Lapis Lazuli : An International Literary Journal
Notice Website Upgrade in Progress Our journal website is currently undergoing a major upgrade to improve functionality and user experience. During this transition, it may take more than 60 days to restore and upload all previously published issues. The current issue will remain available on the website without interruption. Earlier issues will be uploaded gradually as the migration process progresses. We appreciate your patience and understanding during this period. Thank you for your continued support. Lapis Lazuli: An International Literary Journal (ISSN 2249-4529) is an open-access, double-blind peer-reviewed e-journal published by the Pinter Society of India. Dedicated to excellence in Literature in English, language studies, and interdisciplinary humanities research, the journal provides a global platform for original scholarship and creative expression. LLILJ publishes research articles, critical essays, book reviews, interviews, translations, fiction, poetry, memoirs, and other creative works, welcoming contributions from both established academics and emerging scholars. Committed to academic rigor, intellectual innovation, and free access to knowledge, the journal fosters meaningful dialogue across literary, linguistic, and cultural traditions while promoting impactful research that enriches contemporary global scholarship.
Wrinkles in writing: Exploring ageist narratives in select Indian children’s literature
In Indian context, the historicity of children’s books show that they have always been continuously shaping the emotional, psychological, moral, cultural and social perceiving skills and behaviour of children by didacticism. Later it shifted towards fun and entertainment but again noticing the need of the hour in the expeditiously transitioning and socially conscious culture, these books are focusing more on reality and relatable issues like gender disparity, LGBTQ, class, disability and racism. Arising from the status of entertainment these works have become the primary source of knowledge for children, specially for urban children usually living in nuclear families far from their grandparents, the traditional storyteller. Grandparents have always been a part of children’s storytelling reflecting the Indian social family structure, yet the critical examination of their character depiction in the children’s book, whether they promote positive ageing or normalise ageist stereotype, confines to the periphery of research. This study explores how aged characters, their ageing, identity, isolation, intergenerational knowledge preservation, intergenerational bonding and most significantly their character framing has been carried out in Indian Children’s literature. Additionally, it also studies the agency of children as a narrator in co-creation of the ageing narratives and limitations of these texts in contemporary society. Employing the theoretical idea, as a checklist, of Margaret Gullete’s decline narratives, the contrasting idea of Laslett’s third age and also Estes’ structural ageism as required - the selected works, My Dadima Wears a Sari (2007), Monsoon Afternoon (2008) Nani's walk to the park (2018), Ammachi's Amazing Machine (2021) and Paati’s Rasam (2022) - will be explored and analysed. These theories, as a structure, will help in critically examining, comparing and concluding the aging narratives in Indian context with respect to children literature.
In Search of the Self: Alienation and Anxiety in a Posthumanist world in Charles Burns’ Black Hole and Jeff Lemiere’s Sweet Tooth
We inhabit in the world of technology and everyday it is challenging the corpus of our ideas. Technology has infiltrated our lives to such deep extremes that it has become difficult for humans to assert a meaningful existence. We struggle to find ourselves dissected at such moments where there is a struggle between these alterations. The historian Yuval Noah Harari argues in his book Homo Deus, that there has emerged a possibility where this technological search will lead the vulnerable humans to a better world where they will be invincible like the gods. That will be the next step of our civilization. However literature has already foraged into this unthinkable. Posthumanism as a theory tries to seek a passage into this hitherto unknown world borrowing the wings of its imagination. In this paper I want to talk about the concept of alienation and anxiety suffered by humans in such a futuristic world by locating my observations on two phenomenal graphic novels published in two different eras. The first one is titled Black Hole by Charles Burns published between 1995 and 2005 by Kitchen Sink Press and then by Fantasgraphics. The second one is Sweet Tooth written by Jeff Lemiere published by DC Comics, Vertigo Imprint, between 2010-13. What binds these two novels is the sheer intensity of alienation faced by the characters in a posthumanist world. While Charles Burns depicts the transformations of teenagers in Seattle area, after they have contracted a mysterious strange disease transmitted sexually that transformed their bodies and ultimately leading them to societal ostracism, Lemiere’s Sweet Tooth is a search of the self in a post-apocalyptic world. Gus a 9year old boy with antlers is a new breed of human/animal hybrid that appeared after an apocalyptic pandemic of an unknown virus. Underlying these two novels is the crisis of the human. The paper will be an attempt to address the issues of identity, anxiety and alienation deeply embedded in these two novels which are set in a posthumanist, post-apocalyptic period. It will try to engage these issues that have become critical in the concept of understanding posthumanist literature in itself.
Creation and Cosmos: A Comparative Study of Science, Rig Veda and other Ancient Theories
Scientific evidence is often viewed as infallible and reliable, providing clear and undisputed truths. However, when it comes to understanding the origins of the universe and the distant past, the certainty of scientific knowledge becomes uncertain. While science has revealed many astonishing truths, there are still countless mysteries waiting to be unravelled. Just as we have explored the depths of the oceans, there is a yearning to delve into the secrets of the sky. Unfortunately, our current scientific capabilities do not allow us to reach every corner of the vast universe. Consequently, where human exploration ends, imagination and speculation begin. It’s important to note that imagination isn’t merely a fabrication of the mind; rather, it’s a cognitive process that allows us to comprehend that which is unseen and immeasurable. In fact, according to Nyaya philosophy, perception and imagination serve as essential means to verify the authenticity of truth. This article will delve into several important questions: What constitutes a theory? Which holds greater significance, perception or scientific evidence? What theories did ancient Indian scientists adhere to in their search for truth? And how many theories of creation and the cosmos are mentioned in the Rig Veda?
Fractured Futures: Chaos and Resistance in Manjula Padmanabhan’s Escape
Located within a dystopian future characterised by the devoid of women population and the power-centric alteration of knowledge, identity and reproductive rights, the text suggests the structures of totalitarian socio-political structures. The study presents a detailed exploration of Manjula Padmanabhan’s novel Escape (2008), based on the tenets of Chaos and Postcolonial theory. Chaos theory, suggests how seemingly minor fluctuations, the very presence of single female in the novel can enhance profound outcomes in complex regime, by uncovering the inner proneness of tyrannical system and parallelly, Postcolonial theory serves to explore the dynamics of neo-colonial power structures and gender violence within the context of a globalised society. Integrating these parallel perspectives, this paper propounds that the selected text operates as a manifestation of embodied resistance, in which chaotic system suggests not only as disorder, but as a resistive force that owns the capacity to aid transformative opportunities. The text visualizes the society’s strict structural rigidity and its leakages as both as faces of same coin.
Myth, Memory, and Empire: Reading Napoleon through Turner and Romantic Literature
This article examines the cultural afterlives of Napoleon in early nineteenth-century Britain through the interwoven responses of literature and visual arts, with particular attention to J.M.W. Turner’s paintings The Field of Waterloo (1818) and War. The Exile and the Rock Limpet (1842). Napoleon was not merely a historical figure but a cultural text, endlessly reimagined in poetry, satire, and art. Romantic poets like Southey, Wordsworth, and Scott celebrated his downfall at Waterloo as a providential triumph, while Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and women writers such as Felicia Hemans and Louisa Costello offered more sceptical or tragic reflections on the immense human cost of war that ended his reign. Turner’s canvases situate themselves within this contested literary field. The Field of Waterloo, directly referencing Byron’s stanzas, rejects triumphalist commemoration by foregrounding suffering and grief rather than national glory. Two decades later, War. The Exile and the Rock Limpet revisits Napoleon as a diminished yet haunting presence, aligning with Romantic irony, and echoing the ambivalent imagery of contemporary caricatures and poems of exile. Together, these representations show how the Battle of Waterloo and Napoleon’s figure became symbolic sites for negotiating questions of empire, masculinity, domestic loss, and national identity. By situating Turner alongside Romantic poets, women writers, and popular caricatures, this study demonstrates how visual and literary texts fashioned Napoleon into a volatile cultural symbol whose shifting meanings expose the contested identities of post-Waterloo Britain.
Copyright (c) 2025 Lapis Lazuli : An International Literary Journal
Gender Dynamics in Volga’s The Liberation of Sita
The traditional male narratives in The Ramayana and The Mahabharata defines the roles and responsibilities of women. These male-centred narratives treats women as symbols of honour, property, or prizes for male warriors. Existence of women is valued in their relationship to men.Women were idealized as dutiful wives, devoted mothers, and self-sacrificing daughters. Epics reinforced the idea that a woman’s virtue lay in obedience, chastity, and service and they are subjected to tests and trials when they deviated expected norms of the society, . A woman’s honour is tied to the honor of her husband/family, unlike men, whose worth came from bravery and strength. Women in traditional epics were rarely decision-makers. Their roles revolved around supporting male heroes—waiting, suffering, or sacrificing for them. By glorifying submissive women, epics have set models for generations: women should be loyal like Sita, patient like Draupadi, forgiving like Gandhari, or nurturing like Kunti. This normalized gender inequality by presenting it as “ideal womanhood”. Traditional male narratives in epics confined women to roles of obedience, chastity, and service, defining their responsibilities in relation to men, rather than as independent individuals. Women were expected to embody virtues that upheld patriarchal order, making them instruments for sustaining male honour and authority. This paper analyzes how Volga portrays female characters as individuals who defy the norms and rules of the male-dominated society and make choices, and guide one another. Women find empowerment in sisterhood—challenging patriarchal divisions.
“The Void on the Throne: Nietzschean Nihilism and the Echo of 'Nothing' in Shakespeare’s King Lear”
Shakespeare’s King Lear charts a harrowing descent from a world of fragile instability into one of unrelenting despair, where Lear is cast into darkness by the consequences of his own flawed judgment and his inability to comprehend Cordelia’s “nothing” (King Lear 1.1.87). Among Shakespearean tragedies, King Lear offers perhaps the most profound exploration of nihilism. The study argues that the play is not merely a tale of personal misfortune but a dramatic exploration of psychological and existential crisis (Author 23). The characters’ descent into chaos and despair reflects Nietzsche’s analysis of both philosophical and cultural nihilism, even more starkly than Hamlet and Macbeth (Nietzsche 56). Four centuries after its composition, the play remains a fertile ground for critical inquiry because of its enduring philosophical depth. This paper examines the pervasive presence of nihilism in King Lear, with particular attention to the recurring motif of “nothing” and its reverberations throughout the text (Author 27). The relentless suffering and unredemptive ending of King Lear challenge the audience to confront the existential vacuum left by the collapse of order, echoing Nietzsche’s warning that overcoming nihilism is a monumental test of humanity’s strength (Nietzsche 61). By linking Shakespeare’s timeless tragedy with Nietzsche’s philosophical diagnosis, this article further illuminates how the play prefigures modern humanity’s struggle to find meaning in a seemingly meaningless world (Author 30).
Men and Alternative Masculine Behaviours: A Gendered Study of Imtiaz Ali’s Film Tamasha
This study offers a detailed analysis and a textual reading of ‘Tamasha’, a cult hindi movie written and directed by Imtiaz Ali through the lens of ‘Masculine Studies’. It validates how men are represented in the Indian movies with respect to their gender normative roles and various masculine behaviours as facilitated of the social organisation of families. The protagonist of the movie, Ved serves as the voice of all such men who are burdened under the term ‘masculine’ and raises concern for the men who are weak and effeminate as opposed to firm and hegemonically masculine. The Masculinity Studies provide a discussion favouring the non-hegemonic men like Ved, who is a subordinate male thereof who falls in the category of majority of men stuck in the vicious cycle that moves at the behest of dominating men who exercise hegemonic masculinity. The article further attempts to showcase the masculine anxieties of men via ‘Tamasha’ and renders to expose certain the ill-nature of hegemonic masculinity responsible in shaping the discourse of other types of masculinities in Indian families vis-a-vis father-son relationship dynamics. It also represents how the gender identities of men are formed and could be restricted by the patriarchal system present in society.
Distance as constitutive of aesthetic experience: A rereading of Aristotle and Burke
This paper explores the concept of distance as a constitutive mechanism in aesthetic experience, focusing on Aristotle’s notion of catharsis and Burke’s theory of the sublime. By examining how temporal and perceptual separation mediates emotions such as pity, fear, and terror, I argue that distance is not a passive buffer but an active agent in transforming raw affect into ethical, cognitive, and aesthetic meaning. Through a comparative rereading of classical and early modern frameworks, the paper illuminates the ways in which structured mediation allows audiences to engage intensely with negative emotions by drawing upon contemporary interpretations, including Konstan and Halliwell. The paper demonstrates how temporal and perceptual mediation transforms overwhelming emotions into intelligible, meaningful experiences. This comparative analysis reconceptualises distance as a multidimensional mechanism, bridging affective intensity with cognitive and moral comprehension, and highlights its enduring relevance in discussions of tragedy, terror, and the sublime. Ultimately, the aim is to point to a nuanced understanding of how structured mediation shapes the reception and ethical resonance of powerful emotional content in art.
Recreation is a process wherein old ideas are dispensed anew for new audiences allowing classical texts to resonate with contemporary contexts. It works as a bridge between the past and present, ensuring the continuity of literary tradition. In India, literary recreation certainly grabbed the attention of a wider audience particularly, in the field of film and graphic mediums. Aranyaka: Book of the Forest, a graphic novel by Amruta Patil and Devdutt Pattanaik, exemplifies such creation, drawing from Upanishads’ Yajnavalkya, a Vedic literary work. The study examines how Aranyaka reimagines ancient Indian metaphysical thought through multimodal storytelling. It highlights the symbolic representation of images, colours and character construction that motivates the readers to read more which increase the readability and facilitate accessibility to complex Indian philosophical thought. By presenting alternative perspectives and marginalised voices, recreation encourages interpretative plurality. The novel not only reimagines the Upanishadic Forest but also interrogates human relationships with nature, gender roles, and epistemological hierarchies. Through this analysis, the paper explores how such recreations foster new dialogues between tradition and modernity in Indian literature.
Forging English Identity: Dorothy L. Sayers’s Detective Fiction in the Interwar Years
Dorothy L. Sayers (1893–1957), a leading figure of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, offers a compelling literary lens into Interwar English identity. Her Lord Peter Wimsey novels transcend mere puzzles, serving as rich social commentaries. This paper argues that Sayers’s work uniquely reflects and interrogates Britain’s post-World War I landscape by exploring themes of Englishness, critically examining class structures and intellectual elites, depicting the enduring impact of war trauma and fractured masculinity, and challenging gender norms through characters like Harriet Vane. Furthermore, her fiction is imbued with profound ethical and religious dimensions and offers nuanced social commentary on nascent industries like advertising and the dynamics of rural communities. Ultimately, Sayers’s blend of idealized settings with keen realism provides an invaluable cultural document of a nation navigating profound social and psychological transformation.
Desire, Assemblage and Deterritorialization of the Self: A Critical Reading of Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis
In the present era of 21st century, our understanding of capitalism has changed dynamically, where we are experiencing a new form of it altogether. Coming out of feudalism, mercantilism, and industrial capital, now it has taken another new avatar, that of cyber-capital. With the expansion of corporate sector, stock markets, digital economy, money exists in its liquid state, characterized by the hyper-mobility spread through global business networks. The seeds of this unchecked rise in finance were sown in 1970’s, when free market capitalism, popularly known as neo-liberal policies were taken by Regan government in the United States. The effect of this finance is all pervasive and in its manifold Medusa like manner exerts its influence upon individuals, nations and societies with its continuous creation and replication of ‘desire’. Critics such as Frederic Jameson and Ernest Mandel gave a more nuanced term-‘late capitalism’. Therefore it becomes imperative to call the present era as the age of ‘financialization’ when we are witnessing an ascendancy of global finance. The situation demands for a renewed interest in the ontological position of the rational subject, who is now construed, constituted and subjected to the flows of ‘desire’ swirling around, becoming interpellated by constant forces of production and reproduction of desire, living in a ‘libidinal economy’, in Jean Francois Lyotard’s phrase. Displacing from the idea of a rational, logical being’, we are confronted with a new ontological praxis which is enmeshed in the world of money, technology and desire. The inevitable question that haunts us now is- does the ‘real’ at all exist in the hyper-real world of simulation? Can we locate the points of ‘rupture’ when the subject refuses to be a part of these constant ‘desiring-machines’ (to use Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s idea which sees the unconscious as a realm of producing desires)? This paper will try to probe into the matter of ‘subjectivity’ in the realm of this new world of economic, technological and social flows which builds the subjective economy and its assemblages, where it will juxtapose the arguments stated above with a critical reading of Don Delillo’s novel Cosmopolis (2003). In the novel Cosmopolis, the protagonist Eric Packer, a billionaire traverses the city of New York in his limousine, to get a haircut and in the course of his journey witnesses the funeral of a Sufi rap star, violent anti-capitalist movements continually betting against the rise of the Japanese currency yen and losing all his wealth. Depicting the abstraction of finance from the actual reality, Eric’s subjectivity is questioned when he continuously feels that he is attuned to the machines surrounding him that generate flows of capital exchange where he always wanted to become “quantum dust, transcending his body mass.. to live outside the given limits, in a chip, on a disk, as a data” and at the same time affirms himself as “located nowhere”. Immersed in technology, he is at once enslaved by the machines yet seeks a way out to feel reality, to transcend beyond the limits of his bodily perceptions and be free of it. This is the constant impulse of capitalism, where desires are commodified endlessly till the point when the ‘self’ dismantles completely, creating psychic breakdown. Borrowing Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of ‘desiring machines’, “Body without Organs” and Nietzsche’s concept of ‘becoming’, the present paper seeks to find an analogy between the present world of late capitalism and the problematic idea of the ‘self’ , questioning the embedded semiotic capitalism. I would argue, how the dominance of finance capital has given a new idea of the ‘self’ as constituted in the ‘desire’ produced by market capitalism, how the ‘self’ remains caught up between ‘real’ and the ‘digital’, creating a hypermediated world of experience, displaying psychic disorder and how through repeated performances of identity, Eric’s personality is reconfigured and reconstituted.
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Keats and the Science of Sensation: A Proto-Neuroscientific Reading of the Romantic Imagination
This article reads John Keats through the combined lenses of Romantic medicine and proto-neuroscience, arguing that his imagination operates as an embodied cognitive process. Grounded in his medical apprenticeship at Guy’s Hospital, Keats’s poetry reveals an acute awareness of sensation, pain, and pleasure as physiological events that generate aesthetic insight. Close analyses of Ode to Psyche, Ode on Melancholy, Ode to a Nightingale, and selected letters show how Keats constructs the body as the primary site of imaginative and emotional knowledge. By situating his work within early nineteenth-century debates on vitality, materialism, and the nervous system — and placing his ideas in dialogue with contemporary neuroscience — the article positions Keats as a proto-neuroscientific thinker whose poetics anticipate modern theories of embodied cognition, neuroplasticity, and distributed subjectivity.
Negotiating identity and ideology: the concept of the “third way” in Salman Rushdie’s literary vision
This essay argues that Salman Rushdie envisions a “third way” of belonging and seeks to demonstrate how Salman Rushdie creates an alternative form of belonging, based on difference and negotiation between cultures and histories, rather than unity through sameness or ideological absolutism. The concept of ‘people-together’ created by Saleem Sinai in Midnight’s Children is founded upon the principles of choice, multiplicity, and commonality of goals, which rejects restrictive versions of nationalism and ideological absolutism. In Rushdie’s works, migration is not simply a geographical relocation, but a process that transforms memory, identity, and even narrative form itself. The idea of hybridity in Rushdie’s literature challenges the concepts of origin, purity, and cultural authenticity, allowing for a more dynamic and fluid approach to self-understanding and identity formation. Rejecting absolutism, Rushdie envisions society as a living network of memories, languages, and connections. In the end, Rushdie’s writing promotes a democratic and pluralistic imagination, based on diversity, coexistence, and creativity emerging from cultural interaction and historical connectedness.
Wilderness, Identity, and Ecological Awakening: A Deep Ecological Study of Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing
Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing offers a powerful literary exploration of ecological consciousness that aligns closely with the principles of deep ecology. This paper explores nature as a space of contention and destabilization to mirror the fractured consciousness in the novel. The novel relies on the memory gaps and fractured consciousness through which Atwood frames a postmodern subjective narrative of psychological fragmentation, juxtaposing the ecological disruption. The paper analyses Surfacing as resistance against the contemporary narrative of anthropocentric progress through the technological invasion of non human world. It attempts to study the unchecked intrusion of tourism, technology and capital exploitation of natural resources and landscape, and unveils the inflicted violence upon animals and various unprecedented consequences of human reliance and dominance over nature. The protagonist’s finding solace in the wilderness is studied as a rejection of established cultural fixities and patriarchal fabric in society. Eventually, the paper will establish Margaret Atwood’s novel as a genre-defining work of deep ecological criticism that foregrounds the psychological and environmental consequences of technological development to reconsider the contemporary fluctuating relationships between humans and the non-human world. The narrative of the novel is framed around an unnamed narrator’s psychological and spiritual journey into the wilderness, where her immersion in the natural landscape unfolds different aspects and the rejection of anthropocentric development and modern rationality. The novel focuses to critique the exploitation of nature and natural beings through technology, consumerism, and patriarchal culture. The paper analyses through the character of the narrator a symbiotic relationship within nature and human beings; her gradual identification with animals, trees, and the landscape signals a collapse of the human-nature binary and reflects the deep ecological emphasis on biocentrism and ecological interconnectedness.
Crosscurrents of Expressionist Art, Literature and Weimar Cinema: Aesthetics and Politics
This research article explores the intersections between expressionist art, literature and their relationship with Weimar Cinema. There is an analysis of aesthetic connections and the role they play in the shared ideology of rebellion. Weimar Cinema , particular films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, M, Metropolis and Nosferatu are studied as the final outcome of the synthesis of stylistic, political and ideological influences of Expressionist art , architecture, poetry ,plays ,novels and music. A close reading of the films is placed in conjunction with an understanding of the political climate of the period and its relationship with modernism. Representations of the City across these mediums is studied to understand the relationship between urbanization and individual subjectivity in these texts. The paper traces the growth and decline of Expressionism to highlight the trajectory of an important modernist movement
A Feminist Reading of Coming Out as Dalit by Yashica Dutt
Dalit feminist writers in the 21st century aim to expose issues like violence, abuse, sexual harassment and the injustice faced by Dalit women. Dalit women face constant threats of physical assault and sexual violence. Dalit women writers critique male dominance within their communities and challenge mainstream feminism for overlooking caste-based discrimination. These writers advocate for a more inclusive approach that acknowledges the specific experiences of Dalit women. Through literature, these voices advocate for legal reform, solidarity and the recognition of Dalit women's rights as essential to achieving gender social justice. In contrast to mainstream feminist literature that mainly focuses on Dalit women’s writing highlights the layered discrimination and gender inequality caused by the caste system. In Coming Out as Dalit, Yashica Dutt explores violence from both psychological and social standpoints. Dutt critiques upper-caste feminism for neglecting the caste-based oppression of Dalit women, whose oppression is compounded by caste-based discrimination, patriarchy and economic exploitation. This paper will examine Yashica Dutt’s Coming Out as Dalit to analyse the multifaceted violence faced by Dalit women.
African - American Women Writers: Emergence of a New Voice by [Re-] Positioning the Issues of Race and Gender
The African American women writers probe individualism and personal relationships as a means to comprehend multifaceted social concerns while writing from the perspective of being “black” and “women”. They are, thus, in the paramount position to write on racism and sexism that are institutionalized not only in society but also in one’s family and relationships. Though their writing enunciates both sorrow and anger, we also find in them a sense of sanguinity about human possibilities. The Black women writers are forerunners of transformation within their community and have luminously accomplished their mission of resolving their predicament and also to substantiate their sensibility as writers. They proficiently document the sufferings that the black woman has been subjected to over the ages. These writers leave an incredible impact on the generation they are in. They research on the consternations that impinge on womanhood and distinguish their anguish. Black women write for the cause of womanhood. This is strikingly resonated in the profound writing enterprise of Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Nikki Giovanni and Gloria Naylor.
Ecological Trauma and National Wounds in Roma Tearne’s Mosquito
In Roma Tearne’s Mosquito, the geography of Sri Lanka is not just a backdrop but an active force and a victim of the island’s ecological and political collapse. The landscape carries the scars of both past and present violence, showing that it is deeply tied to the nation’s history. Women in this war-torn setting face two layers of trauma: the ethnic conflict that surrounds them and the patriarchal structures that deny them dignity and recognition. Militarization and global neglect create a slow, ongoing violence that harms both people and the environment, turning nature into both a witness and a casualty of national wounds. As a result, people living in this damaged environment experience solastalgia, a deep sense of loss and displacement caused by the destruction of their home surroundings. The paper explores how human suffering and environmental destruction are interconnected, showing the Sri Lankan landscape as a ravaged witness, while also examining how patriarchal family structures further marginalize women.
Embodied Resistance and Indigenous Knowledge: A Study of Tribal Consciousness in Mahasweta Devi’s “Draupadi” and “The Hunt”
This article examines Mahasweta Devi's short stories "Draupadi" and "The Hunt" in the light of embodied resistance and indigenous knowledge systems. While the term "indigenous" has gained political recognition in the global discourse as "first inhabitants," the Indian state has largely confined them to the administrative category of "Scheduled Tribes." Various international organizations have highlighted the distinct political identity of indigenous people based on their distinct history, language, spirituality, and land-based way of life. This article argues that the resistance of Dopdi Mejhen and Mary Oraon is not based on any bookish knowledge or state law, but rather on an experiential, land-centered indigenous knowledge system. Dopdi's naked, scarred body in the story "Draupadi," is transformed into a direct body-politic against state terror, class exploitation, and military rape. This transformation turns subaltern femininity into a place of expression and protest, not of shame. On the other hand, in the story “The Hunt,” the Jani Parab hunting festival, Mary’s forest knowledge and ritual-based violent resistance construct an alternative framework of indigenous women’s self-defense, justice, and collective morality. Bringing together feminist, ecofeminist, and decolonial perspectives, the article shows how indigenous knowledge systems function as both a living epistemological source of resistance to colonial-capitalist violence, and on this basis, a critical frame can be constructed for analyzing the political significance of indigenous culture in postcolonial India.
The Binary of Culture and Politics in Premanand Gajvee’s The Strength of Our Wrists
The Strength of Our Wrists (2013) explores the Marathi play on the Dalit community and navigates its readers to the socio-political milieu of the post-1950s Dalit community. Premanand Gajvee’s three plays, A Sip of Water, Kirwant and Gandhi-Ambedkar portray the condition of Dalits and their suppression in Indian society. This paper examines the relationship between culture and politics in all three of Gajvee's plays. Gajvee never disintegrates the cultural Hindu notion from the political milieu. This paper argues that Gajvee deliberately portrays the Dalits as an organised group to highlight the inefficiency of laws regarding their upbringing and safety. The paper concludes by mentioning the lack of female characters in all three plays and the double marginalisation of Dalit women.
Caste and Violence: A Critical Study of the Selected Short Stories from Sharankumar Limbale’s Dalit Brahmin and Other Stories
Thomas Paine claimed that "all men are born equal, and with equal natural rights," highlighting the fundamental concept of human equality (43). Nevertheless, this notion clashes with the socio-cultural realities present in Indian society, where individuals are categorized into more than three thousand castes based on their birth, leading to established hierarchies that rank some as superior and others as inferior. The Dalits, among the most disadvantaged, continue to face sufferings in the form of social ostracism, discrimination, humiliation and violence due to their lowest status in the caste hierarchy, which proclaims them impure and inferior. In this light, the present paper critically examines the portrayal of violence in the selected short stories from Dalit Brahmin and Other Stories by Sharankumar Limbale. It will use the writings and speeches of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, Jyotirao Phule, and Periyar as a theoretical framework to analyse the text.
Game, Set, Murder: A Comparative Playbook of Christie, Sayers, and Marsh
The so-called “Golden Age of Detective Fiction” (c. 1920s–1930s) represents a distinctive moment in literary history when crime fiction crystallized into a form defined by intellectual rigor, narrative symmetry, and ethical closure. Among the era’s most influential practitioners were three women writers—Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Ngaio Marsh—whose collective output decisively shaped the conventions and ambitions of the modern detective novel. Frequently grouped together as the “Queens of Crime,” these authors shared a commitment to the principles of fair play, rational explanation, and the closed circle of suspects, yet diverged markedly in their narrative priorities, character construction, and ideological investments. This paper offers a comparative analysis of Christie, Sayers, and Marsh by examining their approaches to plot architecture, detective characterization, narrative style, and social commentary. It argues that Christie perfected the detective novel as a game of pure intellectual deception; Sayers transformed it into a vehicle for psychological depth and moral inquiry; and Marsh balanced puzzle-solving with theatricality and professional realism. By situating their work within the cultural anxieties of the interwar period, the study demonstrates how Golden Age detective fiction simultaneously functioned as escapist entertainment and as a subtle diagnostic tool for examining class, gender, authority, and social order. Ultimately, the paper contends that the enduring appeal of the genre lies not in uniformity but in the productive tensions among these three distinctive yet complementary literary visions.
Reading Literature on Riots as Affective Testimony
Through a reading of Tabish Khair’s Night of Happiness, the paper looks at affective strategies deployed in literature that write of sectarian violence in postcolonial India. Thinking through the affect-trauma paradigm, an argument for looking at literary responses to sectarian violence as affective testimonies– one that records both the ungraspability of pain and the more than of representation– would be made. A reading of these affective strategies in Tabish Khair’s Night of Happiness would help us understand the writer’s attempts at establishing affective connections between different bodies, both the writing body and the reading body, which open up the reading body to feel the inaccessible experience. It is affect and its contagion that further make way to feel what has not yet happened to the readers, which makes a possibility of intersubjectivity, allowing readers to access the psychic space of the characters in the fiction.
Comparative Literature: From Eurocentrism to Decoloniality
This paper attempts to trace the history of Comparative Literature as a tool to postcolonial understanding, as well as the importance of a reciprocal relationship, where Comparative Literature can be understood, formulated and practiced through a postcolonial perspective. Though the correlation between these two areas of study has not gone unnoticed, yet, neither has there emerged a decidedly theoretical comparative postcolonial framework. The paper seeks to briefly map the history of the discipline and situate it in its postcolonial reception. In the course of the paper, paper will be focussing on three main aspects of the Comparative Literature-postcolonial conjunction, more or less in this order: postcolonial analysis of the discipline; the decolonising of Comparative Literature; and inversely, decolonising through comparative literature.
Urban Subjectivities in Wendy Dickson’s A Hint of Jacaranda Sindhu J
The paper engages with a specific aspect of the complex urban spaces of Bengaluru through an examination of a select urban narrative by Wendy Dickson, published in 2009. This aspect has to do with the commonly-held notion upheld in urban studies scholarship that, like many fast-growing cities of the Global South, Bengaluru’s urban present and future have had, and continue to have, little engagement with its historical urban pasts. Through an analysis of Wendy M. Dickson’s A Hint of Jacaranda: Recollections of Beauty in the Ordinary, my paper attempts to establish that this work offers an important counter-narrative of urban space which challenges the above perspective. The analysis will draw from frames of urban theory which focus on critical urban nostalgia and locality history, underscoring the importance of developing consciously gendered women-centric perspectives as well as the role of urban memory in shaping contemporary urban subjectivities in relation to Bengaluru’s urban spaces
Animal and Human Hybrids: Exploring Genetic Manipulation and its Ethical Implications in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake
Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) presents a dystopian future shaped by rapid advancements in genetic engineering and biotechnology. Central to the novel are genetically modified animal hybrids such as pigoons, rakunks, wolvogs, and snats, which challenge conventional understandings of species boundaries and raise profound ethical questions regarding scientific experimentation, human responsibility, and ecological sustainability. This paper examines the representation of animal hybrids in Oryx and Crake and analyzes their ethical implications through the lenses of bioethics, environmental ethics, and posthumanist theory. The study argues that Atwood uses hybrid animals not merely as speculative inventions but as critical tools for questioning humanity's pursuit of scientific progress without ethical restraint. Through these hybrid creatures, Atwood highlights the dangers of commodifying life, disrupting natural ecosystems, and blurring distinctions between humans and non-human animals.
Nature’s Muse: Exploring Toru Dutt’s Garden of Poetry and Sensibility
Toru Dutt, a pioneer of Indian English poetry, is essentially a poet of nature. She possesses a profound sensitivity to the natural world and exhibits the distinctive poetic sensibility that characterizes great poets. Living amidst the simplicity and freshness of nature, her heart responded deeply to its sights and sounds. She was acutely aware of its beauty, and her garden at Baugmaree, with its trees, flowers, and birds, served as a constant source of delight and inspiration for her poetry. Numerous passages of vivid nature description scattered throughout her works bear eloquent testimony to her love of nature. Dutt is highly sensitive to the varied beauty of her surroundings, their changing landscapes, and the enchanting diversity of their moods. Her portrayals of nature emerge from keen observation and profound contemplation. Her poetry deserves recognition for introducing a realistic and authentic depiction of nature, a quality that had long been absent from Indian poetry. This research paper seeks to explore the garden of poetry and sensibility cultivated by Toru Dutt, highlighting the significance of nature in shaping her poetic vision.
Cyborg bodies and gender politics: A review of feminist cyborg theory in Frankenstein and contemporary fiction
This paper examines the representation of cyborg bodies and gender politics in the works of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, and Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me through the lens of feminist cyborg theory. This study utilizes Donna Haraway’s concept of the cyborg, along with other contemporary posthumanist feminist perspectives, to explore how these texts undermine traditional distinctions between human versus machine, nature versus technology, and biological sex versus gender identity. Cyborg bodies are examined as sites of power, resistance, and ethical negotiation that expose how patriarchal systems regulate identity and commodify human beings. By methodologically comparing existing scholarship with textual analysis, this study demonstrates how these literary works redefine what it means to be human by emphasizing ethical agency, emotional consciousness, and social belonging over biological origin. Ultimately, this study shows that feminist cyborg theory is a necessary critical theoretical framework for analyzing the intersections of literature, technology, gender politics, and posthuman identity in the 21st century.
Re-creating the Cultural Apparatus of Human Rights through Petrofiction in Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason
The current paper reads petrofiction in Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason, where he approaches the climate change crisis by re-imagining an ‘exoticised’ past, negotiated in the present through narrative multiplicity and cultural specificity. Using Pramod Nayar’s work on the cultural apparatus of Human Rights, the paper examines characters in “from the egg seller’s end”, who instantiate the strategic exoticization and articulation of the liberatory potential of the exotic. There is a re-writing of the diaspora experience by employing the folkloric, and by extension, through exaggeration and parody. The extension of the human rights discourse to the folkloric, as suggested by Pramod K. Nayar, can help to re-vitalize and radicalize the universal human rights discourse. Nury and the Malik’s stories, read through Nayar’s lens, pose a resistance to the institutionalized abstraction of the human rights discourse by foregrounding rumour, communal voice and cultural memory, moving the conversation from literary style to political reality.