in the man’s memory
As oaths encircled him.
The town arrived half wet
For the grand feast. They drowned
In the toast of blessings.
The men drank endlessly
As the rain. The
Ancestral tree shed its leaves.
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A Visit to Ballimaran
No longer that alleyway
of unending pastimes,
no longer that couplet
stalling a game of dice,
no longer that foot’s pause
driving a thought home,
no longer that inspiration
turning words into kites.
Ballimaran is a busy stream
of shoes hung for sale.
No sound of hooves
or sight of palanquins
reigns over subjects.
The colour of footwear
automobile horns
mark the citizen’s health.
I ask a man, “Which way
to Ghalib’s home?”
His eyebrows arch, “Why didn’t
you ask him the address? A
name is not enough.”
I go my way, telling Ghalib’s
ghost, “Your name has lost its
address, your address
its neighbourhood. Is that how
one gains the world?”
The guard in blue uniform
is wearier than stone. He ushers
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me inside the ancient
courtyard made up to date.
I stare at forgeries on stage
set to befool children. It isn’t easy
to veil someone’s neglected
absence.
The telephone booth is an offstage
parody of callers in prosaic
hurry. No one carves like old times a
turn of phrase to perfection.
I ponder. No one anymore counts
blessings with wine. No one
disobeys god with irony. No one braids
the night with couplets.
As light sinks a girl drifts in to read
the dilemmas of Ghalib’s heart. The azan
distracts her glued eyes. She
leaves folding a secret in her dupatta.
It is time to go home. Time to leave
what is left of Ghalib in
Qasim Jaan. To leave what is left
of Qasim Jaan in Ballimaran.
Names that belong to a different
time when the air breathed
verses. And a couplet weighed heavier
than a pair of shoes.
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JENNY MORSE | Four Poems
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Four Poems
by Jenny Morse
Morse, Jenny. “Four Poems.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 2.2 (2012): 50-55. Web.
http://www.coldnoon.com/pdf/Coldnoon_TravelPoetics_Mar’13/JennyMorse.pdf
Licensed Under:
"Four Poems" (by Jenny Morse) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a
http://www.coldnoon.com/copyright/Coldnoon_TravelPoetics_Mar’13/JennyMor
se.html
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Four Poems
by Jenny Morse
Six Miles of Chiloe
I remember leeches sucking on toes like they hadn’t just fed on fat cows in this
paradise; how you called us cowpie-walking champions. I remember wind or
water, the boat trip, the abandonment, the barbed wire that threw us off
course. The one-armed boatman who returned us to civilization, maneuvered
us along the river, climbing back into its mouth like he’d stolen us from the
Pacific and knew that government might hold us in custody a few more
sunsets. A white whale waved as we sat on the beach, enjoying the spray,
wondering how long we could live on bread and cheese.
I remember the cows visited our dry sand the third day, careful not to
moo us out of our tent as if they knew how much sleep meant; the salt air and
the sun. We might have been the only people left in the world while we waited
to see someone who might tell us how to get out of here and watched the baby
crabs playing hopscotch in our footsteps.
I remember the fishermen who ransacked our sunken ship like they knew
where we’d hidden the treasure, how I spied on them as they bathed and
pulled a rope out of the red hull like the ship was just docking and once the
passengers boarded, it would unbeach itself and set out like an ordinary
freighter. We looked for a place to pitch camp and found the dunes. We
wondered where to get fresh water, then found the stream.
I remember hiking down the beach and discovering a dismantled
shelter complete with broken air-conditioning unit, wondering how whoever
had lived there had gotten electricity. Some boys hiked on ahead of us, right
into the cliff’s edge, but we found their home on the ridge through binoculars.
We stared into the sun for long minutes knowing that no one had ever seen the
beach in quite this light; no one would again. The broken u-shape in the cliff
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was a carved imperfection. The waves threw themselves against the rocks,
hoping the fragments would find new life in the orange sun.
I remember the dead seal that both fascinated and disgusted us, and the
kelp that covered the shame of its purple decomposition. Sleep had never been
so easy and I’d never understood the world until that moment, a boat and a
bus and a bridge and a cord of wood away.
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Departure
A train approached in the distance with its horn and its wheels and the
cushions of glass in the windows.
I felt it first in the vibration like bass drums on my shinbones, like little
earthquakes in my knees.
I wrote this poem with you in mind and your feet approaching the train.
I wrote this poem here in the waiting room corridor where the floor
shakes when the load boards and the train rolls downhill and away.
Now, I’m putting on your favorite shoes, measuring
my toes against the instep, but you’ll be
near sea level when you discover
your shoes are no longer on board.
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All I Know of Cusco
I dream of a blue door
or of a blue door’s dream of me,
and from the steep rise of
Cuesta San Blas we can see La Catedral.
La Virgen passes on raised
planks above the chants
of gloria, gracias a dios,
gracias a la madre
de nosotros.
I am lost and distant
from the blue door
or the blue door is lost
and distant from me.
A man arrives to walk
me home. We never speak, but
when we shake hands, I
pass him a coin
and a key.
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Terminal
It was a Wednesday at the end of the world, though the world didn’t end there
then. It ends now as I reflect in blue water, numbered distance, a chronology
located in essentialism and debt. If I asked you how long I stared at the ocean,
would you have a reckoning, would the question linger like your scent after a
shower, would you suspend me in your mind like a hung photograph and then
open a door to hide me.
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NONFICTION
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Nonfiction
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MITALI GANGOPADHYAY | Reading Migration
ISSN 2278-9650
“This is my home”:
Reading Migration in Anjan Dutt’s Bow Barracks Forever
by Mitali Gangopadhyay
Gangopadhyay, Mitali. ““This is my home”: Reading Migration in Anjan Dutt’s Bow
Barracks Forever.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 2.2 (2012): 57-66. Web.
http://www.coldnoon.com/pdf/Coldnoon_TravelPoetics_Mar’13/MitaliGangopad
hyay.pdf
Licensed Under:
"This is my home”: Reading Migration in Anjan Dutt’s Bow Barracks Forever" (by
Mitali Gangopadhyay) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
http://www.coldnoon.com/copyright/Coldnoon_TravelPoetics_Mar’13/MitaliGan
gopadhyay.html
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“This is my home”:
Reading Migration in Anjan Dutt’s Bow Barracks Forever
by Mitali Gangopadhyay
Theories on migration have been largely debated over the years from social,
political and economic perspectives. From the developmentalist optimism of
migration theories in the 1950s and 60s, to the structuralist and neo-Marxist
pessimism and scepticism over the 1970s and 80s, from the new economics of
labour migration approaches of the 1990s, to the transnational immigration
policies involving the diaspora in the twenty-first century, migration studies
have undergone paradigmatic shifts in dealing with the heterogeneous nature
of global migration (Haas, 8). Against this extensive panorama of migration
theory, the growing trend of the Anglo-Indian emigration from postindependence India offers an interesting case study of what Caplan (2007)
describes as “culture of emigration”. On studying the nature of migration in
the Anglo-Indian community, Caplan identifies the role of “culture factors”,
like beliefs, understandings and practices which help the Anglo-Indians to
evolve a “local lifestyle and an outlook which is out-focused and which insists,
as one Anglo-Indian woman put it, that ‘life is only abroad, not here’” (43).
Inseparably connected with the culture of migration is the issue of selfdefinition, or identity, which revolves around the ambivalence concerning
home and nation. Home, for the Anglo-Indian, remains a confused, bifurcated
space, torn between his “original” home, which is the land inherited from his
ancestors, and his “adopted” home, the land acquired by the historical event of
the European colonization of India. The fissure between the “original” and the
“adopted” homes creates a loss of identity, and further complicates his sense of
belonging in the postcolonial environment. While the “original” home
dominates over the psyche of an Anglo-Indian in the form of an imaginative
space, the cartographic reality of his “adopted” home often assumes the
proportion of an exile. These dichotomies of home/exile and belonging/nonbelonging breed complex feelings of rootlessness, insecurity, nostalgia, and
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often instigate the Anglo-Indian to cross the boundaries of his “adopted”
home, in search of a new home. However, this search may not always
culminate in a successful migration to an alternative place of choice. Migration
might just dominate over the psyche as a forceful desire or desperation to cross
geographical borders, while failing ultimately to translate that desire into a
physical transfer of lands. In this context, the desire to migrate or imaginative
migration overpowers the actual, physical act of migration. While migration
theories may be useful to explain migratory causes and patterns in the AngloIndian community, imaginative migration has scarcely been critically studied.
As the title suggests, this essay will examine the issue of migration from
different perspectives and its impact on the identity of the Anglo-Indian
community in Anjan Dutt’s, Bow Barracks Forever (2004). The film critically
explores the emerging trend of migration that leads to the rapid decline of the
Anglo-Indian population in India. Dutt’s approach to the Anglo-Indian act of
migration, I argue, has two distinct angles – first, migration as a physical
journey conditioned by a lucrative socio-economic choice and, second,
migration as a metaphorical or an imaginative journey, a journey that is
navigated in the mind. In Dutt, physical migration is either transnational or
internal, and involves crossing of geographical boundaries. On the contrary,
imaginative migration involves a craving for the “original” or an alternative
home, which is made possible through psychological displacement. My study
intends to show how Dutt focuses more on the desire for migration than on
the physical act of migration itself. The actual geographical displacement,
which constitutes the very basis of migration, is challenged in Bow Barracks
Forever as Dutt discovers an alternative mode of migration, that is, imaginative
migration. Dutt explores the terrain of the mind and shows how imagination
can become a powerful medium through which the act of migration is carried
out. However, imaginative migration is virtual, and hence, transient. Dutt’s
intention, as my essay unfolds, is to show how the desire for migration in an
Anglo-Indian is replaced by an overpowering acceptance of India, as the “only”
home. The film traces the internal journey of an Anglo-Indian female, a voyage
that she undertakes, through personal conflicts and social obstacles, to reach a
point of reconciliation with her “adopted” home.
Constructed in British India to house American troops, Bow Barracks,
one of the oldest buildings in Central Kolkata, is occupied by a mixed
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population of Anglo-Indian, Chinese, Muslim and Hindu families. Though a
considerable percentage of the Anglo-Indians have already migrated to other
countries, they are still the dominant group occupying one of the oldest
building blocks of the city as residents. Anjan Dutt gives reel life to the joys
and pathos of these Anglo-Indian families leading a neglected and unnoticed
existence in one of the centrally located areas of the city. A medley of AngloIndian characters appears against the silhouette of Bow Barracks. Anjan Dutt
focuses on three families, that of Emily Lobo and her younger son Bradley,
Tom and his wife, Anne, and Melville and his wife, Rosa. Peter, the cheater, is a
drunkard, who shuttles between the families, trying to alleviate their worries,
sometimes by offering liquor, at other times, by playing the trumpet. The plot
is spun around the controversy regarding the dilapidated condition of the
Barracks and the possible means available to restore it. There is constant
mention of the Calcutta Improvement Trust (CIT), which has declared the
Barracks unfit for residential purposes and therefore orders an evacuation of
the place for governmental control. The building is also a lucrative property for
the promoter, Mr. Mukherjee, who instils a culture of threat and fear through a
set of hooligans, under the leadership of Kesto. A third option comes in the
figure of Manish, a young architect, who stresses on the heritage of the
Barracks and wants to renovate it. Manish’s inspiring words to the Barrack
residents, “As a citizen of the city, don’t you have some responsibility?” seem
to have a philanthropic mission, but unfortunately lead to his murder. It is
against this social and political insecurity of the Barracks that Anjan Dutt
shows a few representative Anglo-Indian families caught between the
possibility of migration and the unfulfilled desire for it.
Bow Barracks Forever begins with the motif of physical migration. The
Dawson family is moving off to Bombay, and from there to Sidney, Australia.
Their furniture is being shifted, down the stairs of Bow Barracks, and piled up
on a tempo. Mr. and Mrs. Dawson’s little son, Philip, hides under the bed of
Emily Lobo, another resident of the Barracks, reluctant to leave the city, his
home, and above all, his friend, Anwar. Mr. Dawson, however, has made up his
mind to migrate because the “city is going from bad to worse. Everywhere you
go you have got to give ghoosh (bribe)”. The Dawsons migrating to Australia
may be explained in terms of the Neoclassical economics theory, which
determines a migrant’s choice of home on a cost-benefit calculation. In this
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case, the migrants are viewed as rational actors whose primary considerations
are economic, although other factors, like health and re-unification with family
also prevail. However, the apprehensions of stepping into an unknown
country, a new home underlie the Dawsons’ apparent expression of relief in
their rejection of India, or more specifically, Calcutta.
Two other physical migrations which Dutt dramatizes in the film are
that of Sally’s and Abdul Chacha’s family, both of which are instances of
internal migrations, or migrations within the nation. Sally, a teenage AngloIndian girl, realizes that her desire to marry Bradley and migrate to England
will remain a dream, since Bradley is not interested in her, but in Anne. She,
therefore, grabs the next possible opportunity and runs off with one of the
“para chokras” (local boys) to settle in Bombay to begin her new career as a
singer. Abdul Chacha is also forced to leave the Barracks because he is an
illegal tenant and the target of Kesto, the promoter’s hired goon. Unlike Sally,
Abdul and his wife put up a strong resistance against migration, yet
circumstances compel them to move out of the Barracks. Dutt, however, only
dramatizes their departure from the Barracks, their home, but there is no
mention of their destination.
While the act of physical migration is restrictively featured in two or
three shots, the film-text devotes itself largely to the exploration of the
imaginative migration through the principal female character, Mrs. Emily
Lobo. Emily is an Anglo-Indian woman, caught between the two worlds of
London and Calcutta, between her British past and Indian present. Her elder
son, Kenny, is characterized throughout the film by his absence. It is through a
series of phone-call sequences to Kenny in London, where only Emily’s voice
is audible, that Kenny comes alive. From the little boy, Philip, to the old,
drunkard, Peter, Emily’s desire for migration to London is known to all. There
is an outward confidence in her gesture each time she mentions that she would
push off to London with her younger son, Bradley, as soon as Kenny shifts to a
bigger house. Whether she is in the middle of a meeting regarding the
uncertain future of the Barracks, or talking to a guest, Emily breaks off
suddenly and rushes to a local, roadside P.C.O. to call up Kenny. These
international calls are strategically placed in the plot at regular intervals to
externalize Emily’s intense desire for migration. Though the cacophony of the
surrounding streets threatens to shatter her dream, Emily intimately engages
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herself in an imaginative journey of the mind. None of her calls are received by
Kenny; it is after the mechanical “record your message” beep that Emily
immediately embarks on a lone, private journey towards London. She has a
folded sheet of paper in her hand, with her lines to Kenny jotted down, so as
not to waste any precious second of the long-distance I.S.D. calls. The city
recedes to a shadowy background as Emily cocoons herself in a private space,
expressing to Kenny her desperation to reach London:
I have been trying to talk to you for the past months, son. I left so
many messages also…I just want to know whether you got your
confirmation and when you will shift to a bigger house…So just
tell Mummy when you are ready, darling. Will it be Christmas
time?
It is this imaginative migration that keeps Emily occupied throughout the film.
To the little Philip, migrating to Sidney, she says: “You are going to be a pukka
(complete) gentleman. I am going to London to live with Kenny dada. I am
going to see the Big Ben, River Thames and all.” With Sally, she shares her
plans of migration, how she would sell off the expensive gold necklace,
inherited from her husband’s family, to buy air tickets, once Kenny changes his
apartment. In fact, she assures Sally that she would take her to London once
they move out. To the other tenants of the Barracks who have gathered on the
terrace to meet the architect, Manish, she boldly declares, “I don’t want to stay
here for the rest of my life. I am not staying here for long”. This imaginative
migration works like an obsession in Emily and is a pointer to her
psychological displacement, a journey from India, her “adopted” home, to
England, her “original” home.
Kandel and Massey in “The Culture of Mexican Migration: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis” (2002) show how the aspiration to migrate is
transmitted across generations through social networks. Anjan Dutt shows
how this aspiration works in Emily as well. She wants her son, Bradley, to
believe in her dream, to participate in it, and finally, fulfil it. She rebukes
Bradley, “You should be calling your brother, not me”. However, Bradley is
firmly rooted in reality and instead of indulging in his mother’s imagination, he
turns the mirror to his mother:
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And take this one thing clear in your thick head once and for all.
Ken has not called and he will never ever call. He has not been
calling you for the last four years. He is not calling you back
because he is not bothered. So you are stuck here with me in this
stinking city forever. I am nothing. I am a failure like Daddy
because that’s the best I can do. I can’t do anything better than
that. I will end up as a waiter in Park Street because that is the best I
can do, because I am too God damn silly, stupid, weak.
Emily is thunderstruck. The harsh reality which she has carefully evaded so
long stares into her face. As tears roll down her cheeks, Emily sits on the bed,
immobile and lifeless. The flow of her imagination is at once arrested and she
is left in a vacuum.
The final blow comes to Emily in the next scene. When Tom hits his
wife, Anne, in a fit of rage, Bradley makes a valiant protest and is shot by Tom
on the leg. While Tom is arrested, Bradley struggles in the hospital. The
protective mother, who had always tried to keep away her son from the
corrupting influences of Calcutta and had planned a career for him in London,
now sits emotionally wrecked, on a bench outside the hospital, accompanied
by Anne. She looks at Anne, tortured and physically bruised, yet brave enough
to love her son and accept the ruthless challenges as part of life. It is at this
crucial point that Emily has an epiphany and she confesses: “And what a strong
woman she (Ann) is, Peter. After all that beating-sheating (the Anglo-Indian
coinage) she did not leave because of my little boy, because of my little boy”.
Dutt’s use of the epiphany transforms Emily’s perception of home and
identity. The imaginative migration to England had so long dissociated her
from India, her “adopted” home. But once her fantasies of migrating to her
elder son in London are broken, Emily perceives herself and her younger son,
Bradley, in a new light. She feels integrated with the life at Barracks and
reconciles to her Indian identity. Life in the Barracks may be difficult, but like
Anne, she will learn to face it. She now passes on her treasured necklace, the
symbol of her liberty and freedom from Bow Barracks, to Anne, her
prospective daughter-in-law. Finally, she writes to Kenny:
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Do you remember the necklace that your grandmother gave me? I
have been saving it to buy our passage off to London. But I don’t
care about all that now, son. Because I have to give the best thing to
the bravest woman I know. If she can take so much shit and stick
on, so can I.
Anne has not escaped, nor will Emily. In Anne’s possession, the necklace takes
on a different symbol. Anne decides to sell it and use the money for repairing
the Barracks. From Emily’s personal dreams of migration, the necklace now
transcends the microcosmic Lobo family to embrace the future of the entire
Anglo-Indian community and their life in Bow Barracks. To Kenny, therefore,
Emily can now write with a new faith:
Kenny dear, I never felt this way before, but I suddenly feel that I
don’t want to leave this house…This is my house. We have
decided to stay here. Calcutta is getting lousy, no doubt, but this is
my home…So if you ever feel lost and lonely and need to come
back home, just remember, we are always there for you.
The dream of migration, which Emily not only cherished so long, but also
enacted imaginatively in her mind, is replaced by a stronger faith in her
Indianness, and thus she effortlessly surrenders herself to Bow Barracks. India,
or in this context, Calcutta, with all its limitations, emerges as the “only” home
for the Anglo-Indians. The film-maker’s message is explicit. It is this very
awareness that India is their home that can prevent the Anglo-Indians from
migrating abroad.
In her own way, Rosa, too, expresses her desperation to migrate from
India. However, she does not have any preferred destination country. She
indulges in a sexual affair with the Bengali insurance agent, Bipin, and pleads
him to release her from the Barracks: “Why don’t you take me away from here,
Bipin? I can’t, I can’t take it anymore. Even the Dawsons have left from here.
Nothing. There’s nothing here”. Rosa does escape, but returns after some time
to her husband, Melville. With repentant tears and a sincere plea to Melville, “I
don’t know where to go. Please let me stay here”, Rosa reconciles to her home
at Bow Barracks.
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Anjan Dutt’s much controversial cinematic representation of the AngloIndians in Bow Barracks stands out not only in its exploration of the motif of
migration, but also in suggesting how the Anglo-Indian community might be
integrated to their “adopted” home, India. In his discussion on the reasons
behind the mass exodus of the Anglo-Indians from India, Robyn Andrews
(2007) states that it is a “combined effect of a well-established culture of
migration…sense of alienation from India and the reassurance and
encouragement from their contemporaries and kin who reside abroad” that
motivate the Anglo-Indians “to quit India, than to stay” (49). This rising
impetus of the culture of migration is countered by Dutt in celluloid, which
projects how the Anglo-Indians living in the Barracks rise above the push and
pull factors of migration to integrate themselves with India, their “only” home.
Identification with India, Dutt seems to suggest, is not possible by any
imposition of law; it is a condition of the mind which is achieved by
conquering over the desires for migration to attain an overwhelming faith in
one’s Indian identity. Bow Barracks Forever, therefore, remains Anjan Dutt’s
emphatic statement on the need for integrating the fast declining Anglo-Indian
community with India.
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References
Haas de, Hein. Migration and Development: A Theoretical Perspective. COMCAD,
Bielefeld, 2007.
Caplan, L. “‘Life is Only Abroad, Not Here’: The Culture of Emigration among AngloIndians in Madras”, Immigrants and Minorities, 14 (1): 26-46, 1995.
Kandel, W. and D. S. Massey. “The Culture of Mexican Migration: A Theoretical and
Empirical Analysis”, Social Forces, 80 (3): 981-1004, 2002.
Andrews, Robyn. “Quiting India: The Anglo-Indian Culture of Migration”, A Journal
of Sociological Anthropology and Culture Studies, 4 (3): 32-56, 2007.
Gaikwad, V. R. The Anglo-Indians: A Study in the Problems and Processes Involved in
Emotional and Cultural Integration. New Delhi: Asia Publishing House, 1967.
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ARUP K CHATTERJEE | A Twice Born Canon and its Reifiction
ISSN 2278-9650
A Twice-Born Canon and its Reifiction:
The Indian Hill Writings of Emily Eden, Fanny Parkes,
Frank Smythe and Eric Shipton
by Arup K Chatterjee
Chatterjee, Arup K. “A Twice-Born Canon and its Reifiction: The Indian Hill Writings
of Emily Eden, Fanny Parkes, Frank Smythe and Eric Shipton.” Coldnoon: Travel
Poetics 2.2 (2012): 67-76. Web.
http://www.coldnoon.com/pdf/Coldnoon_TravelPoetics_Mar’13/ArupKChatterje
e.pdf
Licensed Under:
"A Twice-Born Canon and its Reifiction: The Indian Hill Writings of Emily Eden,
Fanny Parkes, Frank Smythe and Eric Shipton" (by Arup K Chatterjee) by Coldnoon:
Travel Poetics is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercialNoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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atterjee.html
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A Twice-Born Canon and its Reifiction:
The Indian Hill Writings of Emily Eden, Fanny Parkes,
Frank Smythe and Eric Shipton
by Arup K Chatterjee
The concept of the archive shelters in itself, of course, this memory
of the name arkhe. But it also shelters itself from this memory
which it shelters: which comes down to saying also that it forgets it.
(Derrida, 9)
The design, and the order of texts, in a literary canon, is its architecture. To
prevent abusing the specificity of the discipline I will call it architexture. It is
the selection and systemization of texts into a canonical hermeneutics. What
precedes this architexture is an archiving of texts, by the architects, or what
Derrida calls, the “archons”, who are “first of all the documents’ guardians…
(and) accorded the hermeneutic right and competence…they recall the law
and call on or impose the law.” (10)
I
If Indian English, in pedagogy and curricula, has generally begun after the
Indian nation state, it does not mean that it has glossed over the English that
came before the moment of independence. On the contrary, the canon of
Indian English has begun with the works of Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand, R.K,
Narayan, Rabindranath Tagore, H.L.V Derozio, Sarojini Naidu, among many
others who wrote before India, insofar as, even Rudyard Kipling and E.M.
Forster are, or must be, now considered Indian English writers. A recent
addition to the Delhi University English syllabus is “Anglo-American writing
from 1930” featuring work by Salman Rushdie, who for most part has been the
toast of Indian English. We are, therefore, prepared enough to naturalize
authors into hybrid nationalities, while teaching their works. Despite such
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flexibility, there has been continual academic blindness towards Indian English
travel literature written before independence. Of this literature, not much can
be theorized in terms of present nation building or anti-nation criticism, purely
owing to the stamps of leisure and commission with which travel literature is
couriered to its readers. We have better to teach about hybrid nationalities and
many Indias, in literature of the past and recent greats. Meanwhile, a
colonization of literary ideas has begun through the gateway of a marginal
canon, which I will call “Hill Literature”.
Indian Travel English is so vast that even mining its minor facets is
certainly welcomed with popularity. A part of it is Hill Literature made of early
authors such as Emily Eden, Fanny Parkes, John Lang, and numerous others,
including present ones like Ruskin Bond, Stephen Alter, Bill Aitken. Many of
the older authors have come to public notice only in the last fifteen years or so.
However, the agency of the architexture has been undergoing a regular
domiciliation, on one hand, and colonization on the other. There has been no
embargo on research related to Hill Literature by any patriarch, whatever.
Consequently, when William Dalrymple re-published Fanny Parkes’s
Wanderings of a Pilgrim (1850) as Begums, Thugs & Englishmen, The Journals of
Fanny Parkes (2003), he was free to quote entirely out of context, the subjectauthor of his finds, in order to justify the non-colonial attitude of his
“patriarchic function” (see Derrida, 10). The urgency behind this, as
Dalrymple makes obvious, was the “orthodoxy” of Edward Said’s Orientalism –
phenomena. So, in order to use Parkes as his tool of defiance he unreasonably
schedules her into the binary of the colonial and the non-colonial. An excerpt
from his Introduction to the book, which also informs an article in the
Guardian, reads:
Parkes is an important writer because she acts as a witness to a
forgotten moment of British-Indian hybridity, and shows that colonial travel
writing need not be an aggressive act of orientalist appropriation - not
"gathering colonial knowledge", as Edward Said and his followers would have
us believe, but instead an act of understanding… it is ridiculously simplistic to
see all attempts at studying, observing and empathising with another culture
necessarily "as an act of domination - rather than of respect or even catharsis.
(2007)
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In the chapter “Ascent to Landowr” Parkes finds the Paharis “most
exceedingly dirty” (Vol. II, 227) after having just finished calling them
“animals to stare at” (ibid) resembling Tartars. Dalrymple points out that she
found “Indian men ‘remarkably handsome’” (2003, x). It is not “men” that
Parkes talks about but native servants. The exact passage that Dalrymple
paraphrases from is:
Some of the natives are remarkably handsome, but appear far from
being strong men. It is impossible to do with a few servants, you
must have many; their customs and prejudices are
inviolable…They are great plagues; much more troublesome than
English servants. (Vol. I, 26)
“Remarkably handsome” is as uninsightful and average in Victorian
English expressions as Dalrymple tries to celebrate it. The only other human
subjects Parkes finds “remarkably handsome” in her entire narrative are the
interracial children of Mr Gardner and Mulka, and a certain bridegroom called
Unjun Sheko. Apart from this the phrase is used for cows, bulls, an Arab pony,
camel’s clothing, and so on.
Dalrymple, also adds that for Parkes “The evenings are cool and
refreshing ... The foliage of the trees, so luxuriously beautiful and so novel…”
(2003, x). Those are Parkes’s words immediately after she has pronounced the
climate “oppressive” with “hot winds”. “I can”, she writes, “compare it to
nothing but the hot blast you would receive in your face were you suddenly to
open the door of an oven.” (Vol. I, 25). Within two paragraphs of the above
climatic appreciation, she will call the weather “very uncertain”.
Finally, in a glaring counterfeiture, Dalrymple quotes Parkes, with a
clear intention of sanitizing her persona. This is what Parkes wrote according
to him:
“Oh the pleasure…of vagabondising (sic) in India” (2007)
What Parkes wrote instead was “Oh! the pleasure of vagabondizing over
India (Vol. II, 192, italics mine). The shift from “over” to “in” is strategic for
Dalrymple who intends to project Parkes as a “patriarchic function” of the
class that is not “over” but within the object of rule. In the section of this
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vagabondizing Parkes can be seen “cantering away” on her Arab pony, a sight
which speaks more of her individual and sexual prowess than her undoubted
general love for India and its peoples. The very passages that Dalrymple quotes
from contradict his representation of Parkes. Given this state of his revisionist
and non-contextual references from Parkes, it is clear how little his work has
been scrutinized by the editorial commissioners of both Guardian and
Penguin.
Jacques Derrida analyses in Archive Fever the economy of Sigmund’s
Freud’s rhetoric of self-archiving under the guise of self-criticism, wherein the
psychoanalyst is struggling to find a “mutation” or a cleavage within his own
institution. Freud, is here, matched by Dalrymple in his re-texturing of the
existing architexture. This architexture has come under severe attack from the
Saidian school wherefore it is incumbent upon the archon, now, to highlight
the cleavages, which come in the forms of the Eden sisters, sisters of India
Governor-General, Lord Auckland. He calls Emily Eden “waspish and
conceited” which is entirely justified, and equally dangerous when done so in
comparison with Parkes who as even Dalrymple acknowledges was
“eccentric”. In fact, she was as eccentric as inconsistent, as free as fearless to
express her mercurial responses. There is no vindication of Eden’s highhandedness as there is none of Parkes’s capriciousness. This is to say, casting
Parkes as the symbol of Indian English hybridity is theoretically flawed due to
Parkes individual hybrid constitution. Dalrymple categorically informs of
Eden’s literary popularity, as opposed to Parkes’s whose Wanderings “never
had another edition.” Eden’s Up the Country is, hence, analogous with
coloniality, which must be disavowed, and simultaneously re-avowed in terms
of claiming guardianship over that which is the secret. In Derridean terms, in
the process of clearing the memory of the arkhe or the arch texturer, he has
used itself as his ploy, and shelter.
As Derrida explains, the transformation of Freud’s house into a
museum, although marks a passage from the private to the public, but does not
do so from “the secret to the non-secret” (10). The hermeneutics of the
architexture is left to the “archontic” signatory of a treaty of settlement, or
domiciliation – practically a “house arrest”, as Derrida calls it – and in this
atmosphere the archon archives. He uninterruptedly assumes patriarchy over
the “secret”, marks his exergue before the hermeneutics of the architexture. In
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other words, he cites before the beginning and lawfully orders the beginning
and its course. Dalrymple, in this respect, resembles Lang, the 1850s’
Australian Indian English writer, well known for his contempt of British
officialdom. In his “Himalaya Club” serialized in Charles Dickens’s Household
Words, Lang writes effervescently of English snobbery, from his solipsistic
refuge is Mussoorie. From here, he leaves us an inventory of English manners,
stingy pensioners, and trivial scandals which have become a source of nostalgic
imitation in most of present day Hill Literature. Incidentally, both have written
most of their works based on or around Delhi, both went to Trinity College in
Cambridge, and both are of Scottish descent. Needless to say, both have been
signatories to an archontic domiciliation.
II
Bill Aitken, a Hill Writer from Scotland (now Indian), archives a new canon of
architexts in “An Introduction to the Literature on Nanda Devi”. Unlike
Dalrymple, he does not try to posit the canon – or pose canonical differences –
within colonial and non-colonial binaries. He seeks religio-spiritual, instead of
ideological, grounds of difference, between his predecessors. Of the long list of
authors on the patron-Goddess – as he treats the Nanda Devi – three stand
out, persistently. They are judged on their degrees of reverence for the heathen
deity. Both historically, and in Aitken’s study, Frank Smythe comes between
Eric Shipton and H.W. Tilman. Aitken chooses, however, elaborate first on
Smythe, and leaves “for the last, the best and most literary offerings to the
goddess”, which is Shipton’s Nanda Devi (1936). Aitken’s archival essay
succeeds in polarising Smythe and Tilman as spiritual antagonists, with
Smythe as the believer and Tilman as the “workmanlike non-believer, and
both being finally surpassed by Shipton’s offerings. (Aitken, 2006)
The book by Smythe that Aitken refers to is Valley of Flowers, a choice
that is as beautiful as strategic. Aiken does not choose, for instance, Smythe’s
Kamet Conquered or The Spirit of the Hills, in either of which Smythe is the
mountaineer struggling against the invincibility of the hills, the rugged weather
that scares away Darjeeling sherpas, of the very indomitable spirit that is the
object of ascent. Nowhere is Smythe even partially irreverent of the Himalayas,
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or acts “frustrated” as more recent day mountaineers like John Roskelley.
Instead, in Kamet Conquered he warns:
The Himalaya must be approached humbly…Other mountains
forgive mistakes, but not the Himalaya. (8)
Yet, the atmosphere of unrivalled peace and cosmological sovereignty that
Smythe witnesses in his sojourn in The Valley of Flowers could not be
paralleled during a treacherous climb:
There is a power of which we know little in the west but which is a basic
of abstract thought in the east. It is allowing the mind to receive rather than to
seek impressions, and it is gained by expurgating extraneous thought. It is then
that the Eternal speaks; that the mutations of the universe are apparent: the
very atmosphere is filled with life and song; the hills are resolved from mere
masses of snow, ice and rock into something living. When this happens the
human mind escapes from the bondage of its own feeble imaginings and
becomes as one with its Creator. (64)
Smythe is spiritually drawn to the pristine hills that had seen neither
Europeans nor the commercialism that besotted the Swiss Hills, neither
railroads nor vistas, but remained content in “the kindly peasant folk (that)
graze their flocks in the summer months” (1936, 17).
The Valley of Flowers is located at about 12500 feet, which is at just
half the height of Nanda Devi (over 25000 ft.) The latter is where Aitken
places Shipton, while Tilman is left as “almost a caricature of the emotionally
repressed Englishman” whose “appearance on top of Nanda Devi has a
Chaplinesque dimension”:
[He] crave[s] her indulgence in breaching protocol by not
removing [his] boots on her sacred summit. (Aitken, 2006)
The peak, however, remains for Shipton, for whom it is the “Inviolate
Sanctuary of the “Blessed Goddess”” (also the name of Shipton’s book). The
mountain peak and the mountaineer “seem made for each other” (ibid), each
sharing the other’s philosophical prowess. While Tilman’s Ascent to Nanda
Devi is fraught with rashness and Judaic mindset (he “leapt at the opportunity”
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(ibid), when Shipton refused), Shipton’s reward lies in his “Sanctuary” at the
base of the Nanda Devi. What separates Smythe and Shipton is that the former
is shown singing the praise of the goddess’s feet like a “gardener”, while the
latter consorts with her respectfully near her bosom. Smythe can be seen in
The Valley of Flowers as a self-taught gardener “above jealousy and suspicion”,
without the ambition to exceed his arboreal garden. Shipton, on the other
hand, is brought to the brink of extreme height and fame, whereat he refuses to
cross the sanctuary of Nanda Devi, and de-sanctify it. All three mountaineers
are domiliciliated by Aitken to respective positions, in which Tilman’s
domicile is delegitimized, Smythe’s legitimated, and Shipton’s sanctified. In
archiving this hierarchy of archons, Aitken himself assumes the patriarchic
function.
Thesis
The word “fiction” has its roots in the Latin fictio which means “to feign” or “to
fashion”. Dalrymple and Aitken, both perform the archontic role of
naturalizing a canonical hermeneutics; both do so by the reification of their
corresponding patriarchic functions, through a defense of deferential
responses to the Indian hills, ideologically or spiritually. Dalrymple’s
reification is based on a feigned revisionism of ideology in Parkes’s
representation of India where probably none existed, or an ideology that was
overpowered by her unbounded spirit. It is part of his own quest for
domiciliation. Aitken’s reification tries to fashion away from the current trend
of the technological ascent and altitudinal devaluation of the Himalayas,
thereby re-inscribing his own domicile. While Dalrymple looks back in anger
and gropes for the spoils of war, Aitken lives in historical and spiritual
continuity with the holy ghosts of Uttarakhand. To call one as more or less
archivally upright is not the requisite gesture. In either case, it is an act of
reifiction, which is far from being critically questioned. It is a fiction that
designs and defines a new architexture, that of Hill Literature.
Indian Hill Literature is a marginal canon, yet to be canonized by our
academic institutions. Its study is crucial to our English, and it therefore
requires a systematic, rather than a reifictional hermeneutics. What I have here
called Hill Literature has been a twice-rejected literature, both at the hands of
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the English, and the Indian English. In the last decade there has been
increasing complexity of academic interest in Hill Literature, although not
from Indian universities. In the shelter of a criticism of colonization, or in a
criticism of the same critique, the memory of the present literary colonization
of Hills Literature is waning unnoticeably. Quite readily the hoax and
sombreness of Hill reifictions is turning into a twice born canon, unnoticed at
birth, and re-engendered at the turn of the Third World academization. If the
architexture of Indian hills is at the freedom of the archon it is imperative to
determine the authority that has commissioned this archiving process. What
gets archived within is always for benefit of the without. The domicialiation of
the archivist is not self-determined, and neither is the house arrest a selfincarceration. The nation and the consignation are not in the same domicile.
Our task is then to re-order the exterior source where the consignation
belongs, and re-define the architexture of the hills.
There is no archive without a place of consignation, without a
technique of repetition, and without a certain exteriority. No
archive without outside. (Derrida, 14)
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References
Aitken, Bill. “An Introduction to the Literature on Nanda Devi”.
<http://www.himalayanclub.org/journal/an-introduction-to-the-literature-onnanda-devi/>, 2006.
Dalrymple, William. Begums, Thugs and Englishmen: The Journals of Fanny
Parkes. New Delhi: Penguin, 2003
_____ “Lady of the Raj”.
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/jun/09/featuresreviews.guardianreview35
>, 2007
Derrida, Jacques. “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression” Diacritics, 25 (2): 9-63,
John Hopkins University, 1995. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/465144>
Lang, John. “Himalaya Club”, in Household Words, Vol. XV, ed. Charles Dickens.
London: Ward, Lock, and Tyler, 1857.
Smythe, Frank. Kamet Conquered. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1932.
_____ The Valley of Flowers. London: Hodder, 1936.
Parkes, Fanny. Wanderings of a Pilgrim, in Search of the Picturesque, During Four-andTwenty Years in the East; With Revelations of Life in the Zenana, Vol.s I & II.
London: Pelham Richardson, 1850.
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OSMOND CIEN-MING CHANG | Travel Without Moving
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Travel Without Moving:
Ireland as An-Other England in
G.B Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island
by Osmond Chien-ming Chang
Osmond, Chien-ming Chang. “Travel Without Moving: Ireland as An-Other England
in G.B Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 2.2 (2012): 77-85.
Web.
http://www.coldnoon.com/pdf/Coldnoon_TravelPoetics_Mar’13/OsmondChienm
ingChang.pdf
Licensed Under:
"Travel Without Moving: Ireland as An-Other England in G.B Shaw’s John Bull’s Other
Island" (by Osmond Chien-ming Chang) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed
License.
http://www.coldnoon.com/copyright/Coldnoon_TravelPoetics_Mar’13/OsmondC
hienmingChang.html
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Travel Without Moving:
Ireland as An-Other England in
G.B Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island
by Osmond Chien-ming Chang
Ever since its publication in 1904, G. B. Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island, though
written for the Dublin Abbey Theatre on W. B. Yeats’s invitation, has fuelled a
lot of controversy over its nationalist ideology. Unlike previous topoi in Irish
literature, John Bull not merely expresses Shaw’s firm belief in the experiment
of the iconoclastic, but also leads readers to examine Ireland both as an Edenic
paradise and a country of dirt and poverty through two travellers, the
Anglicized Irishman, Larry Doyle, and the Glastonized Englishman, Thomas
Broadbent. While the controversial attention is often accorded to political and
religious oppression, national identity, and the Gaelic Revival movement
(Irish Literary Renaissance), this satirical comedy is seldom considered and
read as a travelogue.
In his introduction “Bernard Shaw and the Irish literary tradition” Peter
Gahan observes that Shaw’s plays, John Bull in particular, are “pertinent to the
social, political, and economic context of Ireland” (22). In the same vein,
Heniz Kosok notes that the play “mirrors in various ways the specific social
and cultural situation of Ireland at the time when it was written and
performed” (175). Like most of the contemporary Irish playwrights, Shaw
continues with the fundamental ideas of nationalism in John Bull in which the
story background is intricately set between the downfall of Parnell (1890) and
the third Home Rule Bill (1912). While John Bull reflects, in a general way, the
situation of Ireland at a particular moment in history, it can be also said that
the play expresses Shaw’s thoughts about his homeland revealing his concerns
about the possibility of Irish self-government and separation from Britain’s
influence. Shaw puts the idea in his “Preface for Politicians” that Ireland in his
views “is the only spot on earth which still produces the ideal Englishman of
history” (qtd. in Kosok, 178). It is not hard to realize that critics draw much
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attention to political and social issues embodied in this play. Especially, in
tracking the development of cultural nationalism in the Irish Literary Revival,
David Pierce has already commented that “[i]n point of fact, as John Bull’s
Other Island (1904) repeatedly demonstrates, Shaw himself was better than
Yeats at distinguishing English from Irish, not least in showing how the terms
were subject to comic reversal” (4).
The play is introduced to us as a satire on the ridiculous Irishman stock
in the figure of Tim Haffigan and his two friends, or business partners, Tom
Broadbent and Larry Doyle, who travel to a small town Ross Cullen in Ireland.
Perhaps, owing to his white man’s burden, Broadbent not only travels to
Ireland for business, but develops passionate love for everything there,
including Nora Reilly, Doyle’s old lover. Unlike Broadbent, however, Doyle
has no interest in returning to Ireland even after eighteen years; rather, he
would like to stay in London and become an Englishman instead of remaining
Irish. Because of his double-identity struggling between two nations, Doyle is
the one often viewed through the lenses of diasporic and postcolonial theories.
The present paper proposes to investigate sedentary travel (or rigid
travel) in a cross-cultural movement of John Bull which is very little examined
in the field of Shavian studies since 1995. This paper attempts to establish two
things via the Guattari-Deleuzian doctrine of travel. Firstly, it focuses on the
stock of the Anglicanizing Irish gentry as a symbolic reterritorialization within
a superior order of imperialism to highlight a representation of difference
between the self and the other. Secondly, it explores a utopian movement
towards the other, with the application of a Shavian romantic and realistic
imagination. The above discussion seeks to present an overview of the travel
narrative in Shaw’s John Bull.
In order to situate John Bull within the context of the travel narrative, a
division of nomadic and sedentary travel is imperative. In bringing to light the
illusory presence of travel, Deleuze and Guattari, in A Thousand Plateaus,
argue that “even though the nomadic trajectory may follow trails or customary
routes, it does not fulfil the function of the sedentary road, which is to parcel
out a closed space to people” (380). In one way or the other, the nomad, like the
migrant, has a certain territory and customary paths from one point to another,
but the nomad in Guattari and Deleuze’s view is the one whose travel can be
said to cling to the smooth space. Unlike sedentary space, the smooth space is
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not limited “by walls, enclosures, and roads between enclosures,” so that it has
no points and paths within a certain territory or the center. In the light of this
argument, the movement of the nomad, as well as the smooth space, is
deterritorialized without being reterritorialized. Guattari and Deleuze write:
If the nomad can be called the Deterritorialized par excellence, it is
precisely because there is no reterritorialization afterward as with
the migrant, or upon something else as with sedentary (the
sedentary’s relation with the earth is mediatized by something else,
a property regime, a State apparatus). With the nomad, on the
contrary, it is deterritorialization that constitutes the relation to the
earth…(381)
Syed Manzurul Islam, along with Guattari and Deleuze’s, not just simply
argues that the nomad is the one “who moves without moving,” but also links
this movement with the ethic of travel (10). Here Islam’s concept of travel
without moving does not mean that nomadic travel is the one without motion
or toward the centre (inside) but, it denotes a decentred and deterritorialized
scheme of travel. Because of deterritorialization, the nomad does not locate
itself in a striated regime, but, in contrast, lives in a smooth space not enclosed
by any rigid line. In other words, nomadic travel is, in fact, not around a fixed
location but in a boundless space, because it performs without
reterritorialization. As such, it can be said that, home for a nomadic traveller is
anywhere and at the same time everywhere.
Examining the case of John Bull it is not hard to find that Broadbent is
the one who never leaves England like Adela Quested in E.M. Forster’s A
Passage to India, even though both of them set off from London and arrive in
another country. With a set of sensational ideas or prejudices about Ireland
drawn from the Music Hall, Broadbent goes there driven by the white man’s
burden, with the desire to see nations outside the center (Britain). As to the
Stage Irish, it is not limited to a misrepresentation of Tim Haffigan, a man
born in Glasgow, Scotland, as authentic, but this ridiculous arch-image of
Irishman, as pointed out by Doyle, has already been built in the theatre for a
long time:
[Broadbent] But he spoke – he behaved just like an Irishman.
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[Doyle] Like an Irishman!! Is it possible that you don’t know that
all this top-o-the-morning and broth-o-a-boy and more-power-toyour-elbow business is as peculiar to England as the Albert Hall
concerts of Irish music are? No Irishman ever talks like that in
Ireland, or ever did, or ever will…He [Haffigan] picks them at the
theatre or the music hall. Haffigan learnt the rudiments from his
father, who came from my part of Ireland…(13, italics mine)
As a result, Broadbent’s ignorance and misunderstanding about the Irish is
predictable, especially for his misrecognition of Haffigan as the real Irishman.
Being a non-native, Broadbent, cannot, or even has no ability to, tell a
Scottish’s imitation of the Irish accent and behaviour. Just as Islam writes, “the
truth of binary difference…cannot subsist without an epistemological plane
and a representational frame” (52), what Tom Broadbent knows about an
Irishman is in fact based upon what he thinks a real Irishman should be. Partly
because of this misunderstanding and partly due to fantasizing the other island
outside of England, Ireland, to an extent, becomes a country or a place for
Broadbent’s business to develop. Like Mrs Moore in Forster’s A Passage,
Broadbent is the one with a hungry heart to touch and sense the atmosphere of
a foreign country but, definitely unlike her, he is not a visitor to Ireland for his
sincere desire to learn about a new culture, but in the capacity of a
businessman looking for development, and providing his English guidance to
the Irish.
In the following passage, Broadbent behaves no different from a
colonizer:
Broadbent. (quite reassured). Of course I am. Our guidance is the
important thing. We English must place our capacity for
government without stint at the service of nations who are less
fortunately endowed in that respect; so as to allow them to develop
in perfect freedom to the English level of self-government, you
[Doyle] know. You understand me? (16-17)
Broadbent attempts to distinguish and make a division between England and
Ireland, or even, between England and other countries. In this sense, even after
crossing the threshold of the sea between Ireland and England, Broadbent
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never at all passages himself to a foreign nation. Even in Ireland he still adheres
to Britain; he never deterritorializes. Despite the fact that Broadbent shows his
mobility along the smooth surface to Ireland, he does not erase the boundary
between the inside and the outside. On the contrary, with the white man’s
burden to Ireland, he is not merely rigid to think of the position of the Irish,
but also to forget “the memories of the inside” that has him “re-claimed by the
rigid boundary and folded back into the inside” (Islam 53). By this fact, he is,
as this study suggests, the one who travels to Ireland without moving, in the
context of reterritorialization, and fits in Islam’s concept of the sedentary travel
or the Hegelian – “the same re-turns to the same” (53).
Further, turning to the case of Ireland and trying to answer Broadbent’s
question for Doyle, the words above, in Broadbent’s mind, reveal an attitude of
colonialism. To the Irish, England, according to Stanley Weintraub, “meant
colonial rule from Dublin Castle” (434), and, among other characters in John
Bull, Broadbent is the one who “wants to turn the region – exploit it might be
another view – into a tourist hotel with golf course and villagers of commercial
quaintness” (433). In addition to this, Broadbent, as Keegan observes, “spends
his life inefficiently admiring the thoughts of great men, and efficiently serving
the cupidity of base money hunters” (95). Certainly, Broadbent’s optimistic
and sentimental approach towards Ireland as the other island of England and
his pragmatic-materialist attitude makes Ireland an Edenic paradise. Ireland
being on the fringes of the empire, and yet within the premises of capitalism, a
nomadic movement is somehow hard to be achieved. Thus, Broadbent’s travel
to Ireland can be said to be a sedentary travel within the dominant modes of
polis-ing.
However, Ireland in Doyle’s view is a country full of dirt and poverty
that makes him reluctant to return to Ross Cullen. Especially at the moment
when Broadbent asks him to go with him, Doyle replies that he has “an instinct
against going back to Ireland: an instinct so strong that I’d rather go with you
to the South Pole than to Ross Cullen.” Here, he explains the main reason for
not going back:
Doyle. Never mind my heart…How many of all those millions that
have left Ireland have ever come back or wanted to come back? But
what’s the use of talking to you? Three verse of twaddle about the
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Irish emigrant “sitting on the stile, Mary,” or three hours of Irish
patriotism in Bermondsey or the Scotland Division of Liverpool,
go further with you than all the facts that stare you in the face. (14,
italics mine)
Recapitulating Guattari and Deleuze’s division between the nomad and the
migrant, Doyle satisfies the fundamental requirements of travel, above all,
traveling from one point to another and then returning back to the original
place; he cannot be a nomadic traveller in this sense. Instead, he is a sedentary
traveller like Broadbent. When Doyle refuses to go home, it at least contains
two meanings here: one is his reluctance of returning back, and another is his
intention to locate himself in the dominant modes of the polis, referring to
England. And it is this very fact of Doyle clinging to the negativity of
nomadology that features the foundation of his sedentary culture. Despite that
Doyle’s travel fits the ethic of travel, that is, a movement of departure and
arrival, he is the one “along with the route of power,” that never leaves or
escapes from the centre (Islam 43). With regard to Doyle’s travel, it cannot be
called travel because “it can only either be a ‘travelling incarnation’ or the
sedentary movement of power on the adventure of conquest, knowledge and
commerce”, viewed in the light of Islam. As such, both Broadbent and Doyle’s
travel, as we’ve already seen, for its remarking walls, or reterritorializing
territory as a barrier between the inside and the outside, or a refusal of
encountering the other, reveals symptoms of sedentary travel culture in John
Bull. Even though they cross the threshold of the sea between two countries,
they never reach the smooth space because their travel not only moves without
moving but in the end returns to the rigid boundary acknowledged and
allowed by the law/force of the inside.
Although Shaw, as Shavian critics have pointed out, attempts to write
John Bull for specific political purposes, I have sought to explicate not so much
the relationship between two countries (England and Ireland) in the present
study, but rather placed it under the lens of the travel narrative and explored
sedentary movement in the play. Whether or not Shaw had ever thought to
create his characters to represent nationalism or a diasporic nostalgia, or
otherwise, what I have tried to show in this study is that John Bull play is not
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limited to just a political reading but opens itself to our investigation of
possible issues and trends of travel in it.
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References
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1987.
Islam, Syed Manzurul. The Ethics of Travel: From Marco Polo to Kafka. Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1996.
Kosok, Heinz. “John Bull’s Other Eden.” Shaw: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies,
30: 175-90, 2010.
Pierce, David. “Culture Nationalism and the Irish Literary Revival.” International
Journal of English Studies, 2(2): 1-22, 2012.
Shaw, George Bernard. John Bull’s Other Island. The Pennsylvania State University,
2003.
<http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/gbshaw/JBsOtherIsland.pdf>.
Weintraub, Stanley. “Bernard Shaw’s Other Irelands: 1915-1919.” English Literature in
Transition, 1880-1920, 42(4): 433-42, 1999.
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SAPNA DUDEJA | Studying Alternate Protest in Cyber Space
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Studying Alternative Protest in Cyber Space:
Through the Prism of the Pink Chaddi Campaign
by Sapna Dudeja
Dudeja, Sapna. “Studying Alternative Protest in Cyber Space: Through the Prism of
the Pink Chaddi Campaign.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 2.2 (2012): 86-96. Web.
http://www.coldnoon.com/pdf/Coldnoon_TravelPoetics_Mar’13/SapnaDudeja.pd
f
Licensed Under:
"Studying Alternative Protest in Cyber Space: Through the Prism of the Pink Chaddi
Campaign" (by Sapna Dudeja) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a
http://www.coldnoon.com/copyright/Coldnoon_TravelPoetics_Mar’13/SapnaDud
eja.html
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Studying Alternative Protest in Cyber Space:
Through the Prism of the Pink Chaddi Campaign
by Sapna Dudeja
Though social networking sites and the internet have often been used to
garner support within the socio-politico-cultural domain, something
unprecedented happened in India recently that gave a new dimension to such
sites within the Indian context. On January 24, 2009, and later, members
belonging to the right wing extremist organization Sri Ram Sena attacked
women in Mangalore pubs. Incidents of violence supported by similar right
wing units were reported from across the nation in subsequent days. To
protest against such organized violence perpetrated against women, ‘A
Consortium of Pub-Going, Loose and Forward Women’, a group on
Facebook1, organized a campaign which they called ‘the pink chaddi
campaign’ (henceforth referred to as the PCC). The group was formed on
February 5, 2009, with a modest membership. It grew exponentially, touching
a remarkable 58,703 mark as on March 30, 2009. Later, a similar group by the
1
Facebook is a social networking website owned by Facebook Inc. The
founder of Facebook is Mark Zuckerberg, a student at Harvard. Facebook came up
from Harvard University’s version of Hot or Not Facemash. Facemash juxtaposed
photos drawn from the online facebooks of nine houses and asked users to choose the
“hotter” person. Facebook began by offering membership only to Harvard students.
Later, Zuckerberg included Eduardo Saverin (business aspects), Dustin Moskovitz
(programmer), Andrew McCollum (graphic artist), and Chris Hughes in his team and
it spread to other Universities like Yale and Stanford. Starting with an investment of
500,000 US$ from PayPal and 12.7 million US$ from Accel Partners, Facebook saw a
huge loss of around 3 million US$ in the beginning. Companies like Yahoo, Microsoft
and Google tried to buy some stakes in Facebook but only Microsoft was successful in
buying 1.6% shares of Facebook for 240 million US$ and the value of Facebook rose to
15 Billion US$.
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name of the campaign itself was formed on Orkut2 as well. Nisha Susan, the
founding member, urged people to send ‘pink chaddis’ to Pramod Muthalik,
the chief of Sri Ram Sena. Hundreds and thousands of ‘chaddis’ were sent to
the chief’s office and the campaign was hailed as extremely successful when the
chief called off the plan to disrupt Valentine’s Day celebrations across the
nation and was willing to talk across the table.
The campaign also triggered off similar campaigns like ‘the pub
bharo andolan’, initiated by Renuka Choudhary, Minister of State for Women
and Child Development; ‘the free hug campaign’; ‘take the night’, organized
by a group called Fearless Karnataka or Nirbhaya Karnataka; ‘blank noise
picnic’, organized by a group of the same name on Facebook; ‘the pink
condom campaign’, organized by a group on Facebook called ‘The Selfrespecting Hindus’ Initiative for Equality and Liberty with Dignity or The
SHIELD3, to protest against the “sickular (sic) Pink Chaddi walas”. The first
four were supportively aligned with the PCC and aimed at challenging
Muthalik and Sri Ram Sena by having a mass Valentine’s Day celebration.
‘The pink condom campaign’, on the other hand was launched as a counter
2
Orkut, as most people would know, is a website for social networking named
after the creator Orkut Büyükkökten, a Turkish software engineer. The website was
launched on 22nd January 2003 and is managed and operated by Google. By the end of
2006, Orkut became the most visited website in Brazil and was therefore fully
managed and operated by Google, Brazil. In the beginning, membership was through
invitation only but as the number of users kept increasing, the website became open to
all. The features of the website were basically blogging, messaging, scrapping (leaving
friends a message), adding and viewing pictures, videos, blogs and comments. Earlier,
everyone could view images, information and personal data of other members but now
users can set their own levels of privacy.
3
This group, on Facebook, states that it has three main missions: first, “to
speak up against malicious vilification of Hinduism and Hindu culture, and to expose
the coordinated attempts by sickulars (trinity of Evangelists, Jihadis and Communists)
to project Hinduism as the root cause of all evils in the Indian society.” Second, “to act
as a pressure group on saffron organizations (mostly referred as Sangh Parivar by the
mainstream Indian media) who sometimes unfortunately indulge in disagreeable
deeds and acts in the name of Hindu religion and culture.” Third, “to actively work
towards betterment of the Hindu society in particular and Indian society in general, by
fighting vices like casteism, crime and corruption and lending a helping hand in
humanitarian operations.”
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campaign. The group behind the campaign describes itself as The SHIELD or
alternatively as ‘Consortium of Assertive and Proud Hindus who are Sick of
Indian Sickulars Conspiring to Attribute Every Vice in the Society to
Hinduism’. This group is critical of both Sri Ram Sena’s indulgence in
disagreeable acts in the name of Hinduism and the PCC as a “sickular” (sick +
secular) response to the same.
Though the ramifications of these campaigns have been numerous, one
path-breaking accomplishment of these campaigns is that they foreground the
idea of cyber space as the new public sphere. Jurgen Habermas is one of the
key theoreticians to have talked about the public sphere. According to him,
modernity was ushered in when the bourgeois came to power through the
public sphere:
In its clash with the arcane and bureaucratic practices of the
absolutist state, the emergent bourgeoisie gradually replaced a
public sphere in which the ruler’s power was merely represented
before the people with a sphere in which state authority was
publicly monitored through informed and critical discourse by the
people.4
But once they came to power, they began to regulate and thereby close forums
of public interaction so that they could remain in power. And that is why the
dream of emancipation of modernity failed. Rationality got splintered as there
was no communication between the different spheres through which
emancipatory politics could be worked out. So according to him, the task of
post modernity is to achieve “communicative rationality” and consensus
through the public sphere. While Habermas primarily talks about the public
sphere as a space where consent or “public opinion” can be generated, I have
used it to imply a space where protest can be launched. Through these
campaigns, the cyber space emerged as an alternative space where protest
could be launched and online social networking could be used to mobilize
people and resources towards a cause. These campaigns initiated an online
4
Jürgen Habermas. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An
Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. (German, 1962, English Translation,
1989); The MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, pp. 305.
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forum where people from different walks of life could articulate and discuss the
burning questions of the day and more importantly, could bring about a
change. Especially the PCC was successful in making a ‘real’ difference and
showing the potential of the cyber world as a domain where real problems can
not only be articulated but also solved (the extent to which they get solved is
of course debatable and could form the focus of another paper). Since it is a
new domain (especially in India, it is a recent phenomenon), one needs to
analyze it further to explore its potential as a tool of resistance.
When one talks of cyber space and feminism, the category one is
looking at is called cyber feminism – when new scientific developments and
technology are used towards liberating women.5 Cyber feminism, says Sadie
Plant, director of the Centre for Research into Cybernetic Culture at Warwick
University in England, is “an alliance between women, machinery, and new
technology. There is a long-standing relationship between information
technology and women’s liberation.”6 Donna Haraway’s essay “A Manifesto
for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s” is
generally accepted as marking the beginning of cyber feminism. According to
Haraway, “A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and
organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.”(83) In the
essay, she presents an argument for “pleasure in the confusion of boundaries”
(83) and the utopian ideal of “imagining a world without gender” (84). A
majority of western cyber feminists have been preoccupied with the analysis of
Haraway’s concept of the cyborg – either advocating it as enabling or
condemning it as disabling in terms of the feminist project. In India, the fusion
of feminist concerns and the cyber space gave birth to the PCC. The PCC can
be seen as inaugurating a new kind of cyber feminism, opening a new avenue
that cyber feminists around the world can explore further. It is a new kind of
5
While Sadie Plant defines cyber feminism in terms of women’s empowerment
and technology (in general), there are others who define it specifically in relation to
cyber space. However, the concept remains fluid and a strict definition cannot be
provided.
6
As quoted in Hari Kunzru’s “You Are Cyborg”. Issue 5.02 (Feb 1997), Wired
News. <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.02/ffharaway.html> Date of access:
29 March 2009.
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protest, unthought-of till now, having far reaching effect on the real world. The
Indian variety of cyber feminism, it seems, has something significant to
contribute to the debates within the domain of cyber feminism in general.
While one can be hopeful of its potential, the success of just one campaign
does not give us enough reasons not to be cautious against the same.
Thanks to the success of the PCC, technophorics would be one up over
technophobics, especially theoreticians like Howard Rheingold who, in his
book The Virtual Community: Finding Connection in a Computerized World
(1994)7, states that through the cyber space we have “access to a tool that
could bring conviviality and understanding into our lives and might help
revitalize the public sphere.” (14) Further, he opines:
Virtual communities are social aggregations that emerge from the
Net when enough people carry on [electronically mediated] public
discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form
webs of personal relationships in cyber space…When the
automobile centric, suburban, fast food, shopping mall way of life
eliminated many of these ‘third places’ from traditional towns and
cities around the world, the social fabric of existing communities
started shredding… [computer mediated communication is driven
by] the hunger for community that grows in the breasts of people
around the world as more and more informal public spaces
disappear from our real lives. (5-6)
Clearly, according to Rheingold, cyber space is that utopian space where we
shall be able to recover the meaning and the experience of community,
recapture the sense of a “shared consciousness” (245), make up for the loss of
a sense of social belonging, rebuild a sort of small-town public sphere – a world
where every citizen is networked to every other citizen and every member
(who wishes to participate in the discussion) has a voice. It can become “one
of the informal public places where people rebuild the aspects of community
that were lost when the malt shop became the mall.” (25-26) Through this
7
Since this book is not easily available, all the references are as quoted in Kevin
Robin’s essay “Cyberspace and the World We Live In” in The Cybercultures Reader,
edited by David Bell and Barbara M.Kennedy.
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medium, it is claimed, we shall be able to construct new sorts of community,
linked by commonality of interest and affinity rather than by accidents of
location, carry on the project of social revitalization and renewal, “revitalize
citizen-based democracy” (14), transcend national frontiers and build a
“global civil society” (56), form “not only community but true spiritual
communion” (115) in “communitarian places on-line” (56). The successful
PCC seems like the real manifestation of Rheingold’s vision. But what is
problematic is that he seems to suggest that formation of a community and
hence a public space will alone ensure deliverance. He does not really stress on
how this will or should lead to action. For instance - what kind of community is
formed, who are the people who form it, who can access and afford to be a part
of such a community (the question of class is extremely pertinent here,
especially in the Indian context, where not many people have access to the
internet)8, what is their agenda and plan of action, what kind of an intervention
do they seek in the real world (if they seek any), how effective are their
strategies, what is the extent of the gap between their conception and
execution - are some of the questions that one needs to engage with in order to
explore the connection between community formation, public sphere, consent
generation or subversion.
The cyber world has definitely emerged as the new public space but the
formation of a new public sphere and the launching of debates in the same do
not necessarily ensure its use for a political purpose. So many online
communities do not have a political agenda at all. Even when they do have an
agenda and launch a movement, they cannot ensure its success. Since the
cyber community is an open community, once launched, protests gain a life of
their own. A close study of the language used by bloggers/ members of the
PCC is extremely revealing. Besides exposing their subject positions and
ideologies, it shows how, in the public sphere, through and with the use of
language, an issue that started off more as a cultural debate concerning pub
8
In his essay, “ALT.CIVILIZATIONS.FAQ: Cyberspace as the darker side of
the west”, Ziauddin Sardar points out; “Internet access is an expensive luxury… One
can feed a family of four in Bangladesh for a whole year for that sort of money…In the
Third World…only the reasonably well-off can afford access to the Internet. That
leaves most of humanity at the mercy of real reality…So most of the people on the
Internet are white, upper-and middle-class Americans and Europeans; and most of
them, are men…less than one per cent of the people on-line are women.” (739-40)
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culture, Indian culture and the relationship between the two and as a gender
issue attains different dimensions. It became a religious (Christian/West
versus Hindu/non-West) issue with religious fanatics linking ‘chaddi’ as a
cheap form of protest with pub culture, western influence, Christianity and
loose behavior. For instance, let us consider three different entries:
User 1: If you don’t like to send them chaddis, send them idol of
Lord Rama and ask them to follow Him rather than beating up
women for whatever reasons.
User 2: Now chaddis has (sic) to be divided into hindu christian
and muslims!!! we have to think on seperating (sic) based on
relegion (sic)!!
User 3: Initiated by Nisha Susan, a Christian, this is a Christian
conspiracy to lower moral standards of Indian women. Obviously,
the Pink Chaddi Campaign is financed by some Baptist group. The
Campaign is vulgar since gifting the panties is an after-act token of
appreciation of good performance, in the West. That the Christian
initiative dares not send Chaddies to Moslem clerics shows their
true agenda.9
Clearly, the verbal attacks, climate of abuse, linguistic warfare triggered of by
members as well as non-members in the online forums generate dialogue and
add new angles to the issue at hand.
According to Habermas, the cyber domain is already controlled by
capital, and therefore cannot be used for subversive ends.
Use of the Internet has both broadened and fragmented the
contexts of communication…But at the same time, the less formal,
horizontal cross-linking of communication channels weakens the
achievements of traditional media. This focuses the attention of an
anonymous and dispersed public on select topics and information,
allowing citizens to concentrate on the same critically filtered
issues and journalistic pieces at any given time. The price we pay
9
From the official website of Mutiny Media Private Limited, 2007. Entries can
be found in the discussion forum of the pink chaddi campaign. User 1 and 2 –
Februray 14, 2009. User 3- February 20, 2009.
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for the growth in egalitarianism offered by the Internet is the
decentralised access to unedited stories. In this medium,
contributions by intellectuals lose their power to create a focus.10
However, through the example of the PCC, in this paper, I have argued that
the potential of using cyber space for subversive ends cannot be denied. But
again, by stating that cyber space has the potential to be appropriated for
formulating a politics of enablement, I do not mean that it is a benign or
utopian space which can solve all real problems. In fact, no technology is
totally benign or totally evil. It is a double-edged sword. It is open to both use
and abuse. As a matter of fact, cybernetics is more often abused than used. To
realize that, one only needs to study the increase in the rate of cyber-crime in
today’s world and the havoc caused by hackers. In his essay,
“ALT.CIVILIZATIONS.FAQ: Cyberspace as the darker side of the west”,
Ziauddin Sardar states that,
Cybercrime is going to be the crime of the future. Organized crime
is a $ 750 – billion – a – year enterprise, the drug trafficking
generates revenues of $ 400 billion to $ 500 billion; much of this
money finds its way into cyber space, where it is totally out of
governments’ control, where it can lose itself in split-second deals,
and where it is legitimized by the international movement of more
than $ 1 trillion a day. (738)
Further, he adds, “On-line terrorism is not too far away and most of the
early proponents of this sick art are hackers.” (739) Also, “half of cyberspace
which is not commercial is largely ‘toilet wall’.” (741) In the context of virtual
communities, Sardar states that,
A cyberspace community is self-selecting, exactly what a real
community is not; it is contingent and transient, depending on a
shared interest of those with the attention span of a thirty second
soundbite…In a cyberspace community you can shut people off at
10
As quoted in <http://maximiliansenges.blogspot.com/2008/04/socialmedia-in-cyberspace-public.html> Date of access: 29 March 2009.
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the click of a mouse and go elsewhere. One has therefore no
responsibility of any kind…Thus the totalizing on-line character of
cyberspace
ensures
that
the
marginalized
stay
marginalized…[C]yberspace is to community as Rubber Rita is to
woman. (744)
In my opinion, virtual space has meaning only in relation to real space.
When virtual space/ identity/ protest/ culture/ life aims to replace or
substitute real space/ identity/ protest/ culture/ life, it can become dangerous.
For instance, if desire for a virtual protest/ community has the impact of
weakening the desire for a real one, then it can no longer be considered
efficacious; if one’s virtual identity is the only proof of one’s real existence, one
is in danger of extinction at the click of a button. One should be able to locate
the virtual within the real. When new technologies are used to respond to
regressive and solipsistic desires only, it is time to check them and make them
morally and politically responsible.
I would conclude by stating that in this paper I have highlighted an
incident of the formulation of an enabling politics within cyberspace – not to
say that it is homogenously good but to show that although it is abused, it can
be appropriated for a good cause, to make a difference in the real world - and
that is the way forward. One has to think of new, creative ways of resistance.
Since in the cyber age one cannot ignore the interface between the cyber space
and real world, one should try to make use of this new domain to empower
oneself for a socially beneficial cause. Sending a pink ‘chaddi’ to Muthalik, to
my mind, was a very creative, novel, Gandhian and effective way of protesting,
making a real point through the use of virtual means. The pink ‘chaddis’ that
became a tool of non-violent resistance against moral policing succeeded in
achieving the desired effects. The Sri Ram Sena was so unsettled with receiving
so many ‘chaddis’ that its members could not even decide what to do with
them. First, the party decided to send them to an orphanage, then to publically
auction them, then to send saris as return ‘gifts’, then to return them to the
parents of girls who had sent them and finally to publically burn them. The
underwear, I suppose, has never before played such a significant role in the
history of protest movements in India.
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References
Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.
Habermas, Jurgen. “Modernity versus Postmodernity”. A PostmodernReader. Ed.s.
Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutcheon. Albany, State University of New York
Press, 1993: 91-104
Haraway, Donna. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist
Feminism in the 1980s”. Socialist Review, No. 80. 1985. Also pub. in The
Postmodern Turn: New Perspectives on Social Theory. Ed. Steven Seidman. New
York, Cambridge University Press, 1994: 82-115
Kunzru, Hari. “You Are Cyborg”. Wired News. 5(02): 1997.
<http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.02/ffharaway.html>
Robins, Kevin. “Cyberspace and the World We Live In”. The Cybercultures Reader.
Eds. David Bell and Barbara M.Kennedy. London: Routledge, 2000: 77-95.
Sardar, Ziauddin. “ALT.CIVILIZATIONS.FAQ: Cyberspace as the darker side of the
west”. The Cybercultures Reader. Eds. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy.
London: Routledge, 2000: 732-52.
Internet sources:
Orkut.com. http://www.orkut.com/ 7 March 2009
Facebook.com. <http://www.facebook.com/> 30 March 2009
Mutiny Media Private Limited. <http://mutiny.in/2009/02/09/pinkchaddi-campaign/> 7 March 2009
Blog-a-loreans: Brand of Bangalore Bloggers.
<http://blogaloreans.in/2009/02/hug-karo-and-pub-bharo-andolan-inbangalore-to-dare-the-ram-sene/> 8 March 2009.
<http://thepinkchaddicampaign.blogspot.com/> 8 March 2009.
<http://blog.blanknoise.org/> 8 March 2009.
<http://thepinkcondomcampaign.blogspot.com/> 9 March 2009.
<http://hindushield.blogspot.com/> 9 March 2009.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberfeminism> 29 March 2009.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_sphere> 29 March 2009.
<http://maximiliansenges.blogspot.com/2008/04/social-media-incyberspace-public.html> 29 March 2009.
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CONTRIBUTORS
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Contributors
Shoshannah Ganz is an Assistant Professor of English at Grenfell Campus,
Memorial University, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. Her interests are
Canadian literature, religious influence on Canadian writing, travel writing,
and women’s writing. Ganz has published on a number of Canadian authors
and co-edited The Ivory Thought: Essays on Al Purdy, pub. by University of
Ottawa Press. Her monograph on Canadian Literary Pilgrimage is under peer
review with Wilfred Laurier University Press. Shoshannah’s current book
project examines the influence of Eastern thought on Canadian women
travellers writing about South East Asia from 1850-1940.
Kelly Ann Jacobson is a student of M.A. in Fiction at the Johns Hopkins
University. She is the Poetry Editor for Outside In Literary & Travel Magazine.
Jacobson’s poetry has been published in Wooden Teeth magazine and Outside
In Literary & Travel Magazine. Her work can be found at
www.kellyannjacobson.com.
Jean L. Kreiling’s poetry appears frequently in print and online journals and
in anthologies. She is a winner of the Able Muse Write Prize, and has been a
finalist for the Frost Farm Prize, the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, and the
Richard Wilbur Poetry Award. She lives in Massachusetts, USA.
Fahredin Shehu graduated from Prishtina University, Oriental Studies. His
published volumes include Nun, Invisible Pulrality, Nektarina, Elemental 99,
Dismantle of Hate, Plemroma’s Dew, and Mulberies. His work has been
translated into French, Italian, Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Macedonian,
Roma, Swedish, Turkish, Arabic, Romanian, Persian, An ambassador of Poets
to Albania by Poetas del Mundo, Santiago de Chile, Shehu is a member of
World Poets Association, Greece and the Kosovo Pen Center.
Page | 97
CONTRIBUTORS
ISSN 2278-9650
Mohan Rana, finished his undergraduate studies from the University of Delhi.
Originally from New Delhi, he lives in Bath, Somerset, United Kingdom. He is
a very prolific Hindi poet and has so far published seven volumes of poetry –
Jagah (Dwelling), Jaise Janam Koi Darwaza (As If Life Were a Door), Subah ki
Dak (Morning's Post), Is Chhor Par (On This Shore), Pathar Ho Jayegi Nadi
(Stone-River), Dhoop Ke Andhere (In the Darkness of the Sun), and Ret ka Pul
(Sand-Bridge).
Ronojoy Sircar is writing a dissertation for M.Phil in English Literature at
Jamia Millia Islamia University, New Delhi. His poetry has been published in
Nether and Full of Crow.
Manash Bhattacharjee wrote his dissertation for Ph.D at Jawaharlal Nehru
University, New Delhi. His is a frequent writer for The Hindu and Outlook. He
is an independent research scholar and poet living in New Delhi.
Jenny Morse is currently writing a dissertation for Ph.D the University of
Illinois, Chicago, USA. She an instructor at Colorado State University. Her
poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Notre Dame Review, Wilderness
House, Quiddity, and Terrain. Her critical work has appeared in or is
forthcoming in Seismopolite, The Montreal Review, The Ofi Press, and the
Journal of Contemporary Thought.
Mitali Gangopadhyay, Assisatnt Professor in English, teaches in M.D.M.
College, West Bengal State University, Kolkata. She has published in India,
and outside, on a wide range of topics, from Shakespeare to contemporary
Indian English literature. Ganguly has written a monograph on Ruskin Bond
and worked on a research project on the Anglo-Indians in Kolkata. Her areas
of interest are Cinema and Literature, Postcolonial writings and 1857 Mutiny.
Arup K Chatterjee is writing a dissertation for Ph.D at Jawaharlal Nehru
University, New Delhi. His work has been published in Indian and
International journals and anthologies.
Page | 98
CONTRIBUTORS
ISSN 2278-9650
Osmond Chien-ming Chang is writing a dissertation for Ph.D in English
Literature at National Chengchi University, Taiwan, R.O.C. His research
interests are travelogues, English Romanticism, diaspora, fantasy literature,
and trauma studies.
Sapna Dudeja is presently writing a dissertation for Ph.D in English Literature
at Jamia Millia Islamia University, New Delhi. She teaches English at the
University of Delhi.
Page | 99
EDITORIAL BOARD
ISSN 2278-9650
Editorial Board
EDITOR
Arup K Chatterjee
Poet, Critic and Researcher
Jawaharlal Nehru University
New Delhi, India
ASSISTANT EDITOR
Amrita Ajay
Researcher, and Teacher of English
University of Delhi, India
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
K Satchidanandan
Poet, and Former Professor of English, University of Calicut
Former Editor of Indian Literature, the Journal of Sahitya Akademi
New Delhi, India
Lisa Thatcher
Writer
Sydney, Australia
Page | 100
EDITORIAL BOARD
ISSN 2278-9650
Sudeep Sen
Poet, and Editor of Atlas Magazine
Editorial Director of Aark Arts Publishers
New Delhi, India, London UK
GJV Prasad
Poet, Novelist, and Critic
Professor of English, Jawaharlal Nehru University
Vice Chair, Indian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language
Studies
Editor of Journal of the School of Languages
New Delhi, India
Sebastien Doubinsky
Poet, Novelist, and Critic
Researcher, and Lecturer, Aesthetics and Communication
Editor of Le Zaporogue Journal (pub. In French & English)
Aarhus University, Denmark
Page | 101
EDITORIAL BOARD
ISSN 2278-9650
Page | 102

issue vi | mar

Transcription

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