Critical South Asian Studies

Front Matter

2024-08-05

Myth, Mystery, and Murder: Trauma and Resistance in The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

Ashmita Saha — 2024-08-05

This paper attempts to read Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, which is set against the 1980s Sri Lankan Civil War, and focuses primarily on how the mythic and magic realist elements within the narrative offer different variations of the idea of a national imaginary and delineate the intersectional traumatic experiences of the central character, Maali Almeida. Bronisław Malinowski, in his Myth in Primitive Psychology, stated that people in pain often turn to myths, legends, and folktales to seek a form of psychological escape from the repressions imposed by society. The novel, however, uses fantasy not as a form of psychological escape, but as a form of resistance against the chaos and injustice which the Civil War ensued. Designed partly as a whodunit, with the ghost of a dead gay atheist photojournalist searching for his killer, it provides certain avenues of exploration into trauma studies and also looks at how the central character rises above his own trauma by resorting to fantasy and magic realism. Moreover, by retaining the voice of the dead character, and also using a second person narrative style, it implicates the reader within the scheme of events and leaves open a possibility of overcoming trauma through a new understanding of the social and political institutions.

From Esoteric Religiosity to Ethical Inclusivity: An Investigation of the Detrimental Effects of Religious Trauma in The Saint of Bright Doors

Lemon Sam — 2024-08-05

In fantasy, the conflation of disparate familiar conventions and concurrent subverted delineation of the same often renders a reimagination of the essentialist socio-political norms. Such transgressions of recognizable circumstances by dint of fantastical elements also engender a feeling of ‘hesitation’, as argued by Tzvetan Todorov, which also encourages readers to eulogize the protagonists for their prowess in undertaking an arduous quest to resolve a multi-layered mystery. However, the celebration of magical environments and supernatural characters by popular imagination often surpasses the protagonists’ emotional challenges and intermittent indecisiveness to acquire empowerment. Sometimes, their objective of seeking the truth is hindered by the cognitive deficiencies induced by childhood abuse, domestic violence, the necessity of achieving belongingness, and so on. In this regard, this study attempts to analyze the detrimental effect of religious trauma on the individual pursuit of redefining fantastical traits in The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera. With the seamless unification of traditional fantasy elements such as invisible ‘antigods’, lethal catechism, and magic doors, with the modern socio-cultural developments in terms of ringing phones, emails, quarantines, and social distancing, the select fiction depicts the protagonist’s journey into a world that is imbibed with both mundane and mystic implications. This study further seeks to investigate the consequences of indoctrinated religiosity in restraining agency hued with fantastical peculiarities.

At Childhood’s End: Trauma, Survivance, and the Healing Fantastic in Abhishek Majumdar’s The Djinns of Eidgah

Mayurika Chakravorty — 2024-08-05

This essay explores how Abhishek Majumdar’s play The Djinns of Eidgah embraces the non-mimetic mode to capture the dyscatastrophe (Tolkien) in the valley – the loss of childhood, radicalization of youth, and the inconceivable brutality and violence. It will analyze how the play casts the radicalized youth as djinns, fantastical beings made of ‘fire, dust, and smoke’, who are caught in the liminal space between life and death, between captivity and freedom, much as the valley is. As the Djinns warn ‘not to expect reason from a world gone wrong’, the play too effectively uses the fantastic to depict the chaos and madness so unrealistic that it challenges the boundaries of the realistic parameters. The paper also examines the use of Dastaan tradition -- legends and stories to add a mythopoeic dimension to the narrative which signals the loss of innocence and a contrapuntal imagining of the past against the trauma of fractured and dislocated present while also presenting a trope for healing, resistance, and survivance.

Evolution of Female Desire and Fantasy in Bollywood Cinema: Perspectives from Male and Female Directors in the Post-Liberalization Era

Shrinwanti Mistri — 2024-08-05

The camaraderie between cinema and fantasy has a prolonged story, as one escalates the other. Since echoes of 'sexual fantasies’ and ‘gaze’ in cinema have been primarily celebrated and fantasized through patriarchal prisms, Bollywood and female desire have historically been fraught with challenges. However, Bollywood cinema has lately been undergoing significant landscape twists by featuring female fantasies in a bold and progressive manner at the forefront of narratives. In light of this, drawing from theoretical perspectives on the male gaze and psychoanalytic feminism, this paper will examine the evolving representations of female desire, fantasy and sexuality in contemporary Bollywood cinema. Through a nuanced analysis of nine key Bollywood films from 1996 to 2023, this paper will compare male and female directors' approaches to the male gaze when depicting female desire and sexuality on screen, examining how filmmakers' personal perspectives shape cinematic portrayals. It will also consider how economic liberalization affected the representation of female sexual desires and fantasies in Bollywood cinema, emphasizing the intersection of culture, economics, and gender in Indian popular culture. To conclude, this paper will illuminate how Bollywood cinema has become a powerful platform for the exploration of female desire and fantasy, serving as a catalyst for social change and challenging conventional gender norms in contemporary Indian society.

Itihasam of/as Legend: Time, Space, and Narrative Consciousness in The Legends of Khasak

Srinjoyee Dutta — 2024-08-05

Truth is light splintered through a prism and that gave me the idea of the astrophysicist who turns away from the outer universe to the space within.

V. Vijayan, ‘Afterword’, The Legends of Khasak

The Legends of Khasak (1969) by O.V. Vijayan has enjoyed a cult readership in the Indian subcontinent. The dominant critical or scholarly strain has been to read it as a literary symptom of the postcolonial imaginary. However, this has restricted the thematic potentialities of the text. While it employs the conventional postcolonial contestation between modernity and tradition as its framework, it far exceeds the binary in the forging of a novel consciousness and form. Using this as the theoretical springboard, the paper will attempt an exploration of Vijayan’s revisioning of the postmodern novel through the reconfiguration of the coordinates of time and space. This reconfiguration occurs through the lens of magic realism in so far as the experience of space – or Khasak as a site of the legendary – is conditioned by the experience of time. The aim of the paper is to look at the protagonist Ravi and his experience of the liminal boundary between history and myth, and the concomitant form of the novel through its reconceptualization of the Eurocentric theoretical paradigms of novelistic and epic time. This anticipates the emergence of a new spatio-temporal and narrative consciousness symptomatic of the fragmentary postcolonial condition.

“Something Miraculous about Them”: ‘Indian Doctors’ and quacks in White Australia, 1880-1930

Amit Sarwal — 2024-08-05

Delving into the historical narrative of medicine in colonial India and Australia, this article sheds light on a neglected aspect: the role of ‘Indian doctors,’ encompassing oculists and hakims, practitioners of indigenous Indian medicine, within the Australian landscape. Often marginalized in discussions of migration patterns and colonial medical history, these ‘Indian doctors’ possess a rich history intricately interwoven with the complex networks of the British Empire. Drawing upon the insights of scholars who have highlighted the mobility of ‘Indian doctors’ in Britain and Australia, this article underscores their significant presence and impact during the period spanning from 1880 to 1930. Through an analysis of contemporary Australian newspaper reports, the article unveils the popular representations of these practitioners and explores their influence across both regional outposts and urban centres within the confines of White Australia. By bringing the stories of these oft-forgotten healers to the forefront, this article aims to enrich our understanding of colonial medical dynamics and transnational networks.

The Uncanny in Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand: Subverting the Reality

Nabanita Chakraborty — 2024-08-13

This paper explores Geetanjali Shree’s postmodern novel Tomb of Sand which falls in the liminal space between the real and the fantastic. Her novel interrogates the relevance of borders and boundaries; not only the geographical and psychological borders in post-partition India but borders defining gender identities, human and non-human worlds, familiar and strange. Shree provides a feminist lens to grasp the concept of Freud’s theory of the uncanny. Freud in his essay The Uncanny explains that the uncanny is not something unfamiliar but the familiar which is kept hidden or repressed. He explores the various dimensions of the uncanny like animism, magic, déjà vu, doubling, repetition in thoughts and language, fear of castration, queerness and return to the maternal body. Geetanjali Shree underscores how the feeling of uncanny can be associated with dissonance and strangeness in moving beyond or challenging the socially constructed habits and comportments of gendered bodies. The feeling of being out of sorts with one’s own body, breaking down boundaries and rules constructed by society, challenging the normative ideal and unearthing what has been silenced in culture, engenders the feeling of uncanny.

Editorial Introduction: Art as Subversion

Binayak Roy — 2024-08-05

Editorial