From Amitabh Bachchan's line in Namakhalal "English is a very phunny language" to the hilarious l... more From Amitabh Bachchan's line in Namakhalal "English is a very phunny language" to the hilarious lesson of mixed up English in Phas Gaye re Obama or to the use of English(?) in the recent title Mujhse Fraaandship Karoge? , the 5000 crore industry of Bollywood Cinema has presented the audience with comedy scenes through the use of English language. With big banners like Amir Khan Productions making movies like Dhobhi Ghat and Delhi Belly originally in English and then dubbing them in Hindi, one is bound to question the currency of this language in the most absorbed popular bases in India: Bollywood. Largely understudied, Bollywood cinema produces the maximum number of films per year and is one of the most popular media to travel globally. What charm does it create for its global audience and what is the framework through which it functions? What impact does this language have in cinema and how are the film-makers using the language? How can this site of entertainment, which is so culturally enriched, also become a site of questioning and enquiry?
Woolf's first novel The Voyage Out, flows from characteristic conversation of objective perceptio... more Woolf's first novel The Voyage Out, flows from characteristic conversation of objective perceptions to conflicts of muted perspectives eventually subsuming in silence, a silence as powerful as words and a silence which needed the same effort as conversation. In her diaries and letters she struggles with not only how to comprehend the space of novel writing but also how to lucidly portray the silences between conversations, and to her latter seemed more important, as one can see her toying with this idea all throughout her oeuvre. This paper would like to understand what silence meant for Virginia Woolf and why the in-between silences mattered to her and why she constantly projects that in her writing by charting a literary landscape for us with distinguishing spaces and the sounds and silences it envelopes, I would explore this through a discussion of the narrative of her first novel The Voyage Out.
Anita Desai in her fictional landscapes adeptly practices “thinking with memory” her novels, inst... more Anita Desai in her fictional landscapes adeptly practices “thinking with memory” her novels, instead of tracing the cultural history through fictional memoryscapes, presents us with fractured identities and shards of memory, questioning cultural history. In her novel Clear Light of Day (1980) placed against the backdrop of one of the most traumatic episodes of cultural history, Partition of 1947, Desai explores the lives of four siblings in their old Delhi house, through the memories of two sisters, Bim (short for Bimla) and Tara. The narrative takes us to the “subliminal aspects of everyday”, and highlights the post-Partition trauma that gets enveloped in the silences of the past, presenting a memory that can never be commemorated.
From Amitabh Bachchan's line in Namakhalal "English is a very phunny language" to the hilarious l... more From Amitabh Bachchan's line in Namakhalal "English is a very phunny language" to the hilarious lesson of mixed up English in Phas Gaye re Obama or to the use of English(?) in the recent title Mujhse Fraaandship Karoge? , the 5000 crore industry of Bollywood Cinema has presented the audience with comedy scenes through the use of English language. With big banners like Amir Khan Productions making movies like Dhobhi Ghat and Delhi Belly originally in English and then dubbing them in Hindi, one is bound to question the currency of this language in the most absorbed popular bases in India: Bollywood. Largely understudied, Bollywood cinema produces the maximum number of films per year and is one of the most popular media to travel globally. What charm does it create for its global audience and what is the framework through which it functions? What impact does this language have in cinema and how are the film-makers using the language? How can this site of entertainment, which is so culturally enriched, also become a site of questioning and enquiry?
Woolf's first novel The Voyage Out, flows from characteristic conversation of objective perceptio... more Woolf's first novel The Voyage Out, flows from characteristic conversation of objective perceptions to conflicts of muted perspectives eventually subsuming in silence, a silence as powerful as words and a silence which needed the same effort as conversation. In her diaries and letters she struggles with not only how to comprehend the space of novel writing but also how to lucidly portray the silences between conversations, and to her latter seemed more important, as one can see her toying with this idea all throughout her oeuvre. This paper would like to understand what silence meant for Virginia Woolf and why the in-between silences mattered to her and why she constantly projects that in her writing by charting a literary landscape for us with distinguishing spaces and the sounds and silences it envelopes, I would explore this through a discussion of the narrative of her first novel The Voyage Out.
Anita Desai in her fictional landscapes adeptly practices “thinking with memory” her novels, inst... more Anita Desai in her fictional landscapes adeptly practices “thinking with memory” her novels, instead of tracing the cultural history through fictional memoryscapes, presents us with fractured identities and shards of memory, questioning cultural history. In her novel Clear Light of Day (1980) placed against the backdrop of one of the most traumatic episodes of cultural history, Partition of 1947, Desai explores the lives of four siblings in their old Delhi house, through the memories of two sisters, Bim (short for Bimla) and Tara. The narrative takes us to the “subliminal aspects of everyday”, and highlights the post-Partition trauma that gets enveloped in the silences of the past, presenting a memory that can never be commemorated.
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