Papers by Rimjhim Bhattacherjee
Asian Quarterly, 2019
Critical analyses of Anita Desai’s texts have engaged with their critique of patriarchal codes an... more Critical analyses of Anita Desai’s texts have engaged with their critique of patriarchal codes and norms that fettered women’s existence in postcolonial India. However, an issue less explored is the recurrent trope or motif of disability in Desai’s oeuvre. This paper seeks to study the representation of Disability in Desai’s 1977 novel Fire on the Mountain. In doing so, it shall use the concept of ‘narrative prosthesis’ theorised in Disability Studies to explore the metaphorical nature of disability representation in the novel.
Cultural materialism as a theoretical approach seeks to undertake a critical analysis of culture,... more Cultural materialism as a theoretical approach seeks to undertake a critical analysis of culture, cultural forms and their relationship with nationhood and nation formation. Raymond Williams in his 1973 work The Country and the City elaborated on the central concerns of this approach. According to Williams, cultural forms and particularly literature, reflect and consolidate social norms and realities. As Hywel Dix explains, " Williams emphasized the fact that nationhood had originally been imagined into existence in part through its literature and cultural forms. Accordingly, to produce a different kind of literature is to imagine a different kind of nation. " (3) Similarly, Benedict Anderson's seminal work Imagined Communities talks of the convergence of capitalism and print culture as central to the creation of the 'imagined community' of the nation. Cultural forms and particularly printed texts help reflect and generate social order. In doing so, they help create the identity of a nation. When certain texts then, subvert this overarching social order by presenting narratives of liminal, marginalised (non) identities, they problematize the notion of a unified nation and help generate a more nuanced understanding of the same. This aspect of cultural forms, particularly writing, would be examined in detail by Homi Bhabha in Nation and Narration where he builds upon the work of both Williams and Anderson. In the words of Dix, " Bhabha refers to Rushdie's Satanic Verses in which Rushdie gives fictional realization to the kind of working class Indian community that had previously made little impact on the novel tradition in Britain. This is not, Bhabha points out, because such communities had not previously existed but because they lacked access to the means of representation. Bhabha says that by writing a novel about a community of people previously excluded from the literary record, and explicitly in opposition to the dominant political tones of the period, Rushdie enables us to imagine 'how newness enters the world.' " (23) The political and cultural space of India houses several varying groups of people and therefore some community or identity category is constantly under threat of being stifled and marginalised in the grand narrative of the nation. Literature, as a cultural form, has time and again sought to give voice to and rebel against such injustice and hold itself up as the repository of human values and ethics. The writings of Mahasweta Devi can be regarded as representative in this concern. In her novels and short stories, writer and social activist Mahasweta Devi has always sought to give voice to some of those communities in India that have remained on the margins of literary and political society and have been denied access to the 'means of representation.' This paper shall examine one such short story, 'Daini' which has been translated by Ipsita Chandaas 'Witch' in the 1998 collection Bitter Soil. In reading the text, it shall strive to see how categories like tribal identity, caste, gender and disability can oppose or throw into questions notions of modernity and dominant social and political processes.
Firdaus Kanga's novel, Trying to Grow, tells the story of Brit Kotwal, a young Parsi boy with ost... more Firdaus Kanga's novel, Trying to Grow, tells the story of Brit Kotwal, a young Parsi boy with osteogenesis imperfecta, negotiating his life in the Bombay of the 1970s. From the beginning, this semi-autobiographical work draws our attention to the common religious and medical perceptions of disability in Indian society. This paper proposes to study how the novel focuses on several aspects of the lived reality of a person with " brittle bones " who does not grow more than four feet tall. The paper also explores how the novel focuses on and confounds the commonly perceived notion of the asexuality of disabled individuals. Brit's voice is extremely aware and articulates positions of difference within disability and sexuality discourses. He is able to occupy what can be called a truly modern disability subjectivity. But, this paper shall show that Brit presents the reader with this modern, emancipatory rhetoric of disability because of the privileges of his gender and class status in the Indian context. Within the same text, Brit's disabled female cousin is literally and figuratively mute and meets with a very different fate. The paper shall thus investigate and try to complicate the representation of disability, sexuality and the " modern " disability subjectivity in Kanga's novel.
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Papers by Rimjhim Bhattacherjee