shiv kumar

Stuart Hall, in his 1983 lectures states, "people have to have a language to speak about where they are and what other possible futures are available to them….These futures may not be real; if you try to concretize them immediately, you may find there is nothing there. But what is there, what is real, is the possibility of being someone else, of being in some other social space from the one in which you have already been placed." (Hall, 2016, p.205) The literature from Northeast India puts forward the issue of systematic erasure and structural exclusion [institutionalized through legal mechanisms like the Armed Forces Special Powers Act.] from the mainstream national imagination and literary space. Easterine Kire's primary agenda is to revitalize cultural practices that have been facing "historical elision." (Sarkar, 1997, p.359) This elision threatens the poly-ethnic, culturally vibrant, and tribal cultures by constructing and presenting the northeastern region of India as a conflict-ridden space. Situated within this ontology of existence, reality, and becoming, Easterine Kire's Don't Run, My Love (2017) and Sky is My Father: A Naga Village Remembered (2018) revive and revitalize the folktales and cultural practices to assert the cultural economy of the Naga tribes. Her writings represent a politically conscious positionality of the characters, context, and the plot to assert the culturally constituted identity through the revival of vibrant cultural practices and tribal epistemologies.

Ageing, in India, and especially old age, is considered as static and outside the social fabric. They are seen as outside the active social life but the literature on gerontology or ageing refutes and question the stereotype of ageing passive and static and present old age as active and as participating as any other stage of life.This paper attempts to question the stereotypes of ageing by analyzing two short stories, The

Emily Dickinson's poems capture various emotions related to life that are presented through her poem. Death is perceived as a life giving force in a different metaphysical sense of understanding. Spiritual crisis coupled with a sense of association with material reality forms a sense of conflict in her poems that she attempts to merge together to form a holistic meaning of life, reality and her worldview. In her worldview, death is treated as a being that helps to transcend the material reality and move towards achieving a sense of unity of being in spiritual sense.

Precarity is defined as a state of uncertainty in terms of job, situation or life. It has
emerged as a global phenomenon that finds resonance in every part of the world literature.
Indian writings are not unaffected by it especially Dalit writings. This precarious situation
becomes different when it is combined and seen within caste dominated space. It produces a
different kind of situation where individual ability and capability do not hamper in achieving
the desired position/result but rather it is the caste identity that sabotages or makes it difficult
to achieve. Dalit writings are essentially, by nature, precarious as their characters experience
precarity in every sense of the word either in terms of vocational identity, identity crisis,
affiliation or life as a whole. Even the location of their bodies symbolizes the precarious
situation in terms of location and space. Uncertainty, in various forms, is an essential aspect
of Dalit writings. Precarity is not only class specific but it is also more connected implicitly to
caste identity where stratification of lower caste in terms of their caste identity refers to their
precarious existence where any mode of escape from it is not encouraged. This constant
defeating presence of caste consciousness leads to a situation of uncertainty that provides a
thematic structure to their narratives.

Within the context of language debate in Indian literary circle the identity of an author is often connected with the medium which he/she uses in representing the Indian reality. This is very much prevalent in the case of English used by non-English speakers. The critics sought to establish how the literary representation and medium used construct and define one's identity within the cultural and socio-political context. These perennial questions have perplexed the minds of those Indian writers who write both in vernacular and in English like Girish Karnad. Girish Karnad's Broken Images, published in 2010, takes up the debate of the politics of language in Indian literary culture, specifically in relation to the respective claims of modern Indian language and English. The title and the prologue of the monologue are taken from T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland, which also raises question of stable identity. Within this context, the monologue's title is a signifier of the split identities which is signified in the semiotic figure of Manjula Nayak who portrays the dilemma of Indian writers writing in both vernacular and English language.

Dalit writings are considered to be centred on the issue of identity politics. Most analysis rests on their
claim of identity as fixed and static. They ignore an embedded process of various spatial implications,
characters’ interaction with it, and a self-reflexive narrative gaze that most of the prominent Dalit
writers present through their autobiographical narratives. Concentration on these concepts provides
a fresh perspective to critically analyse Dalit writings and presents a different understanding of identity
formation. This article proposes to unearth this process through a reading of Bama’s Karukku (2012),
in English translation. It attempts to establish that identity formation in Dalit writings is a process that
is based on various kinds of spatial experiences that could be divided into three stages of development.
This process culminates in transforming a character into a politically conscious Dalit figure. Also, this
article attempts to chart a character’s development that corroborates to body’s spatial-cultural location
and its response to/within that space. It is an attempt to understand various spatial ramifications that
the character experiences in an attempt to forge an identity outside the traditional definition.