Papers by Dr. Radha S . Gautam
The end of all education, all training should be man making'
The partition of India is a defining moment in the history of the Indian sub-continent. The year ... more The partition of India is a defining moment in the history of the Indian sub-continent. The year 1947 marked the birth of two nations: India and Pakistan on the basis of religion, but in reality it marked a division of the Indian Muslims, first 1947 and later in 1971. The present paper offers a close reading of Rahi Masoom Reza's Adha Gaon and examines the intervention of the national politics into the local domestic spaces of the common people in the context of partition. The paper analyzes how nationalism and communal politics interrupted and rearranged domestic lives of these people by exploring the love of its residents for their village. It is argued that the identities based on the age old relationship, trust, understanding and inter-personal relations, despite their inter or intra clashes, are superior to the ones imposed by the state agencies.
Navsari India The present paper explores the use of a specific narrative device, that of, using c... more Navsari India The present paper explores the use of a specific narrative device, that of, using child narrator or the privileging of child's point of view in Bapsi Sidhwa's Cracking India to see how the novelists historicize the loss of innocence by reconstructing the past through memory. Working through the larger backdrop of socio-historical and political happenings, Sidhwa has assigned her girl child narrator the task to look at the adult world. The novelist's use of the frame of childhood relocates the historical event of partition, the period of national turmoil and transformation, in the private world of the home and thus creating an intimate intervention into official historical narratives. I want to explore how child perspective is used to negotiate the binaries that Sidhwa's text set up between the national and personal. My argument is that child-perspective functions as a bridge, as an interpretative filter, informing and educating the readers. The children become apparently universal mediators who in their own innocent ways unlace an alien and complex world knowable.
The partition of India is one of the most defining moments in Indian History. Unimaginable atroci... more The partition of India is one of the most defining moments in Indian History. Unimaginable atrocities were perpetrated on innocent people. Women were the worst victims of the communal violence. However, such violent acts have not been recorded in the statist hegemonic accounts of partition history. Though literary narratives have emerged as significant archives where one can confront the plight of common men and women, very few fictional narratives have focussed on women's activism. By addressing Mukul Kesavan's Looking through Glass and Bapsi Sidhwa's Cracking India this paper retrieves women's activism from such a turbulent period when women's bodies were territorialized as the chief mediums in the process of nation-formation.
Since the Vedic period, Indian subcontinent has been an embodiment of inclusive culture and civil... more Since the Vedic period, Indian subcontinent has been an embodiment of inclusive culture and civilization. Over the centuries, the continuous interaction and assimilation of different people and cultures has inculcated deep rooted traits of tolerance, a highly evolved humanism, and ethos in which any particular linguistic, religious or ethnic group is able to tolerate and appreciate the creative elements of others. However, in post-Independence period secularism in India has proven to be a contested issue. The partition of the colonial nation into two independent nation-states, India and Pakistan, in 1947 was brought about by the primacy of religion. August 1947 not only saw the establishment of two nation-states, India and Pakistan, but also the moment of inception of new identities. This harrowing event rendered millions widowed, orphaned and homeless. With the partition, religious sentiments of people in their divisive and exclusionist sense became defining forces of identity. At this juncture, political nationalism gave way to religious nationalism. The present paper examines Shiv K. Kumar's A River with Three Banks (1998) and explores how this literary testimony represents secular ethics of coexistence and offers its own subaltern way of secularism.
The debate on constituting India as a nation has been a deeply contentious issue in the decades b... more The debate on constituting India as a nation has been a deeply contentious issue in the decades both preceding and following Indian independence in 1947. Tagore, a multifaceted genius and a versatile figure, is one of the most reverential names in the literary-cultural world in India as well as abroad. Tagore was a great visionary. He observed and critiqued the idea of nation at a time when most of the Indian people were steeped deeply in the intoxicated wave of patriotism. His foresightedness was greatly misunderstood and critiqued by then nationalists. This paper revisits Rabindranath's essay Nationalism to analyze how the writer's views contribute to the creation of a nation in Indian context and offers an alternative framework to the idea of a nation. The paper further attempts to locate Tagore's idea of nation in the present context and concludes by establishing the fact that Rabindranath Tagore's vision has become more appropriate and relevant than ever in today's violent world of intolerance, vengeance and fanaticism.
The partition of India is the most painful and traumatic episode of Indian history. Partition in ... more The partition of India is the most painful and traumatic episode of Indian history. Partition in general was accompanied by a huge wave of violence, but the atrocities against women were probably the most horrible ones. Though women were neither the part of the political decisions that divided the nation nor they had any role in the violence that followed partition, yet they were the worst targets of brutality inflicted by the men of other communities. The impact of the partition on women was much different and more traumatic and heartrending than men. Atrocities were enacted upon the bodies of women as men of one religious group sought to dishonour the men of another faith by declaring them impotent in their inability to protect their women. Partition was such a tragic moment of madness in Indian history in which men went mad and women shrank to symbols only; symbols of the nation or community they belonged to. This research paper offers a feminist reading of the partition by focusing on the victimization and sufferings of the women during partition as reflected and embedded in Rahi Masoom Reza's Adha Gaon, Intizar Hussain's Bastiand Shiv K Kumar's A River with Three Banks. PUBLICATIONS Women were the worst victims of Partition having to endure not only the destruction of their homes, displacement and violence, but also abduction, prostitution, mutilation and rape as they became "a sign through which men communicated with each other" (Das 56). Bagchi and Subhoranjan Dasgupta argue," the easiest way to assail a community is to defile the sexual purity of its women." (Bagchi 1--14) Kabir avers that the 'wound that was then inflicted on the body of the individual was also a wound inflicted on the body collective, most obviously through the rape, mutilation and abduction of women' (Kabir "Musical Recall"). Writing about the partition experience of north India, Gyanendra Pandey uses Beeran ki kai jaat (what caste or nationality can a woman have?) because she belongs to someone else, and therefore to his caste, nationality and religion" (Pandey 165). However, then Pandey points out the extreme paradox and says: Yet, the evidence from 1947 seems at times to suggest almost the exact opposite: not that ' women had no religion for community or nation, but that they came for a moment to stand for nothing else"(Pandey 165).
Representation of traumatic events like partition has been an exhausting exercise for authors. Th... more Representation of traumatic events like partition has been an exhausting exercise for authors. The novel form has facilitated the novelists to access counter/ alternative histories through memory, allegory, myths, and other inter-textual devices outside the domain of official historiography. However, ending of such narratives has been more challenging task for writers. The present research paper analyzes narrative endings of Tamas, Adha Gaon and A River with Three Banks to find out the authorial specific efforts endorsed in reconciling the pangs of a tragedy.
The partition of India is one of the most traumatic and complex event not only in the history of ... more The partition of India is one of the most traumatic and complex event not only in the history of the Indian subcontinent, but also in the world history. The decision of Partition left its people with identities, which were communal in nature and overpowered all other identities -gender, class, caste, and region that had existed in the country so far. Religion, which had hardly been an identity marker in pre-partition life, suddenly began to play an essential role in the Indian politics. This was in contrast to the daily experiences of people at many places, where people of different religions were living with great peace and understanding. The present paper attempts to examine discourse of identity through the reading of Mukul Kesavan's Looking through Glass and Shiv K. Kumar's A River with Three Banks. Both texts are distinct in its delineation of identity politics. Religious identity, which was so exclusively enforced on people at the time of Partition, appears as a symbol of exteriority in these narratives.The paper has four sections. The Introduction proposes the aim of the paper and discusses the concept of identity. The second and the third sections trace the ways the selected novelists have projected and problematized the issues of identities especially in the pluralistic domain of Indian sub--continent in the wake of partition. The last segment of the paper will serve as a conclusion.
Literature has emerged as an alternative archive for partition history, which has great potential... more Literature has emerged as an alternative archive for partition history, which has great potential to bring in forefront the silenced local accounts of the marginalized people often elided in the fact-based statist History. India experienced one of the world's largest population displacements in 1947 at the time of partition of British India. The year 1947 signified not only the inscription of spatial borders but also erected a national-historical checkpoint across which old cultural and familial histories were erased only to be replaced by the new nationally imposed identities. Further segmentation of Pakistan in 1971 on the basis of language marked a big question mark on the partition of 1947. This paper represents a comparative analysis of RahiMasoom Reza's AdhaGaon (1966) and IntizarHussain'sBasti (1978) to retrieve the history of those who had to migrate, were caught in the sectarian violence, and lost their homes, hearth and their families. Both of the novels are the best examples in which serious attempts are made to capture the human side of the historic event: the sense of loss at being uprooted from one's home, the feeling of helplessness and dejection at the deterioration of the newly constructed nations. The novels strongly interrogate in retrospect the religion-based partition or rather partitions of the Indian subcontinent. The paper humbly shows that the selected novels can be read as potential sources of history.
Drafts by Dr. Radha S . Gautam
Those who are born are only infants. By the time they die they are India is constitutionally decl... more Those who are born are only infants. By the time they die they are India is constitutionally declared a secular state. However, The recent political, social and religious events and turns have challenged secularism with its communalist, religious fundamentalist and separatist attitudes. Secularism, one of the main political ideologies of the post-colonial state in India, has been at the centre of scholarly and political debates among the intelligentsia in recent times. The present paper explores how counter-discourses of sacred and profane are projected and negotiated in the narrative of Topi Shukl by Rahi Masoom Reza and what possibility the narrative contains of reconstructing the secular vision of our nation by rewriting its culture.
The past is not dead. In fact, it is not even past. (William Faulkner) The present paper discusse... more The past is not dead. In fact, it is not even past. (William Faulkner) The present paper discusses the role of translator as a witnessing agent within the specific context of the partition of the Indian sub-continent. The paper establishes the role of the translator as the communicator of the original testimony and examines Intizar Hussain's Basti (1979) to inquire how memory mediates experiences and translates them into text. Basti (1979), one of the significant texts in the genres of Partition literature, though, involves displacement and uprooting of people, it mainly emphasizes on the predicament of those who remain anchored to their pluralistic past. The translation of the novel Basti (W. Pritchett 1995) almost after twenty-six years not only surfaces the regional or local histories of partition but also asserts and affirms the relevance of bringing such regional texts into the realm of mainstream literature. The paper concludes by highlighting some of the nuances of the Hindi and English versions of the selected text.
Literature has emerged as a potential reservoir to retrieve the experiences of the marginalized p... more Literature has emerged as a potential reservoir to retrieve the experiences of the marginalized people often elided in the hegemonic statist accounts of official histories. The holocaust of Germany and partition of India caused unprecedented human suffering, exodus and displacement. Innumerable people were compelled to live a hyphenated life between two nations and two cultures. However, these traumatic experiences, which changed the course of the life of innumerable innocent people, are not inscribed in the dominant discourses of history. It is only in literary narratives we come across such accounts. By retrieving the experiences of exilic figures, the present paper underlines the problematics of exile, displacement and refuge in Intizar Hussain's Basti and Anita Desai's Baumgartner's Bombay. These narratives are one of the best renderings where migration is conceptualized in historical contexts encompassing the experiences of the marginalized people entangled in the statist decisions. This paper explores these two texts to showcase how exile to an alien land is exploited as the site of refuge.
Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 into secular India and Muslim Pakistan and then in 1... more Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 into secular India and Muslim Pakistan and then in 1971 Bangladesh is an event that even after seven decades haunts the psyche of the people. However, the representation of partition is punctuated by a deadly silence and a long amnesia. The relationship between traumatic experiences of the partition and representing these experiences in a narrative has always been a problematic issue. To convey and to draw out the " micro history " embedded within the historical event and depict the unrecorded and fragmented folk experiences,, a range of strategies of representation, including allegory, symbolization, myths, irony, motifs of ruins, mourning, mobilization and devastating time and different other tropes have been employed by these novelists With the graphic narratives representation of partition trauma has taken a new turn in which visual expression of trauma merged with text offers multiple mediums to the experiences of the tragedy. This mode of representation has facilitated us to think about historical representation and memory without necessarily delving into a complicated historiography. The use of images in this work may be considered to reproduce the repetitive compulsion of traumatic memory, as these icons translate the characters' suffering into images pregnant with symbolic meaning. The present paper attempts to explore how the graphic novel This side That side: Restorying partition seeks to represent the trauma of partition in the lives of people by means of different techniques and iconic values and negotiates the boundaries of nation.
The Partition of India and Pakistan created one of the largest mass migrations of people. Million... more The Partition of India and Pakistan created one of the largest mass migrations of people. Millions were killed in communal conflicts and in the aftermath of this tragedy. The massive scope of traumatic psychoses that developed from this event is understandably large in number, ranging from post-traumatic stress disorder, suicide, to cases of complete insanity. But in 1947, the capability to address such an onslaught trauma, especially in India and Pakistan, was more than limited. In the 1940s and 1950's people were not well equipped with the language of psychiatry and psychoanalysis; it was too much to hope for any systematic understanding of the collective trauma. Partition had a widespread psychological impact, which is impossible to understand in its totality. Partition as a collective or national trauma, has had profound implications for Indian and Pakistani national identity, politics and religious relations in South Asia and it continues to be felt in the present, like with all its unsettling sensations. No full understanding of Partition is possible without comprehending the crucial role of Psychology. The present paper is a humble attempt to analyze the psychological implications of the partition event through the analysis of behavioral patterns of the victimized people in some selected literary narratives and to bring in forefront the less exposed side of this traumatic event.
Conference Presentations by Dr. Radha S . Gautam
Each week I pull hard / the water from the well, bathe in my sari, wring / it out, beat it agains... more Each week I pull hard / the water from the well, bathe in my sari, wring / it out, beat it against the flattest rocks—Are you / Muslim or Bengali, they/ asked again and again. / Both, I said, both. [Seam 28] The appropriation of women's bodies as a symbol of victorious conquest has been a common pattern in wartime violence. Peacetime physical assault is considered a crime against a woman but in wartime sexual assault by combatants against a woman is justified as routine act of the victors. Women's bodies turn into objects of symbolic exchange during wartime. Although a vast literature has emerged and various angles of partition are documented, the gender issue is less argued one. The stories of the victimisation of women in the course of sectarian violence have largely been repressed and silenced. Sexual Violence in wartime has much wider social and cultural implications for the woman and the social group she belongs. The present paper offers a close reading of Seam by Tarfia Faizullah to show the contiguity of extreme forms of gendered violence the partition occasioned in catastrophic Bangladesh liberation war in 1971 and attempts to demonstrate how women's bodies become metaphorical sites in times of conflict and turns into carriers of meanings between different ethnic groups.
A people without a language of its own is only half a nation… to lose your native tongue… is the ... more A people without a language of its own is only half a nation… to lose your native tongue… is the worst badge of conquest. (Thomas Davis 1843) Since its introduction in India by British as the language of facilitation and then its inclusion in three language formula by Indian Government, English has attained a hegemonic status in 21st century and has become a language that unifies different territories in multiple ways. Globalization is reshaping our lives and leading us into uncharted territories. English is the most widely used language in many domains across the globe like global media, private and public educational sectors, international forums, finance, business, politics, diplomacy etc. One of the problems that has plagued India after Independence is the question of a common language of communication and official discourse, a language through which India can define its identity. The choice of colonial language as a means of communication in India has evoked a considerable debate both in pre-independence and post-independence period. The present paper is a humble attempt to understand the status of English in India then and now. The paper is divided into three parts. The first part explores the connection between nationalism and language, the second segment traces the development of English in India and in its concluding part the paper is concerned with the effects of globalisation and spread of English language as the lingua franca; the language that provides us an international identity.
Thoughts are incomplete; they are suggestions and standpoints for dealing with situations of expe... more Thoughts are incomplete; they are suggestions and standpoints for dealing with situations of experience. Till they are applied and tested in these situations they lack full point and reality….only testing covers full point and reality. (Dewey, 1916:161)
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Papers by Dr. Radha S . Gautam
Drafts by Dr. Radha S . Gautam
Conference Presentations by Dr. Radha S . Gautam