Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi received an urgent request from his very good friend, Israeli... more Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi received an urgent request from his very good friend, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to send more Indian workers to fill in for Palestinians who were denied entry into Israel after the events of October 7, 2023. Significantly, Muslim workers were encouraged not to apply while Hindu workers were. Compared by Michelle Buckley and Paula Chakravartty to a system that "resembles British indenture"-one designed to replace indigenous Palestinian labor with precarious, cheap and supposedly pliant workers from a newly minted ally-this deal represents the latest moment in a sharp shift in India's position on Palestine that has been accelerating since 1992, the year India officially established diplomatic relationships with Israel. While the shift toward Israel, begun by the Congress and accelerated by the BJP, reflects a changed post-Cold war geopolitical scenario, it is crucially connected, as Sukumar Muralidharan (2014) writes, to India's changing perceptions of its self-image on the world stage (77). While there are complexities and ambiguities in the stances of Indian anticolonial stalwarts like Gandhi and Nehru vis-à-vis Palestine and Israel, as documented in the edited collection From India to Palestine, this shift toward Israel and away from Palestine reveals how the Indian state and its nation-making project has moved away from a commitment to a post-Bandung decolonizing consensus to embracing its role as a neoliberal regional hegemon in the South Asian context. The "amnesia" about Palestine has been so massive post-1992 that "young people, far away from the willful stratagems of government, see a natural alliance between Israel and India via the 'war on terror'" (Hariharan 2014 30). The Bibi-Modi "bromance" takes this much further-accelerating tendencies already immanent in the Hindu supremacist worldview from the 1930s, such collaborations reveal that in steadily making moves "toward becoming an ethnostate much like Israel itself, the Modi government's Islamophobic kinship with Netanyahu's regime is making itself evident" (Buckley and Chakravartty 2024). All this while India still pays lip-service to Palestinian sovereignty and humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza in the national and international sphere. 1 To be sure, despite the depredations of neoliberal and neofascist governmentality, the vacillations and hypocrisies of state policy, and strategies of interpellation in countries like India, there is a significant degree of support for Palestine in South Asian nations. The dockworker's strike in February 2024 in India and street art in Dhaka linking the Bangladeshi and Palestinian flags after the fall of Sheikh Hasina's government are reminders of the reverberations of the popular support that the Palestinian cause still inspires in the region. 2 This forum on Palestine and South Asia draws inspiration from these contemporary assertions of Global South and anticolonial solidarity and also takes its lead from a subcontinental literary-cultural CONTACT Amit R. Baishya
The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial and Decolonial Literature, 2024
Amitav Ghosh's observations on science fiction in The Great Derangement have been discussed widel... more Amitav Ghosh's observations on science fiction in The Great Derangement have been discussed widely, but less attention has been paid to his comments about "serious fiction," a shorthand for realism. Whenever the question of realism has been posed with respect to climate change following Ghosh's comments, the tendency has been to argue that climate catastrophe necessitates a "mutant or recombinant" mode (Ganguly 421). These mutant modes are a form of "planetary realism, a recombinant literary mode that registers human generated climatological shocks as they reverberate in the present, and whose cataclysmic effects will last well beyond human habitation on this planet" (448). But is it possible to look at traditional realism, the mode that Ghosh says is inadequate to represent climate catastrophe, differently? Furthermore, given that nonhuman elements like sand lie hidden in plain sight in the realist division between the spatial container of the setting and the temporal dynamism of plot, can we reconsider the stories that seemingly inert forms of matter narrate? For Ghosh, the ascendancy of gradualism over catastrophism in geology, the rise of probability in mathematics and statistics and the predominance of the "filler" in the realist novel emerge within the horizon of the same modern episteme predicated on dualist divisions between humans and nature and humans and nonhumans. While narratives proceed by linking elements that are exceptional, what is distinctive about the modern realist narrative: … is precisely the concealment of those exceptional moments that serve as the motor of narrative. This is achieved through the insertion of … "fillers." According to Moretti, "Fillers function very much like the good manners so important in [Jane] Austen: they are both mechanisms designed to keep the "narrativity" of life under control-to give a regularity, a 'style' to existence …" It is thus that the novel takes its modern form, through "the relocation of the unheard-of toward the background while the everyday moves into the foreground." (Ghosh 17) Descriptions of setting also function as fillers. They anchor the reader in a particular place and time and provide a style and regularity to existence against which the dramatic events of the plot unfold. Ghosh's example is Bengali author Advaita Mallabarman's A River Named Titash.
To be present in history, even as nothing more than a chuckle, was a universe away from being abs... more To be present in history, even as nothing more than a chuckle, was a universe away from being absent from it, from being written out of it altogether. A chuckle. .. could become a foothold in the sheer wall of the future.-Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness A key idea that I will explore in this chapter is Donna Haraway's concept of "multispecies flourishing," which, for me, is a powerful descriptor for peace with the Other.1 Here, by "Other," I mean not just human Others but a whole host of non-human Others with whom we enter into relationships of kinship. "Multispecies flourishing" is not peace as a state of suspended war or a fuzzy version of mutual coexistence and friendship that avoids conflict but the messy and laborious process of making kin within quotidian networks of obligation and responsibility. I wager that Arundhati Roy's second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (henceforth Ministry), creates such a storied world in neoliberal urban locales scarred by species-extinction.2 I consider neoliberalism not simply as an economic ideology but also, in Jason Moore's sense, "a way of organizing nature-as a multispecies, situated, capitalist world-ecology."3 Spatial redistributions and practices that impact both human and non-human worlds in the contemporary neoliberal city and proliferating instances of environmental racism/casteism are among the primary nodes through which to analyze such organizations of nature.
This special issue of South Asian Review is on Northeast Indian Anglophone Literature which we re... more This special issue of South Asian Review is on Northeast Indian Anglophone Literature which we refer to by the acronym NIAL. Defining the field of NIAL is imperative now as literature in English from this region, while emerging from diverse origins, constitutes a rich and substantial body of works distinct and different from Indian Writing in English. 1 Works in NIAL also share common thematic preoccupations and cosmological frameworks. We state clearly that we find both "Northeast" and "Anglophone" limited, but nevertheless strategically useful for our purposes. Our brief discussion of the terms does not dwell on their epistemic limitations, but more on why we find them useful to name and define the contours of the knowledge-field we are exploring. This field thus far has elicited scattered and disconnected close-ups, but no sustained and panoramic wide-angle view like we present here. The region now called Northeast India has been a vibrant cultural ecumene and crossroads prior to the period of colonialism and of post-colonial nation states (Saikia 2004; Chatterjee 2013). The history of the "directional category" (Baruah 2006) called Northeast India can be located within three moments in 19 th-20 th century colonial/post-colonial history. The first is the "frontierization" of the region during the colonial period. Parallel to the establishment of the NWFP (North-West Frontier Province) in the colonial era, there was the simultaneous formation of the NorthEast Frontier Tracts (most of contemporary Arunachal Pradesh and some parts of Nagaland) (Baruah 2020, 2). The second moment was the period of WWII. The Japanese occupation of Myanmar and some portions of Northeast India (1940-44) was the critical episode that led the Indo-Myanmar border to emerge as the dividing line between South and Southeast Asia (Baruah 2004, 2-4). South Asia came to stand for the territories of British India (minus Burma). The third moment is the legacy of "ad-hoc decisions" (Baruah 2020, 25) made by the post-colonial Indian state. Two pieces of Indian parliamentary legislation passed in 1971-the NorthEastern Areas Reorganization Act and the NorthEastern Council Act-consolidated this place name in the popular imagination. These spatial
Assamese ction written by janajatiya writers (writers from indigenous, "tribal" communities) can ... more Assamese ction written by janajatiya writers (writers from indigenous, "tribal" communities) can be read productively via a deployment of various standpoints from the "nonhuman turn." This chapter reads the triangulation of three nonhuman entities-bamboo, rats, and rein Arunachali author Yeshe Dorje Thongchi's short story "Baah Phulor Gundho" ("The Smell of Bamboo Blossoms"). While stories by janajatiya writers such as Thongchi are usually read via "tradition" versus "modernity" and social reform perspectives, this chapter argues that nonhuman entities play a vitalist and agential role in their ctional universes. Thongchi's short story demonstrates this through a unique event that occurs in Northeast India-the periodic owering of bamboo that leads to an exponential increase in rat populations-which becomes the fulcrum for an exploration of social change and the passage of time in the lifeworlds of the Nyishi tribespeople in Arunachal Pradesh. This chapter suggests that dynamic temporal shifts in so-called traditional societies are represented in ction not through overt changes in mentalités alone but via shifting con gurations and relationships between humans and nonhuman interlocutors. I focus on Axamiya ction by janajatiya ("tribal") writers that has usually been read through the optic of the complex interactions between "tradition" and "modernization" (Misra, "Crossing"; Dutta). Assam is a diverse, polyglot state populated by numerous tribal and nontribal communities. While nontribal writers have produced memorable etic depictions of janajatiya societies, the emic view provided by tribal writers such as Rongbong Terang (Karbi), Jatin Mipun (Mising), Lummer Dai (Adi) and Yeshe Dorje Thongchi (Sherdukpen) have enriched and expanded the oeuvre of Axamiya literature over time. The critical consensus on such literary productions emphasizes how janajatiya writers focus on the seepage of modernizing discourses and practices into "traditional" societies. Moreover, the impulse toward the social reform of janajatiya societies is evident in their ctions. While these are valuable interpretive frameworks, insights culled from multiple strands of the "nonhuman turn" (Grusin), I wager, show both the agential role of nonhuman entities and the entanglement and coconstitution of categories such as the "human" with various others in janajatiya ction. Moreover, they also illustrate some crucial modalities through which societies and lifeworlds change and mutate. My speci c focus here is Yeshe Dorje Thongchi's short story "Baah Phulor Gundho" ("The Smell of Bamboo Blossoms"). I locate my analysis of "Baah Phulor Gundho" at the intersection of three strands of the nonhuman turn: human-animal studies, critical plant studies, and "elemental ecocriticism" (Cohen and Duckert).
This article reads two cetacean tales-"Entanglement" and "Requiem"-by the prominent South Asian w... more This article reads two cetacean tales-"Entanglement" and "Requiem"-by the prominent South Asian writer of science fiction, Vandana Singh, to evaluate her portrayal of ordinary dimensions of living and existing in situations impacted by climate change. While cetaceans often function as an exotic alien other in science fiction and in cultural fantasies, Singh places her cetacean tales among Indigenous communities in the North Arctic region. Communities like the Inuits and the Iñupiat share relationships of collaborative reciprocity with cetaceans like belugas and bowhead whales. Deploying the geographer's Chie Sakakibara's concept of "cetaceousness"-complex, co-constitutive and quotidian relationships among humans and cetaceans in the North Arctic-this article studies Singh's merger of realism and speculation in her representation of the impact of global warming on populations for whom climate change is not a catastrophe waiting in the future, but whose effects have seeped into the minutiae of the everyday and the ordinary.
While Namwali Serpell's novel The Old Drift can be read as a fictional account of colonial and po... more While Namwali Serpell's novel The Old Drift can be read as a fictional account of colonial and postcolonial Zambian history, this article focuses on the text's exploration of Anthropocene timegeobiochemical and planetary temporal scales that predate human histories, while also gesturing towards futures where Homo sapiens may be absent. This article focuses on deep temporality in the novel via the use of mosquito and Moskeetoze (mosquito-like microdrones) narrators. While mosquitoes facilitate encounters with the deep past and of entangled human-nonhuman histories, the Moskeetozes enable representations of the vicissitudes of the "Anthrobscene" (Parrikka) and the creative potentialities of improvised life that emerge in hazardscapes in the Global South. Additionally, The Old Drift gestures towards a speculative planetary future where mosquitoes and Moskeetozes integrate to evolve new modalities of swarm intelligence and forms of life.
Routledge Handbook of Critical Kashmir Studies, 2022
Saadat Hasan Manto's Urdu short story "Tetwal ka Kutta" (2007) (Translation: The Dog of Tetwal; h... more Saadat Hasan Manto's Urdu short story "Tetwal ka Kutta" (2007) (Translation: The Dog of Tetwal; henceforth "Tetwal") has had afterlives in two contemporary graphic productions from Kashmir-Malik Sajad's künstlerroman Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir (2015) and Arif Ayaz Parrey and Waseem Helal's graphic-segment "Tamasha-e-Tetwal" in the anthology This Side, That Side: Restorying Partition (2013). 1 This chapter analyzes the intertextual resonances and critical departures from Manto in the two Kashmiri graphic productions via two perspectives: (1) the polyvalent circulation of stray dogs as symbols, material presences, and interspecies cohabitants, and (2) the erasure of Tetwal/Kashmir as historically specific locales in Manto's oeuvre. While dogs are among the most humanized of animals, their status teeters ambivalently between sentimental anthropomorphism, images of bestiality, and/or sheer abjection. 2 This ambivalence impacts their representations in literature and cinema where their presence is often read through the registers of symbolism or allegory (for example, the stray dog as a substitute for the figure of the refugee in "Tetwal"). Humans identify sentimentally especially with domesticated dogs by endowing them a human "face." Humans also other dogs by denying them face or endowing them a feral face. Phrases such as "like a dog"-an important one for this chapterare signifiers for their abject status. The ambivalence toward dogs becomes even more prominent if canines are strays. Many Euro-American cultures see dogs only as faithful companions and helpers in a large number of human activities.. .. We tend to see dogs as a product of the human capacity to bend nature to our needs and, as such, we like to think that dogs are acceptable only as far as they are under our full control.
Drawing on anthropologist Kathleen Stewart’s description of the ordinary as an “animate circuit t... more Drawing on anthropologist Kathleen Stewart’s description of the ordinary as an “animate circuit that conducts force and maps connections, routes and disjunctures,” this article reads the representations of the fugitive potentials of the quotidian in Shillong-based artist Tarun Bhartiya’s photomontage/postcard collection Niam/Faith/Hynñiewtrep (2021). Focusing on Bhartiya’s utilization of the technique of montage and the poetic juxtaposition of text and images, I consider the pluriversal narratives of pasts, presents and futures in his representations of the ordinary and the quotidian in a frontier/borderland space like Northeast India as a contribution to the nascent field of visual studies and the photographic archive in the region. This essay evaluates the significance of avant-garde visual practices, like those of Bhartiya’s, in probing the minutiae of ordinary life and its fugitive and unpredictable potentialities.
In her remarkable memoir of illness, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating (henceforth Wild Snail), El... more In her remarkable memoir of illness, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating (henceforth Wild Snail), Elizabeth Tova Bailey recounts that at the age of thirty-four, she was struck down by a mysterious viral infection during a trip to Europe. After living with the chronic illness for more than fifteen years, Bailey learns that her debilitation was possibly caused by tick-borne encephalitis (TBE) (168). Her period of snail watching-the other major subject of her memoir-was from a single year of about two decades of illness (163). The snail, a white-lipped forest snail (Neohelix albolabris) (165), was a gift from Bailey's friend during the period of her convalescence. 1 The friend picks up the snail from the woods and brings it to Bailey because she thought she may enjoy having it. Bailey is flummoxed by this gift. It did not seem very interesting initially, and the responsibility for "something so uncalled for-was overwhelming" (4). She confesses that she "couldn't imagine what kind of life a snail might lead" (7). It was inconspicuous and did not attract attention (8). However, "after weeks of around-the-clock companionship" the snail and Bailey were "officially cohabiting" (22). Closely observing this animal other enables Bailey to reconsider the limits of her imagination of (human) self. The turning point arrives when Bailey reflects on the similitudes between her chronic debility and the predicament of her animal companion. Bailey attunes herself to the life the snail leads, pays close attention to its alien motions, supplements observation with an intellectual curiosity about its physical and cultural life, and recognizes that, despite their differences, human and snail life converge more than she initially thought. 2 Crucially, what seems like a specific focus that aids survival slowly morphs into a reflection on living with others, both animal and viral. If the snail is the unexpected nonhuman guest that hospitality is extended to, the uncomfortable corporeal cohabitation with the virus-an uninvited guest-leads Bailey to an ambivalent reflection on the entanglements of the human with the inhuman within a growing awareness of deep time processes. 3 Robert McFarlane writes in Underland that thinking in a deep time perspective becomes:
This article is part of a Book Forum review of Sanjib Baruah's book In the Name of the Nation: In... more This article is part of a Book Forum review of Sanjib Baruah's book In the Name of the Nation: India and its Northeast (2020). The Book Forum consists of individual commentaries on this text by five interested scholars, followed by a response by the author. The article may be read individually or alongside the other contributions to the Forum, which together constitute a comprehensive discussion of the themes and arguments in the book.
South Asian Gothic (University of Chicago Press), 2020
Through a reading of the Assamese author Dhrubajyoti Bora's Kalantor Trilogy ('End of Time Trilog... more Through a reading of the Assamese author Dhrubajyoti Bora's Kalantor Trilogy ('End of Time Trilogy', 2012) -comprising of Kalantoror Gadya ('The Prose of Tempest ', 1996), Tezor Andhar ('The Darkness of Blood ', 2000) and Artha ('Meaning', 2001) -this chapter connects two terms: 'Gothic' and 'state terror'. 1 Bora's trilogy is a powerful fictional chronicle of a period of political terror in the northeastern Indian state of Assam from the late 1980s to the early 2000s. The period covers the rise to prominence of one of the most dominant independents groups in Northeast India, the ULFA (United Liberation Front of Assam), its status as a virtual parallel administration, the brutal period of counter-insurgency carried out by the Indian army encompassing two major operations termed Operation Bajrang and 'Operation Rhino', terror in ordinary life unleashed by both sovereign entities, prevalence of cultures of impunity, and the extrajudicial killings of suspected family members and sympathisers of the ULFA (known as the 'secret killings of Assam') between 1998 and 2002. 2 Of the three novels, the most wide-ranging is Kalantoror Gadya, an eleven-part novel that explores the impact of political terror on urban and rural life in the 1980s and 1990s. I will focus on the manifestly 'Gothic' segment of the novel -the third part titled Babula Puraan' (The Tale ofBabula'). The novella Tezor Andhar
This interview with science fiction writer Vandana Singh focuses on her rapidly expanding oeuvre ... more This interview with science fiction writer Vandana Singh focuses on her rapidly expanding oeuvre in climate fiction. More specifically, she discusses her cli-fi under the umbrella of three major concerns: their realist settings in a near future, the affirmative
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi received an urgent request from his very good friend, Israeli... more Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi received an urgent request from his very good friend, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to send more Indian workers to fill in for Palestinians who were denied entry into Israel after the events of October 7, 2023. Significantly, Muslim workers were encouraged not to apply while Hindu workers were. Compared by Michelle Buckley and Paula Chakravartty to a system that "resembles British indenture"-one designed to replace indigenous Palestinian labor with precarious, cheap and supposedly pliant workers from a newly minted ally-this deal represents the latest moment in a sharp shift in India's position on Palestine that has been accelerating since 1992, the year India officially established diplomatic relationships with Israel. While the shift toward Israel, begun by the Congress and accelerated by the BJP, reflects a changed post-Cold war geopolitical scenario, it is crucially connected, as Sukumar Muralidharan (2014) writes, to India's changing perceptions of its self-image on the world stage (77). While there are complexities and ambiguities in the stances of Indian anticolonial stalwarts like Gandhi and Nehru vis-à-vis Palestine and Israel, as documented in the edited collection From India to Palestine, this shift toward Israel and away from Palestine reveals how the Indian state and its nation-making project has moved away from a commitment to a post-Bandung decolonizing consensus to embracing its role as a neoliberal regional hegemon in the South Asian context. The "amnesia" about Palestine has been so massive post-1992 that "young people, far away from the willful stratagems of government, see a natural alliance between Israel and India via the 'war on terror'" (Hariharan 2014 30). The Bibi-Modi "bromance" takes this much further-accelerating tendencies already immanent in the Hindu supremacist worldview from the 1930s, such collaborations reveal that in steadily making moves "toward becoming an ethnostate much like Israel itself, the Modi government's Islamophobic kinship with Netanyahu's regime is making itself evident" (Buckley and Chakravartty 2024). All this while India still pays lip-service to Palestinian sovereignty and humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza in the national and international sphere. 1 To be sure, despite the depredations of neoliberal and neofascist governmentality, the vacillations and hypocrisies of state policy, and strategies of interpellation in countries like India, there is a significant degree of support for Palestine in South Asian nations. The dockworker's strike in February 2024 in India and street art in Dhaka linking the Bangladeshi and Palestinian flags after the fall of Sheikh Hasina's government are reminders of the reverberations of the popular support that the Palestinian cause still inspires in the region. 2 This forum on Palestine and South Asia draws inspiration from these contemporary assertions of Global South and anticolonial solidarity and also takes its lead from a subcontinental literary-cultural CONTACT Amit R. Baishya
The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial and Decolonial Literature, 2024
Amitav Ghosh's observations on science fiction in The Great Derangement have been discussed widel... more Amitav Ghosh's observations on science fiction in The Great Derangement have been discussed widely, but less attention has been paid to his comments about "serious fiction," a shorthand for realism. Whenever the question of realism has been posed with respect to climate change following Ghosh's comments, the tendency has been to argue that climate catastrophe necessitates a "mutant or recombinant" mode (Ganguly 421). These mutant modes are a form of "planetary realism, a recombinant literary mode that registers human generated climatological shocks as they reverberate in the present, and whose cataclysmic effects will last well beyond human habitation on this planet" (448). But is it possible to look at traditional realism, the mode that Ghosh says is inadequate to represent climate catastrophe, differently? Furthermore, given that nonhuman elements like sand lie hidden in plain sight in the realist division between the spatial container of the setting and the temporal dynamism of plot, can we reconsider the stories that seemingly inert forms of matter narrate? For Ghosh, the ascendancy of gradualism over catastrophism in geology, the rise of probability in mathematics and statistics and the predominance of the "filler" in the realist novel emerge within the horizon of the same modern episteme predicated on dualist divisions between humans and nature and humans and nonhumans. While narratives proceed by linking elements that are exceptional, what is distinctive about the modern realist narrative: … is precisely the concealment of those exceptional moments that serve as the motor of narrative. This is achieved through the insertion of … "fillers." According to Moretti, "Fillers function very much like the good manners so important in [Jane] Austen: they are both mechanisms designed to keep the "narrativity" of life under control-to give a regularity, a 'style' to existence …" It is thus that the novel takes its modern form, through "the relocation of the unheard-of toward the background while the everyday moves into the foreground." (Ghosh 17) Descriptions of setting also function as fillers. They anchor the reader in a particular place and time and provide a style and regularity to existence against which the dramatic events of the plot unfold. Ghosh's example is Bengali author Advaita Mallabarman's A River Named Titash.
To be present in history, even as nothing more than a chuckle, was a universe away from being abs... more To be present in history, even as nothing more than a chuckle, was a universe away from being absent from it, from being written out of it altogether. A chuckle. .. could become a foothold in the sheer wall of the future.-Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness A key idea that I will explore in this chapter is Donna Haraway's concept of "multispecies flourishing," which, for me, is a powerful descriptor for peace with the Other.1 Here, by "Other," I mean not just human Others but a whole host of non-human Others with whom we enter into relationships of kinship. "Multispecies flourishing" is not peace as a state of suspended war or a fuzzy version of mutual coexistence and friendship that avoids conflict but the messy and laborious process of making kin within quotidian networks of obligation and responsibility. I wager that Arundhati Roy's second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (henceforth Ministry), creates such a storied world in neoliberal urban locales scarred by species-extinction.2 I consider neoliberalism not simply as an economic ideology but also, in Jason Moore's sense, "a way of organizing nature-as a multispecies, situated, capitalist world-ecology."3 Spatial redistributions and practices that impact both human and non-human worlds in the contemporary neoliberal city and proliferating instances of environmental racism/casteism are among the primary nodes through which to analyze such organizations of nature.
This special issue of South Asian Review is on Northeast Indian Anglophone Literature which we re... more This special issue of South Asian Review is on Northeast Indian Anglophone Literature which we refer to by the acronym NIAL. Defining the field of NIAL is imperative now as literature in English from this region, while emerging from diverse origins, constitutes a rich and substantial body of works distinct and different from Indian Writing in English. 1 Works in NIAL also share common thematic preoccupations and cosmological frameworks. We state clearly that we find both "Northeast" and "Anglophone" limited, but nevertheless strategically useful for our purposes. Our brief discussion of the terms does not dwell on their epistemic limitations, but more on why we find them useful to name and define the contours of the knowledge-field we are exploring. This field thus far has elicited scattered and disconnected close-ups, but no sustained and panoramic wide-angle view like we present here. The region now called Northeast India has been a vibrant cultural ecumene and crossroads prior to the period of colonialism and of post-colonial nation states (Saikia 2004; Chatterjee 2013). The history of the "directional category" (Baruah 2006) called Northeast India can be located within three moments in 19 th-20 th century colonial/post-colonial history. The first is the "frontierization" of the region during the colonial period. Parallel to the establishment of the NWFP (North-West Frontier Province) in the colonial era, there was the simultaneous formation of the NorthEast Frontier Tracts (most of contemporary Arunachal Pradesh and some parts of Nagaland) (Baruah 2020, 2). The second moment was the period of WWII. The Japanese occupation of Myanmar and some portions of Northeast India (1940-44) was the critical episode that led the Indo-Myanmar border to emerge as the dividing line between South and Southeast Asia (Baruah 2004, 2-4). South Asia came to stand for the territories of British India (minus Burma). The third moment is the legacy of "ad-hoc decisions" (Baruah 2020, 25) made by the post-colonial Indian state. Two pieces of Indian parliamentary legislation passed in 1971-the NorthEastern Areas Reorganization Act and the NorthEastern Council Act-consolidated this place name in the popular imagination. These spatial
Assamese ction written by janajatiya writers (writers from indigenous, "tribal" communities) can ... more Assamese ction written by janajatiya writers (writers from indigenous, "tribal" communities) can be read productively via a deployment of various standpoints from the "nonhuman turn." This chapter reads the triangulation of three nonhuman entities-bamboo, rats, and rein Arunachali author Yeshe Dorje Thongchi's short story "Baah Phulor Gundho" ("The Smell of Bamboo Blossoms"). While stories by janajatiya writers such as Thongchi are usually read via "tradition" versus "modernity" and social reform perspectives, this chapter argues that nonhuman entities play a vitalist and agential role in their ctional universes. Thongchi's short story demonstrates this through a unique event that occurs in Northeast India-the periodic owering of bamboo that leads to an exponential increase in rat populations-which becomes the fulcrum for an exploration of social change and the passage of time in the lifeworlds of the Nyishi tribespeople in Arunachal Pradesh. This chapter suggests that dynamic temporal shifts in so-called traditional societies are represented in ction not through overt changes in mentalités alone but via shifting con gurations and relationships between humans and nonhuman interlocutors. I focus on Axamiya ction by janajatiya ("tribal") writers that has usually been read through the optic of the complex interactions between "tradition" and "modernization" (Misra, "Crossing"; Dutta). Assam is a diverse, polyglot state populated by numerous tribal and nontribal communities. While nontribal writers have produced memorable etic depictions of janajatiya societies, the emic view provided by tribal writers such as Rongbong Terang (Karbi), Jatin Mipun (Mising), Lummer Dai (Adi) and Yeshe Dorje Thongchi (Sherdukpen) have enriched and expanded the oeuvre of Axamiya literature over time. The critical consensus on such literary productions emphasizes how janajatiya writers focus on the seepage of modernizing discourses and practices into "traditional" societies. Moreover, the impulse toward the social reform of janajatiya societies is evident in their ctions. While these are valuable interpretive frameworks, insights culled from multiple strands of the "nonhuman turn" (Grusin), I wager, show both the agential role of nonhuman entities and the entanglement and coconstitution of categories such as the "human" with various others in janajatiya ction. Moreover, they also illustrate some crucial modalities through which societies and lifeworlds change and mutate. My speci c focus here is Yeshe Dorje Thongchi's short story "Baah Phulor Gundho" ("The Smell of Bamboo Blossoms"). I locate my analysis of "Baah Phulor Gundho" at the intersection of three strands of the nonhuman turn: human-animal studies, critical plant studies, and "elemental ecocriticism" (Cohen and Duckert).
This article reads two cetacean tales-"Entanglement" and "Requiem"-by the prominent South Asian w... more This article reads two cetacean tales-"Entanglement" and "Requiem"-by the prominent South Asian writer of science fiction, Vandana Singh, to evaluate her portrayal of ordinary dimensions of living and existing in situations impacted by climate change. While cetaceans often function as an exotic alien other in science fiction and in cultural fantasies, Singh places her cetacean tales among Indigenous communities in the North Arctic region. Communities like the Inuits and the Iñupiat share relationships of collaborative reciprocity with cetaceans like belugas and bowhead whales. Deploying the geographer's Chie Sakakibara's concept of "cetaceousness"-complex, co-constitutive and quotidian relationships among humans and cetaceans in the North Arctic-this article studies Singh's merger of realism and speculation in her representation of the impact of global warming on populations for whom climate change is not a catastrophe waiting in the future, but whose effects have seeped into the minutiae of the everyday and the ordinary.
While Namwali Serpell's novel The Old Drift can be read as a fictional account of colonial and po... more While Namwali Serpell's novel The Old Drift can be read as a fictional account of colonial and postcolonial Zambian history, this article focuses on the text's exploration of Anthropocene timegeobiochemical and planetary temporal scales that predate human histories, while also gesturing towards futures where Homo sapiens may be absent. This article focuses on deep temporality in the novel via the use of mosquito and Moskeetoze (mosquito-like microdrones) narrators. While mosquitoes facilitate encounters with the deep past and of entangled human-nonhuman histories, the Moskeetozes enable representations of the vicissitudes of the "Anthrobscene" (Parrikka) and the creative potentialities of improvised life that emerge in hazardscapes in the Global South. Additionally, The Old Drift gestures towards a speculative planetary future where mosquitoes and Moskeetozes integrate to evolve new modalities of swarm intelligence and forms of life.
Routledge Handbook of Critical Kashmir Studies, 2022
Saadat Hasan Manto's Urdu short story "Tetwal ka Kutta" (2007) (Translation: The Dog of Tetwal; h... more Saadat Hasan Manto's Urdu short story "Tetwal ka Kutta" (2007) (Translation: The Dog of Tetwal; henceforth "Tetwal") has had afterlives in two contemporary graphic productions from Kashmir-Malik Sajad's künstlerroman Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir (2015) and Arif Ayaz Parrey and Waseem Helal's graphic-segment "Tamasha-e-Tetwal" in the anthology This Side, That Side: Restorying Partition (2013). 1 This chapter analyzes the intertextual resonances and critical departures from Manto in the two Kashmiri graphic productions via two perspectives: (1) the polyvalent circulation of stray dogs as symbols, material presences, and interspecies cohabitants, and (2) the erasure of Tetwal/Kashmir as historically specific locales in Manto's oeuvre. While dogs are among the most humanized of animals, their status teeters ambivalently between sentimental anthropomorphism, images of bestiality, and/or sheer abjection. 2 This ambivalence impacts their representations in literature and cinema where their presence is often read through the registers of symbolism or allegory (for example, the stray dog as a substitute for the figure of the refugee in "Tetwal"). Humans identify sentimentally especially with domesticated dogs by endowing them a human "face." Humans also other dogs by denying them face or endowing them a feral face. Phrases such as "like a dog"-an important one for this chapterare signifiers for their abject status. The ambivalence toward dogs becomes even more prominent if canines are strays. Many Euro-American cultures see dogs only as faithful companions and helpers in a large number of human activities.. .. We tend to see dogs as a product of the human capacity to bend nature to our needs and, as such, we like to think that dogs are acceptable only as far as they are under our full control.
Drawing on anthropologist Kathleen Stewart’s description of the ordinary as an “animate circuit t... more Drawing on anthropologist Kathleen Stewart’s description of the ordinary as an “animate circuit that conducts force and maps connections, routes and disjunctures,” this article reads the representations of the fugitive potentials of the quotidian in Shillong-based artist Tarun Bhartiya’s photomontage/postcard collection Niam/Faith/Hynñiewtrep (2021). Focusing on Bhartiya’s utilization of the technique of montage and the poetic juxtaposition of text and images, I consider the pluriversal narratives of pasts, presents and futures in his representations of the ordinary and the quotidian in a frontier/borderland space like Northeast India as a contribution to the nascent field of visual studies and the photographic archive in the region. This essay evaluates the significance of avant-garde visual practices, like those of Bhartiya’s, in probing the minutiae of ordinary life and its fugitive and unpredictable potentialities.
In her remarkable memoir of illness, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating (henceforth Wild Snail), El... more In her remarkable memoir of illness, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating (henceforth Wild Snail), Elizabeth Tova Bailey recounts that at the age of thirty-four, she was struck down by a mysterious viral infection during a trip to Europe. After living with the chronic illness for more than fifteen years, Bailey learns that her debilitation was possibly caused by tick-borne encephalitis (TBE) (168). Her period of snail watching-the other major subject of her memoir-was from a single year of about two decades of illness (163). The snail, a white-lipped forest snail (Neohelix albolabris) (165), was a gift from Bailey's friend during the period of her convalescence. 1 The friend picks up the snail from the woods and brings it to Bailey because she thought she may enjoy having it. Bailey is flummoxed by this gift. It did not seem very interesting initially, and the responsibility for "something so uncalled for-was overwhelming" (4). She confesses that she "couldn't imagine what kind of life a snail might lead" (7). It was inconspicuous and did not attract attention (8). However, "after weeks of around-the-clock companionship" the snail and Bailey were "officially cohabiting" (22). Closely observing this animal other enables Bailey to reconsider the limits of her imagination of (human) self. The turning point arrives when Bailey reflects on the similitudes between her chronic debility and the predicament of her animal companion. Bailey attunes herself to the life the snail leads, pays close attention to its alien motions, supplements observation with an intellectual curiosity about its physical and cultural life, and recognizes that, despite their differences, human and snail life converge more than she initially thought. 2 Crucially, what seems like a specific focus that aids survival slowly morphs into a reflection on living with others, both animal and viral. If the snail is the unexpected nonhuman guest that hospitality is extended to, the uncomfortable corporeal cohabitation with the virus-an uninvited guest-leads Bailey to an ambivalent reflection on the entanglements of the human with the inhuman within a growing awareness of deep time processes. 3 Robert McFarlane writes in Underland that thinking in a deep time perspective becomes:
This article is part of a Book Forum review of Sanjib Baruah's book In the Name of the Nation: In... more This article is part of a Book Forum review of Sanjib Baruah's book In the Name of the Nation: India and its Northeast (2020). The Book Forum consists of individual commentaries on this text by five interested scholars, followed by a response by the author. The article may be read individually or alongside the other contributions to the Forum, which together constitute a comprehensive discussion of the themes and arguments in the book.
South Asian Gothic (University of Chicago Press), 2020
Through a reading of the Assamese author Dhrubajyoti Bora's Kalantor Trilogy ('End of Time Trilog... more Through a reading of the Assamese author Dhrubajyoti Bora's Kalantor Trilogy ('End of Time Trilogy', 2012) -comprising of Kalantoror Gadya ('The Prose of Tempest ', 1996), Tezor Andhar ('The Darkness of Blood ', 2000) and Artha ('Meaning', 2001) -this chapter connects two terms: 'Gothic' and 'state terror'. 1 Bora's trilogy is a powerful fictional chronicle of a period of political terror in the northeastern Indian state of Assam from the late 1980s to the early 2000s. The period covers the rise to prominence of one of the most dominant independents groups in Northeast India, the ULFA (United Liberation Front of Assam), its status as a virtual parallel administration, the brutal period of counter-insurgency carried out by the Indian army encompassing two major operations termed Operation Bajrang and 'Operation Rhino', terror in ordinary life unleashed by both sovereign entities, prevalence of cultures of impunity, and the extrajudicial killings of suspected family members and sympathisers of the ULFA (known as the 'secret killings of Assam') between 1998 and 2002. 2 Of the three novels, the most wide-ranging is Kalantoror Gadya, an eleven-part novel that explores the impact of political terror on urban and rural life in the 1980s and 1990s. I will focus on the manifestly 'Gothic' segment of the novel -the third part titled Babula Puraan' (The Tale ofBabula'). The novella Tezor Andhar
This interview with science fiction writer Vandana Singh focuses on her rapidly expanding oeuvre ... more This interview with science fiction writer Vandana Singh focuses on her rapidly expanding oeuvre in climate fiction. More specifically, she discusses her cli-fi under the umbrella of three major concerns: their realist settings in a near future, the affirmative
Postcolonial Animalities, co-edited by Suvadip Sinha and Amit R. Baishya, brings together ten ess... more Postcolonial Animalities, co-edited by Suvadip Sinha and Amit R. Baishya, brings together ten essays to consider the interfaces between "human" and "animal" and the concrete presence of animals in postcolonial cultural production. This edited collection critiques monohumanist conceptions of the "human" and considers the co-constitutiveness of imaginaries of the human with grammars of animality. One of the central contributions of this volume is to decolonize existing conceptualizations of the human-animal relationship, and to consider the material representation of animals within the realm of colonial and postcolonial cultural production from the perspective of ethical alterity and alternative narratives of anticolonial and postcolonial politics. The volume also explores entanglements of race and species in colonial and neocolonial frameworks without transforming such inquiries into a zero-sum game that privileges one category over another. The essays in the volume, focusing on multiple geographical locations ranging from South Asia, Southeast Asia, post-Ottoman Turkey, the Caribbean, Australia, South Africa and Palestine/Israel, historicizes and understands multispecies, interspecies and transspecies encounters, affiliations and connections in and through their localized dimensions, and studies human-animal encounters in their varied and complex affective relationalities. Through such inquiries, the volume considers how modes of representing animals, including located forms of anthropomorphism and zoomorphism, help us think-with and be-with different animals.
Deepak Unnikrishnan's Temporary People is a riveting debut collection of twenty-eight short stori... more Deepak Unnikrishnan's Temporary People is a riveting debut collection of twenty-eight short stories written in a mélange of stylistic registers. Fiction, Unnikrishnan writes, has "barely addressed the so-called guest workers of the (Arabian) Gulf." Divided into three parts-"Limbs," "Tongue," and "Home"-Temporary People addresses this absence and explores how "temporary status affects psyches, families, memories, fables, and language(s)." Critical here is the fleeting, groundless, and ephemeral quality of the temporary; its propensity to efface or render ghostly the stories of individual lives. As Muthassi in "Sarama" says: "Everybody . . . has a past that ought to be heard. The present is paralyzed without a past." The poignancy of Temporary People is accentuated by the fact that such pasts are often not heard. When the stories find auditors, they assume ghoulish, grotesque shapes. The tone is set by the statement of an anonymous person that serves as an epigraph for "Limbs": "There exists this city built by labor, mostly men, who disappear after their respective buildings are made. Once the last brick is laid . . . the laborers . . .
The strength of The Hunt for Mount Everest lies in the way the author plots the story of the 'dis... more The strength of The Hunt for Mount Everest lies in the way the author plots the story of the 'discovery' of the mountain at the juncture of the history of mountaineering 1921 British Mount Everest reconnaissance expedition.
0 how river and sea meet and yet maintain their distinct identities. Murugan makes sure to convey... more 0 how river and sea meet and yet maintain their distinct identities. Murugan makes sure to convey that not everything modern and new implies progress. This necessity to navigate and compromise in life, as endorsed by Murugan in the novel, also brings with it a share of laughter and a perceptive sense of humor. The excellent translation by Nandini Krishnan is praiseworthy, given its accessibility and poignancy that make the novel a delightful read.
Animal Intimacies is a formidable entry in the burgeoning oeuvre of multispecies ethnography. At ... more Animal Intimacies is a formidable entry in the burgeoning oeuvre of multispecies ethnography. At the core of the book is the concept of relatedness. Govindarajan writes that through relatedness, she attempts to "capture the myriad ways in which the potential and outcome of a life always and already unfolds in relation to that of another" (3). Unlike the predominant trajectory in critical animal studies, Govindarajan does not focus exclusively on warm, fuzzy narratives of interspecies relatedness. As she emphasizes, the concept of relatedness she explores can be simultaneously "desirable and undesirable" and is "decidedly uninnocent" (4).
s well-known short story "Tetwal ke Kutte" is very prescient in contending with our hypernational... more s well-known short story "Tetwal ke Kutte" is very prescient in contending with our hypernationalist and jingoistic conjuncture.
Description: This iteration of the capstone will introduce you to the exciting new field of plant... more Description: This iteration of the capstone will introduce you to the exciting new field of plant humanities through a focus on plants in fictional narratives (novels, short stories, comic books, cinema and television). We will begin with a dominant mode through which plants are represented in fiction-the register of horror. Texts we will discuss include John Wyndham's Day of the Triffids, Alan Moore's Swamp Thing, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (the original 1950s movie) and an episode from the smash Netflix series Stranger Things. We will then move to representations of plants in science fiction where we will read Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation and Sue Burke's Semiosis. We will conclude with discussion of contemporary novels that consider the entanglement and relationality of humans and plants in the Anthropocene-the contested name for the geological epoch where the human species leaves its mark on the planetary system. Novels we will read include Richard Powers' The Overstory and Elif Shafak's The Island of Missing Trees. Students are encouraged to bring their own interest in plants as they work on their capstone projects. Required Texts: 1) John Wyndham-The Day of the Triffids (Penguin) 2) Alan Moore et al-Saga of the Swamp Thing: Book One (Vertigo) 3) Jeff VanderMeer-Annihilation (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) 4) Sue Burke-Semiosis (Tor) 5) Richard Powers-The Overstory (Norton) 6) Elif Shafak-The Island of Missing Trees (Bloomsbury) Grade Breakdown: 1) Short writing assignment due before Spring Break: 150 pts (15%) 2) Annotated Bibliography and Abstract: 150 pts (15%) 3) Draft of Final Paper (6 pages): 100 pts. (10%) 4) Attendance and Participation (including regular responses on the discussion board on the secondary readings): 200 pts (20%) 5) Capstone Research Project (12-15 page research paper): 400 pts (40%) *No Final Exam As you can see you can earn a maximum of 1000 pts in this course. The grades can be broken down on a ten pt. scale as follows
is one of the major authors referred to in discussions of colonialism and colonial discourse. Whi... more is one of the major authors referred to in discussions of colonialism and colonial discourse. While this course focuses on Conrad and colonialism, it extends the ambit to consider the Polish-born writer's representation of the environment and as a figure who anticipates some of the major questions being discussed in the Anthropocene. To clarify: our goal is not to resuscitate Conrad as an environmental writer; instead, we will focus on how Conrad represents the changes to the environment engendered by colonialism and extractive capitalism. In addition, as one of the most powerful writers to have represented the sea, islands and archipelagos, Conrad anticipates many of the questions that dominate the Anthropocene-the controversial name for the geological epoch where the human species has supposedly emerged as a nonhuman force to leave its stratigraphic mark on the planet. Conrad's representation of the practices of extractive capitalism, the complex relationships between land and water, his representations of the crafts of seafaring and of forms of life in archipelagic formations (as in Lord Jim) are forerunners of many of the ideas being discussed in the Anthropocene epoch. We will think about these questions through a close discussion of major Conradian texts like Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, Lord Jim, Typhoon, An Outpost of Progress, Youth and Victory.
Course Description: "We hear all around us the coming Event, the catastrophic imaginary orienting... more Course Description: "We hear all around us the coming Event, the catastrophic imaginary orienting and demanding action-the last wave, the sixth extinction. And yet pulsing through various terrains is a very different temporality-the river becomes a polluted dump; the fog becomes smog; rock formations become computer components." Elizabeth Povinelli, Geontologies: Requiem for Late Liberalism Climate change can be a difficult phenomenon to represent in fiction as its effects are often dispersed temporally and spatially. Moreover, while our attention is often drawn to major climate cataclysms (which are increasing in intensity in the current era), much of what happens due to climate change flows under the radar and is woven into the fabric of the ordinary and the everyday. The critic Lauren Berlant uses the term "crisis ordinariness" in a different context, but this can be an apt descriptor for the ordinary, cruddy ways in which people across the planet live with the effects of climate change. This course on contemporary global climate fiction will consider how writers of fiction contend with climate change at an aesthetic level. Do they focus on spectacular catastrophes or on the ordinary minutiae of daily life? Do we need concepts like the "sublime" (Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant) or "hyperobjects" (Timothy Morton) to contend with the multiscalar effects of climate change? Can concepts like "crisis ordinariness" or the what the anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli calls the "quasi-event" (events that lack dramatic qualities, but possess potential for change) be good descriptors for how people live with a climate scarred world? Do narratives on climate change have to be "global" or "local" in scope? How do writers imagine climate-changed futures for both humans and nonhumans? The sampling of fiction we will read will help us address these questions. We won't be reading some well-known American works on climate change that often dominate the critical conversation (by Octavia Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, Barbara Kingsolver, for instance); instead, we will look at climate change fiction emerging from different regions and locales in the planet such as South Asia, Oceania and the Caribbean. Required Texts: 1) Amitav Ghosh-Gun Island (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) 2) James Bradley-Clade (Titan Books Limited) 3) Charlotte McConaghy-Migrations (Flatiron Books) 4) Rita Indiana-Tentacle (And Other Books) 5) Alexis Wright-The Swan Book (Washington Square Press) 6) Other reading material indicated on your syllabus available on Canvas.
Classroom: Copeland Hall, 0246. Time: 1.00-2.15 TR Office Appointments: Set up by email; all appo... more Classroom: Copeland Hall, 0246. Time: 1.00-2.15 TR Office Appointments: Set up by email; all appointments online. Email Contact: [email protected] Mode of Delivery: Hybrid (one class F2F, two subsequent classes synchronously online and so on-synchronous online classes indicated in your course schedule) Course Description: Dogs are considered to be the most "humanized" of animals. However, a survey of world literature and culture shows that dogs play very ambivalent and complex roles in human societies. Focusing on contemporary literature and cinema, this course will explore the ambivalent representations of dogs in human cultures through a focus on five major themes: 1) Living-with Dogs, 2) Dogs Tell their Stories 3) Stray and Free-range Dogs, 4) Dogs and the Political and 5) Canine Documentaries. Ultimately, the aim of this course is not only to de/ familiarize a neighborly animal, but to ask what goes into the making of that complex and slippery term "the human." Required Texts: 1. Sigrid Nunez-The Friend (Virago) 2. Paul Auster-Timbuktu (Henry Holt) 3. Mohammad Hanif-Red Birds (Bloomsbury)
Postcolonial literature and theory traditionally privileges questions of "human suffering" (Kwame... more Postcolonial literature and theory traditionally privileges questions of "human suffering" (Kwame Anthony Appiah). If animals are in the horizon at all, they usually appear as specters that haunt constructions of the human. While we will acknowledge the genealogy of "human skins, animal masks" (Neel Ahuja) in postcolonial literature and theory over the longue durée, our joint explorations will also orient us in different directions. Some of the fundamental questions driving this class include:
A conversation between Elizabeth Povinelli and Amit Baishya for Borderlines journal. The conversa... more A conversation between Elizabeth Povinelli and Amit Baishya for Borderlines journal. The conversation covers the major issues in Povinelli's work.
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