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- Convenors:
-
Monika Browarczyk
(Adam Mickiewicz University )
Alaka Atreya Chudal (University of Vienna)
- Location:
- Room 112
- Start time:
- 29 July, 2016 at
Time zone: Europe/Warsaw
- Session slots:
- 4
Short Abstract:
The panel focuses on an interdisciplinary approach to study of life narratives in South Asia. By life narratives we understand not only literary texts but texts of culture. Scholars of various disciplines are invited to consider how the self is constructed in these life narratives.
Long Abstract:
The panel focuses on an interdisciplinary approach to study of life narratives in South Asia. By life narratives we understand not only literary texts but texts of culture (oral traditions, interviews, performances, art, cinema, and social media etc.). Scholars of various disciplines are invited to consider how the self is constructed in these life narratives. Here, the concept of the self in performance allows for definition of the self as heterogeneous, fluid and liminal. Mapping the multiplicity of the self in particular life narratives, we simultaneously emphasize the multiplicity of forms of narrating the self in the South Asian context. The focus on contemporary texts of culture provides an insight into the complexity of contemporary South Asian society undergoing major transformations, particularly the social campaign for the inclusion of previously marginalised and excluded histories and stories by, for instance, Dalit writers and LGBT activists. We invite contributions focussing on, but not restricted to, the following: autobiographical practices of women and/or other marginalized actors in literature, cinema, and other media; the construction and fluidity of self-identity and responses to it on social networking sites (i.e. Facebook, Twitter etc.). We encourage papers presenting case studies and analysis through different critical perspectives and interdisciplinary approaches.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
Each biographical representation reinvents its subject, making careful choices to craft new messages. Comparing a popular TV serial on Rāmānuja with the earliest biographic material in Śrīvaiṣṇava scriptures shows how biography continues to be an effective medium to speak to new audiences.
Paper long abstract:
The philosopher-theologian, Rāmānuja, revered as the greatest ācārya by the Śrīvaiṣṇava community of Tamil Nadu, is credited with the composition of a number of philosophical treatises, defeating a number of famous scholars in philosophical debate, drawing in different social groups/ castes into the Srirangam temple ritual, and creating a more inclusive community.
Rāmānuja's life has been a subject of numerous religious texts through the centuries, and in the twentieth century, a number of texts of popular culture from films to fiction to children's comic books have continued to inspire and instruct newer generations.
In June 2015, Kalaignar TV, a media house affiliated to the DMK, an important political formation in present-day Tamil Nadu, launched a serial on Rāmānuja, scripted by five-times state chief-minister, Mr. Karunanidhi.
Why is a political party that is self-consciously anti-brahmanical, and rooted in the atheistic tradition of Periyar, celebrating the life of a brahmana ācārya of a deeply theistic tradition?
I contend that each biographical representation of a well-known subject is a re-conceptualization. By careful selections and omissions, and highlighting of certain themes from the available narratives, new messages can be crafted even from old stories. On the other hand, traditional values and diktats can be reinforced by being repackaged in the reinvented biography. A comparison of the popular television serial on of Rāmānuja with the earliest biographic material available in the Śrīvaiṣṇava scriptures will show how biography continues to be an effective medium to speak to new audiences.
Paper short abstract:
The paper focuses on jōgappas, a local community of devotees of the South Indian goddess Reṇukā-Ellamma. Based on recent field data I shall discuss their multi-contextual self-positioning within diverse and sometimes contradictory discourses on (trans-)gender and (folk-)religion.
Paper long abstract:
The paper focuses on jōgappas, a local community of male born dedicated devotees of the goddess Reṇukā-Ellamma Dēvi, who follow folk-religious beliefs and practices, and as a characteristic element of their devotion, adopt a female role. With the initiation they become bound to serve and worship the dēvi, and commit themselves to an ascetic way of life. Jōgappas are regarded as auspicious and as the dēvi's spouses; they are even worshiped as divine themselves. Today, however, jōgappas become increasingly affected by processes of sanskritisation and modernisation, as well as by diverse discourses on gender issues. While, due to recent debates on a third gender category, the public has stopped differentiating between various transgender communities, jōgappas clearly distance themselves from hijras, the dominant male to female transgender community. Yet, lines between both communities become increasingly blurred. Furthermore, jōgappas are involved with the growing urban movement of LGBT activists and discussions on rights and health issues of sexual minorities which are shaped by western terminologies. However, the dēvi, and rituals and festivals to worship and celebrate her female divine power, śakti, are still central for jōgappas to establish their distinct identity, as well as their obvious transgenderism. Today, jōgappas are challenged to negotiate their identities and "belonging" within multiple contexts and struggle for cultural survival. This results in a diversity of multi-layered and fluid, but sometimes also rigid positionings of selves. The paper discusses these processes based on examples from interviews and on observations during recent fieldwork in North Karnataka.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how female participants of the South Indian Siri tradition experience themselves in the liminal stages of the Siri ritual, and in their daily lives. How does the women's exceptional position as a female deity's vehicle and medium influence their life narratives and self-identity?
Paper long abstract:
In annual festivals at temples all over the Tulu-speaking area of Coastal Karnataka, the local Siri spirits are worshipped by hundreds and thousands of devotees, most of them women. The Siri tradition revolves around Siri, her son Kumara, her daughter Sonne and her granddaughters Abbaga and Daraga. The tragic lives of Siri, a virtous and spirited young woman who fights against the injustices of a male-dominated society, and her descendants are told in the so called Siri paddana. The paddana is traditionally sung by women working in paddy fields, but also during the annual Siri rituals. Men (Kumaras) and women (Siris) who are already initiated into the ritual tradition recite passages of the paddana and get possessed by the mythological Siri characters.
As part of my Ph. D. project which is concerned with South Indian oral epics as sources of personal and social identity, I have observed several Siri rituals and conducted a number of interviews with female performers. Based on the analysis of these interviews, as well as selected case studies, it will be shown how the Siris perceive themselves and the (social) world around them. We will see how the affiliation to the Siri tradition influences the women's self-identity, and in what way the Siri paddana and its moral are important to the female performers even today. Moreover, it will be discussed what it means to become possessed in public as a woman, and why many Siris are less and less willing to do so nowadays.
Paper short abstract:
Discussion on the Aghor Tradition of ascetics in India.
Paper long abstract:
Treating text, either oral or written, as a narrative of life is always at once a delightful as well as a challenging effort in that one has to put on glasses to look at the text in a particular light. This is as true of marginalized communities as of hagiographical narratives. But what if the hagiographical narrative itself belonged to a marginalized section of society? Then the effort becomes doubly interesting. My paper tries to tweak out the double interest so expressed in the case of a book belonging to the Aghor tradition of ascetics in India. The title of the book is "Aghor Guru Guh" in Hindi, which can be translated as "Mysteries of the Aghor Master". This book deals with the life and teachings of Aghoreshwar Mahaprabhu Baba Bhagawan Ram ji, also known as Sarkar Baba to his devotees. He has been the most renowned Aghor ascetic of Varanasi in our times, bringing Aghor from the cremation ground into society, starting a leprosy hospital in Varanasi, and writing books on the subject of Aghor where earlier, only colonial or other kinds of somewhat skewed views existed on the subject of Aghor.
Paper short abstract:
This paper is going to examine autobiographical writings of contemporary Punjabi writer, Dalip Kaur Tiwana, with some references to autobiographies of other Punjabi women writers of the same generation such as Amrita Pritam and Ajeet Kaur.
Paper long abstract:
Contemporary Punjabi literature and its practitioners have a special affinity with autobiography and most probably the number of akin autobiographies in Punjabi, especially literary autobiographies by popular writers, exceeds by leaps and bounds sum of autobiographies in any other modern Indian language. Dalip Kaur Tiwana (b. 1935), an extremely prolific and popular Punjabi writer, and the subject of this paper, is similarly an author of a number of autobiographies written and published over time and dealing with different periods of her life. Like other female Punjabi writers of her time, for example Amrita Pritam (1919-2005) and Ajeet Kaur (b.1935), she too approaches her life-story in a very literary manner, working and reworking the material with an aim to present a consistent and unitary portrayal of the self, a self that pleases her enough to be projected like a protagonist of a novel. Literary strategies employed in Dalip Kaur Tiwana's autobiographies often thus mirror strategies employed in her fiction, and the presentation of these strategies is going to be the subject matter of this paper.
Paper short abstract:
The paper discusses approaches to a biography in Contemporary Hindi Literature. Shivani’s autobiography as a basic text of a life narrative is compared with “Bisat” edited by M. Garg. Memoirs, biography and literary allusions establish new dimensions for creative writing, enriching cultural history.
Paper long abstract:
The paper discusses different approaches to a biography in Contemporary Hindi Literature. Shivani's autobiography is chosen as a basic text of a life narrative to be compared with "Bisaat. Teen bahinen teen aakhyaan". This unique book consists of a novel and two stories, written by three sisters - famous Hindi writers Mridula Garg, Manjul Bhaagat and Achala Bansal. The three narratives are based on a real history of their family. A foreword by M.Garg helps to put together different trends of the plot and narration, to form a polyphonic view on the life of several generations.
Shivani, writing about herself and her family, depicts a vivid picture of Modern India. She concentrates on her mother as a key figure. Starting with the title of this aatmaakathaa - a line from Tulsidas's pada, Shivani discusses literature, praising and admiring her mother for devotion to Hindi literature. A real life and its literary reflection create a double perspective. It helps to understand Shivani' life story better, and at the same time enriches cultural history of India, giving a self- portrait of a prominent Hindi writer.
The two books will be compared with an interview by Mamta Kalia, based on her life and professional experience. This short oral narrative resembles some important features of a literary text. The paper will also discuss if these life narratives could be or not considered as belonging to "women's writing" literary movement, though some of these five writers do not agree with this definition.
Paper short abstract:
The paper focuses on early 20th century autobiographical texts by women in which the authors grant insight into supposedly “female” affairs of the private sphere. At the same time private female identities are being publicly reconstructed to fit the agenda of social reform.
Paper long abstract:
Public discourse in late 19th century India was predominantly the domain of male agents who evaluated social issues in reformist societies and journals. Women's ascribed space, on the other hand, was that of the "private", i.e. the family's home, which was in turn closed to the public. Women's selves in public discourse were being constructed by male authors who portrayed them as virtuous and devoted, but also as feeble and easily vulnerable by the dangers and temptations of modern life. By the early 20th century, however, women started to claim a voice - and a space - of their own within public discourse. Many of those early writings by female authors chose the autobiographical mode as the best suited medium of articulating a female perspective. Autobiographical writing seemed to enable the authors to grant first-hand insights into the highly disputed space of the private sphere. This private sphere and the selves of the women inhabiting it were at the same time being reconstructed to fit the public agendas of their authors. The anonymity provided by the public sphere encouraged authors to refute predominant notions of femininity and female agency, to attack social hypocrisy and to propose other forms of social interaction. The autobiographical style catered to both the necessity of investigating profoundly private matters and that of presenting them to a public audience. Female selves were thus publicly remade to grant women access to the presumably masculine sphere of public debate.
Paper short abstract:
The first-person narrative mode, crucial for autobiographical accounts, was absent during the initial period of novel writing in Hindi. It started appearing within this new literary genre only from the first decade of the twentieth century, contributing to the further development of Hindi novel.
Paper long abstract:
The first-person narrative mode, crucial for autobiographical accounts, was completely absent during the initial period of novel writing in Hindi. It started appearing within this new literary genre only from the first decade of the twentieth century in novels like Mādhavī-mādhav vā madan-mohinī ("Madhavi and Madhav, Madan and Mohini") by Kishorilal Goswami or, to a lesser extent, in Ṭheṭh hindī kā ṭhāṭ ("A tale devised in pure Hindi") and Adhkhilā phūl ("Half-blossomed flower") by Ayodhya Singh Upadhyay 'Hariaudh'. The gradual shift in the position of the narrator in relation to the story contributed to the further development of Hindi novel. The paper draws on Hindi novels by both renowned and less known Hindi writers in order to explore the wide spectrum of possibilities provided by the first-person narration.
Paper short abstract:
I analyse the constructions of performative multiple and conflicting ‘selves’ as seen in life narratives of Bengali woman superstar Suchitra Sen(1931-2014). I examine the triad of sensual glamour queen, bhadramahila and reclusive sanyasin to excavate a map of conflicts of traditional and modern.
Paper long abstract:
This paper analyses the constructions of a performative self as seen in the life narratives of perhaps the only woman superstar Suchitra Sen(1931-2014) who dominated Bengali popular cinema in the 1950s-70s. My paper tracks the multiple sites of these narratives—film texts, star biographies, interviews, film advertisements, and fiction—to excavate the contours of a 'bhadramahila' self (genteel middle class) that her performances exhibit. Drawing on filmic, written, online and photographic sources, my paper will analyse significant shifts in the performance of gender (Butler) that these sites display. While in her heyday, her star text was calibrated very carefully along the grids of sensual beauty and glamour, her retirement is marked by a curious re-invention of her star persona as the reclusive sadhika figure.I will address the following questions: What might be the reasons for the unease that is visible in the film magazines of the 1950s -60s around the glamorous and sensuous star image of Suchitra Sen? Why has she been 'remade' as a renouncer figure? Is a star self also determined or circumscribed by gender under patriarchy? Focusing on the multiple and conflicting 'selves' of Suchitra Sen's I will argue how this triad of the sensual/ glamour queen, the elite married bhadramahila and the reclusive sanyasin offers a fascinating map of the traditional and the modern, colliding to chart out a Janus faced modernity(Gyan Prakash). Can this map of Janus faced modernity enable an entry into performances of gender of women's life narratives in the Indian context?
Paper short abstract:
The aim of the paper is to present the figure of Phoolan Devi and some version of her biographies. The most essential elements of Phoolan’s story are present in every narration about her, but every author, including the heroine herself, highlights only some of its components, changing the others.
Paper long abstract:
The aim of the paper is to present the figure of the famous "bandit queen" of India. There are many legends and aspects of Phoolan Devi's life, with changes depending on who narrates the story. For some Phoolan is a heroine of the type of Robin Hood, others see her as a symbol of the fight of the most oppressed groups of people in India. Finally there are those who consider her to be an ordinary murderer.
The presentation of this interesting person with the background of the general phenomenon of banditry in India is not intended to be an answer to the question whether Phoolan Devi was a victim, or indeed an unscrupulous woman. The most interesting fact is that some of her biographies in a very remarkable way glide over some fact, highlighting the others.
The three essential elements of Phoolan's biography (the recurring sexual violence, the reasons for which she found her place among dacoits and the massacre in the Behmai village) are present in every story about her life, but every individual author, including the heroine herself, highlights only some of its components, clearly neglecting the details of others. While such an approach is not surprising in the story told by Phoolan, trying to justify some of her actions, it becomes astonishing especially in the work of Shekhar Kapur, whose film has been much criticized, and rises the question of how much the story of Phoolan Devi is an attempt to show a biography of an extraordinary women and how much it is a simple sensation.
Paper short abstract:
This study will focus on the film & life of Rituparno Ghosh (1963-2013), an icon of the LGBT community of India, in general and his film Chitrangada (2012) in particular.
Paper long abstract:
Chitrangada is a character of the epic Mahabharata that was interpreted by Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) in a dance-drama Chitra (1913) and recently reinterpreted by Rituparno Ghosh (1963-2013) not only in his film Chitrangada (2012) but also to some extent in his life too. In Mahabharata Chitrangada is a Manipuri princess who falls in love with Arjun and subsequently gets married and a son from him but Tagore made her an Amazon worrier who is in a quest to discover her gender identity.
Rituparno Ghosh, who is considered to be an icon of the LGBT community of India, taking clues from his own life experiences delves further in reinterpreting Chitrangada in a LGBT context. As a director of the film and as an actor of the lead role as Chitrangada he authentically builds up the issue: "Can you choose your Gender? This study will try to understand what happens when body, sexuality and Gender do not correspond and facilitate each other to form a 'normal' identity. It will also examine the truth what mother of the protagonist proclaims in one place in the film: "Nature dictates what is natural. It has its own desire"? This study will also try to address the epistemological question on the nature and formation of body and desire.
Paper short abstract:
In MF Husain’s Hindi autobiography Em. Ef. Husen kī kahānī apnī zubānī people and places become a catalyst for manifestations of the self in art and in literature. I introduce this verbal and visual autobiography as a series of sketches of a performative self surfing the world in space and time.
Paper long abstract:
This paper analyzes MFHusain's Hindi autobiography Em. Ef. Husen kī kahānī apnī zubānī, drawing from Elizabeth Grosz's notion of the body as a socio-cultural artifact and the exterior of the subject bodies as psychically constructed (Space, Time and Perversion 1995: 103-110), as well as from Rosi Braidotti's concept of nomadic identities, insofar they don't belong anywhere and belong everywhere (Nomadic subjects 1994, Nuovi soggetti nomadi 2002). Bodies and spaces are envisioned as "assemblages or collections of parts" in constant movement, crossing borders and creating relationships with other selves and other spaces. People and places become a catalyst for manifestations of the self in art -MF Husain being foremost a painter- and eventually also in literature. I introduce MFHusain's verbal and visual autobiography as a series of sketches of a performative self surfing the world in space and time. My research questions are, among others: How does MFHusain construct or deconstruct the self though crossings and linkages? How is the self performed inside and outside private and public spaces? How is the complex (sometimes even contradictory) relationship between self and community portrayed? How does MFHusain's performative self become the core of socially inflected images, such as the collage of social and community relations that constitute rural and urban spaces? How are bodies inflected by class, race, and gender produced and reproduced in MF Husain's visual and verbal autobiography? How does this autobiography articulate notions of (imagined) community/ies, nationalism, transnational subjectivity, nostalgia?
Paper short abstract:
In 1977 Krishna Sobti in an autobiographical essay, Sobti Meets Hashmat, described herself using the figure of her male alter ego, or Hashmat. The paper examines the text as a distinct auto-narrative focusing on performing the self through a construct of heterogeneous, multi-layered persona.
Paper long abstract:
Krishna Sobti, one of the most widely acclaimed Hindi writers, authored three volumes of her reminiscences (Ham Haśmat, 'Me, Haśmat', published in 1977, 1999, and 2015) to portray some figures of the Hindi literary scene. She willingly bestowed the authorship of these volumes on her literary male alter ego, or Hashmat. Adapting the strategy of inferring her self-narrative by retelling the narratives of others, Sobti, interestingly, ends the first volume of these literary portraits with a sketch entitled Sobti Meets Hashmat (Mulākāt Haśmat se Sobtī kī), where she describes herself and her creative works using the figure of literary male persona created by her. In this paper - inspired by the application of the 'narrative self' theory, which opens a possibility of individualised approach to life writings - I would like to close-read this text as a distinct auto-narrative to examine various individual strategies of performing the self through a construct of heterogeneous, multi-layered persona. The authors of life writings have been always accommodating various identities and thus expressing diverse 'shades' of the self, Sobti's essay is an exquisite example of this phenomenon.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the fictional and non-fictional works of Esther David, a Bene Israel Jewish writer and artist in Ahmedabad. I explore the ways in which she negotiated her multiple identities that evolved through her relationships with her family, the Jewish community, Ahmedabad, and India.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the fictional and non-fictional works of Esther David, a Bene Israel Jewish writer and artist in Ahmedabad. It aims to understand how she expressed her ideas on the self in her writings and the ways in which she negotiated her multiple identities that evolved through her relationships with her family, the Jewish community, Ahmedabad, and India. Among her different ways of defining the self, the Jewish identity is of particular importance and posed her various dilemmas in life. This community, whose history in India, according to its legend, can be traced back to the ancient period, is highly conscious of its minority status in India. This has led to substantial pressure on the women of this community to observe and protect their 'tradition' and 'home' as daughters, wives, and mothers. The paper focuses on Esther's descriptions of various moments that made her reexamine her identities, especially as an Indian Jew and a woman. These moments occasionally occurred amid small incidents within the family and neighbourhood, such as those related to food, clothes, and rituals, and sometimes when she observed problems related to marriage. Such moments of self-examination also occurred at the time of communal riots in Ahmedabad, which left her with fear, pain and the sense of guilt. While highlighting her narratives of these moments, I would like to demonstrate how her stories of the self are closely interwoven with the stories of the Jewish community and those of Ahmedabad during the last few decades.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines Rabindranath Tagore's autobiographical writings with a focus on nostalgia, probing the contention that nostalgia is a privileged sentiment. Under what conditions does nostalgia arise? How to link it to the dominant temporal imaginaries of colonial and postcolonial South Asia?
Paper long abstract:
The proposed paper is outwardly beside the point of the panel: no emancipatory self-articulation in terms of gender or class is to be expected from autobiographical writings by Rabindranath Tagore, exponent of the cultural elite in colonial Bengal and himself the apex of literary fame. However, after looking at the role of nostalgia in his "Jiban smrti", "Chelebela" and other similar writings, I will argue that nostalgia is unevenly distibuted in autobiographical literature, and in many ways bound to social and cultural privileges. In further broadening the lens, the paper will speculate on how nostalgia in autobiographies is linked to dominant temporal imaginaries of South Asia, thus furnishing various synapses with the more contemporary life narratives the panel seeks to address.
Paper short abstract:
This paper will explore the Sound Archive of Berlin which holds a collection of records with Himalayan prisoners of World War I. With the help of a vast amount of records, it will try to figure out to what extent could these records with prisoners of war be understood as “representations of the self”?
Paper long abstract:
The Sound Archive of the Humboldt University Berlin holds a collection of more than one hundred records with prisoners of World War I who came from the Himalaya. In service of the British they fought on the battlefields of Europe and were imprisoned in the German camps in Wünsdorf and Zossen, close to Berlin. A vast amount of records were produced by 'Königlich Preußische Phonographische Kommission' containing songs, stories and other audio samples in more than two hundred languages.
Around the turn of the 21st century, all records were digitized and made accessible for scholarly research. But until now very little has been carried out and the focus remained largely on their production process. Moreover, records with prisoners of war from the Himalaya remain completely unexplored since almost a century. This paper will shed light on this desideratum through the method of translation and critical hermeneutic analysis. It will try to answer the questions such as: To what extent could these records in the languages of Himalayan prisoners be understood as "representations of the self"? Did the prisoners have agency in the production of the records? Or were they merely saying or singing what the German scholars asked or ordered them to? Do the prisoners represent themselves in these records or were they represented by the German researchers? What was the initiative behind the selection of stories or songs? An exploration of this almost forgotten archive will help us to answer these questions.