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Wednesday, February 23, 2022

The Joys of Motherhood

Buchi Emecheta:-

Buchi Emecheta OBE was a Nigerian novelist who has published over 20 books, including Second-Class Citizen (1974), The Bride Price (1976), The Slave Girl (1977), and The Joys of Motherhood (1979). Her themes of child slavery, motherhood, female independence, and freedom through education have won her considerable critical acclaim and honors, including an Order of the British Empire in 2005. Emecheta once described her stories as "stories of the world.... women face the universal problems of poverty and oppression, and the longer they stay, no matter where they have come from originally, the more the problems become identical."

From 1965 to 1969, Emecheta worked as a library officer for the British Museum in London. From 1969 to 1976 she was a youth worker and sociologist for the Inner London Education Authority, and from 1976 to 1978 she was a community worker.

Following her success as an author, Emecheta traveled widely as a visiting professor and lecturer. From 1972 to 1979 she visited several American universities, including Pennsylvania State University, Rutgers University, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

From 1980 to 1981, she was a senior resident fellow and visiting professor of English, University of Calabar, Nigeria. In 1982 she lectured at Yale University, and the University of London, as well as holding a fellowship at the University of London in 1986. From 1982 to 1983 Buchi Emecheta, together with her journalist son Sylvester, ran the Ogwugwu Afor Publishing Company.

Double colonization of women:-

The Joys of Motherhood is a novel that gives the impression that it might well appeal to western feminists. With motherhood as its theme, and the irony of its title, it appears to be part of the significant body of feminist literature concerned with women's experience of motherhood in patriarchal cultures. John Updike, in his review for The New Yorker, calls it "a graceful, touching, ironically titled tale that bears a plain feminist message". However, the messages contained in Buchi Emecheta's tale are neither plain nor traditionally feminist.

In fact, the morals of Nnu Ego's story are disclosed in a literary style that is only fleetingly satisfactory, or even familiar, to the western feminist reader. Despite its subject matter, the novel rejects the feminist codes normally associated with motherhood. Instead of utilizing the celebratory or critical gestures towards motherhood that we normally associate with feminist discourse, The Joys of Motherhood draws us into unfamiliar territory where the relationship of motherhood to female subjectivity becomes everything or nothing.
To begin, I would like to summarise what we might mean by western feminist interpretations of the woman-authored African text. Female-authored Third World literature became popular with feminist publishers and readers in the First World for a number of reasons. As a postcolonial and literary rendering of English, it represented at once an engagement with, and alienation from, a language that Euro-American feminists have identified as oppressive and man-made, responding, therefore with frustration about the restrictions placed upon women writers historically, especially in Europe. Secondly, it rejected or disrupted male European forms of writing previously assumed to be normative.
Conventional feminist responses to The Joys of Motherhood are unsettled by an unfixed, third-person narrative that maps the life of one woman, and the cultural and self-constructed expectations of motherhood to which she is subjected. The maternal body itself directs the narrative, which is structured around the ability of its central character, Nnu Ego, to bear children. While the novel contains a series of epiphanies as Nnu Ego confronts personal and social crises, it is not a quest novel in the European sense of the tradition. Her purpose is not to achieve liberation or even self-knowledge, but to bring into the world many healthy sons who will care for her in old age. Her dependence upon her maternal body to provide her with identity, status and, finally, personal welfare, defies the conventions of the Euro-American feminist quest in which women's pre-ordained roles as wives and mothers are consciously over-turned. Instead, Nnu Ego represents women who, from birth, are assigned as chattels. Their true value becomes known once they are old enough to marry and conceive children, in particular sons. So, while women are extremely important in one way, their status is completely lost, or is never gained, if this maternal expectation remains unfulfilled. While relating the crisis of motherhood that disrupts and then destroys the life of Nnu Ego, the unstable narrative itself exposes the difficulties of defining female subjectivity beyond the constraints of fertility and motherhood. Consequently, the troubles that Nnu Ego encounters in her life are mirrored in the text, which seems either unable or unwilling to fix female identity beyond the condition of motherhood.
The narrative hints that the elusive "real woman" might lie in the powerful image of Nnu Ego's own mother, Ona. On her deathbed she urges her lover, Agdabi, to allow their daughter to have a life of her own. Through this scene, Ona asserts that a real woman is someone whose feelings of worth do not depend on fulfilling the expectations of a father and husband; in other words, a woman who does not define herself as a chattel, but as an independent individual. Ona's refusal to marry is ostensibly to please her father, but we learn that the real reason is to allow her to maintain her sexual and economic independence. Agdabi's interpretation of Ona's dying wish is, however, quite different from what one may assume given Ona's ideas concerning women's independence. He believes that for his daughter to achieve womanhood, she must be married and become a mother of sons and, to do this successfully, she must accept the authority of her father and husband. The conflict between dominant cultural constructions of womanhood—to which Nnu Ego is compelled to adhere—and an untrammelled female subjectivity symbolised by her mother Ona is established early in the text. This dichotomy concerning female identity underlies the novel's ambiguities, and causes the series of events that lead to Nnu Ego's decline. It is her untimely death that permits narrative closure and emphasises both the danger and the hopelessness of her quest.
The novel opens in Lagos in 1934 with the cinematic image of Nnu Ego running wildly through the streets after discovering the body of her dead baby. She is sightless, wordless, and formless. With no identity outside the designation of mother, she feels she is incapable of existing. A fellow Igbo who encounters the despairing woman prevents her suicide and, from this point, Nnu Ego's journey through life unfolds before her like the life of a person who is about to drown. The narrator's reference to drowning warns the reader that the story we are about to experience is the story of a person who will not survive. Nnu Ego's failure to conceive in the first months of marriage seriously affects the rest of her life. She becomes emotionally unstable and is beaten and finally rejected by her husband. She is returned to her father, who by custom is obliged to find her another husband. She is required to travel to Lagos, far from her tribal connections, to live with her new husband Nnaife, a man whom she finds repellent.
Nnu Ego's reaction to Nnaife (translated from Igbo means "Little Father", another of the novel's many paradoxes) indicates her own ideas about what constitutes masculinity. She says that "with a belly like a pregnant cow", and his hair worn in the long style of a mourning widow, Nnaife has the appearance and demeanour of a middle-aged woman. To Nnu Ego and the society in which she lives, a middle-aged widow has, of course, no value. She is husband-less and past her childbearing years. Through Nnu Ego's harsh appraisal, the reader learns that the colonisation by, and servitude to, the British has not just emasculated Igbo men like Nnaife, but also made them worthless. In a society in which domestic servitude is equated with femininity, their loss of power is confirmed by their feminine appearance. Nnu Ego also notes with some irony that the economic exploitation of men like Nnaife is tantamount to slavery, which colonial rule has nevertheless deemed immoral and has made illegal for indigenous Nigerians to practice.
Throughout the text, as in Emecheta's other work, marriage and motherhood are constructed as modern allegories for slavery. In The Joys of Motherhood, Nnu Ego works extremely hard for very little money to feed and educate her children. In addition, the unexpected and enduring love she has for her children becomes itself a form of emotional bondage from which escape is impossible. The narrative makes a series of connections between marriage, motherhood, slavery, and colonisation: all form a unique literary discourse that has the potential to be shared by other women writers of the Black Diaspora. A literature that acknowledges a common history of slavery and colonisation, overlaid with contemporary representations of marriage and motherhood, is capable of uniting the political concerns of Black women in different parts of the world, and also of stressing the importance of the individual in the face of change.
Throughout the text, we are frequently reminded of Nnu Ego's chi, a spirit who accompanies her throughout her life and who is responsible for both her good and bad fortune. Nnu Ego's chi is the spirit of a slave woman who was buried alive with her dead mistress, the senior wife of Nnu Ego's father. With the difficult circumstances that befall Nnu Ego in adulthood—infertility, poverty, hunger, and exploitation—the chi appears to impose upon the living woman her own lowly rank, and what Nnu Ego perceives as the slave's revenge provides her with an explanation for her misfortune.
Nnu Ego is overjoyed when she discovers she is capable of conceiving after all and she is able to enjoy, for a brief period pregnancy and motherhood unimpeded by tradition in which motherhood is constructed as a duty to the father and husband. Her new-found ability to bear children does not only satisfy her maternal longings and fulfil social expectations, it provides her with the only form of feminine identity she is permitted, or can contemplate: motherhood. After her son's birth, she feels like a "real woman" and is gratified that there will be somebody left behind to refer to her as "mother". Thus Nnu Ego's overriding desire to be a mother is important for her in death as well as in life. Immediately after her first child dies in infancy, Nnu Ego publicly attempts suicide by trying to fall from a busy bridge. A bystander comments that she is not mad but that, "she has only just lost the baby that told the world that she was not barren". Later in the novel, in a contest between mother and father for control over the oldest son, Nnaife's younger wife tells Nnu Ego that, "In Ibuza sons help their father more than they ever help their mother. A mother's joy is only in the name". Here, Adaku reminds Nnu Ego that the joy of motherhood is only ever an illusion; that mothers cannot expect to gain happiness from the children themselves, only a kind of happiness gained from the knowledge of the status that motherhood brings. Adaku here expresses the wisdom that continues to elude Nnu Ego and, for a period in the narrative, she represents the voice of modern Black feminism.
The image of Africa as female recurs in anti-colonial, as well as colonial discourses. In an appropriation of the Mother Africa trope by anti-colonial male writers, Africa is frequently represented as the figure of a woman, who is on the one hand, young, beautiful, and fertile, and on the other, "raped", degraded, and impoverished. Stratton argues that these contradictory images do not reflect genuine concerns for the economic and political position of African women, but instead represent a projection of the degradation that men feel as a result of colonisation. Despite this, mothers and motherhood remain a powerful symbolic force in both male- and female-authored Black literature. In a parallel reading of the Joys of Motherhood with Alice Walker's Meridian, Barbara Christian asserts that matrilineal connection is an important theme for women writers of the Black Diaspora because it counters the damage to the family caused by slavery and European colonisation. To Christian, textual representations of the joys and sorrows of motherhood are capable of emphasising the historical and cultural connections between Black women worldwide. But, possibly because of the apparent permanence of motherhood in the face of unrelenting political and social change, African male writers have represented women as politically static and ahistorical.
The Joys of Motherhood and Meridian vigorously re-write this assumption, revealing women as both victims and agents of change. For the female African writer, the mother figure is also capable of bridging the gap between the oral storyteller and the creator of the written word, thus strengthening the connection between women's traditional role and that of the published author in English. Most importantly, however, the image of the mother is capable of re-assigning the figure of women in African literary discourse. According to Stratton, whether a woman is "canonised as mother or stigmatised as prostitute, the designation is degrading, for he [the male writer/narrator] does the naming and her experience as a woman is trivialised and distorted" (52). Stratton proposes that pregnancy and childbirth in male-authored African literature have come to signify the writer/narrator's own interpretation of his nation's history, in particular, how each pregnancy might indicate the potential for a new beginning for the nation as well as his own renewed potency. Female-authored representations of women and motherhood are capable of re-writing these metaphors. The Joys of Motherhood addresses the false consciousness of the Mother Africa trope through the life story of Nnu Ego. By relocating motherhood from metaphor to social realism, Emecheta critiques the ways in which the myths of motherhood are imposed on Nigerian women and also re-writes the Mother Africa trope of anti-colonial discourse. As Stratton notes, The Joys of Motherhood succeeds in exposing the unreliable male-authored narratives of African nationalism, narratives in which lofty ideas of nationhood are masculine in nature, while social and political difficulties that beset the newly independent nation are presented as feminine.
Despite Emecheta's refusal to subscribe to literary nationalism practised by her male counterparts, an important comparison between Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and The Joys of Motherhood can be made. Emecheta and Achebe are both Igbo writers for whom the novel in English is a means to inscribe and assert the African subject in literary discourse, and whose writing is overlaid with concern about the survival and well-being of the Igbo people. If we look at the texts as parables about individuals, subjected to overwhelming change, who in failing to adapt to these changes do not survive, then there are a number of meaningful similarities. Okonkwo and Nnu Ego symbolise both the positive and negative aspects of their tribal culture. The conflict that they encounter throughout their adult lives echoes their nation's tension between tradition and modernity and, through their own struggle to survive, they anticipate Nigeria's struggle for political independence. The novels are set in different times in Nigeria's history: Things Fall Apart takes place in the 1890s, and The Joys of Motherhood during the middle of the twentieth century. In Achebe's novel, Okonkwo is paralysed by the changes he is forced to consider as colonisation and Christianity threaten his traditional beliefs. As the daughter of a powerful chief, Nnu Ego is compelled to follow the customs of her father's generation but in an urban, colonial environment in which they have little relevance.

In their depiction of the inability of the individual to adapt to modernity, the texts invoke Franz Fanon's manifesto for the survival of Africa which proposes that the people must discard all the harmful customs of pre-European contact and adhere only to those that are capable of nurturing the people. At the same time, Fanon urges Africans to take the positive things from European colonisation and disregard the rest. Nnaife's second wife, Adaku, recognises the need to do this if she and her children are to flourish. She picks and chooses from tradition and modernity, discarding the customs that will disadvantage her like being a virtuous wife to Nnaife. As a consequence, she and her daughters thrive. In contrast, Nnu Ego remains loyal to her husband to the bitter end. In a delightful but ultimately destructive twist of fate, her testimony in the British colonial court as the good, traditional wife is what ruins Nnaife's case and lands him in prison. So the virtuous senior wife whom Nnaife has exploited throughout her life is the very person who unwittingly brings about his undoing.
Their son, Oshia, on the other hand, relinquishes all his traditional obligations. According to custom, he is responsible for the emotional and physical well-being of his ageing parents, and his failure to provide for them means they can survive neither the historical circumstances in which they find themselves, nor the painful awareness of their son's neglect. Unlike Adaku, Oshia rejects tradition outright. In this way, he represents the migrant African who takes advantage of all the things that colonisation and independence have to offer, but turns his back on the transformed, but troubled, nation and mother, leaving it and her to flounder. Here the text articulates the connection between the plight of women and the plight of Africa, a connection dominating texts by anti-colonial male writers. But Emecheta never reduces the woman/mother to a symbol for the nation. The novel's concerns are about the condition and status of real women and mothers. If there is a plain feminist message in the Joys of Motherhood, as Updike suggests, then it is borne by the absent mother, Ona, and enacted by the junior wife, Adaku: women must, when they can, seize the right to control their lives if they and their people are to survive.

A Dance of the Forests

Major Themes - A Dance of the Forests

Wole Soyinka:-

Wole Soyinka was born on 13 July 1934 at Abeokuta, near Ibadan in western Nigeria. After preparatory university studies in 1954 at Government College in Ibadan, he continued at the University of Leeds, where, later, in 1973, he took his doctorate. During the six years spent in England, he was a dramaturgist at the Royal Court Theatre in London 1958-1959. In 1960, he was awarded a Rockefeller bursary and returned to Nigeria to study African drama. At the same time, he taught drama and literature at various universities in Ibadan, Lagos, and Ife, where, since 1975, he has been professor of comparative literature. In 1960, he founded the theatre group, “The 1960 Masks” and in 1964, the “Orisun Theatre Company”, in which he has produced his own plays and taken part as actor. He has periodically been visiting professor at the universities of Cambridge, Sheffield, and Yale.

During the civil war in Nigeria, Soyinka appealed in an article for cease-fire. For this he was arrested in 1967, accused of conspiring with the Biafra rebels, and was held as a political prisoner for 22 months until 1969. Soyinka has published about 20 works: drama, novels and poetry. He writes in English and his literary language is marked by great scope and richness of words.

As dramatist, Soyinka has been influenced by, among others, the Irish writer, J.M. Synge, but links up with the traditional popular African theatre with its combination of dance, music, and action. He bases his writing on the mythology of his own tribe-the Yoruba-with Ogun, the god of iron and war, at the centre. He wrote his first plays during his time in London, The Swamp Dwellers and The Lion and the Jewel (a light comedy), which were performed at Ibadan in 1958 and 1959 and were published in 1963. Later, satirical comedies are The Trial of Brother Jero (performed in 1960, publ. 1963) with its sequel, Jero’s Metamorphosis (performed 1974, publ. 1973), A Dance of the Forests (performed 1960, publ.1963), Kongi’s Harvest (performed 1965, publ. 1967) and Madmen and Specialists (performed 1970, publ. 1971). Among Soyinka’s serious philosophic plays are (apart from “The Swamp Dwellers“) The Strong Breed (performed 1966, publ. 1963), The Road ( 1965) and Death and the King’s Horseman (performed 1976, publ. 1975). In The Bacchae of Euripides (1973), he has rewritten the Bacchae for the African stage and in Opera Wonyosi (performed 1977, publ. 1981), bases himself on John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera and Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera. Soyinka’s latest dramatic works are A Play of Giants (1984) and Requiem for a Futurologist (1985).

Soyinka has written two novels, The Interpreters (1965), narratively, a complicated work which has been compared to Joyce’s and Faulkner’s, in which six Nigerian intellectuals discuss and interpret their African experiences, and Season of Anomy (1973) which is based on the writer’s thoughts during his imprisonment and confronts the Orpheus and Euridice myth with the mythology of the Yoruba. Purely autobiographical are The Man Died: Prison Notes (1972) and the account of his childhood, Aké ( 1981), in which the parents’ warmth and interest in their son are prominent. Literary essays are collected in, among others, Myth, Literature and the African World (1975).

Soyinka’s poems, which show a close connection to his plays, are collected in Idanre, and Other Poems (1967), Poems from Prison (1969), A Shuttle in the Crypt (1972) the long poem Ogun Abibiman (1976) and Mandela’s Earth and Other Poems (1988).

A Dance of the Forests:-

One of Wole Soyinka's most well-known plays, A Dance of the Forests, was commissioned as part of a larger celebration of Nigerian independence. It was a divisive play that enraged many Nigerians at the time of its release, owing to its indictment of political corruption in the country.

Soyinka returned to Nigeria in 1959, after attending university in England, to write this play, immersing himself in Yoruba folklore as a way of reconnecting with his homeland. The play is about a group of mortals who summon the spirits of the dead in the hopes that these wiser spirits will help them guide them, only to discover that the spirits are just as petty and flawed as they are.

Many have interpreted the play as a cautionary tale for Nigerians on the occasion of their newfound independence, reminding them to be critical and seeking, and warning them not to become complacent. It also serves as a metaphor for not romanticising pre-colonial Africa and remaining vigilant. When Soyinka was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986, A Dance of the Forests was cited as one of his crowning achievements, and he was referred to as "one of the finest poetical playwrights who have written in English."

Major Themes - A Dance of the Forests:-

1. Atonement

The play's central theme is atonement. The Dead Man and Dead Woman are brought back to life so that the four mortals who mistreated them in the past will recognize and atone for their transgressions. While the mortals are unaware for much of the play, they eventually realize that the Dead Man and Dead Woman's visitation is to teach them a lesson, and by the end, they have gone through a kind of conversion, realizing that they have sinned before.

2. Corrupted Power

Another major theme in the play is corrupted power, as exemplified by the characters of Mata Kharibu and Madame Tortoise. As we are taken back to the king's palace, we see that Madame Tortoise uses her beauty and power over men to sow discord. Mata Kharibu is also corrupted by his immense power, as evidenced by his insistence on his soldiers fighting against their better judgement and his merciless punishment of free thought. Wole Soyinka tells a storey that teaches the reader that all power is corruptible and that just because someone is given authority does not mean they are a good or ethical person.

3. Wounds & Trauma

The play depicts how people carry trauma and wounds from their past with them, and how everyone has some sensitive part of their biography that haunts and hurts them. The Forest Head is aware of this and works to bring these wounds to light in the hope that those who have been hurt in the past can move on.
4. The Past
Despite the fact that it takes place over the course of a single day, the play does not have a strictly linear structure. The narrative, as we quickly learn, is about past sins, and each mortal character has multiple identities, representing both who they are in the present and who they once were in the past. The present is layered on top of the past, as if to imply that nothing from our past is ever truly gone, that we are descended from patterns and events that came before us and continue to affect us in the present. The play's plot revolves around how humans must overcome and learn from their pasts.

5. Nature

The play takes place in a forest, and throughout, various elements of the natural world come to life to take part in the reckoning that is taking place with the mortals. The Forest Head is a spirit who presides over the forest, and during the welcoming of the Dead Man and Dead Woman, various spirits of different natural elements are called upon to speak their piece. These include Spirit of the Rivers, Spirit of the Palms, Spirits of the Volcanos, and others. All of these elements of nature are personified through verse, showing us the connection between the human and the natural world.

6. Birth

One of the unresolved features of the Dead Woman is the fact that she was killed while pregnant with a child. She returns to the world of the living still with a pregnant belly, and during the welcome ritual, the fetus appears as a Half-Child, who is caught between being influenced by the spirit world and remaining with his mother. The Half-Child is a tragic figure, as he was never given the relief of life, and when he is given a chance to speak he says, "I who yet await a mother/Feel this dread/Feel this dread,/I who flee from womb/To branded womb cry it now/I'll be born dead/I'll be born dead." The figure of the child is a tragic one, standing in as the ultimate symbol for the wrongs done to the Dead Man and Dead Woman, and the unresolvedness of their plight.

7. Ritual:-

Rituals and tradition are another major themes as well as a formal element of the play. Throughout, we see the characters going through the motions in order to gain a better understanding of their circumstances. The ceremony for the mortals' self-discovery, in which the mortals must relive their crimes, the Dead Man and Dead Woman must be questioned, and the mortals must reveal their secret wrongs, is one of these rituals.

Another ritual that takes place is the Dance of Welcome, in which the forest spirits perform and deliver monologues. The Dance of the Half-Child then decides where the unborn child will go. Rituals, dances, and formal representations are frequently used to stand in for literal events. Indeed, the entire play can be seen as a collection of the various formalized rituals that comprise the narrative.

Friday, January 28, 2022

Gun Island

Hello Readers,

I am Asari Bhavyang from Department of English and recently we have completed a discussion on Amitav Ghosh's novel "Gun Island". It was a very wonderful novel and we all enjoyed it. Dilip Barad sir has tried his best to explain to us. we have got thinking Activity task so, let's begin...

Amitav Ghosh:-

Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta in 1956, and studied at Dehra Dun, New Delhi, Alexandria and Oxford. He was awarded a doctorate from Oxford University. He has written for many publications including The Hindu, The New Yorker and Granta, and taught in universities in both India and the US. His first novel, The Circle of Reason, set in India and Africa and winner of the 1990 Prix Médicis Étranger, was published in 1986. Further novels are The Shadow Lines (1988); The Calcutta Chromosome (1996), about the search for a genetic strain which guarantees immortality and winner of the 1997 Arthur C Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction; The Glass Palace (2000), and The Hungry Tide (2004), a saga set in Calcutta and the Bay of Bengal. His books of non-fiction include 3 collections of essays: Dancing in Cambodia and At Large in Burma (1998); The Imam and the Indian (2002), around his experience in Egypt in the early 1980s; and Incendiary Circumstances: A Chronicle of the Turmoil of Our Times (2005). His recent novels form a trilogy: Sea of Poppies (2008), an epic saga set just before the Opium Wars, shortlisted for the 2008 Man Booker Prize for Fiction Prize; River of Smoke (2011), shortlisted for the 2011 Man Asia Literary Prize; and Flood of Fire (2015), which concludes the story. He has also published The Great Derangement (2016), a non-fiction book on climate change. In 2007 Amitav Ghosh was awarded the Padma Shri by the Indian Government, for his distinguished contribution to literature.

Gun Island :-

A lonely, ageing Bengali man who deals in rare books and antiquities in New York finds himself reluctantly drawn into an obscure legend from the Sunderbans. This legend is connected to a shrine to a man called Bonduki Sadagar, or the Gun Merchant, who fled from the ire of the local snake goddess, Manasa Devi, and paid a price for doing so. This is the beguiling premise upon which Amitav Ghosh’s latest novel, Gun Island, is built.

1. How does Amitav Ghosh use myth of Gun Merchant 'Bonduki Sadagar' and Manasa Devi to initiate discussion on the issue of Climate Change and Migration/Refugee crisis / Human Trafficking?

Myth:-

working at one of India’s most widely read news magazines, I would often be frustrated when my editor shot down one story idea or other by saying, “This is not what our readers want.” In his mind, there was this mythical magazine reader that could afford to pay the Rs 30 for the weekly shot of news we provided. This reader was not interested in what happened to the small-town boys that became criminal dons in Bombay, nor was this interested in the lives of neglect most of India’s sportsmen lived in, no matter how many awards they had won – unless they were cricketers, of course. These mythical readers were interested, though, in the new Rolls Royce just launched in India, priced at about Rs 40 million, or just about $1 million at that time, in 2007.

These mythical readers are also who the literary publishers cater to – aspirational, middle-class consumers who are far more interested in wasteful spending, even if only in their imagination, than in sustainable living. The grim challenges – or even small victories such as Chhewang Norphel’s artificial glaciers in Ladakh or a technological breakthrough to create a new arsenic filter – related to climate change are not the stuff of novels that publishers feel will sell. It may be that they are right, but if these stories are not commissioned, if they are not published and promoted, how will we ever cultivate the authors that can tease out the complexities of life in this increasingly fragile environment?

Ghosh had insisted that fiction about climate change would be more impactful if it is situated in strictly realistic worlds to drive home the consequences to this world as it is, in real terms. But the occult and the supernatural haunt the pages of Gun Island and propel it forward at every turn – whether it is via hauntings or by the repeated appearance of the creatures associated with Manasa Devi – snakes and spiders.

But Ghosh seems to have marvelously lost his own argument. Nothing about the non-realistic parts of his story takes away from the telling of its story about two intertwined issues – human rights (specifically the rights of refugees) and the climate crisis. He asks urgent, important questions about what migration and movement mean, what closed borders and xenophobia are doing to people whose own countries have been historically devastated by colonialism, what this repeating of imperialist history means for today’s world. They find their most compelling realization in the love story between Rafi and Tipu, two young men from the Sunderbans who make the perilous journey to Europe together until they get separated. Through repeated encounters with the natural world, which is given the same agency it was given in The Great Derangement, he brings home the horror of the climate crisis.

It is the turning over of several binaries and his deeply felt, gentle turning away from the ideals of anthropocentrism that is compelling about his approach to telling Gun Island. Cinta, who is in many ways Deen’s intellectual and emotional mentor tells him:

“You mustn’t underestimate the power of stories. There is something in them that is elemental and inexplicable. Haven’t you heard it said that what makes us human, what separates us from animals, is the faculty of storytelling? But what if the truth were even stranger? What if it were the other way around? What if the faculty of storytelling were not specifically human but rather the last remnant of our animal selves?”

This is done through the experiences of extreme weather events, but also through quieter encounters with the natural in ways that urban populations are increasingly not able to even contemplate – a snakebite in Los Angeles, a venomous spider in a big city apartment that has never been seen before. It is in the terror of these moments that our utter lack of preparedness with the hugest consequences of climate change, when they come, is reflected.

2. How does Amitav Ghosh make use of 'etymology' of common words to sustain mystery and suspense in the narrative?

Many of the events in the novel that seem magical are dismissed and explained away by its more ‘rational-minded characters almost immediately. A seemingly miraculous ecological event that happens in a climactic scene towards the end of the book theoretically has a logical explanation, as Piya hurriedly explains to Deen, who is finally worn down into being wonderstruck with what is happening to and around him. The hauntings in this book, too, could simply have emotional or talismanic value to the characters they are happening to.

In the end, Ghosh seems not to reject the rationale for the mysterious, but simply puts them both on a spectrum of emotional experience. And it is via this emotional self-awareness, this open-mindedness that his protagonist begins to approach the world, and it's very real and present problems. This is the mental journey that a privileged NRI bhadralok man like Deen, with his particular background and history, is not equipped to make. In the end, the lesson he seems to learn is deceptively simple – in this vast and unknowable world that is being torn apart by human systems, this vulnerability matters, and fuels what we ultimately do with what we have to face in front of us.

The story has its problems, including its flaws in pacing, or its preoccupation with the inner life of its principal character to the neglect of many of its other compelling people, particularly the women (especially Cinta, who feels woefully underused and whose perspective could liven up a novel like this immensely). Even so, this is in some ways Ghosh’s most tender, even most personal novel yet – while simultaneously being global in scope. It is a story full of that particular grace.

3. There are many Italian words in the novel. Have you tried to translate these words into English or Hindi with the help of the Google Translate App? If so, how is Machine Translation helping in the proper translation of Italian words into English and Hindi?

Yes, there are many Italian words in this novel and without goggle translation, it is impossible to tell what that word might be telling or what writer what to say. I think the writer what to see a real picture of readers that is why he has used that type of language so, readers may also feel that they are indifferent space. yes, I also tried to translate the word in English or a different language, and while doing that sometimes I was imagining that word from a different angle and its meaning was totally different. I would like to tell you it was a great experience and it is hard to just depend on goggle translation if we have some idea of background history then only we can get to know the sence.

4. What are your views on the use of myth and history in the novel Gun Island to draw the attention of the reader towards contemporary issues like climate change and migration?

we can say that Amitav Gosh has tried to see the real Image of the world. that what is going to happen or what is going on in the world we can see that what Amitav Ghosh has written in his Novel that become true in the world. It also wants to see the readers about the contemporary issues that what is happening and how they can come out from it. we can see the magical world in it and there are chance-making schemes that also play a vital role.

we also know that due to climate change people are facing many problems in the world somewhere there is heavy rain and somewhere it is too cold. we see that if tide might come then it can harm people who are close to the river. we also see that people are migrating from one place to another for their better future they just want to get the good lifestyle that is is a reason that they are going to live the city life and leaving the village.

5. Is there any connection between 'The Great Derangement' and 'Gun Island'?

The Great Derangement, one of the central questions of which was why authors of literary fiction do not tackle questions of climate change given its grave consequences for humanity. But Ghosh’s treatment of this story in Gun Island is still surprising in some ways. For one thing, although key characters from the Hungry Tide (Nilima Bose, Moyna and the cetologist Piya) return in this story, in its telling and concerns it feels far closer to what Ghosh did with the Calcutta Chromosome.

Like in the Chromosome, the presence of marginalized, even forgotten feminine power acts as a driving force. Similar to the Chromosome, this power is channeled through mysterious deities who are worshipped for who they are and do not feel the need to explain themselves. Like in the Chromosome, the presence of this power challenges hegemonic ways of thinking that rely on so-called ‘objective’ truths.

In the Great Derangement, the author has asked why one of the major issues of our time – climate change – has been neglected by the literary community. In South Asia, the answer is easy to see. By catering to an urban, prosperous and global community, authors and publishers produce books that allow us to ignore the damage taking place in the lives of the marginalized. The literary community is not innocently unaware, but actively complicit in a process that allows us to ignore the damage that climate change is doing to the lives of the poor.

Friday, January 21, 2022

The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness :

I am Asari Bhavyang and I am a student of English Department at Mkbu. recently we completed "The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness" book by Arundhati Roy. we got a goggle classroom task by Dilip Barad sir. we have talked about Political issues in the novel, Gender concerns in the novel, Environmental concerns in the novel / Ecofeminist study, Narrative Patterns in the novel. so, let's begin...

Arundhati Roy :-

Arundhati Roy, born in 1960 in Kerala, India, was an architecture student at the Delhi School of Architecture. Although she was trained in architecture, her interest was not in that field; she envisioned herself growing as a writer. Her first work, ‘The God of Small Things’ (1997) kickstarted her career as an author. This work led to her winning the Booker Prize for Fiction and was published in 19 countries in 16 languages, selling around 6 million copies. Her general style of literary output was composed of political nonfiction, capitalism, and struggles related to her homeland. She was often met with conflict with Indian authorities because of her active role in numerous human rights and environmental causes. She faced criticism because she vocally supported Naxalite insurgency groups. She voiced out her concerns and thoughts about various issues such as, the need for inclusion of Afghan women in the peace talks between the Untied States and Taliban, against the arrest of a professor who was arrested for alleged Maoist links, Kashmiri independence, prevention of the construction of dams in Narmada etc. Hence, in recognition of her involvement in her advocacy of human rights, in 2002, she was awarded the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award, the Sydney Peace Prize in 2004 and also the Sahitya Akademi Award from the Indian Academy of Letters in 2006.

The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness :-

1) Political issues in the novel:-

The novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, reflects a specific political purpose and acts as a tool of political propaganda. The idea of political fiction became common in the twentieth century, mostly after World War I. This new fictional pattern gave a chance of expressing to those sensible groups of writers who were disturbed by the power-hungry dictatorial governments. Those political works included different political ideologies, the impact of politics on society, people, their hopes, and their fears. Writers found space for writing on issues that were dominant at that time, such as war, gender discrimination, justice, race, economic problems, etc. thus, the genre of political novels gained the attention of the writers.

However, the idea of a political novel has remained unclear because the concept of politics, to be represented by a political novel is vague as well as complicated. In a layman's language, a political novel is a work of fiction that discusses politics, politicians, governments, political leaders, etc. It discusses political behavior and most importantly contemporary ideas, life, and issues of society. Any novel written in support of a particular faction, is in effect a political instrument, even if not in intent. A writer may claim to be impartial, yet the readers may observe the ideology in the work. Such novels present phenomena or people, with intense political seriousness. Joseph Blotner, in his book The Modern American Political Novel, explains the concept of political fiction in detail. He has classified the political novels into the sub-categories, such as, "the novel as a political instrument", "the novel as a mirror of national character", "the novel as an analyst of group behavior" or "the novelist as a political historian". He has further explained the concept of the novel as a political instrument in his book. By political instrument, he means a novel that serves a specific purpose, mainly as a tool of political propaganda for a particular ideology, party, or individual. It could also have been written favoring a particular political faction over the other.

According to her, the solution to the problem of Kashmir is independence from India. Her stance on the Kashmir issue has been highlighted in the various stages of the second part of the novel. Her ideology of freedom for Kashmir is evident through the character of Musa, a freedom fighter. The novel depicts the activist side of the author, through the characters and the incidents narrated. The historical references of the Ahmedabad Massacre and the Kashmir fight also illustrate the political ideas of the writer. Her choice of the word "Ministry" in the title also shows that the novel aims to point out the political issues under the cover of social matters and the lives of the unique characters.

2) Gender concerns in the novel:-

Hijra is a distinctive South Asia known for their gender and sexual difference and associated with their transgender and intersex identities. Otherwise known as transwomen, they are traditionally subjected to prejudices and embedded within narratives of exclusion, discrimination, and the subculture. As a result, Hijras are typically perceived as isolated, abject, and passive victims who remain social and economic peripheries. Concerning the stereotypical image of hijras, this study explores Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness to examine the novel’s problematization of hijras in India. In this novel, sexual and gender non-conformity are addressed within characters desiring to be neither a man nor a woman. This framework allows for a manifestation of gender flexibility and feminine writing as a tool for self-emancipation. Both protagonists Anjum and Tilo, illustrate that hijras are not predetermined but are formulated in a complex process of a conscious rewriting of the self. While the former character resists heteropatriarchal normativity through her conscious alterations of the phallogocentric structure of her Urdu language, the latter defies societal conventions of family and marriage with unorthodox views and actions that are materialized in the writing of her story.

3) Environmental concerns in the novel / Ecofeminist study :-

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, draws out the issues of the deteriorated condition of river due to construction of dams and the sewage system of industrial wastages, the ‘otherness’ of animals , birds, fishes and trees and their easy exploitation, the wiping out of sparrow, vulture from biodiversity due to excessive scientific manifestations, the predicament of zoo animals, the abolition of forest for the steel and mining factories and the uselessness of nuclear testing etc. The author unravels that most of the environmental delapidations are the result of Euro-American ideology of ‘development’ project which is a disguised form of neo-colonialism and imperialism.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness investigates the current environmental problems and my whole-hearted endevour in Roy’s influential task in the light of postcolonial ecocriticism.The Ministry of Utmost Happiness has shown this in an unobtrusive way and demands a sharp and scholastic observation from the readers. The novel opens with a prologue and the prologue provides author’s concern for lower species. The unquenchable thirst of human beings has led the demise of ‘white-baked vulture’, the scavengers of dead and the death of sparrow due to environmental changes, -

“sparrow that have gone missing, and the old white-baked vultures custodians of dead for more than a hundred years, that have been wiped out,”

Thus Arundhuti Roy has expressed her libertarian and ecological ideas in a penetrative way in this novel. The present novel criticizes the development and questions the state-oriented policy and betrays the root cause of ecological problems and explores the after-effect of dominating nature. She caters the whole world by hinting solutions to the ecological problems prevalent in the present world. She tries whole-heartedly to save the costly lives of the people of this world by creating an eco-consciousness among readers. Arundhati Roy’s only concern is to create public awareness about environmental degradation and its negative impact of human life and other species through her writings. And as a responsible writer she has penned her experience beautifully in her present novel and successfully decodes the ecological imperialism of First World nations.

4) Narrative Patterns in the novel :-

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness due to the incoherency in the narrative pattern. The narrative starts at the unusual setting of a necropolis, to depict the long litany of necropolitics created by the corrupted pseudo-democratic setup of India,under the clutches of globalization, materialization, industrialization, westernization and the other long list of existing political scams. By the order of structure, the novel starts with the story of Anjum, a trans-woman, precisely a woman trapped in a man‟s body. The time gap is adjusted to tell the story of Anjum right from her birth to the events that led her to the first setting of the graveyard. Through this part of the narrative, Roy molds the one half of the dystopian sphere by etching the caste craze, media politics, gender politics, globalization, islamophobia etc. that rules the democratic India, which cracked the whole set up and demolished the “the ministry of utmost happiness”. The when Anjum and her party on the process of molding the utopia within the necropolis reaches Janata Mantar, the conjoining point of the novel, Anjum falls into a rabbit-hole, and the readers are tangentially taken into another dystopian half, to bring out some characters from that side into the fabrication of the utopia in the necropolis.

The novel depicts the tales of four college mates, whose lives are intertwined by love. Tilo, the unconventional, rebellious, architect student and a to-be member of Anjum‟s utopia, is the unfulfilled love of the next narrator Biplab Das, who later to become a bureaucrat, Naga later to become a successful journalist and Musa, a Kashmiri forced to intensely involve himself in the struggle for freedom. The other half of the already framed dystopia is created through the star-crossed love of Musa and Tilo by showing the injustice of the government towards the downtrodden marginalized masses like women, poor, Kashmiri people, orphans, untouchables etc. This phase deconstructs the stereotypical notion of hero-worship of army,and the corruption in other governmental institution like police forces, doctors, politicians etc.

The narrative builds up the dystopian society, giving the readers an apocalyptical warning, whereas in the undercurrent Roy creates a utopia, build up by the rejects of the society under the guidance of Anjum. Miss Jebeen the second or Miss Udaya Jabeen is the ultimate diptych link in the narrative, connecting both halves of the dystopia, and is considered as a savior, who would help in the propagation of the maneuver of empathy, which in turn shows Roy‟s hope in the future generation, unlike her tone in The End of Imagination.

The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness

Arundhati Roy :-

The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness :-

1) Political issues in the novel:-

2) Gender concerns in the novel:-

3) Environmental concerns in the novel / Ecofeminist study :-

“sparrow that have gone missing, and the old white-baked vultures custodians of dead for more than a hundred years, that have been wiped out,”

4) Narrative Patterns in the novel :-

Thursday, January 20, 2022

Research Methodology Workshop

I am Asari Bhavyang from English Department in MKBU .We were having Three Sessions in a Workshop and it was conducted on 7th Jan 2022 it was held by Dilip Barad sir and it was a very great experience and we all get to know many more new thing about Research Methodology . and in all three sessions, they all were dealing with a different type of topic which was very attractive and useful.

On Friday Dilip Barad Sir has organized this workshop which was related to Research & Dissertation writing. First Session was conducted by Dr. J P Majmudar Sir on the Importance of Research. Then Second Session was conducted by Dilip Barad Sir who talk about Qualitative Research in Digital Era. Then last but not least third session was conducted by Vaidehi Hariyani Madam she talks about Citation Tools and Techniques.

Dr. J P Majmudar Sir He was a retired person. He was having very good intelligence that he was telling all important things which we have to take care of while doing research and how to write research paper he gave many Example also and he also talk that how Research is important in Ph.D. and at that stage if a Ph.D. person is not Knowing about research so, They have included this paper in post Graduation so, they will at least know that how to write a research paper and by that it will be not new area but it will be familiar to them. Then he also talks that how by reading all the research work which has already been done you may get a new path to think for your topic we have to find a gap of over research topic and we have to just not bluf in our Research topic but have to talk by giving evidence that will prove your point and add incitation that will prove that this was called by other and you agree with who so ever point or disagree and if agree then also give your explanation. The first and main part of your research is to select your topic you have to select the topic in which you are interested, then only you will be able to work nicely. They also inform us that now it will be compulsory to have ph.d degree if you want to be proffer.

Then after break, our Second Session was Conducted by Dilip Barad Sir he has talk about Qualitative Research in Digital Era. In that First Sir Talk about Avoid Plagiarism because it might harm you in Future . we also know that if something is connected to Academic purpose then Citation is important to saw that you have taken this from other and it is authentic and you have not gone throw to any random work. It is oun duty to cite all the things from where you have taken the thing . If we are taking something from book then also it is our duty to cite , if you are taking from book and you might think that no one might caught you then you are making yourself fool .Once you are caught doing Plagirism then you may have to loss your job also.

Example :-

Hungary's president has to loss his degree due to plagiarism that was a reason that fight was going on.
Mr Schmit who has got Gold medal in Olympic from country he has to reatun that due to Plagiarism..
German defence ministry has to rezine from his post in ph.d due to plagirism.
There are so many Example that people are making suicide due to using Cut+ Copy = Sucide.

How to Know Plagiarism :-

In this there was 10 types of unoriginal work (Plagiarism )

Clone :- we can say it is connected with wikipidea information, and I would suggest that don't believe in this type of wikipidea cite and don't cite that.It will make your work doubt.
Ctrl+C :- we have to just not copy and past from other cite we have first read from there and write it with our own language.
Find- Replace :- In this people are just changing keywords and adding new words for it.(Low Plagiarism)
Remix :- In this people are gathering from many cite and making one work.(Low Plagiarism)
Recycle :- In this people are publishing there own work time and again .(Low Plagiarism)
Hybrid :- In this people are citing only selected cite and remaining they are not citing.(Low Plagiarism)
Mashup :- In this they are gathering from all the cite .
404 Error :- in this people are writing about a things which does not exist in this world
Aggregator :- In this people are only giving information.now able to argurre.
Re- tweet :- In this people are talking about others work , that what they think , and what is there oppion.(Low Plagiarism)

we have to inform more and more people to avoid Plagiarism and tell them if they will still do then they might be in problem in future.Internet matters but not for copy past. we have to come up with orignality and now a days there are many machine which will easily catch how much is plagiarism and if your plagiarism will more then 10% then you might have to work again into your topic.

Indentify the Quality of Digital Resource :-

Authority :- In this we have to see that all things are proply cited or not and most important thing it to site in order.
Educational :- we have see that our Goal of making research is successfully added or not.
Internet :-Now a days people are just interested in sell content and not interested in inform user.
Originality :-we have to use Journal Article in this then only your work is qualitative research.
Quality :-we have not be bayas we have to take good as well as bad thing.

Wisdom

Knowelege

process

Information

Data

Then Third session was conducted by Vaidehi Hariyani Madam she talks about Citation Tools and Techniques. In that students were divided into 5 group and all has to show that how they are citing during preastation. some were using Citation machine, some from words....

But at the end we saw that without felling all detail there is no any Mechine who is automatically felling all things .we have to fill all thing manually. then madam teaches us how to cite MLA,Journal Article, Youtube video, Image, Dictionary words.......etc.

so, it was very interesting workshop and its was long also but we get to know and more by attended this type of workshop ,I hope you also enjoyed it. I would like to thanks to Dilip Barad sir for organizing this type of Workshop.