The play Sacrifice (Visarjan, 1890) by Rabindranath Tagore is commonly acknowledged to have been an important exploration of the conflicts between faith, ritual, and reform, especially in its interaction with the ethical implications of religious orthodoxy. Building upon this enduring critical foundation, the current paper seeks to emphasise the psychological depth and structural significance of the play’s female characters. The research takes a two-fold theoretical approach based on archetypal psychology of Carl Gustav Jung, where Gunavati is understood as the Terrible Mother—a source of authority, devotion, and latent violence—and Aparna is the redemptive Anima, a source of compassion, introspection, and moral renewal. These archetypal characters function not merely as symbols but as dynamic psychic forces that influence the dramatic movement. Simultaneously, E. M. Forster’s theoretical formulation in Aspects of the Novel illuminates the nuanced characterisation of Tagore’s female characters, who embody the traits of “round characters” who develop and surprise throughout the drama. Together, these frameworks reveal that the ethical vision of Sacrifice is created through the interaction of archetype and narrative form, with female characters serving as both symbolic and transformative agents.
Identity and association are some of the key aspects that govern life of an individual. Human intricacies generate curiosity among academicians which leads them to explore the human psyche. Qala, a Hindi film released in the year 2022 deals with many human follies and intricacies. Set in the late 1930s and early 1940s, it is the story of the eponymous character, Qala Manjushree, who wants to make a career in the music industry. But, amidst the fame and glory ofthe music world, Qalas'suppressed and subdued emotions keeps haunting her. The story deals with the issues of upbringing, identity, gender, patriarchy, mental health and complexity of human psychology, which had intrigued the audience. Through psychoanalytic theory of Freud and John Bowlbys' theory of attachment, the paper aims to explore the identity crisis and suffocation of Qala and also her mother, which often is a result of a troubled upbringing.
Desire? is a 30-minute Indian documentary directed by Garima Kaul that has been screened at several international festivals, including the Scottish Queer International Film Festival and the Glasgow Short Film Festival. This performance-based documentary focuses on asexuality-an often-overlooked identity in both mainstream and queer discussions. It challenges the dominant idea that sexuality must always involve desire or attraction by bringing forward the real-life experiences of asexual individuals in India. Through personal stories, visual performances, and reflective narration, the film questions how society defines desire and normalises sexual behaviour. This paper uses queer theory to analyze how Desire? opens up space for thinking differently about sexuality in Indian culture. It argues that the film helps to reimagine desire as something that does not have to fit into fixed or conventional categories. By doing so, it gives visibility to asexual voices and highlights the need to broaden our understanding of sexual identities.
Family Dysfunction is a social construct characterised by mental illness, unhealthy relationships, leading to emotional longings and the absence of transactional patterns in a family. While dysfunctions are pernicious to family functioning, family resilience enables family members to recover from persistent life challenges, fostering positive family functioning despite dysfunctions or myriad adversities. It is a nascent concept across all the disciplines of the study; nevertheless, the literary panorama of the research is diminutive. The present study negotiates a holistic appraisal offamily dysfunctions and family resilience in Colm T & oacute;ib & iacute;ns'The BlackwaterLightship, highlightingfamilial conflicts between three Devereux family women, Lily, Dora, and Helen, who forget all their differences and join with Declans'friends to succour, Declan in his last stages of life. By adopting family resilience processes proposed by Dr. Walsh, it uncovers the strength-oriented approaches of the family in the novel to argue and revitalise transactional patterns in surmounting dysfunctions. The findings unfold a synergistic examination of dysfunctional systems, highlighting the absence of transactional patterns, emotional dysphoria, and the quest for resilience among the distressed family members involves rejuvenating reparative potential and equanimity through the systemic study offamily resilience. The study asserts thatflummoxed family relationships within the human community must forge resilience despite dysfunctions to achieve positive outcomes for effective family functioning.
The article introduces the concept of Blue Humanities, its scope and magnitude in todays' interdisciplinary and fluid literary scenario. Being relatively a recent trend, the article explains the rubrics of planetary water, the need to educate ourselves in oceanic literacy, and about resetting our relationship with marine life. The contingency to manage our marine environment for sustainable development and to conserve biodiversity are inevitable spectrums in the dynamics of oceanic deliberations. 'Biophilia' can be traced back to a very long past, but with changes that has happened to the planet, oceanic narrative is an imperative discourse in literary circles. The modern shift in the narrative dimension thus is from the green to the blue, from land to the ocean. The article also touches on the recent discussions and imperatives in blue humanities as being part of environmental humanities.
This study explores how ordinary individuals-particularly women-are victimised by state and insurgent violence in conflict-ridden regions, with a focus on Danesh Ranas' novel Red Maize (2015). Drawing on Ranas' lived experience as a police officer in the violence-torn Doda district during the late 1990s, the novel offers an intimate portrayal of trauma and survival amid geopolitical turmoil. The paper analyses the novels' depiction ofgendered trauma, alternating narrative voices, symbolic representations such as the maize crop, and the roles of female agency and resilience in a militarised zone. Through a trauma-theoretical lens, this paper examines how Red Maize functions as a site of resistance literature that illuminates both individual suffering and collective resilience.
This article intends to examine how musics'internalization of the continued ideological legacies ofcultural nationalism and the consolidation ofa dominant patriarchy combined to marginalize the woman performer, followed by a radical recasting in more acceptable roles that confirmed to the newly constituted moral standards of the nation-space. Through a reading of Shashi Deshpandes'Small Remedies (2000), the article interests itself in investigating the polemical interventions which ensured that the woman artist did not rise beyond her preordained role as a mere companion and consort to the central icon of the male musical progenitor, a guru or ustad ofa gharana. Public representation ofwomens'musical practices premises itself on a dynamic aesthetics of reclamation that reinforces their respectably married status through emblems like the mangalasutra, reinstating their conformity to conventional, heteronormative structures.
Jayanta Mahapatra is considered among the representative poets without whom the oeuvre of Indian English literature remains incomplete. Drawing pride in his roots and regional identity, Mahapatras' works are also critical of the outdated aspects of the Indian cultural tradition. He takes the material from his local setting and critically addresses the position of the marginalised. His poems blend past and present, memory and desire, to create a realm of unique realist-aesthetic experience. This article seeks to explore the reasons behind the presence of experimental voices in the select poems of Jayant Mahapatra and how those experiments contribute to opening new realms in the tradition ofIndian English poetry. Though Mahapatras'poetic corpus is too wide, the present paper, in its ambit, analyses select poems like Dawn at Puri, Hunger, Close the Sky, Ten by Ten, A Rain of Rites, Ash and Relationship from different collections to serve its critical purpose.
This article investigates how power and resistance play out in Manjula Padmanabhans'Escape (2008) between authoritarian Generals and their people and among the oppressed, considering human-drone hierarchies. The study examines important characters-Meiji, her uncles, and the drones-and finds that resistance manifests as overt disobedience, covert subversion, and intra-group conflict. While Youngest and Meijis' escape indicates tactical resistance, their privileged position raises concerns about the underprivileged who remain behind. The drones' paradoxical autonomy undermines traditional power dynamics by demonstrating posthuman agency within oppressive systems. The study contends that Escape deconstructs binary notions of oppressor and oppressed, instead portraying resistance as cyclical and intrinsically unstable. This study combines feminist perspectives, Foucaults'biopower, and contemporary theories to provide a sociopolitical reading ofPadmanabhans'apocalyptic narrative.
In an age marked by the dynamic of accelerating artificial intelligence and deepening ecological instability, theorists like James Lovelock contend that humanity is witnessing a shift from the Anthropocene (a human-centered epoch defined by environmental degradation) to the Novacene (a new era in which hyperintelligent entities may act as planetary stewards). This paper examines how Claire Busss' The Gaia Solution (2019), a speculative eco-dystopia, probes this transition by imagining a future in which Gaia, AI systems, environmental collapse, and authoritarian governance converge. Notably, the novel envisions what may be called a hopeful dystopia-a narrative that, while depicting crisis and control, suggests the possibility of renewal through ethical co-evolution between humans and intelligent machines. The paper uses an interdisciplinary framework by integrating James Lovelocks'Novacene hypothesis, Ursula Heises' concept of eco-cosmopolitanism, and Donna Haraways'cyborg theory to analyse how Buss reimagines Gaia as both a mythic and scientific force to transcend anthropocentric frameworks. By combining literary analysis with posthuman and ecological theory, this study contributes to a growing body offiction-driven ecocriticism that reinterprets agency, survival, and environmental ethics in light of technological futures.
This paper seeks to rethink the economy of labour/leisure, ambition and the body in the lyrical world of Param Sundari (an item song from the Hindi film Mimi) from a Marxist feminist perspective. The paper will argue how the lyrics of the concerned item number can be interpreted as reducing the female body to a source of purely utilitarian pleasure and thus, enabling the repetitive production and reproduction of the labour power of the working class. In this context, this paper will analyze the Hindi item song Param Sundari as an urban narrative and attempt to understand how the values of the urban working class and the idea of the female body are represented through the lyrics of the concerned item song. Employing Laura Mulveys' idea of the male gaze, the paper would further problematize the representational politics of cinema and argue how the latter s' smooth operation in a society is enabled by the structural imperative of a symbiosis with patriarchy. Thus, this paper purports to explore and expound the economy of labour/leisure in a capitalist society and how capitalist hegemony belies the idea ofgender inequality, and commodification of the female body behind the facade offemale ambition, success and liberty.
The strong bond between human life and the world of Nature has been explored perennially by literary artists and wordsmiths. While a traumatic experience like rape can be harrowing, the epiphany attained by a creative journey through Nature is equally rewarding. Laurie Halse Anderson powerfully uses this trope in her novel, Speak. While the immovable nature of the trees indicates the lingering effect of the trauma, their firm rootedness suggests the strength to hold the entire tree in its place and overcome any adverse weather. The silent trees become the mouthpiece for Melinda, the protagonist of the novel, to speak about her trauma. This paper aims to study the revival of the lost communication not through words but through the subject ofMelindas' drawing, trees. This paper uses art therapy approach to examine the importance of looking beyond words to heal from trauma resulting from rape.
Inquiries into the politics of Partition have amply acquired a dominant space in academic discourse. The stronghold of intertwined trajectories of Partition violence, nationhood and communalism forpastseven decades in the official narratives has relegated its human experience to an ephemeral occurrence. Majority of Partition literature restricts the representation of trauma by branding the violence as communal insanity that need not be recorded, revisited, and retold. Perhaps, the historians feared that the discussion of this communal cataclysm would herald a similar recurrence. Thus, Partition historiography shunned the existence of the personal testimonies of its victims. The traditional cannon falls short at portraying the historical memory of debilitating loss and horrific trauma which became the truth of its survivors. Only recently have the academicians begun to appreciate the implications of the indelible mark of the memories of violence left on human history. This paper attempts to probe into the unheard echoes of Partition Discourse to investigate the significance of narrativising Partition violence, which has been left behind the shadows.
Posthumanism and new materialism radically decentralizes, interrogates and reconceptualizes the universalized privileging notion of human anthropocentric autonomy and subsequently eradicate the anthropocentric binary between human and the non-human. This binary is dismantled through the concepts such as Karen Barads' new materialist onto-epistemology of 'intra-action'and Stacy Alaimos'posthuman 'trans-corporeality'. Each concept highlights the embeddedness and mutual interdependence of human and the non-human, and through this intra-action of interference a new diffractive configuration emerges. Trauma theorists like Cathy Caruth present the notion of unspeakability of the traumatic memories. Partition genocide rendered the traumatic memories of survivors unspeakable due to the overwhelming intensity ofpsychological pain. The article reads Geetanjali Shrees' Tomb of Sand through the concept of 'intra-action'to recalibrate a new, complex diffractive entanglement of speakability that undermines the utter despondency encompassing the inexpressibility of partition memory. The present paper focuses on the role of non-human objects in generating the sequestered memories ofpartition violence that distorted the speaking power of the partition survivor, Ma, in the novel. It also incorporates Rosi Braidottis'posthuman notion of interconnectedness of human and non-human to facilitate the role of intra-acting agencies, which reflect how the trope of contiguousness between the protagonist Ma, and non-human entities lifts the veil of horrific partition memory.
Various envisioned futures have been presented in the canonical literature by portraying connections between the present and future. However, for canonical literature imagination has been restricted to futuristic imagination only. In contrast, Afrofuturists often return to the past and reconstruct their history to imagine a fully liberated future. This paper analyses The Piano Lesson as a rewriting of the history of black Americans via a new historicist lens. The present research argues that even if the categorical oppression caused by slavery might have ended in the past, the psychological threats caused by oppression still exist and continue to affect the lives and relationships of people ofAfrican descent in America. The analysis illuminates how August Wilson rewrites the history of the African American people by equipping his characters and ghosts with self-fashioning and self-cancellation to imagine a better future.
Jean Arasanayagams'Apocalypse '83 paints a stark portrait of Sri Lankas' ethnic conflict through the lens of poetry. This paper delves into the verses, using them as a gateway to comprehend the profound hardships encountered by Sri Lankan refugees. By exploring their memories, the analysis goes beyond the battlefield, illuminating the human cost of war and the psychological impact on civilians. The paper examines how these refugees remember their struggles, aiming to unearth the historical context embedded within the poems. Through this exploration, the research sheds light on the social fabric of these minority groups and the deep injustices they endured. Ultimately, the analysis focuses on the refugees'journey, using their memories to reclaim their identities shattered by war.
Gender issue in Brexit discourses is a gorilla in the room-an obvious yet unaddressed topic of discussion. Britains' withdrawal of membership from the European Union has given birth to a new subgenre, BrexLit, a variation of the Condition-of-England novels. The socio-political and economic ramifications of this watershed, as reflected in Brexit novels, have been critiqued. However, gender issues in Brexit novels are still unexplored. This paper undertakes a textual analysis of Sam Byerss' 2018 novel Perfidious Albion, which is considered as a major BrexLit and attempts to showcase cyber sexism prevalent in the contemporary scenario in Britain. Byerss' narrative foregrounds a dystopic vision of contemporary Britain. It archives how both old and new media are used unethically to create a xenophobic, anti-immigrant toxicity. This paper investigates how the process ofpolitical de-Europeanisation aggravates backlash. Attempts have been made to unearth how, in the backdrop of this narrative, the victims retaliate against diverse misogynies and offer narratives of empowerment and female solidarity.
