The Long 2020: Reflections of Epidemiological Times, 2024
This chapter, divided in three sections, attempts an overview of the contemporary literary produc... more This chapter, divided in three sections, attempts an overview of the contemporary literary productions in Bengali, in the wake of the Covid 19 pandemic and the ensuing lockdown. It also attempts to describe late 19th- and early 20th-century Bengali literature's engagement with multiple epidemics that had devastated the Bengali countryside: malaria, cholera, smallpox, etc. The repeated waves of pandemics and their representation in Bengali literature were integral in the construction of the Bengali realist novel, creating a space of ferment which allowed for reconstruction of society, reconsideration of social divisions and consolidation of social work as an extension of nationalist activities. This second section enquires in some detail about these texts, ranging from Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Anandamath to Sarat Chandra Chatopadhyay’s Srikanta, from Bibhuti Bhushan Bandyopadhyay’s Aranyak to Banaphul’s Jangam. The third section of the paper analyzes the construction of an alternate society through Tarasankar Bandyopadhyay’s social realist novels, written and set in the 1920s and 30s, in rural Bengal and in Calcutta. Most of his novels like Ganadebata, Dhatridebata, etc., reckon with a society in flux, dealing on one hand with colonialism, on the other, with the gradual transformation in traditional societies, the destabilization of existing hierarchies and creation of new ones. In each of these moments of epidemiological crisis, the novels also recognize extraordinary characters, individuals who had been pushed to the margins of traditional society. In moments of crisis, they transcend their marginalities through agentive action and empathy. Their action in the course of the novels, become crucial in framing the post-pandemic social relations.
COVID-19 has simultaneously ushered in a crisis of public health and of livelihood, where women i... more COVID-19 has simultaneously ushered in a crisis of public health and of livelihood, where women in general, and migrant women in particular, have been affected disproportionately. Across South Asia, from unequal access to medical treatment to vaccines, the pandemic has pushed women to the margins of an already fragile healthcare system. Migrant workers, as a diverse group (both national and foreign), has borne the brunt of this pandemic and the subsequent collapse of the economic systems and their social security networks. How have women migrant workers fared under these circumstances? On the one hand, they have been pushed out of different development agendas, employed informally in construction, agricultural and service sectors without any of the benefits of so called 'development'. On the other, with the increasing precaritization of the informal sector, coupled with unpaid care and work, and the palpable threats of domestic violence, women migrant workers in South Asia continue to experience the worst impact of this pandemic.
This paper draws on the understanding of figuration as cultural norms reified through reiteration... more This paper draws on the understanding of figuration as cultural norms reified through reiterations. The changing figuration of the Indian 'housewife mom' is explored here through the trope of housework. Tracking two different advertisements of the same products across forty years, in the medium of television, this paper argues that advertisements proceeds with embracing change and creating new markets. Contrary to contemporary middle class women's actual engagement with housework, advertisements for products related to housework continue to posit the source of expert knowledge in the figure of them woman. As a corollary to this move, (unpaid) housework gets naturalised for women, and becomes a dominant component in mainstream constructions of femininity.
More often than not, these domestic workers are internal
migrants, having travelled from other pa... more More often than not, these domestic workers are internal migrants, having travelled from other parts of the city, of the district, of the state, of the country. The gap between their employers and themselves is not merely economic, but also ideological – one that leaves them perpetually on the outside of the gate. From 15 March onwards, many parts of India, but very prominently Karnataka, Delhi, and Maharashtra, witnessed large groups of migrant workers gathering at railway stations, trying to get back home. Restaurants had started to shut by this time, many non-essential services were reducing their workforce, caught between a lack of work and hence, income, and no guarantee of a place to stay – they chose to try their luck back at home. This was not in any way different from what the overseas migrants had chosen to do, in which the Central government was a willing participant. India had brought back 75 Indian nationals from Wuhan in China, 263 from Italy and 389 from Iran by this time. In contrast, the rapid shutting down of passenger trains and interstate buses created a situation that escalated between 15 March to 25 March, and from 26 March onwards, newspapers and television channels started showing images of innumerable people, carrying their luggage on their heads, setting out for home. Several social media users were quick to compare these images with those from the partition of India.
In this article, I closely read Manjira Saha’s 2018 volume Chhotoder
Border. a collection of chil... more In this article, I closely read Manjira Saha’s 2018 volume Chhotoder Border. a collection of children’s line drawings and short narratives collated from school children in the India- Bangladesh borderlands. Certain recurring tropes emerge from these rough drawings and short descriptions, rife with spelling mistakes. The border, an English word repeatedly transcribed in Bengali, does not need an introduction or justification in the lives of these children of the borderlands–the materiality of the border is represented through barbed wire fences, through the “police” who are at once scary and helpful, and the repeated, casual reference to trafficking in goods. I identify the materiality and the affective dimensions of the border through the narratives and drawings in Chhotoder Border. This article analyses the linguistic and visual texts collected by Saha in the volume to understand the framing of the materiality of the IndoBangladesh border as well as its affective import among the students who are the contributors to Saha’s volume. In so doing, it contributes to the burgeoning discourse around the “cultural aspect of borders”. By investigating the “figurations” or narrative tropes/ themes present in these border narratives this article furthers the understanding of discursive construction and circulation of borders.
This chapter is an exploration of the logistical space of Haldia, the location of Kolkata Port Tr... more This chapter is an exploration of the logistical space of Haldia, the location of Kolkata Port Trust’s deep-sea dock, and a hub of industries, infrastructural, and logistical networks, connected by road, river, and rail transport. I seek to understand how logistics and labour create space. Haldia continues to see large-scale migration and displacement, owing to both the construction of the dock and the promise of a resurgent economy. Based on ten months of ethnography, I detail the flourishing of an ‘other’ logistics in Haldia, one based in modes of survival and hustling that exist in the shadow of the city’s official logistical activities. Its central actors are marginal women, and its objects, the key cargo of Haldia port: coal.
Ecology, Literature, and Culture: An Anthology of Recent Studies, 2021
Abstract:
Spanning over 50 years in the subcontinent, the 2018 Indian English novel by Shubhangi... more Abstract: Spanning over 50 years in the subcontinent, the 2018 Indian English novel by Shubhangi Swarup, Latitudes of Longing, juxtaposes temporal human action and political events with nature’s cyclicity, continental drifts and massive movements that disturb and reorient the balance in nature. This novel, in its post-coloniality challenges colonial boundaries as well as the legacy of the enlightenment that creates a division between nature and culture, in doing so it also questions colonial knowledge systems like anthropology, geography, taxonomy and zoology—modes of knowledge that nevertheless continue to shape postcolonial reality. Unlike the narrative techniques of the modern realist fiction that with its preoccupation with a ‘mimetic ambition’ is centred on the general probabilities, this novel incorporates the sudden, the climactically catastrophic and the improbable in nature, addressing the ecocritical aspiration in contemporary fiction. Therefore the language encompasses elements of magic realism, premonitions and tales of a fantastic past, making the narration cyclical and rife with digressions, simultaneously non-realistic and postcolonial. The legacy of enlightenment rationalism is also the dual victimisation of women and nature—both seen as coterminous in certain patriarchal discourse, but also as targets of aggression. Ecofeminism advocates a new epistemology that would address the patriarchal aggression on nature and women—in the novel achieved by nature’s careful selection of who is part of it, is attuned to it (Chandra Devi, Apo), and who can understand and therefore foretell the future. The human body here, especially the bodies of some women, the elderly and the tortured become both metaphors for geopolitical changes, and modes of knowledge formation—breaking down the Cartesian hierarchy of mind/ body. Moreover, certain geopolitical settings in the novel are also portrayed as locations that resist the onset of the anthropocene, by juxtaposing an intuitive understanding of nature with an evolving scientific discourse.
Ipshita Chanda, Selfing the City: Single Women Migrants and Their Lives in Kolkata. New Delhi: Sa... more Ipshita Chanda, Selfing the City: Single Women Migrants and Their Lives in Kolkata. New Delhi: Sage Stree, 2017, 323 pp., ₹995, ISBN: 9788190676045 (Hardcover).
Women and Education in India: A representative Study, 2020
In this article we look at the development of Bethune College and the generations of extraordinar... more In this article we look at the development of Bethune College and the generations of extraordinary women who taught and studied here--but also take a look at life as a boarder in the hostel, women's participation in sports and in poltical movements, and the spheres of literature and culture. This is a chapter in the volume Women and Education in India: A Representative Study, edited by Shantanu Majee.
So much of this write up concentrates on the 19th and early 20th centuries, the second half of th... more So much of this write up concentrates on the 19th and early 20th centuries, the second half of the 20th century being marked primarily by partition refugees from the present Bangladesh. The 21st century is also the time when that lover of Calcutta, P. T Nair went back to Kerala—having once followed in the footsteps of Madhavan, the hero of O. Chandumenon’s Indulekha, the first novel in Malayalam, who travelled to Calcutta in the 1880s in search of a job and witnessed a man entering a tiger’s cage at Alipore Zoological Gardens. Calcutta architecture bears testimony to all the different migrations that it has housed and assimilated—the mansions on Central Avenue and Vivekananda Road housing both the central courtyard native to indigenous buildings, Corinthian cornices, louvre windows and the Marwari jaffrey—the Calcutta baroque. The Islamicate architecture of the mini Lucknow that the last nawab of the kingdom of Oudh, Wajid Ali shah created in Garden Reach is slowly being eroded by forces of history and of politics. A note on the migrant city therefore cannot bypass the current political clime that seeks to define who is a citizen—bringing to the fore once again the claims to the space of the nation state and the ones who are refused citizenship.
Published as part of calcutta Research Group's volume Borders of an Epidemic: Covid 19 and the Mi... more Published as part of calcutta Research Group's volume Borders of an Epidemic: Covid 19 and the Migrant Workers.
In this paper I look at two “fat films” produced in India, films that have active, agential fat s... more In this paper I look at two “fat films” produced in India, films that have active, agential fat subjects as their protagonists. Released across a gap of three years, and in two different languages, the films can however be read together given the historical context of their release, the locales they inhabit and their identification as “multiplex films.” The size and shape of the human body, in contemporary India (as well as in the rest of the world) carry several layers of meaning, foremost of them being the fat body. On the fat body are concentrated many social significations: that of (the lack of) beauty and desirability, of ill health and lack of fitness, of over consumption, and embodying threats of an “epidemic,”, of being greedy, lethargic and a voracious eater. These significations also have to be read within the context of a global increase in products and services dedicated to weight loss, catering both to those worried about their health and those concerned with their appearance, as well as the simultaneous recognition of fat people as a new consumer category. The fat body is also one present only as the “before” of successful weight loss narratives, finding very little representation in popular media., Iit is thought of as a body in need of transformation, an unfinished project. The films discussed here draw on the tensions existing within these discursive formations. Their resolutions promote an acceptance of the fat body, but the films’ journeys to these resolutions are different. Located within what can be called “multiplex films” genre, “niche middle-class oriented films in a range of styles not previously viable with the old mass public,” , in terms of their visuals, the kinds of characters that populate the screen, the locations they inhabit and the way the dialogues are peppered with English, the two films under consideration here, despite their different languages, can be grouped together based on their shared negotiations with the fat body in contemporary India.
Contrary to the commonsense that understands logistical networks in terms of products, money, and... more Contrary to the commonsense that understands logistical networks in terms of products, money, and impersonal chains and flows of information , recent research has focused on the human side of logistics (Neilson and Rossiter 2014). This chapter investigates the interaction of existing 'big' logistical systems with human action, and details alternative logistical networks that mirror big logistics, but also point to the gendered profile of paid logistical work. From the margins of the Bengali port city of Haldia, I focus not on the capital associated with big logistics but on how its excesses and spillages create networks of their own. Women, children, and the elderly populate this alternative logistical world, but—unlike the machinery, money, and movements that characterize male labour in Haldia—their work gets swept under the carpet in the predominant logis-tical vision of the port city.
Between 2012 and 2014, the popular Bengali women’s magazine
Sananda brought out three cover featu... more Between 2012 and 2014, the popular Bengali women’s magazine Sananda brought out three cover features (one each year), on ageing. They comprised advice for emotional well-being, information regarding diet, fitness and how best to take care of an ageing body. Under late capitalism, Mike Featherstone argues, machine is a powerful metaphor for the body. Increasingly, maintenance (of optimal bodily functions, of a youthful appearance, etc.) like that of a machine becomes a legitimate concern for the ‘management’ of the ageing body, bringing its appetites, desires and dissatisfactions under control, supervised upon by experts. This paper situates Sananda’s concern with the ageing body within contemporary explosion(s) in body cultures, whereby the body is at the same time the site of the operation of bio power, and produced as a function of consumerism. By meting out expert advice to its target readers, and preaching the correct bodily conduct appropriate to each ‘age’, Sananda participates actively in the creation of ageing, albeit active consuming subjects.
Take a look at the first installment of CRG's collaborative work with Western Sidney University, ... more Take a look at the first installment of CRG's collaborative work with Western Sidney University, under the aegis of the wonderful Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter. My tiny piece on Haldia is a part of this.
Situating Social Media: Gender, Caste, Solidarity. Protest, 2020
Social media produces numerous spaces and opportunities, globally, for people to link up, reach o... more Social media produces numerous spaces and opportunities, globally, for people to link up, reach out, mobilise, assert their identity, build bridges... For those on the margins, this virtual alternative enables them to break down otherwise impenetrable social barriers and form close-knit digifams. This book is a collection of 9 essays that take an indepth look at social media activism and its ramifications.
The Long 2020: Reflections of Epidemiological Times, 2024
This chapter, divided in three sections, attempts an overview of the contemporary literary produc... more This chapter, divided in three sections, attempts an overview of the contemporary literary productions in Bengali, in the wake of the Covid 19 pandemic and the ensuing lockdown. It also attempts to describe late 19th- and early 20th-century Bengali literature's engagement with multiple epidemics that had devastated the Bengali countryside: malaria, cholera, smallpox, etc. The repeated waves of pandemics and their representation in Bengali literature were integral in the construction of the Bengali realist novel, creating a space of ferment which allowed for reconstruction of society, reconsideration of social divisions and consolidation of social work as an extension of nationalist activities. This second section enquires in some detail about these texts, ranging from Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Anandamath to Sarat Chandra Chatopadhyay’s Srikanta, from Bibhuti Bhushan Bandyopadhyay’s Aranyak to Banaphul’s Jangam. The third section of the paper analyzes the construction of an alternate society through Tarasankar Bandyopadhyay’s social realist novels, written and set in the 1920s and 30s, in rural Bengal and in Calcutta. Most of his novels like Ganadebata, Dhatridebata, etc., reckon with a society in flux, dealing on one hand with colonialism, on the other, with the gradual transformation in traditional societies, the destabilization of existing hierarchies and creation of new ones. In each of these moments of epidemiological crisis, the novels also recognize extraordinary characters, individuals who had been pushed to the margins of traditional society. In moments of crisis, they transcend their marginalities through agentive action and empathy. Their action in the course of the novels, become crucial in framing the post-pandemic social relations.
COVID-19 has simultaneously ushered in a crisis of public health and of livelihood, where women i... more COVID-19 has simultaneously ushered in a crisis of public health and of livelihood, where women in general, and migrant women in particular, have been affected disproportionately. Across South Asia, from unequal access to medical treatment to vaccines, the pandemic has pushed women to the margins of an already fragile healthcare system. Migrant workers, as a diverse group (both national and foreign), has borne the brunt of this pandemic and the subsequent collapse of the economic systems and their social security networks. How have women migrant workers fared under these circumstances? On the one hand, they have been pushed out of different development agendas, employed informally in construction, agricultural and service sectors without any of the benefits of so called 'development'. On the other, with the increasing precaritization of the informal sector, coupled with unpaid care and work, and the palpable threats of domestic violence, women migrant workers in South Asia continue to experience the worst impact of this pandemic.
This paper draws on the understanding of figuration as cultural norms reified through reiteration... more This paper draws on the understanding of figuration as cultural norms reified through reiterations. The changing figuration of the Indian 'housewife mom' is explored here through the trope of housework. Tracking two different advertisements of the same products across forty years, in the medium of television, this paper argues that advertisements proceeds with embracing change and creating new markets. Contrary to contemporary middle class women's actual engagement with housework, advertisements for products related to housework continue to posit the source of expert knowledge in the figure of them woman. As a corollary to this move, (unpaid) housework gets naturalised for women, and becomes a dominant component in mainstream constructions of femininity.
More often than not, these domestic workers are internal
migrants, having travelled from other pa... more More often than not, these domestic workers are internal migrants, having travelled from other parts of the city, of the district, of the state, of the country. The gap between their employers and themselves is not merely economic, but also ideological – one that leaves them perpetually on the outside of the gate. From 15 March onwards, many parts of India, but very prominently Karnataka, Delhi, and Maharashtra, witnessed large groups of migrant workers gathering at railway stations, trying to get back home. Restaurants had started to shut by this time, many non-essential services were reducing their workforce, caught between a lack of work and hence, income, and no guarantee of a place to stay – they chose to try their luck back at home. This was not in any way different from what the overseas migrants had chosen to do, in which the Central government was a willing participant. India had brought back 75 Indian nationals from Wuhan in China, 263 from Italy and 389 from Iran by this time. In contrast, the rapid shutting down of passenger trains and interstate buses created a situation that escalated between 15 March to 25 March, and from 26 March onwards, newspapers and television channels started showing images of innumerable people, carrying their luggage on their heads, setting out for home. Several social media users were quick to compare these images with those from the partition of India.
In this article, I closely read Manjira Saha’s 2018 volume Chhotoder
Border. a collection of chil... more In this article, I closely read Manjira Saha’s 2018 volume Chhotoder Border. a collection of children’s line drawings and short narratives collated from school children in the India- Bangladesh borderlands. Certain recurring tropes emerge from these rough drawings and short descriptions, rife with spelling mistakes. The border, an English word repeatedly transcribed in Bengali, does not need an introduction or justification in the lives of these children of the borderlands–the materiality of the border is represented through barbed wire fences, through the “police” who are at once scary and helpful, and the repeated, casual reference to trafficking in goods. I identify the materiality and the affective dimensions of the border through the narratives and drawings in Chhotoder Border. This article analyses the linguistic and visual texts collected by Saha in the volume to understand the framing of the materiality of the IndoBangladesh border as well as its affective import among the students who are the contributors to Saha’s volume. In so doing, it contributes to the burgeoning discourse around the “cultural aspect of borders”. By investigating the “figurations” or narrative tropes/ themes present in these border narratives this article furthers the understanding of discursive construction and circulation of borders.
This chapter is an exploration of the logistical space of Haldia, the location of Kolkata Port Tr... more This chapter is an exploration of the logistical space of Haldia, the location of Kolkata Port Trust’s deep-sea dock, and a hub of industries, infrastructural, and logistical networks, connected by road, river, and rail transport. I seek to understand how logistics and labour create space. Haldia continues to see large-scale migration and displacement, owing to both the construction of the dock and the promise of a resurgent economy. Based on ten months of ethnography, I detail the flourishing of an ‘other’ logistics in Haldia, one based in modes of survival and hustling that exist in the shadow of the city’s official logistical activities. Its central actors are marginal women, and its objects, the key cargo of Haldia port: coal.
Ecology, Literature, and Culture: An Anthology of Recent Studies, 2021
Abstract:
Spanning over 50 years in the subcontinent, the 2018 Indian English novel by Shubhangi... more Abstract: Spanning over 50 years in the subcontinent, the 2018 Indian English novel by Shubhangi Swarup, Latitudes of Longing, juxtaposes temporal human action and political events with nature’s cyclicity, continental drifts and massive movements that disturb and reorient the balance in nature. This novel, in its post-coloniality challenges colonial boundaries as well as the legacy of the enlightenment that creates a division between nature and culture, in doing so it also questions colonial knowledge systems like anthropology, geography, taxonomy and zoology—modes of knowledge that nevertheless continue to shape postcolonial reality. Unlike the narrative techniques of the modern realist fiction that with its preoccupation with a ‘mimetic ambition’ is centred on the general probabilities, this novel incorporates the sudden, the climactically catastrophic and the improbable in nature, addressing the ecocritical aspiration in contemporary fiction. Therefore the language encompasses elements of magic realism, premonitions and tales of a fantastic past, making the narration cyclical and rife with digressions, simultaneously non-realistic and postcolonial. The legacy of enlightenment rationalism is also the dual victimisation of women and nature—both seen as coterminous in certain patriarchal discourse, but also as targets of aggression. Ecofeminism advocates a new epistemology that would address the patriarchal aggression on nature and women—in the novel achieved by nature’s careful selection of who is part of it, is attuned to it (Chandra Devi, Apo), and who can understand and therefore foretell the future. The human body here, especially the bodies of some women, the elderly and the tortured become both metaphors for geopolitical changes, and modes of knowledge formation—breaking down the Cartesian hierarchy of mind/ body. Moreover, certain geopolitical settings in the novel are also portrayed as locations that resist the onset of the anthropocene, by juxtaposing an intuitive understanding of nature with an evolving scientific discourse.
Ipshita Chanda, Selfing the City: Single Women Migrants and Their Lives in Kolkata. New Delhi: Sa... more Ipshita Chanda, Selfing the City: Single Women Migrants and Their Lives in Kolkata. New Delhi: Sage Stree, 2017, 323 pp., ₹995, ISBN: 9788190676045 (Hardcover).
Women and Education in India: A representative Study, 2020
In this article we look at the development of Bethune College and the generations of extraordinar... more In this article we look at the development of Bethune College and the generations of extraordinary women who taught and studied here--but also take a look at life as a boarder in the hostel, women's participation in sports and in poltical movements, and the spheres of literature and culture. This is a chapter in the volume Women and Education in India: A Representative Study, edited by Shantanu Majee.
So much of this write up concentrates on the 19th and early 20th centuries, the second half of th... more So much of this write up concentrates on the 19th and early 20th centuries, the second half of the 20th century being marked primarily by partition refugees from the present Bangladesh. The 21st century is also the time when that lover of Calcutta, P. T Nair went back to Kerala—having once followed in the footsteps of Madhavan, the hero of O. Chandumenon’s Indulekha, the first novel in Malayalam, who travelled to Calcutta in the 1880s in search of a job and witnessed a man entering a tiger’s cage at Alipore Zoological Gardens. Calcutta architecture bears testimony to all the different migrations that it has housed and assimilated—the mansions on Central Avenue and Vivekananda Road housing both the central courtyard native to indigenous buildings, Corinthian cornices, louvre windows and the Marwari jaffrey—the Calcutta baroque. The Islamicate architecture of the mini Lucknow that the last nawab of the kingdom of Oudh, Wajid Ali shah created in Garden Reach is slowly being eroded by forces of history and of politics. A note on the migrant city therefore cannot bypass the current political clime that seeks to define who is a citizen—bringing to the fore once again the claims to the space of the nation state and the ones who are refused citizenship.
Published as part of calcutta Research Group's volume Borders of an Epidemic: Covid 19 and the Mi... more Published as part of calcutta Research Group's volume Borders of an Epidemic: Covid 19 and the Migrant Workers.
In this paper I look at two “fat films” produced in India, films that have active, agential fat s... more In this paper I look at two “fat films” produced in India, films that have active, agential fat subjects as their protagonists. Released across a gap of three years, and in two different languages, the films can however be read together given the historical context of their release, the locales they inhabit and their identification as “multiplex films.” The size and shape of the human body, in contemporary India (as well as in the rest of the world) carry several layers of meaning, foremost of them being the fat body. On the fat body are concentrated many social significations: that of (the lack of) beauty and desirability, of ill health and lack of fitness, of over consumption, and embodying threats of an “epidemic,”, of being greedy, lethargic and a voracious eater. These significations also have to be read within the context of a global increase in products and services dedicated to weight loss, catering both to those worried about their health and those concerned with their appearance, as well as the simultaneous recognition of fat people as a new consumer category. The fat body is also one present only as the “before” of successful weight loss narratives, finding very little representation in popular media., Iit is thought of as a body in need of transformation, an unfinished project. The films discussed here draw on the tensions existing within these discursive formations. Their resolutions promote an acceptance of the fat body, but the films’ journeys to these resolutions are different. Located within what can be called “multiplex films” genre, “niche middle-class oriented films in a range of styles not previously viable with the old mass public,” , in terms of their visuals, the kinds of characters that populate the screen, the locations they inhabit and the way the dialogues are peppered with English, the two films under consideration here, despite their different languages, can be grouped together based on their shared negotiations with the fat body in contemporary India.
Contrary to the commonsense that understands logistical networks in terms of products, money, and... more Contrary to the commonsense that understands logistical networks in terms of products, money, and impersonal chains and flows of information , recent research has focused on the human side of logistics (Neilson and Rossiter 2014). This chapter investigates the interaction of existing 'big' logistical systems with human action, and details alternative logistical networks that mirror big logistics, but also point to the gendered profile of paid logistical work. From the margins of the Bengali port city of Haldia, I focus not on the capital associated with big logistics but on how its excesses and spillages create networks of their own. Women, children, and the elderly populate this alternative logistical world, but—unlike the machinery, money, and movements that characterize male labour in Haldia—their work gets swept under the carpet in the predominant logis-tical vision of the port city.
Between 2012 and 2014, the popular Bengali women’s magazine
Sananda brought out three cover featu... more Between 2012 and 2014, the popular Bengali women’s magazine Sananda brought out three cover features (one each year), on ageing. They comprised advice for emotional well-being, information regarding diet, fitness and how best to take care of an ageing body. Under late capitalism, Mike Featherstone argues, machine is a powerful metaphor for the body. Increasingly, maintenance (of optimal bodily functions, of a youthful appearance, etc.) like that of a machine becomes a legitimate concern for the ‘management’ of the ageing body, bringing its appetites, desires and dissatisfactions under control, supervised upon by experts. This paper situates Sananda’s concern with the ageing body within contemporary explosion(s) in body cultures, whereby the body is at the same time the site of the operation of bio power, and produced as a function of consumerism. By meting out expert advice to its target readers, and preaching the correct bodily conduct appropriate to each ‘age’, Sananda participates actively in the creation of ageing, albeit active consuming subjects.
Take a look at the first installment of CRG's collaborative work with Western Sidney University, ... more Take a look at the first installment of CRG's collaborative work with Western Sidney University, under the aegis of the wonderful Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter. My tiny piece on Haldia is a part of this.
Situating Social Media: Gender, Caste, Solidarity. Protest, 2020
Social media produces numerous spaces and opportunities, globally, for people to link up, reach o... more Social media produces numerous spaces and opportunities, globally, for people to link up, reach out, mobilise, assert their identity, build bridges... For those on the margins, this virtual alternative enables them to break down otherwise impenetrable social barriers and form close-knit digifams. This book is a collection of 9 essays that take an indepth look at social media activism and its ramifications.
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migrants, having travelled from other parts of the city, of the district,
of the state, of the country. The gap between their employers and
themselves is not merely economic, but also ideological – one that
leaves them perpetually on the outside of the gate. From 15 March
onwards, many parts of India, but very prominently Karnataka,
Delhi, and Maharashtra, witnessed large groups of migrant workers
gathering at railway stations, trying to get back home. Restaurants
had started to shut by this time, many non-essential services were
reducing their workforce, caught between a lack of work and hence,
income, and no guarantee of a place to stay – they chose to try
their luck back at home. This was not in any way different from
what the overseas migrants had chosen to do, in which the Central
government was a willing participant. India had brought back 75
Indian nationals from Wuhan in China, 263 from Italy and 389
from Iran by this time.
In contrast, the rapid shutting down of passenger trains and
interstate buses created a situation that escalated between 15
March to 25 March, and from 26 March onwards, newspapers and
television channels started showing images of innumerable people,
carrying their luggage on their heads, setting out for home. Several
social media users were quick to compare these images with those
from the partition of India.
Border. a collection of children’s line drawings and short narratives
collated from school children in the India- Bangladesh borderlands.
Certain recurring tropes emerge from these rough drawings and
short descriptions, rife with spelling mistakes. The border, an English
word repeatedly transcribed in Bengali, does not need an
introduction or justification in the lives of these children of the
borderlands–the materiality of the border is represented through
barbed wire fences, through the “police” who are at once scary and
helpful, and the repeated, casual reference to trafficking in goods. I
identify the materiality and the affective dimensions of the border
through the narratives and drawings in Chhotoder Border. This article
analyses the linguistic and visual texts collected by Saha in the
volume to understand the framing of the materiality of the IndoBangladesh border as well as its affective import among the
students who are the contributors to Saha’s volume. In so doing, it
contributes to the burgeoning discourse around the “cultural aspect
of borders”. By investigating the “figurations” or narrative tropes/
themes present in these border narratives this article furthers the
understanding of discursive construction and circulation of borders.
Spanning over 50 years in the subcontinent, the 2018 Indian English novel by Shubhangi Swarup, Latitudes of Longing, juxtaposes temporal human action and political events with nature’s cyclicity, continental drifts and massive movements that disturb and reorient the balance in nature. This novel, in its post-coloniality challenges colonial boundaries as well as the legacy of the enlightenment that creates a division between nature and culture, in doing so it also questions colonial knowledge systems like anthropology, geography, taxonomy and zoology—modes of knowledge that nevertheless continue to shape postcolonial reality.
Unlike the narrative techniques of the modern realist fiction that with its preoccupation with a ‘mimetic ambition’ is centred on the general probabilities, this novel incorporates the sudden, the climactically catastrophic and the improbable in nature, addressing the ecocritical aspiration in contemporary fiction. Therefore the language encompasses elements of magic realism, premonitions and tales of a fantastic past, making the narration cyclical and rife with digressions, simultaneously non-realistic and postcolonial. The legacy of enlightenment rationalism is also the dual victimisation of women and nature—both seen as coterminous in certain patriarchal discourse, but also as targets of aggression. Ecofeminism advocates a new epistemology that would address the patriarchal aggression on nature and women—in the novel achieved by nature’s careful selection of who is part of it, is attuned to it (Chandra Devi, Apo), and who can understand and therefore foretell the future. The human body here, especially the bodies of some women, the elderly and the tortured become both metaphors for geopolitical changes, and modes of knowledge formation—breaking down the Cartesian hierarchy of mind/ body. Moreover, certain geopolitical settings in the novel are also portrayed as locations that resist the onset of the anthropocene, by juxtaposing an intuitive understanding of nature with an evolving scientific discourse.
Road housing both the central courtyard native to indigenous buildings,
Corinthian cornices, louvre windows and the Marwari jaffrey—the Calcutta baroque. The Islamicate architecture of the mini Lucknow that the last nawab of the kingdom of Oudh, Wajid Ali shah created in Garden Reach is slowly being eroded by forces of history and of politics. A note on the migrant city therefore cannot bypass the current political clime that seeks to define who is a citizen—bringing to the fore once again the claims to the space of the nation state and the ones who are refused citizenship.
Sananda brought out three cover features (one each year), on ageing.
They comprised advice for emotional well-being, information regarding
diet, fitness and how best to take care of an ageing body. Under late
capitalism, Mike Featherstone argues, machine is a powerful metaphor
for the body. Increasingly, maintenance (of optimal bodily functions, of
a youthful appearance, etc.) like that of a machine becomes a legitimate
concern for the ‘management’ of the ageing body, bringing its appetites,
desires and dissatisfactions under control, supervised upon by experts.
This paper situates Sananda’s concern with the ageing body within
contemporary explosion(s) in body cultures, whereby the body is at the
same time the site of the operation of bio power, and produced as a
function of consumerism. By meting out expert advice to its target
readers, and preaching the correct bodily conduct appropriate to each
‘age’, Sananda participates actively in the creation of ageing, albeit active
consuming subjects.
Books by Samata Biswas
migrants, having travelled from other parts of the city, of the district,
of the state, of the country. The gap between their employers and
themselves is not merely economic, but also ideological – one that
leaves them perpetually on the outside of the gate. From 15 March
onwards, many parts of India, but very prominently Karnataka,
Delhi, and Maharashtra, witnessed large groups of migrant workers
gathering at railway stations, trying to get back home. Restaurants
had started to shut by this time, many non-essential services were
reducing their workforce, caught between a lack of work and hence,
income, and no guarantee of a place to stay – they chose to try
their luck back at home. This was not in any way different from
what the overseas migrants had chosen to do, in which the Central
government was a willing participant. India had brought back 75
Indian nationals from Wuhan in China, 263 from Italy and 389
from Iran by this time.
In contrast, the rapid shutting down of passenger trains and
interstate buses created a situation that escalated between 15
March to 25 March, and from 26 March onwards, newspapers and
television channels started showing images of innumerable people,
carrying their luggage on their heads, setting out for home. Several
social media users were quick to compare these images with those
from the partition of India.
Border. a collection of children’s line drawings and short narratives
collated from school children in the India- Bangladesh borderlands.
Certain recurring tropes emerge from these rough drawings and
short descriptions, rife with spelling mistakes. The border, an English
word repeatedly transcribed in Bengali, does not need an
introduction or justification in the lives of these children of the
borderlands–the materiality of the border is represented through
barbed wire fences, through the “police” who are at once scary and
helpful, and the repeated, casual reference to trafficking in goods. I
identify the materiality and the affective dimensions of the border
through the narratives and drawings in Chhotoder Border. This article
analyses the linguistic and visual texts collected by Saha in the
volume to understand the framing of the materiality of the IndoBangladesh border as well as its affective import among the
students who are the contributors to Saha’s volume. In so doing, it
contributes to the burgeoning discourse around the “cultural aspect
of borders”. By investigating the “figurations” or narrative tropes/
themes present in these border narratives this article furthers the
understanding of discursive construction and circulation of borders.
Spanning over 50 years in the subcontinent, the 2018 Indian English novel by Shubhangi Swarup, Latitudes of Longing, juxtaposes temporal human action and political events with nature’s cyclicity, continental drifts and massive movements that disturb and reorient the balance in nature. This novel, in its post-coloniality challenges colonial boundaries as well as the legacy of the enlightenment that creates a division between nature and culture, in doing so it also questions colonial knowledge systems like anthropology, geography, taxonomy and zoology—modes of knowledge that nevertheless continue to shape postcolonial reality.
Unlike the narrative techniques of the modern realist fiction that with its preoccupation with a ‘mimetic ambition’ is centred on the general probabilities, this novel incorporates the sudden, the climactically catastrophic and the improbable in nature, addressing the ecocritical aspiration in contemporary fiction. Therefore the language encompasses elements of magic realism, premonitions and tales of a fantastic past, making the narration cyclical and rife with digressions, simultaneously non-realistic and postcolonial. The legacy of enlightenment rationalism is also the dual victimisation of women and nature—both seen as coterminous in certain patriarchal discourse, but also as targets of aggression. Ecofeminism advocates a new epistemology that would address the patriarchal aggression on nature and women—in the novel achieved by nature’s careful selection of who is part of it, is attuned to it (Chandra Devi, Apo), and who can understand and therefore foretell the future. The human body here, especially the bodies of some women, the elderly and the tortured become both metaphors for geopolitical changes, and modes of knowledge formation—breaking down the Cartesian hierarchy of mind/ body. Moreover, certain geopolitical settings in the novel are also portrayed as locations that resist the onset of the anthropocene, by juxtaposing an intuitive understanding of nature with an evolving scientific discourse.
Road housing both the central courtyard native to indigenous buildings,
Corinthian cornices, louvre windows and the Marwari jaffrey—the Calcutta baroque. The Islamicate architecture of the mini Lucknow that the last nawab of the kingdom of Oudh, Wajid Ali shah created in Garden Reach is slowly being eroded by forces of history and of politics. A note on the migrant city therefore cannot bypass the current political clime that seeks to define who is a citizen—bringing to the fore once again the claims to the space of the nation state and the ones who are refused citizenship.
Sananda brought out three cover features (one each year), on ageing.
They comprised advice for emotional well-being, information regarding
diet, fitness and how best to take care of an ageing body. Under late
capitalism, Mike Featherstone argues, machine is a powerful metaphor
for the body. Increasingly, maintenance (of optimal bodily functions, of
a youthful appearance, etc.) like that of a machine becomes a legitimate
concern for the ‘management’ of the ageing body, bringing its appetites,
desires and dissatisfactions under control, supervised upon by experts.
This paper situates Sananda’s concern with the ageing body within
contemporary explosion(s) in body cultures, whereby the body is at the
same time the site of the operation of bio power, and produced as a
function of consumerism. By meting out expert advice to its target
readers, and preaching the correct bodily conduct appropriate to each
‘age’, Sananda participates actively in the creation of ageing, albeit active
consuming subjects.