Papers by Ignatius Richard
INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH JOURNAL FOR HUMANITIES, 2024
History is a contested site for the search for truth. In the post-partition era in India, the Mus... more History is a contested site for the search for truth. In the post-partition era in India, the Muslim communities are often subjected to existential crisis owing to the projected xenophobic fervour of the privileged informed with political intentions. When the historical contributions of Muslims to nation-formation are negated, they rely only on their collective memory to find a sense of belonging in the newly formed nation. The Odd Book of Baby Names traces the story of a dying Muslim king in post-independent India, who is rumoured to have fathered every child in a city. The novel revolves around the search for a diary which carries the names of all the children the king had fathered. This paper attempts to understand the contesting relationship between history and memory under the light of memory studies.
Interdisciplinary Research Journal for Humanities, 2023
Man's search for meaning in life is a recurrent theme in time-old literatures. With the advent of... more Man's search for meaning in life is a recurrent theme in time-old literatures. With the advent of globalization, erstwhile concrete identities become fluid. This further problematized man's conception of meaningful life. Sublimity helps human beings to dwarf themselves before greater things in order to transcend their immediate reality. Anees Salim's novel The Small-town Sea traces the life of a dying father and his son. The author juxtaposes the dying man's life to the infinite sea in the novel. The sea acts as a sublime for the dying man to transcend his material life. This paper is a discussion on Edmund Burke's concept of sublime with reference to Anees Salim's novel The Small-Town Sea.
Madhya Bharti, 2022
Anticipating the arrival of neo-colonialism, Frantz Fanon postulated that once the power struggle... more Anticipating the arrival of neo-colonialism, Frantz Fanon postulated that once the power struggle between the colonizer and the colonized is over, it will be followed by the power struggle of native elites and the subaltern in the postcolonial nation. Oppression and exploitation of the subaltern continue to exist in the hands of native elites through various forms. The status-quo of elites is achieved by manipulating the discourse of 'nation'. The political decolonization of India was accompanied with partition of the country along religious line. Though the founding fathers of the nation believed in secular state, the outgrowing religious fundamentalism in India aims at creating a nation of unitary identity where being a Hindu is not just a religious identity but an ethnic identity, an essential identity to be an Indian, thereby eliding other identities which defy the unitary identity. This excludes Dalit, Adivasi and Muslim from the national narrative. Such varied identities, according to the fundamentalists, have to be policed, domesticated and to be projected as a potential threat for nation. Anees Salim's Vanity Bagh is an account of a fictional Muslim hamlet called Vanity Bagh. It throws light on the bitter experiences of Muslim communities in the postcolonial India where their belonging to the nation is questioned. This paper demonstrates how Muslim community is ethnically 'othered' within their own nation with reference to Anees Salim's novel Vanity Bagh.
IJ Publication, 2020
With the advent of film studies as an academic discipline, the objective reality of cinema is que... more With the advent of film studies as an academic discipline, the objective reality of cinema is questioned with the incorporation of literary theories within the discipline. It tries to provide a conceptual context to understand a film not just as an art but reflection of social reality. Understanding ecology through a feminist theory facilitated ecofeministic approach to any text. An ecofeministic approach enables a reader to understand the social construct in terms of analysing the subjugation of woman and nature in apposition under a patriarchal community. It not only parallels the togetherness of nature and woman in the contemporary time but even looks back her acquaintance with nature across time. The Indian film Aruvi, a change over in the Tamil film industry, metaphorizes the life of the girl, Aruvi the protagonist, with that of nature. This paper explores how Aruvi as a woman who was born in nature's arena becomes a self-agency to voice against the capitalized society in a way demonstrating the aggression of patriarchal community on both woman and nature.
Literature as Cultural Artefact, 2020
With the inception of Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in Birmingham, Cultural stu... more With the inception of Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in Birmingham, Cultural studies have become more and more popular among the Literature scholars. In an already existing postcolonial context, the inclusion of cultural perspectives paved way to multidimensional, dynamic and discursive relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. There has been a ceaseless resistance to the erstwhile received colonial discourses, triggered by the postcolonial concept of 'write-back-to the centre'. One such is Anand Neelakantan's Vanara: a counter narrative to an episode in Indian epic Ramayana. Vanara throws light upon the story of Bali, Sugreeva and Tara-mythological characters belonged to Vanara community who become the representatives of suppressed voices in canonical literatures. It is a tale of naïve forestdwellers overrun by the civilized which traces the conflict between the upper-caste Devas and the lower-caste Vanaras. This paper traces the dichotomy between the colonizer and the colonized in the novel in relation to cultural constructs.
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Papers by Ignatius Richard