Future of Postcolonial Studies: Globalization and Environmentalism

Future of Postcolonial Studies: Globalization and Environmentalism     

  Postcolonialism’s deep alliance with poststructuralism that “focuses on textual issues instead of historical issues” and reads colonialism through the paradigm of representation rather than any other form of socio-economic exploitation. Postcolonialism’s conceptualization of the migrant as the “archetype of a postcolonial identity” that prioritizes the notions of hybridity, ambivalence and in-betweenness, and is essentially based on the postcolonial elite. The temporal ambiguity of postcolonialism that celebrates the contemporary world as an emancipatory space for the free flow of culture and borderless-ness, whereas the materialist critics interpret current globalization through their concerns for neocolonialism.

Postcolonialism’s anti-colonial stand, primarily reached through the binaries between the colonizer and the colonized and evident in the early work of Fanon, Memmi and Mannoni, became redundant in later postcolonialism that was deeply influenced by the interrogations of binaries in poststructuralistm. Postcolonialism’s post-structural turn is epitomized by Bhaba’s concept of the hybridity, “‘hybridity' which is commonly defined as “the creation of new transcultural forms within the contact zone produced by colonization” . Thus the binaries of the Self and the Other, the colonizer and the colonized, the oppressor and the oppressed were overshadowed by the concepts of in-betweenness, contact zones, cultural amalgamation, multiculturalism, which distinctly aim more at paradigms of synthesis and exchange rather than polarities.  Consequently, this also marks the alienation of postcolonialism from political concerns of anti-colonialism to a cultural concerns of identity and cultural diversity colonialism through “neocolonial” economic globalization and military occupations of the contemporary day and age.

Most of the criticism against postcolonialism as an ineffective tool to understand globalization stems from this critique of postcolonialism as too deeply entrenched in postmodernism. The crux of the issue lies in postcolonialism’s emphasis on ‘hybridity,’ which is identified as an essentially postmodern concept and celebrated as a condition of globalization. One of the most vocal voices against hybridity has been that of Aijaz Ahmad, who in his famous essay “The Politics Of Literary Postcoloniality” critiques postcolonialism for its insistence on postmodernism—a paradigm he describes as nothing but “apocalyptic anti-Marxism”(110). Ahmad’s objection to the postmodern leanings of postcolonial studies concerns its three major thematic concerns: 

a) “the theme of ’hybridity’, ’ambivalence’ and ’contingency’, as it surfaces especially in Bhabha’s writing but also much beyond; 

(b) the theme of the collapse of the nation-state as a horizon of politics; and 

(c) the theme of globalised, postmodern electronic culture, which is seen at times as a form of global entrapment and at other times as yielding the very pleasures of global hybridity”.

 Thus, for Ahmad, while the nation state increasingly gains in importance and continues to play a significant role especially in the context of state control over transnational finance, the celebration of globalization of culture through global electronic media is to foreground the “structural offensive of capital,” or “imperialist ideology” the when substantial proportions of the global population” are deprived of “conditions of bare survival, let alone electronic literacy and gadgetry” . For Ahmad thus, the postcolonial critic claiming cultural hybridity, which he terms as “carnivalesque” , assumes an essentially elite position. Thus, the privileged migrant who can “live a life of constant mobility and surplus pleasure” is totally dissociated from the class struggles and local resistances . Ahmad not only declares postcolonialism as incapable of addressing the crisis of contemporary global capitalism, he also echoes in Dirlik’s line of argument, that the postcolonial cultural critics are themselves consumers and producers of interchangeable, commodified cultures that represent the “depthlessness and whimsicality of postmodernism - the cultural logic of Late Capitalism”in Jameson’s superb phrase”

As long as globalization is conceived as a cultural rather than a structural experience, it functions as what Roland Robertson has called ‘‘a site of social theoretical interests, interpretative indulgence, or the display of world-ideological preferences’’; considered as an aggregate of local experiences in displacement rather than a structure patterned by causal relationships, the culture of globalization cannot account for ‘‘the global-human condition.

One of the ways through which the new postcolonial readings of contemporary literature can address the material conditions of globalization is through an understanding of the politics of production, dissemination and reception of the postcolonial texts as cultural commodities in the global literary market. Taking cues from the enquiries of the new historicists, it is important that postcolonialism also explores the historical context of the production of the text and its role as an ideological artifact in the way it responds to the tenets of neoliberal globalization. Thus, the new interventions in postcolonial literary studies, Milz argues, should not merely focus on texts that thematize the socio-economic-political realities of globalization but must go beyond the content of the text and rather understand “the relationship between literature and globalization within the larger context of contemporary power relations between nation-states, institutions, corporations, global markets, international trade and policy instruments  and so on.

The future of postcolonial studies :-

The field of Postcolonial Studies has been gaining prominence since the 1970s. Some would date its rise in the Western academy from the publication of Edward Said’s influential critique of Western constructions of the Orient in his 1978 book, Orientalism. The growing currency within the academy of the term “postcolonial” (sometimes hyphenated) was consolidated by the appearance in 1989 of The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. Since then, the use of cognate terms “Commonwealth” and “Third World” that were used to describe the literature of Europe’s former colonies has become rarer. Although there is considerable debate over the precise parameters of the field and the definition of the term “postcolonial,” in a very general sense, it is the study of the interactions between European nations and the societies they colonized in the modern period. The European empire is said to have held sway over more than 85% of the rest of the globe by the time of the First World War, having consolidated its control over several centuries. The sheer extent and duration of the European empire and its disintegration after the Second World War have led to widespread interest in postcolonial literature and criticism in our own times.

[there is] a prevailing version of postcolonial studies in the United States that so embraces its aura of ‘new work’ and its dual allegiances to high theory and a rather reified, distanced, and monolithic ‘Third World literature’ that it largely estranges itself from the individual and collective histories of several important allied traditions such as American studies, Native-American studies, African-American studies, Asian-American studies, Latino studies, and Gay and Lesbian studies.(Cooppan 1999: 7)

Despite the fact that there are pressing political overlaps between disenfranchised peoples and groups across the world , there are also important differentials between them: Native Americans or African-Americans, however disenfranchised, are citizens of the most powerful nation-state in the world; on the other hand, at least within the United States, many immigrants from the third world are either from relatively well-off sections of society, or even when not, have participated in what Toni Morrison has called a ‘most enduring and efficient rite of passage into American culture: negative appraisals of the native-born black population’, an ugly process that makes solidarities as difficult as they are necessary.

The list of former colonies of European powers is a long one. They are divided into settler (eg. Australia, Canada) and non-settler countries (India, Jamaica, Nigeria, Senegal, Sri Lanka). Countries such as South Africa and Zimbabwe which were partially settled by colonial populations complicate even this simple division between settler and non-settler. The widely divergent experiences of these countries suggest that “postcolonial” is a very loose term. In strictly definitional terms, for instance, the United States might also be described as a postcolonial country, but it is not perceived as such because of its position of power in world politics in the present, its displacement of native American populations, and its annexation of other parts of the world in what may be seen as a form of colonization. For that matter, other settler countries such as Canada and Australia are sometimes omitted from the category “postcolonial” because of their relatively shorter struggle for independence, their loyalist tendencies toward the mother country which colonized them, and the absence of problems of racism or of the imposition of a foreign language. It could, however, be argued that the relationship between these countries to the mother country is often one of margin to center, making their experience relevant to a better understanding of colonialism.
The debate surrounding the status of settler countries as postcolonial suggests that issues in Postcolonial Studies often transcend the boundaries of strict definition. In a literal sense, “postcolonial” is that which has been preceded by colonization. The second college edition of The American Heritage Dictionary defines it as “of, relating to, or being the time following the establishment of independence in a colony.” In practice, however, the term is used much more loosely. While the denotative definition suggests otherwise, it is not only the period after the departure of the imperial powers that concerns those in the field, but that before independence as well.
The formation of the colony through various mechanisms of control and the various stages in the development of anti-colonial nationalism interest many scholars in the field. By extension, sometimes temporal considerations give way to spatial ones (i.e. in an interest in the postcolony as a geographical space with a history prior or even external to the experience of colonization rather than in the postcolonial as a particular period) in that the cultural productions and social formations of the colony long before colonization are used to better understand the experience of colonization. Moreover, the “postcolonial” sometimes includes countries that have yet to achieve independence, or people in First World countries who are minorities, or even independent colonies that now contend with “neocolonial” forms of subjugation through expanding capitalism and globalization. In all of these senses, the “postcolonial,” rather than indicating only a specific and materially historical event, seems to describe the second half of the twentieth-century in general as a period in the aftermath of the heyday of colonialism. Even more generically, the “postcolonial” is used to signify a position against imperialism and Eurocentrism. Western ways of knowledge production and dissemination in the past and present then become objects of study for those seeking alternative means of expression. As the foregoing discussion suggests, the term thus yokes a diverse range of experiences, cultures, and problems; the resultant confusion is perhaps predictable.
The expansiveness of the “postcolonial” has given rise to lively debates. Even as some deplore its imprecision and lack of historical and material particularity, others argue that most former colonies are far from free of colonial influence or domination and so cannot be postcolonial in any genuine sense. In other words, the overhasty celebration of independence masks the march of neocolonialism in the guise of modernization and development in an age of increasing globalization and transnationalism; meanwhile, there are colonized countries that are still under foreign control. The emphasis on colonizer/colonized relations, moreover, obscures the operation of internal oppression within the colonies. Still others berate the tendency in the Western academy to be more receptive to postcolonial literature and theory that is compatible with postmodern formulations of hybridity, syncretization, and pastiche while ignoring the critical realism of writers more interested in the specifics of social and racial oppression. The lionization of diasporic writers like Salman Rushdie, for instance, might be seen as a privileging of the transnational, migrant sensibility at the expense of more local struggles in the postcolony. Further, the rise of Postcolonial Studies at a time of growing transnational movements of capital, labor, and culture is viewed by some with suspicion in that it is thought to deflect attention away from the material realities of exploitation both in the First and the Third World.

Midnight children

Salman Rushdie :-

Salman Rushdie is undoubtly one of the most famous novelists in presenttime. His second novel Midnight's Children received greater critical acclaimand made Rushdie a famous literary figure in English speaking world. The novelwon for him Booker of Bookers prize in 1993. In the novel Rushdie introduces aninnovator narrative technique which is different from the contemporary writers.He uses the first person narrative through Saleem Sinai, the protagonist of thenovel. Rushdie also makes good use of the device of Magic Realism in Midnight'sChildren. Further Rushdie's use of cinematic elements can clearly be seen inthe novel.

All this shows Bombay Cinema's influence on Rushdie and Rushdie'suse of Indianized English is his biggest achievement. His use of Indian worldlike ekdum, angrez, firangee etc. give Indian flavor to the novel. Above all,Rushdie can be considered the master of narrative techniques at present time.

The narrative techniques in Midnight's children :-

Rushdie's Midnight's Children introduces a new narrative technique which is totally different from the traditional narrative techniques. Also Rushdie sets the trend for experimentation with narrative technique and usage of English language. In this way, he gave a new direction to Indian writing in English. William Walsh Rightly praised the technique by saying that, "combining the elements of magic and Fantasy, the grimmest realism, extravagant force, multi-mirrored analogy, and a potent symbolic structure, Salman Rushdie has captured the astonishing energy of the novel unprecedented in scope, manner and achievement in the hundred and fifty-years-old tradition of the India novel in English".

The novel covers a period of seventy five years of the history of the Indian subcontinent. The protagonist, Saleem Sinai, narrates the story of his birth and the birth of Indian subcontinent. The narrative blurs the chronological boundaries. As, Rushdies counterpart, Saleem Sinai narrates his story from a distance of time, and place. Like the narrator of Mahabharta, Sanjay who is endowed with special power to see things from a distance, and narrates the events of the Kurukshetra war, Saleen is endowed with magic power so that he can see from a distance and read the mind of readers.

Rushdie used the device of magic realism for the framework of the novel. When we go through the novel, we find that Saleem Sinai, the protagonist, has the gift of having an incredible sense of smell which allows him to determine other's thoughts and emotions. This gift of Saleem is same to that of his grandfather Adam Ajiz who also had the same large nose and magical gift. In the novel we see that how Adam's incredible sense of smell and his magical nose saved him from being killed in the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre.

Character :-

Adaptation is an integral part of literature in which one genre is transformed into the same or the another. The person who adapts any literary product generally adds or deletes, maybe something or maybe many things, from the original and recreates a new original proving Linda Serger’s statement, “…adaptation is a new

original”, right.

The concept of the transfer of a novel into a feature film is known as ‘Novel into Film’. It is considered in modern western culture as a type of derivative work. Popular novels are frequently adapted into films to take advantage of the popularity of the written literature. The reason is to reach the audience easily in order to make

commercial benefit. Obviously, the more successful the source novel is, the more likely it is to attract a larger

audience. By now many novels have already been converted into films but there is still no definitive theory of adaptation, thus the critics and scholars ponder over adaptation, yet cannot seem to agree on what makes an adaptation a success or a failure. On successfully observing both the genres without any prejudices, the observer can realise that the change is a new creativity that also helps in better understanding of the texts.

 Themes and symbols :-

A mixture of fiction and history, verisimilar and imaginary, Midnight’s Children is narrated in the first person by Saleem Sinai, one of the 1000 children born right at or soon after midnight on 15th August 1947, India’s Independence Day from the British Empire. Each child holds some kind of supernatural, magical power.

The perfect balance, so typical in Rushdie’s works, is denoted even chronologically here, with the Indian Independence Day being the perfect centre of the novel’s timeline. While the present time of the story is set at the end of the 1970s – 32 years after Saleem’s birthday – the first events he tells are about his grandfather, Aadam Aziz, in 1915 – 32 years before. Its central position makes that eventful night even more important: everything revolves around it.

Throughout the whole novel, pairs of characters are presented more or less in direct opposition to each other. As Saleem’s story serves as an allegory of India’s history, as we will see further on, these clashes also assume a specific metaphorical meaning: tradition versus opposition (Tai the boatman and Aadam Aziz, Salem’s grandfather); Muslims and Hindus (Saleem and Shiva); different visions of Islam (Aziz again and his wife Naseem). In a way, contrast is most frequent relationship between characters and, where events in Saleem’s life reflect historical events of India, these frictions represent clashes in the country’s society – a never-ending flow of conflicts between different ethnic groups, faiths, or political parties.

Texture :-

In the journey from the novel to the movie, Midnight’s Children bypasses many plots and remains faithful to many. At the very beginning, the episode of Padma being a faithful audience to Saleem’s story is

replaced by direct narration but the episode of the famous perforated sheet remains faithful to a good deal.

Aadam and Naseem have comparatively become smaller characters in the movie. Thus, Tai turns into a character of an unrecognisable youth in the movie and the episode of Naseem’s breaking of silence after a gap of three long years is omitted.

As Ahmed and Amina directly shift to Bombay, the part in which Amina saves Lifafa from being killed by the mob and Lafifa’s cousin Shri Ramram Seth making mystic prophesies about Amina's son fail to get a place in the movie.

Even Saleem’s prowess in digging deep into people's minds evades in the motion format. In the movie,Saleem has the power to get connected to the midnight's children only, and his power to get into anyone’s mind is missing. Thus, Saleem’s one-sided love with Evie Burns as well as his attempt to push into Evie’s mind is lost. Similarly, the episode of using his mental abilities to follow Amina around the town to discover her affair with Nadir is replaced by a monotonous observation through overhearing.

The movie tries to keep Saleem’s image clear enough and therefore the scene in which Saleem sees his mom, Amina, masturbating; while reciting the name of a man who is not Saleem’s father, and Saleem having a glance of his mother’s butt while she is about to pee; is reduced to a scene where Saleem watches his mother being passionate and taking the name of her former lover.

Unlike the text where Saleem is hospitalised for a cut in his fingers, Saleem in the motion genre is

hospitalised soon after a teacher badly punishes him. Then after, in both the formats, Saleem’s parents discover

that Saleem is not their biological son.

The entire episode of Saleem being sent to live with his filmmaker uncle and movie-star aunt is replaced by the episode where Saleem is sent to his aunt, Emerald, whose husband, Zulfikar, is Pakistani Army’s one of the supreme officers. And unlike the text, Saleem becomes youth in Pakistan in the movie. Thus,Instead of travelling to Pakistan with his family, Saleem reunites with them in Karachi. But, from his journey

from childhood till youth, Saleem was alone, with no friends, except the friends of his mind – the midnight’s children. The irony remains that in the text, Saleem fails to connect with the midnight’s children while he was in Pakistan.

In Pakistan, Jamila becomes famous as a singer as in the original genre, but Ahmed fails to enjoy moderate success making bath linens in the movie.

The movie doesn’t agree to emancipate the feeling of incest in Saleem, like in the novel. Therefore, his love for Jamila and his unnecessary justification towards a love relationship between both of is erased from the motion format.

In the movie, Saleem undergoes a nasal surgery not because he gets a severe sinus infection, like in the novel, but just because Ahmed forcibly makes that happen. But similar to the text, Saleem realises that he has lost his power of telepathy, but in its place, he is endowed with a powerful sense of smell where he can even smell the perfume of new love.

The text shows the revolt of the midnight’s children against Saleem . 

 Aesthetic :-

Midnight’s Children has been adapted three times so far, first for television (MCS) in 1998 by Rushdie, then for theatre (MCT) in 2002, again by Rushdie with dramaturg Simon Reade and director Tim Supple,5 and lastly for film (MCF) in 2012.6 Both of the earlier adaptations have also been published as books: The Screenplay of Midnight’s children (Rushdie, 1999b), and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children: Adapted for the Theatre (Rushdie, Reade, and Supple, 2002). The film screenplay, the most recent of these, was written by Rushdie and the Indian-Canadian director Deepa Mehta; in the film Rushdie also appears as the narratorial voiceover, and Satya Bhabha (who plays Saleem)Is the son of Rushdie’s friend, the postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha.

that the film adaptation is a protracted creative project that has taken into consideration, more than previous adaptations of the novel, not only new forms of representation and

new ways of reading, but also new ways of engaging its constructed audiences.

Comparisons with the novel are not made in order to calibrate its success but as variations on a theme with two foci: the question of beginning, and the question of address. We con-clude that the adaptation by the author of the “original” presents different types of adjust-ment, and that the questions of audience and media are more relevant.

As with the 2012 film adaptation, Rushdie was involved in the other adaptations as

both author of the source text and screenplay writer and co-adaptor, thus “authorizing”these dramatizations. This direct involvement prompts such questions as: What is at

stake when the author of the “source” text participates in the adaptation, co-creates it,and thus wishes to retain prolonged authorial control over the text? What implications do the merging of author and voiceover narrator have for the reception? What is involved when the author breaks “the fourth wall”, speaking directly to the audience through the imaginary barrier that, by convention, separates viewers from the characters (and the author)? What happens when the typically central issues in adaptation theory (author-ship, authenticity, fidelity, and intertextuality) become marginal? To offer tentative

answers to these questions here, we will first consider critical considerations and

Rushdie’s own views on adaptation, before analysing the adaptations especially through audience construction.

Postcolonial study in bollywood

Postcolonial Theory and Bollywood Films

Postcolonial theory has hardly been a defining paradigm in the field of film studies. Postcolonial theory originally emerged from comparative literature departments and film from film and media studies departments, and despite the many intersections postcolonial theory has not been explicitly foregrounded. However, there are more similarities and natural points of intersections between the two areas than it would at first appear. For example, both postcolonial theory and film studies emerged at the end of the 1970s with the development of semiotic theory and poststructuralist thought. Both areas engage intensively with the field of representation, implying the ways in which a language, be it cinematic or otherwise, manages to convey reality as “mediated” and “discursive,” and therefore influenced by power relations. An example could be the notion of the gendered gaze by Laura Mulvey and her concept of looked-at-ness and how it also applies to the screening and representation of black and colonized bodies in films, which bell hooks later theorized as black looks, to which she proposed the response of an oppositional gaze. Despite their different genealogies, it is therefore not only very natural but also necessary to combine postcolonial theory and film in order to unearth how the visual field is inherently hegemonizing and hierarchical and therefore in need of critical appraisal and a deconstructive take, such as postcolonial theory. Postcolonial theory has critically contributed to revisiting the representation of the Other, addressing long-standing tropes and stereotypes about cultural difference and racial otherness. This implies new interventions on how visual representations are implicated in the policing of boundaries between East and West, between Europe and the Rest, the self and the other, undoing or rethinking the ways in which the visual field conveys operation of a mastery that needs to be undone and decoded.

Rang De Basanti :-

Rang De Basanti (Color me Saffron) tells us the story of Caucasian and Hindi speaking, British filmmaker, Sue, who comes to India to make a documentary on India’s revolutionary and legendary freedom fighters, Bhagat Singh, Chandrashekar Azad, Sukhdev, Rajguru and Ashfaqullah Khan who were instrumental in India’s struggle against the British. The five Indian youngsters she chooses to play the revolutionaries are Laxman Pandey (Atul Kulkarni), a Hindu fundamentalist with political aspirations; Daljit Singh called DJ (Aamir Khan), a Punjabi guy who is also an ex-student of the university and uninterested in the life outside the universities’ gates; Aslam (Kunal Kapoor), a rational Muslim ; Sukhi (Sharman Joshi) , a fun loving guy primarily interested in women; Karan (Siddharth) a rich kid who dreams of settling abroad and shares an estranged relationship with his father; and Sonia (Soha Ali Khan) , a youth activist who is engaged to a patriotic pilot Ajay (Mad havan). The group of friends is at first unable to relate the characters they portray on screen. The film-within-a-film format allows Mehra to compare yesteryear’s ideal ism (represented through the freedom fighters) with today’s skepticism (represented through the portrayal of the friends) and as Sue continues to make the documentary, the idealism of India’s revolutionary heroes’ seeps into the protagonists. Somewhere during the making of the movie, the friends find themselves moved by the passion of the characters they play. They gradually begin to realize that their own lives are not very different from the actors they portray on the screen and that the same state of affairs that once plagued the revolutionaries continues to torment the present generation. 

While, previously it was the British Empire who played the villain, today this role is being essayed by contemporary politicians. Soon the barrier of time between the two generations begins to dissolve as the characters become one in spirit. The death of their close friend, Ajay, who dies like a hero, having averted a greater tragedy by crashing his MiG plane (inspired from a real life incident in India) into an empty field instead of trying to save his own life pushes their tolerance over their brink, as instead of honoring his martyrdom, the Indian government labels him as a careless novice so as to deflect media attention away from the details of the purchase of faulty Russian MiGs. The friends are devastated by Ajay’s death and shocked by the corruption they encounter from the bureaucracy when they try to clear his name. This forces them to take action against the State. In the process of trying to cleanse the system, they take the law into their own hands and meet a tragic end. In the film, the docudrama shot by Sue of British India in the 1930s runs along with the main story and intersects it at decisive moments in the narration. The climax of the film sees the blurring of the past and the present, reiterating the idea that nationalism is not yet dead and that people need to wake up and be the change they talk about. 

As Hindi film critic Dr. Chakravorty describes it, RDB is more than another patriotic film: it is a moral, social and political allegory. “By blending history along with the nationalist struggle, idealism and humanitarianism along with contemporary politics, religious fundamentalism, and the lack of social responsibility, Mehra pro vides us with a mirror to look inwards and think about the way we live and the choices we make.”13 It was for this reason that audiences, especially youngsters, for whom daily life in India was on the lines depicted in RDB, found this film to be a slice of their own lives. RDB also ends with a strong message that it is not patriotic or right to be indifferent to what is going on in the country, and even more so in public life. Moreover, nor is it correct to sit on the fence and point fingers at all the things going wrong in a democracy like India. It stresses the idea that is very important for people to actively participate in the public sphere to bring about change in their country. “No country is perfect, it needs to be made perfect”14 and this is the message that Mehra’s film leaves the audience with. Interestingly enough, film critics even when discussing the movie in their reviews felt that RDB could lead to reflection, discussion and possibly even action among youngsters in India. It was for this reason that RDB enjoyed much publicity before and after its release. It also helped that this film had an interesting ensemble of novice and established actors starring in it and that the popular press declared the film to be one of the biggest releases of 2006. 

While there is always the danger of popular cinema like RDB being labeled es capist, mere entertainment, and fantasy-oriented, it is very essential to understand the role it plays in motivating audiences to act in certain ways. For despite all its inanities and irrelevancies this cinema is ideology-filled and its raw material is the society of today. RDB, by focusing on the concerns of youngsters, operating from their perspective and speaking their language, conveyed the mindset of urban and educated youngsters in post-independent India. It therefore serves as a fertile ground to study issues of changing culture, identities, media consumption and audience effects among others. It is in this context that I study the consumption of RDB and the implications of the same on young audiences. RDB, as this thesis showcases, is an example of a distinctive case in which the consumption of a super commodified cinematic product revitalized citizenship among the youth in India.

Lagaan :-

 Lagaan films with their appeal to the mass audience of uprooted peasants, factory workers, the unemployed, uneducated and poor can decolonise the imagination of the Indian masses. It points out that "Lagaan's" efforts at indigenisation and interrogation of prescribed discourses of modernity and history deserve credit for making possible the creation of public debates within a culture where the majority of the population is non-literate, and is unable to partake in elite discussions of culture and modernity.

 conclusion :-

 The white woman's association with capitalism and modernity in Rang de Basanti, Lagaan, and Indian advertisements, buttresses the dominance of the Indian male and affirms nationalist constructions of gender. Dark suggests that romance with the white woman offers a form of redemption for the various humiliations the Indian male suffered in the colonial dynamic and offers a fantasy of symbolic wholeness á la Frantz Fanon. Indeed, this introduction of the British woman in both Lagaan and Rang de Basanti harkens back to the imperialist romances popular in the 1980s, based on the novels of E.M. Forester and Paul Scott. Both David Lean's film Passage to India and the television series Jewel in the Crown highlight the British woman's consumption of Indian culture and the perils of such erotic consumption. In these films, the erotic gaze of the British woman is correlated directly to the punishment of the Westernized Indian man, who is jailed and beaten for his purported sexual aggression against her. The eroticism in these romances depends on the sadomasochistic degradation of the Indian male linked to the British woman's excessive, misplaced, and ultimately impossible desire. Renato Resaldo has perhaps the most blunt description of the "paradox"of "imperialist nostalgia" that plays out in these romances: "A person kills somebody, and then mourns the victim" . According to Resaldo, this nostalgia disguises any complicity of the mourner in this loss, in effect erasing the traumatic history. In relationship to imperialist nostalgia, Jennifer Wen-zel describes "anti-imperialist nostalgia" as a phenomenon in a formerly colonized nation, in which the pre-independence period becomes an idealized ur-moment of potential, not necessarily fulfilled in the present day nation-state. In both forms of nostalgia, the pre-independence period acts as a fetish or an object that compensates for the trauma of Britain's loss of empire and India's occupation under colonial rule. If for Anne McClintock, the fetish, as both commodity and psychoanalytic "perversion," work off the "failure of a single narrative of origins" whether cultural or sexual, Rang de Basanti offers a type of doubling of India's narrative of origins as a nation-state. In Rang de Basanti two types of fantasies imperial and anti-imperial — overlap. Although Sue is the supposed director of a documentary film, she also acts symbolically as the fantasy audience, both a witness to India's successful transformation into a global force and the Western subject who provides recognition for the historical trauma behind India's birth into modernity through sentimental affiliation with heroic individuals.

SR: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

 SR: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie :-

Chimamanda was born in Enugu, Nigeria on September 15, 1977. Her works centered primarily on the Biafran war in Nigeria in the late 1960’s.

From a young age, Chimamanda is already a voracious reader. She found the work of fellow Igbo Chinua Achebe, “Things Fall Apart,” as truly powerful and trans formative. She studied medicine in Nsukka for a time, however, she felt that it was not her calling so she left for the United States in 1997. In the US, she studied Political Science and Communication at the Eastern Connecticut State University. Traveling back and forth to Nigeria and the US, she also worked hard and earned a Creative Writing Master’s degree from the prestigious John Hopkins University. Later on, she also went and studied African history at Yale.

Chimamanda Adichie’s play entitled “For Love of Biafra” was printed in Nigeria in 1998 but she remarked that this particular play as appallingly“melodramatic.” In this play, she explored the repercussions of the 1960 Nigeria and Biafra war. Later on, she wrote stories picturing the conflicts in that same war. In 2006, she wrote her highly-successful novel “Half of a Sun,” still drawing inspiration from the said Biafran and Nigerian war.

Her first novel entitled “Purple Hibiscus” was written and published in 2003 when she was still a student at the Eastern Connecticut State University. The novel talks about the coming-of-age of a 15-year-old girl named Kambili. Although they are rich, her father was a religious fanatic which causes a lot of problems. This novel won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 2005 for Best First Book written by an African category and also won the 2005’s Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book for all categories. Furthermore, the said novel was short-listed for the 2004 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction.

Chimamanda Adichie received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2008. In 2009, she then released her collection of short stories called “The Thing Around Your Neck.” In 2013, she released “Americanah,” a novel which tells the story of a young Nigerian woman learning and blogging about ethnicity and race in the US.

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Truly, the story of Chimamanda Adichie’s success is the perfect example of how one can turn discrimination against one’s color and cultural background into their very own platform for success.

1. Did the first talk help you in understanding of postcolonialism?

yes, the first talk help  me in understanding of postcolonialism.Americanah is written entirely in the third person point of view. The narrator is both reliable and omniscient. This does not change even when the book shifts focus from present to past and from Ifemelu to Obinze. The narrator reveals the actions and thoughts of the characters throughout the book. For example, when Obinze meets a woman and her son in a coffee shop in England, the narrator describes the actions of the three characters while also revealing that Obinze finds her attractive and the encounter leaves him thinking about love. This point of view allows the reader to get to know the characters involved and develop an interest in what happens to them.

The story is told in a mix of exposition and dialogue, with dialogue occurring through a wide variety of characters. The pace is moderate with enough action to keep the reader.

2. Are the arguments in the seconds talk convincing? 

yes, the arguments in the seconds talk convincing because The words she sampled were from a now-famous TED Talk by Chimamanda where she talks about feminism, and why it is important to teach it to girls. More recently, we have seen some heated debates about the relevance of feminism, thanks to the tumblr ‘Women Against Feminism’ and all the negative light they are casting on the movement.

More than anything, our point of view is that people are now having honest an open conversations on a global scale, and we have an anti-feminist site to that for that. Feminism is getting more publicity than ever, in this digital age where literally anything has the potential to go viral, like their tumblr page. What it has also allowed is for the positive (read: not radical or exclusionary) feminist voices to rise up and be stronger than ever, and show cynics that all the stereotypical things about the movement that seem to be perpetuated by society, are certainly not telling the full story. The negative and radicalism has hijacked what true feminism is about: equality, and women supporting women.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has just released a book version of her TED talk called ‘We should all be feminists’, which you can buy online, or you can watch the full video here. Given the current climate of feminism, it couldn’t have been more timely.

If there is anyone out there looking for a clear, concise, short and convincing reason why feminism is still relevant, this is the speech you need to hear or read. To start off, let’s be reminded of the dictionary definition: “the theory of the social, political and economic equality of the sexes.”

For those that think Chimamanda spent her life reading feminist books and probably can’t identify with her, you’d be wrong.

In an interview with Vogue about the release of her book, Chimamanda says her speech was received quite well from the men in her country.

“I was surprised that some of the young men that I’ve heard from, mostly Nigerians, who I thought of as so retrograde that they could not be saved, actually started to think about and talk about gender. We don’t really talk about gender, and I’m very much a believer in the power of discourse, in having conversations, of trying to reach out.”

3. What did you like about the third talk?

In the third video about truth in post-truth era, she beautifully said about the courage of speaking truth. Her thought is to be loyal with ourselves to tell the truth. Post truth is very dangerous weapon in this 21st century, especially political parties make use of this kind of weapon to provocate riots and also Media used for profit and to raise their TRP. So. She tries to say that do not driven as sheeple with the political language, try to understand the truth with authentication and always doubt in such a things.

4. Are these talks bringing any significant change in your way of looking at literature and life?

yes, these talks bringing significant change in my  way of looking at literature and life because after this talk in my mind I can see the world in larger picture instead looking from only one perspective . 

Shashi Tharoor

Shashi Tharoor :-

Shashi Tharoor is a member of the Indian Parliament and also a columnist, author, human rights activist, and a former UN envoy. He served in the UN for 29 years. He is passionate about politics and has been writing for newspapers, like Washington Post, The Times of India, New York Times, The Hindu and many more. He has also written fiction and non fictions, which have also been translated into many languages. He is known as a compelling speaker and has won many awards.

Shashi Tharoor was born in 1956 in London. He is originally from Kerala as his parents, father Chandran Tharoor and mother Lily were from Kerala. His early education was completed in Montfort school in Yercaud, Tamil Nadu and Campion School in Mumbai. His high school was completed in St. Xavier’s Collegiate School in Kolkata. He earned his honours degree in History from St. Stephen’s College in Delhi. A bright student, he won a scholarship to Tuffs University in Boston. He earned his master’s degree in the US and also a Ph.D at Tuffs University in Diplomacy from Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.
Shashi Tharoor’s first wife was Tilottama Mukherjee and they have two sons, Ishaan and Kanishk. However, they divorced and Tharoor married a Canadian national named Vhirsta Giles. After splitting from Giles, Tharoor married Sunanda Pushkar, who has a son from a previous marriage. However, she died mysteriously in a hotel room in Delhi. He is known to love theatre and has played the role of Antony in Cleopatra. He acted in various plays even in school and college days. Tharoor founded the Quiz Club in St. Stephen’s College. He was elected as the President of the college union.
Shashi Tharoor in his whole political career has been surrounded by various controversies. His remarks have irked his party members many times and he has been caught in a fix due to his statements. He was also attacked due to his participation and being a shareholder in the Kochi-IPL team. He was accused of having made financial gains to Sunanda Pushkar, who was not his wife then. The matter became serious as the income tax department asked him to pay income tax on sweat equity even after giving it up. All this made Shashi Tharoor to resign from the post of the Minister of State of External Affairs.
The death of Sunanda Pushkar also built up controversies. Her death mystery has not been solved yet and investigations are being carried out.

An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India :-

While I was reading this book, I kept thinking that one of the things people on the left could reasonably do is just make up stuff about the extent of murderousness that colonisation has involved. The reason being that it is highly unlikely anyone on the left would have the imagination to think up the horrors that were actually inflicted upon the world by the imperial ambitions of Britain or Spain – or the costs to indigenous peoples in the US or Australia. This book documents horrors upon horrors. But infinitely worse is the clear view that is left of the British who were not merely rapacious is thievery from those they pretended to be lifting out of darkness, but who did nothing to alleviate suffering when lifting the smallest finger would have saved many lives from the most horrible of deaths.
Winston Churchill does not come out of this at all well. As someone born in Ireland, he has never particularly been a hero of mine anyway – but in India his name ought to be a curse.
I’m not going to list the catalogue of crimes against humanity visited upon India by British rule – this book provides ample examples and ought to be read for that alone – however, I want to focus mostly on something that I believe still holds relevance for us today everywhere on the planet – the inhumanity of free market economics when accepted as a moral philosophy.
Marx says somewhere that we should consider capitalism as simultaneously the best and the worse system that has ever existed. As the author here points out, those in charge of India from Britain were guided by ethical principles that had two great foundations – that the market is always right and a vision of Malthus where overpopulation inevitably leads to famine. This meant that when various imposed famines occurred in India those who might otherwise have been expected to do something to reduce the suffering experienced by the people saw any such action as misguided ‘charity’ that would, in fact, merely make matters worse. That the market had spoken and the death of those people (counted in millions) was ultimately the kindest thing. Rather than divert some of the food that was being transported out of these areas where people were starving, the food continued to be moved to Europe and the people dropped like flies.
The point isn’t that such actions were the cynical excesses of a hideous regime content to merely suck the wealth and life out of India – and, there is something to this as well, of course – but rather that free market economics, with its invisible hands and its dogmatic certainties, allows people to consider their actions (or inactions) as the height of morality while millions perish. This was done to Ireland with the same callous disregard as it was to India. That the monsters who committed the crimes remain heroes is difficult to understand other than from the perspective that we still live under the sway of an ideology that still believes the market will provide and any intervention in its free action will ultimately prove counter-productive – and thus are the greatest of human tragedies visited upon the poor while the wealthy can barely count their riches.

The Black Prince:-

'The Black Prince' successfully makes an aware of some determinant historical events of the past.
 The Black Prince is a 2017 international historical drama film directed by Kavi Raz and featuring the acting debut of Satinder Sartaj. It tells the story of Duldeep Singh, the last Maharajah of the Sikh Empire and the Punjab area, and his relationship with Queen Victoria.
In this movie , we can see the Postcolonialism through the main character of Duldeep Singh. In this movie we can see that the condition of Duldeep Singh that he find himself with the two different cultures of his India birth and British education.
After the death of his father Maharajah Ranjit Singh who was the previous ruler of the Sikh Empire. And after his death , Duldeep Singh placed on the throne at the very early of five age.  After the time passed Britishers who colonized Punjab and they take Duldeep with them and separated from his mother.In the movie prince Duleepsingh play roll as a protagonist. One thing I noticed that this movie also focus on how British government ruled on India. Movie reflected good side of British government though providing so many things for prince but Prince always prefers conman life. Mother of the princes also hate British government and people. She didn't like their manner of hospitality. Normally movie working surrounding nationalism,colonialism,reflect British's manner,clothe,food,Christianity...etc.
So, Duldeep consider himself as  a Britisher but it is not actually that. After the few years he meet his mother and his mother told him the story about Britishers that what they did with him in the prior. Then after the death of his mother , he came to know that who is he and which country he is actually belong. He want to go at India but Britishers who deny him to go there.
So in a way, he found himself in dilemma that what should he do?
So, in a Postcolonial perspective .... Duldeep Singh himself free to live with Britishers but he is colonized by his mind. That he didn't do anything according to his mind. He always colonized by that british people who always wants to kept him with under their rules.

Summarise Ngugi Wa Thiongo's views :-

Ngugi Wa Thiongo who was an African Writer & Professor of English Literature and language in Africa." Decolonizing the Mind" the book by Kenyan novelist and Postcolonial theorist Ngugi Wa Thiongo. It is the collection of essay about language & its constructive role in national culture, history and identity.In this book he talks about..." What language played the role in African Literature?"
Decolonising the Mind is a collection of essays about language and its constructive role in national culture, history, and identity. The book, which advocates for linguistic decolonization, is one of Ngũgĩ’s best-known and most-cited non-fiction publications, helping to cement him as a pre-eminent voice theorizing the “language debate” in post-colonial studies.

            Ngũgĩ describes the book as “a summary of some of the issues in which I have been passionately involved for the last twenty years of my practice in fiction, theater, criticism, and in teaching of literature…” Decolonizing the Mind is split into four essays: “The Language of African Literature,” “The Language of African Theater,” “The Language of African Fiction,” and “The Quest for Relevance.”
So, in the Postcolonialism , Resistance is very important , Resistance is the main buzz word in post colonial. So he said that the another form of to resist language is to own it or discard the language totally.

1984

 1) What is dystopian fiction? Is '1984' dystopian fiction?

Dystopian fiction offers a speculative glimpse of the future, one often experiencing a cataclysmic decline, with characters battling their way through environmental ruin, technological control, and government oppression. As a sub-genre of science fiction, the popular dystopian novel can challenge readers’ views about current social and political climates, offer warnings, and in some instances, inspire action. But how is dystopian fiction determined? First, let’s define the difference between the utopian and dystopian world.

When Sir Thomas More coined the term “utopia” in his 1516 book Utopia, he was inadvertently shaping centuries of genre. With the advent of Utopia, which was about an ideal society on a fictional island, the dystopia was born.

Margaret Atwood once said, “If you’re interested in writing speculative fiction, one way to generate a plot is to take an idea from current society and move it a little further down the road. Even if humans are short-term thinkers, fiction can anticipate and extrapolate into multiple versions of the future.”

The significance of dystopian fiction on literature can vary from educating and warning humanity about current social and political structures, to reflecting an author’s beliefs on the pitfalls of society (H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine), to critiquing behaviorism (Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange), and cautioning on oppressive regimes (Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Orwell’s 1984).

George Orwell’s 1984 is a defining example of dystopian fiction in that it envisions a future where society is in decline, totalitarianism has created vast inequities, and innate weaknesses of human nature keep the characters in a state of conflict and unhappiness. Unlike utopian novels, which hold hope for the perfectibility of man and the possibility of a just society, dystopian novels like 1984 imply that the human race will only get worse if man’s lust for power and capacity for cruelty go uncorrected.

In 1984, characters live in fear of wars, government surveillance, and political oppression of free speech. The London of the novel is dirty and crumbling, with food shortages, exploding bombs, and miserable citizens. The government is an all-powerful force of oppression and control, and crushes the characters’ identities and dreams. This dystopian vision of the future, written thirty-five years before the year the novel is set, suggests that man’s inherent nature is corrupt and repressive. Orwell wrote the book in the aftermath of World War II and the rise of fascism in Germany and the Soviet Union, and paints a pessimistic picture of society’s ability to avoid further global disasters.

Dystopian fiction usually works backward from the present to find an explanation for the fictional society’s decline, and thus to provide a commentary on the reader’s society or a warning of how the future could turn out. In 1984, as Winston works to acquire objects from the past, find spaces without telescreens or microphones in them, and recover memories of the time before the Party, Orwell provides the reader with glimpses of how Winston’s society came to be. We learn about a nuclear war, a revolution, mass famines, and a period of consolidation of power by the Party.

Dystopian novels explore the effects of oppression and totalitarianism on the individual psyche as well as how the individual functions in a repressive society. Winston’s trouble retrieving and trusting his memories illustrates the way the Party has corrupted his emotional life as well as his daily existence, asking the reader to question the nature of memory and individual consciousness. By suggesting that Winston is initially complacent because he can’t remember whether or not life was better and he was happier before the Revolution, the book examines the importance of memory in creating a sense of self.

2) your learning about the novel from online screening of the film - share screenshots, if you have taken. 

Winston Smith is a low-ranking member of the ruling Party in London, in the nation of Oceania. Everywhere Winston goes, even his own home, the Party watches him through telescreens; everywhere he looks he sees the face of the Party’s seemingly omniscient leader, a figure known only as Big Brother. The Party controls everything in Oceania, even the people’s history and language. Currently, the Party is forcing the implementation of an invented language called Newspeak, which attempts to prevent political rebellion by eliminating all words related to it. Even thinking rebellious thoughts is illegal. Such thoughtcrime is, in fact, the worst of all crimes.

As the novel opens, Winston feels frustrated by the oppression and rigid control of the Party, which prohibits free thought, sex, and any expression of individuality. Winston dislikes the party and has illegally purchased a diary in which to write his criminal thoughts. He has also become fixated on a powerful Party member named O’Brien, whom Winston believes is a secret member of the Brotherhood—the mysterious, legendary group that works to overthrow the Party.

Winston works in the Ministry of Truth, where he alters historical records to fit the needs of the Party. He notices a coworker, a beautiful dark-haired girl, staring at him, and worries that she is an informant who will turn him in for his thoughtcrime. He is troubled by the Party’s control of history: the Party claims that Oceania has always been allied with Eastasia in a war against Eurasia, but Winston seems to recall a time when this was not true. The Party also claims that Emmanuel Goldstein, the alleged leader of the Brotherhood, is the most dangerous man alive, but this does not seem plausible to Winston. Winston spends his evenings wandering through the poorest neighborhoods in London, where the proletarians, or proles, live squalid lives, relatively free of Party monitoring.

One day, Winston receives a note from the dark-haired girl that reads “I love you.” She tells him her name, Julia, and they begin a covert affair, always on the lookout for signs of Party monitoring. Eventually they rent a room above the secondhand store in the prole district where Winston bought the diary. This relationship lasts for some time. Winston is sure that they will be caught and punished sooner or later (the fatalistic Winston knows that he has been doomed since he wrote his first diary entry), while Julia is more pragmatic and optimistic. As Winston’s affair with Julia progresses, his hatred for the Party grows more and more intense. At last, he receives the message that he has been waiting for: O’Brien wants to see him.Winston and Julia travel to O’Brien’s luxurious apartment. As a member of the powerful Inner Party (Winston belongs to the Outer Party), O’Brien leads a life of luxury that Winston can only imagine. O’Brien confirms to Winston and Julia that, like them, he hates the Party, and says that he works against it as a member of the Brotherhood. He indoctrinates Winston and Julia into the Brotherhood, and gives Winston a copy of Emmanuel Goldstein’s book, the manifesto of the Brotherhood. Winston reads the book—an amalgam of several forms of class-based twentieth-century social theory—to Julia in the room above the store. Suddenly, soldiers barge in and seize them. Mr. Charrington, the proprietor of the store, is revealed as having been a member of the Thought Police all along.

Torn away from Julia and taken to a place called the Ministry of Love, Winston finds that O’Brien, too, is a Party spy who simply pretended to be a member of the Brotherhood in order to trap Winston into committing an open act of rebellion against the Party. O’Brien spends months torturing and brainwashing Winston, who struggles to resist. At last, O’Brien sends him to the dreaded Room 101, the final destination for anyone who opposes the Party. Here, O’Brien tells Winston that he will be forced to confront his worst fear. Throughout the novel, Winston has had recurring nightmares about rats; O’Brien now straps a cage full of rats onto Winston’s head and prepares to allow the rats to eat his face. Winston snaps, pleading with O’Brien to do it to Julia, not to him.

Giving up Julia is what O’Brien wanted from Winston all along. His spirit broken, Winston is released to the outside world. He meets Julia but no longer feels anything for her. He has accepted the Party entirely and has learned to love Big Brother.

3) What according to you in the central theme of this novel?

The Dangers Of Totalitarianism :-

1984 is a political novel written with the purpose of warning readers in the West of the dangers of totalitarian government. Having witnessed firsthand the horrific lengths to which totalitarian governments in Spain and Russia would go in order to sustain and increase their power, Orwell designed 1984 to sound the alarm in Western nations still unsure about how to approach the rise of communism. In 1949, the Cold War had not yet escalated, many American intellectuals supported communism, and the state of diplomacy between democratic and communist nations was highly ambiguous. In the American press, the Soviet Union was often portrayed as a great moral experiment. Orwell, however, was deeply disturbed by the widespread cruelties and oppressions he observed in communist countries, and seems to have been particularly concerned by the role of technology in enabling oppressive governments to monitor and control their citizens.

In 1984, Orwell portrays the perfect totalitarian society, the most extreme realization imaginable of a modern-day government with absolute power. The title of the novel was meant to indicate to its readers in 1949 that the story represented a real possibility for the near future: if totalitarianism were not opposed, the title suggested, some variation of the world described in the novel could become a reality in only thirty-five years. Orwell portrays a state in which government monitors and controls every aspect of human life to the extent that even having a disloyal thought is against the law. As the novel progresses, the timidly rebellious Winston Smith sets out to challenge the limits of the Party’s power, only to discover that its ability to control and enslave its subjects dwarfs even his most paranoid conceptions of its reach. As the reader comes to understand through Winston’s eyes, The Party uses a number of techniques to control its citizens, each of which is an important theme of its own in the novel.

4) What do you understand by the term 'Orwellian'?

Orwell’s career as a writer was long and productive – at one time or another he produced novels, journalism, memoirs, political philosophy, literary criticism and cultural commentary. But the term “Orwellian” most often relates to his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, completed a couple of years before his death. The novel presents a vision of a Britain taken over by a totalitarian regime in which the state exerts absolute power over its citizens.

Think what you will of Johnson and Gove, but they are hardly representative of the dark forces at work in Orwell’s dystopian novel. The minister describing the letter seems to be watering down the adjective to mean something like a secretive and undemocratic influence of one faction over another within the government. This is certainly not the situation in Orwell’s novel in which The Party appears, on the surface at least, to be absolutely in control – something that could hardly be said of the prime minister at the moment.

Nineteen Eighty-Four presents a number of concepts and ideas that have worked their way into the contemporary imagination – and that, in so doing, have shifted somewhat from their original meanings. Big Brother, the all-seeing, all-knowing emblem of totalitarian control, and Room 101, the regime’s torture chamber, for example, are concepts that have developed a life of their own beyond Orwell’s original ideas.

It may be an exaggeration to describe the activities of some of our current cabinet ministers as Orwellian – nevertheless, there is a sense in which it might be accurate. The anonymous minister who commented on the letter also seemed to suggest that it was the language that was being used that was in some way Orwellian.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, one of the projects the totalitarian state is undertaking is to create a new language: Newspeak. This involves the simplification and purification of the English language to the extent that it functions purely as a means of maintaining state power and control.

Perhaps one of the ironies of using writers’ names as adjectives is that they become saddled with the very things that they were warning us about. Dickensian, for example, has become synonymous with the worst aspects of a class-ridden Victorian society, while Kafkaesque refers to the dehumanising effects of the individual’s encounter with inflexible state bureaucracy.

Orwell’s name will forever be associated with totalitarianism and the manipulation of language in order to maintain state control. This is particularly ironic given that in an essay of 1946 – Politics and the English Language – he was keen to champion plain speaking in political discourse. His rules for writing contain pieces of advice that remain invaluable for all writers and public commentators. For example: “Never use a long word where a short one will do”, “If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out”, and “Break any of these rules rather than say anything outright barbarous.”

An Artist of the Floating World

 Kazuo Ishiguro :-

Kazuo ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan on 8th November 1954. The house he lived in for the first five years of his life had been built in the traditional Japanese style, with tatami mats and sliding shoji screens. Early photographs show Ishiguro as a baby, sitting as formally as he was then able, in front of family samurai swords, banner and heirlooms. The house was three generational, with his paternal grandfather as head of family. His grandfather had spent many years away from Japan, in Shanghai, charged with establishing Toyota, then a textile machinery company, in China. Ishiguro’s father, Shizuo, had been born in Shanghai in 1920. His mother, Shizuko, like all members of her immediate family, was in Nagasaki when the atom bomb was dropped on the city in August 1945. Ishiguro attended kindergarten in Nagasaki and learned hiragana, the first and simplest of the three Japanese alphabets.

Ishiguro left Japan with his parents and elder sister in April 1960 to live in Britain, after Shizuo Ishiguro, a research oceanographer, was invited to work for the British government at the National Institute of Oceanography. The family settled in Guildford, Surrey, thirty miles south of London, expecting to stay in England for two years at most. The young Ishiguro attended the local school and became a choirboy at the neighbourhood church. From age 11, he attended Woking County Grammar School where he was educated until going to university. Although the Ishiguro family regularly considered returning to Japan, Shizuo Ishiguro’s research continued to be supported by the British government, and the family never returned. (The storm surge machine Shizuo Ishiguro invented is now a part of the permanent exhibition at the Science Museum in London.)  

Video recode of An Artist of the Floating World by Dilip Barad  sir:-

1. 'Lantern' appears 34 times in the novel. Even on the cover page, the image of lanterns is displayed. What is the significance of Lantern in the novel?

Lanterns in the novel are associated with Ono’s teacher Mori-san, who includes a lantern in each of his paintings and dedicates himself to trying to capture the look of lantern light. For Mori-san, the flickering, easily extinguished quality of lantern light symbolizes the transience of beauty and the importance of giving careful attention to small moments and details in the physical world. Lanterns, then, symbolize an outlook on life which prizes small details and everyday moments above the ideological concerns of nationalists or commercial concerns of businesspeople. It is an old-fashioned, aesthetically focused, and more traditional way of viewing the world.

The An Artist of the Floating World quotes below all refer to the symbol of Lanterns. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:

2. Write about 'Masuji Ono as an Unreliable Narrator'.?

How many voices can an author create? How evolved can craft be that there comes the point when the creator ceases to exist, and all that is left is the immersed reader, intruding in another world? The answer is Kazuo Ishiguro, the man who, for me, has taken first-person narration and a compromised narrative to the point of no return. Choose a character, and he will get into its skin like an invisible cellular organism with no home of its own. He will do so in so fantastic a way that it leaves you questioning the truth, like speaking to someone you aren’t too sure about. After he or she departs, you think, “What are they hiding? Am I in the dark?” 

An Artist of the Floating World is a masterpiece that glides in out and of many dimensions. On the one hand, it is a story of generations separated by a massive ideological gulf. On the other, it is about an older man attempting to come to terms with his mistaken philosophies. It is also a historical fiction set in the Japan of limbos; Japan, which has suffered because of its misplaced imperialism, been shattered by bombings and is now critical of the past and every person representing it. At the heart of it is an unreliable narrator, Masuji Ono. Once an acclaimed painter, Ono is our guide through post-World War II Japan and its sociopolitical and emotional trauma; felt in extremities like the once-vibrant pleasure districts destroyed by bombings and kids who loved Popeye and Godzilla.

The book is a contemplative journey, spread across four time frames: October 1948, April 1949, November 1949 and June 1950. We are introduced to a retired artist of great acclaim, Masuji Ono. Ono lives with his youngest daughter Noriko, and his attempts to secure a good match for her is a central theme. In the past, Noriko’s engagement had been called off. While Ono likes to believe that his family was more powerful than the boy’s, Noriko’s often belligerent behaviour suggests the unsuccessful engagement has more to do with Ono’s past. His older daughter Setsuko asks Ono to meet his acquaintances and rectify his errors should Noriko’s prospects inquire about the family’s history. This simple task is the starting point of his recollections, opening twisted alleys of memory.

We seek to understand concepts like Ono’s rise as an artist, his relationship with his students and peers, the moral chasm that exists between him, his sons-in-law and his grandson, and the politicisation of art. I have reasons to say that we seek to understand Ono’s life – the untrustworthy memory and what he is telling us. Ono’s narration is not dependable, and there is not a second perspective to corroborate what he is saying. This is displayed continually; Ono never completes an anecdote in one go, one recollection invariably gives rise to another or how he thinks he knows someone only for us to find that the person has no memory of him. What Ono thinks of himself does not resonate with people in that world. For his disillusioned son-in-law, Ono is one of the many traitors who led the country awry with grand plans of Japanese Imperialism that caused only pain and loss. Ono himself lost his son to the Manchurian War and his wife to a freak raid. The reader might assume these topics to be of particular importance to him. Still, Ono avoids speaking about any issue that exposes his emotional vulnerability and delves too much into his past affairs. Mentions of these deaths come and go, as little remarks stuffed into the larger scheme.  

Why our narrator is unreliable is a debatable topic. At first go, it can be age. After all, Ono is well-retired with two daughters and grandchildren. However, the irregularity in information can be attributed much more to more unpleasant circumstances than memory failing. As the novel progresses, Ono is revealed to have been a man of controversial associations. During World War II, Japan was an Allied Power alongside Germany and Italy. A considerable section of the population was pro-War, viewing any opposition to the war effort with great scepticism. Ono, a pro-government imperialist, broke away from his master and drawings of the floating world (a phrase used to describe Japan’s pleasure districts) to begin painting subjects that depicted military might. At the beginning of the war, he becomes a part of a state committee clamping down on unpatriotic art. Ono reports Karudo, once his protégé. As a result, Karudo’s paintings are burnt, and the police harass him. Ono tells us that he tried to step in and convince the authority to go easy on Karudo. However, whether it is the truth or just another way to hide his betrayal and cruelty, we don’t know.

The ideological tussle between Ono and his family members is an essential thread in the novel. To some extent, Ono realises that he was vastly mistaken during the war and the younger generation, like daughters and his son-in-law’s look at him with a degree of suspicion and contempt. The latter want men like Ono to take accountability for steering Japan on the wrong path. They now live in a post-war society where America is the centre of culture and politics. This is not a phenomenon that has gone down well with Ono, who would rather have his grandson enjoy samurais than behave like a cowboy. Although he claims to be unaware of his importance in society, we understand that Ono likes to think of himself as someone who has been quite influential, a part of the crème of the art world. Towards the end, when Setsuko (his older daughter) consoles him that his pro-militancy paintings weren’t influential enough to have caused massive harm, it is a very hurtful thought for him.

Like Ishiguro’s celebrated The Remains of the Day, An Artist of the Floating World is a beautiful lesson in restraint. The former is the story of an English butler whose commitment to service caused such emotional limitation that he could not pursue the woman he loved. In the latter, we have an ageing man whose convictions are failing him as he grapples with guilt and ethical tussles. War is an important occurrence in both, and more than war, the sides one chooses. In The Remains of the Day, the protagonist reflects on how the reputed British manorial lord he served sided with Nazi Germany because he did not know better. In such scenarios, as both age and regret become strong, exuberant or verbose writing would not be relatable. Ishiguro’s writing is fluid, hard-hitting, but not raw. His style is refined, elegant prose at its best, entirely moulded according to the narrator’s realities.  

An Artist of the Floating World was a delightful, very enlightening experience about a unique world that conventional reading may not expose one to. Despite being a history student, I was surprised at the nuance of ideology and radicalisation in post-War Japan that the author highlighted so brilliantly. The writing flows; through former pleasure districts, reception rooms in Japanese homes, the villas of master painters and pubs where artists gathered with pupils. Each of these spaces stands for a different ideology and a different time in Ono’s life. Ishiguro’s most outstanding merit is shaping his style in a way that changes with age. A young Ono is much more aggressive, while Ono as a grandfather is loving and almost endearing. The tonality changes beautifully, and this requires immense, almost God-gifted skill.

Ishiguro gifts his readers a story that is almost the truth but has enough cracks for falsities to creep in.

3. Debate on the Uses of Art / Artist (Five perspectives: 1. Art for the sake of art - aesthetic delight, 2. Art for Earning Money / Business purpose, 3. Art for Nationalism / Imperialism - Art for the propaganda of Government Power, 4. Art for the Poor / Marxism, and 5. No need of art and artist (Masuji's father's approach)

Kazuo Ishiguro’s second novel, An Artist of the Floating World (1986), is narrated retrospectively, from the post-war vantage of 1948-50, by the painter, Masuji Ono. Ono’s ambition caused him first to leave the commercial and auto-exoticizing “art for export” firm of Takeda for the art-for-art’s-sake milieu of Moriyama, which focuses on the ephemerally sensual “floating world” of the traditional Japanese pleasure district. Moriyama, influenced by European Impressionism just as Impressionism was influenced by Japanese prints, represents a convergence of East and West in the nation-nullifying utopian space of the painting, a space whose evanescence is the guarantee of its authority. (Ishiguro’s Anglophone audience may be reminded that Oscar Wilde singled out Japan, in “The Decay of Lying,” as the paradigm of the artistic nation, a country to be congratulated for its glory as an aesthetic invention rather than for its everyday life.) But Masuji Ono’s ambition, stoked by the tempter Matsuda, leads him to become involved in far-right politics. The novel’s culminating revelation, albeit underplayed by Ono’s diffident narration, is that Ono acted as a police informant on “unpatriotic activities,” which led to the arrest and torture of his protégé, Kuroda.

When summarized in this way, the novel sounds misleadingly like the depiction of a straightforward decline: as if Ono’s artistic ambition leads him first to aloof and implicitly elitist aestheticism, and then from aestheticism to overtly elitist fascism, as Walter Benjamin might have predicted:

“Fiat ars – pereat mundus”, says Fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of “l’art pour l’art.” Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.

But Ishiguro’s novel tells a very different story, one consonant not with a Marxist critique like Benjamin’s but instead with the aestheticist philosophy of Wilde and his fin-de-siècle cohort. In this story, the aesthete becomes a totalitarian precisely because he abandons his apolitical outlook.

Ishiguro suggests as much in the novel when he presents the triggering event of Ono’s turn from aestheticism to fascism as a walk with Matsuda through a slum. This walk fills Ono with Dickensian sympathy for the suffering people and leads him to paint his first political propaganda picture, in he portrays the squalid children of the slum as nationalist fighters against international parasites. In other words, a feeling readers associate with the political left—a desire for social justice and the alleviation of poverty—sets Ono on his road to moral ruin. The novel insists on this point when the nationalist spokesman Matsuda recruits Ono by denouncing aestheticism and dropping the name of Marx:

‘There’s a certain kind of artist these days,’ he went on, ‘whose greatest talent lies in hiding away from the real world. Unfortunately, such artists appear to be in dominance at the present, and you, Ono, have come under the sway of one of them. Don’t look so angry, it’s true. Your knowledge of the world is like a child’s. I doubt, for instance, if you could even tell me who Karl Marx was.’

Ishiguro here implies an analysis that directly opposes Benjamin’s: in this novel, the turn toward the politicization of art leads toward fascism. Or, to put it another way, the aestheticization of politics and the politicization of art amount equally to totalitarianism, and Ono would have been better off remaining in his studio, indifferent to the affairs of his country.

But Ishiguro intensifies his novel’s ironies when he hints strongly that Ono has overrated the importance of his own complicity in the depredations of the World War II era. The suspense of the novel, as it unfolds, involves the question of whether or not Ono’s wartime activities will derail his youngest daughter’s marriage prospects. The reader, however, gradually comes to understand, beneath Ono’s own awareness, that his daughter’s suitor’s family is barely aware of his past and regards him only as a harmless conservative relic.

Ishiguro warns the reader, then, that the politicized artist will not only commit evil deeds—such as Ono’s informing on Kuroda—but will also be as ineffectual as he would have been had he remained apolitical. The totalitarian artist is therefore denied by the novel even the glamor of infamy; Ono’s actions are both vile and bathetic, which, Ishiguro suggests, are all that the politicized artist’s actions could ever be.

4. What is the relevance of this novel is our times?

As he relates this story of moving from artistic movement to artistic movement, Ono repeatedly claims to be proud for having struck out on his own, following his convictions, even if they proved wrong in the end. He says that this is a quality an artist can be proud of, even if his work does not stand the test of time. But, in fact, the story of Ono’s career shows that he opportunistically sought relevance and recognition by following other’s ideas, and cannot point to any unique contributions of his own. When describing his time painting at the Takeda firm to his proteges, Ono says that what he took from his experience at the firm is the need to “rise above the sway of things.” But Ono left the Takeda firm to go to another place where he was expected to closely adhere to another person’s ideas, and when he ultimately left Mori’s, it was to create art that would adhere to Matsuda’s ideas. Based on his descriptions of his wartime work, Ono seems to have created derivative, unexceptional propaganda posters. It is work that does not seem likely to have sprung from his own original ideas, but rather from copying and adapting other people’s ideas at the moment those ideas were rising to the cultural fore. When Ono sees other artists deciding to strike out on their own, he is far from supportive of their pursuit of originality. Sasaki, Mori’s favorite student early on in Ono’s time living at the villa, develops his own style and is treated as a traitor by the other students living at the villa. Ono records no effort on his own part to defend Sasaki. At the same time, while Ono leaves the villa with the support of Matsuda and his Okada-Shingen society, it seems that Sasaki leaves with no such support or guidance, truly as a result of his convictions. In dealing with his own student Kuroda, Ono is so offended by his student’s innovations that he gives his name to the Committee of Unpatriotic Activities, leading all of Kuroda’s work to be burned and Kuroda himself to be jailed and beaten.

In the end, other characters’ statements suggest that Ono’s presentation of himself is skewed; his belief that the courage of his convictions led him to paint original, ground-breaking works that have since been discredited seems nothing more than self-aggrandizement. In his final conversation with Matsuda, Matsuda says that they “turned out to be ordinary men with no special gifts of insight” and that their “contribution turned out to be marginal.” Ono rejects taking Matsuda’s words at face value, saying that there was something in the Matsuda’s manner that suggested he believed otherwise. In Ono’s last conversation with his daughter Setsuko, she reassures her father that he does not need to feel guilty for encouraging the militarism of the war years because it was not really culturally significant.

The novel’s presentation of a vain and self-deluding artist whose contributions lose their importance with the passage of time gives the title its meaning. Ono feels encouraged by a lifetime of acclaim for his work to believe that his contributions were important and will be remembered. But, in fact, he was only one of the many artists of his time who painted derivative works in styles invented by others. Although Ono leaves Mori-san’s villa and ceases to paint the geishas of the “floating world” of pleasure districts, the ultimate unimportance of his career makes him an “artist of the floating world” in a different sense. Ono finds a transitory success by shaping his work to fit the demands of specific times and places, and by copying others who have gained acclaim. But this world is neither timeless nor permanent; it is transitory, “floating.” The novel shows how the world in which Ono was an important artist is already floating away, superseded by new currents, ideas, events, and artists.