Through the divergent paths of two female characters Ashima Bhaduri Ganguli and Moushumi Mazoomdar, this article contends that Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake (2003) stages a dialectic between inherited Bengali tradition and self-fashioned modernity. The essay places the novel in the context of research on South Asian American writing feminist diaspora theory and transnational food studies. This article argues that Ashima and Moushumi, on the other hand, occupy different kinds of "third space," (Bhabha ) in which their existence as diasporic subjects is defined by their daily negotiations of food, fashion, movement, and memory. We do not consider food practices and sartorial practices as two independent systems of symbolism. Expanding upon Hall's notion of "new ethnicities," Butler's "theory of performativity," and Brah's concept of "diasporic positionality," we demonstrate how Ashima's hybridized domestic practices and Moushumi's cosmopolitan selfhood challenge the teleological models of assimilation. In-depth close readings of several pivotal scenes such as Moushumi's Parisian dinner party, Ashima's spontaneous jh & amacr;l m & umacr;r & imacr; in a Cambridge kitchen and the final breakdown of Moushumi and Gogol's marriage illustrate how Lahiri encapsulates desire resistance and nostalgia in commonplace material culture.
This essay analyzes Mysskin's films Onaayum Aattukkuttiyum (2013) and Psycho (2020) through the philosophical lens of Georges Bataille, particularly his theories of transgression, sacrifice, and the sacred. It argues that Mysskin's serial killers embody Bataillean figures who rupture societal taboos, seeking a form of continuity or sacred experience through extreme violence, consequently challenging normative perceptions of morality and order. Bridging these cinematic and theoretical worlds, the study illuminates a shared genealogy rooted in the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose existentialist inquiry into the 'humiliated' and the 'underground' informs both Bataille's concept of sovereignty and Mysskin's characterization of the transgressor. The analysis additionally engages with the Buddhist subtext, especially in Psycho, to examine themes of suffering (dukkha), impermanence (anicca), and the prospect of redemption, offering a unique Eastern philosophical counterpoint to Western existentialism-and it is precisely where these threads converge, where Bataillean transgression, Dostoevskyan existentialism, Buddhist metaphysics, and a distinct cinematic idiom of nocturnal esthetics and embodied otherness meet, that Mysskin emerges not merely as a genre filmmaker but as a moral philosopher of the margins, one who locates the sacred precisely where society most insistently averts its gaze.
This article examines Banu Mushtaq's Heart Lamp: Selected Stories through the concept of the somatic archive, a living ledger of unpayable juridical debt inscribed on wives' bodies through the convergence of Islamic marriage law, reproductive governance, and domestic discipline in Kannada Muslim spaces. Reading six stories through feminist somaesthetics, biopolitics, necropolitics, and Kristevan abjection, it argues that South Asian women's domestic bodies become necro-biopolitical zones where intensive management and systematic abandonment converge, and where the demand that wives incorporate the abject, including the husband's bodily decay and dissolution, functions as the definitional gesture of somatic debt. The article further traces how the somatic archive is transmitted intergenerationally from mother to daughter, and how it generates, in the same bodies it subjugates, the hidden transcripts of resistance that constitute a counter-archive of somatic autonomy.
Analyzing the graphic narrative The Deep (2020) by Warli artists Mayur Vayeda and Tushar Vayeda, this article explores how the narrative, through the employment of Indigenous eco-cosmologies, visual narratology, and material poetics, reconfigures the graphic narrative format. The article annotates how The Deep, by dissolving the rigid fortification of logocentrism in literature, proffers a decolonial epistemological resistance, decentralizing the hegemony of the Western literary canon. Decanonizing the bibliographic code through the utilization of Warli painting on hand-bound, recycled cotton papers, horizontal stitching, fragmented storytelling, etc., the narrative performs an epistemological reconstitution of the West-dominated format of graphic narratives. The visual travelogue, The Deep, registers the embodied journey of the authors across the stream of Ganjad (India) and oceans of Awashima (Japan), capturing the riverine and marine ecologies and offering a contrasting yet entangled understanding of the aquascape of the two geospatial locales. Warli ecocosmovisions, which are also reflected in their aesthetic motifs, decolonize Eurocentric, Cartesian epistemologies on nature by embracing multispecies assemblages. By investigating various visual-verbal narratological techniques, the article foregrounds how The Deep discards colonial epistemologies of nature while simultaneously decanonizing logocentric literary forms.
This article examines the acting style of Fahadh Faasil in the Malayalam-language film Aavesham (Enthusiasm, 2024) to foreground a specific dimension of film analysis where the material aspects of bodily movement and gestural particularity shape the character's porous and shifting presence on-screen. In so doing, it demonstrates the centrality of the body as a potent variable through which the expressivity and excess of Faasil's slapstick set pieces reveal the range of his screen acting. Through a close reading of selected scenes from the film, the article offers a vocabulary of "doubling" as an embodied contradiction, a performance mode in which humor and horror operate simultaneously by splitting the actor's body without reconciliation. In reframing the genre question through the performative body in comedy, this article advances "doubling" as a theoretical proposal to illustrate how film genre is continually reanimated by the actor's corporeal work. This intervention is situated within ongoing debates in comedy studies, film theory, and star studies with a particular emphasis on performance, genre, and embodiment in global film cultures.
"Claustropolis: 1984," the second part of Siddhartha Deb's third novel The Light at the End of the World explores the fifteen days leading up to the disaster on "that night" in Bhopal and is narrated from the perspective of a Hindu fundamentalist assassin who was involved in the anti-Sikh riots in Delhi in October-November 1984. I analyze this section and its representation of air through a contention with both the "old" and the "new" weird. The "old" weird, epitomized by the work of H.P. Lovecraft, often focuses on making architecture weird as quotidian spaces open portals to the numinous beyond, much like what happens to the narrator as he walks through the grounds owned by the company. The "new" weird, associated with progressive writers like China Mieville and Jeff Vandermeer, approach this hybrid generic aesthetic mode via what Mieville calls "radicalized sublime backwash"-an aspect that we also notice in Deb's novel. A critical consideration of the deployment of weird esthetics enables us to contend with the radical contingency of a disastrous event-how it appears as an "alien visitation" to its many unsuspecting victims at the moment of the catastrophe, and the slow violence that it inflicts across the decades.
This paper explores the subcultural tendencies and negotiations that go into the scripting process of Malayalam soft-porn cinema, one of the low-budget formations that emerged in the late 1980s and peaked into prominence in the early 1990s and 2000s. Drawing from fieldwork conducted from 2011 to 2017 among film personnel, including directors, scriptwriters and production managers who worked with soft-porn, I locate how soft-porn can be theorized with the backdrop of the generic definition of melodrama in mind. I argue that soft-porn's status as an unstable text is conditioned through multiple variations of story threads mediated through the figure of the censor script writer. Shuttling between the narratives of scripting of the films, personal archives of filmmakers and the accidental discovery of these scripts at the archives, I demonstrate that "soft-porn" emerges in a collective process of name-giving and generic formulations. I also address questions about access, legitimacy and translatability that haunts working on delegitimized forms such as pornography, and why scholars working on genre formations need to attend to the ways generic categorizations can also emerge from the way the film is written about, as much as it becomes part of legal and illegal assemblages of material infrastructures.
