Day: November 24, 2015

By Dr Omila Thounaojam

Morrison experiments with anti-conventionalism and most profoundly comes up with the creation of Sula, a woman whose personality in the novel totally diverts away from the conventional expectations of “how” an ideal woman should be like. She is a woman who will not mother, nurture, or take her place in the usual heterosexual social order that characterizes women like Helene Wright and her daughter Nel. Sula could be considered as an imaginative creation of Morrison’s experiment with feminist ideologies wherein, she tries to imagine a self-creation, rebelling from, and at odds with, all the preceding prescription. Morrison has asserted that she wanted to take a woman who is unlike Geraldine in The Bluest Eye or Helene Wright (Nel’s mother) and Nel in Sula who just folds away many parts of herself by just preparing oneself for marriage and home-making (Asinof “Fresh Ink”). Hortense Spillers notes that in Sula, the novelist imagines a woman, who, intends on opening up all parts of herself rather than folding them away, flouts convention and received morality (214).

Morrison cuts Sula free from the conventional responsibilities and definers of an ideal womanhood and provides her a kind of detachment and distance by cutting her loose from feeling and as well to make her in many ways surprisingly evil. In a series of events that unfold in the course of the narrative, one finds Sula coldheartedly disposing her grandmother Eva by placing her in a degraded old home meant for old people. A string of signs is linked to Sula based on the community’s mythology, thereby almost equating her with the devil figure. Morrison has noted in many of her interviews that she is fascinated with the way black communities tolerate evil, learning to live and survive in its presence rather than responding aggressively and anxiously to banish or exorcise it.

Nonetheless, the community in Sula, more than simply tolerating it, helps to add up in Sula the evil that it perceives and even needs. Sula’s presence is a need for the community for it challenges its members to explore their best selves and this facet is markedly evident in the novel when, after her death, the sense of relief, hope and order that the people of her community felt is short-lived: A falling away, a dislocation was taking place. … Without her mockery, affection for others sank into flaccid disrepair. Daughters who had complained bitterly about the responsibilities of taking care of their aged mother-in-law had altered when Sula locked Eva away, and they began cleaning those old women’s spittoons without a murmur. Now that Sula was dead and done with, they returned to a steeping resentment of the burdens of old people (153-54). Throughout the novel, there is a reiteration of “how” it is only Sula who can look upon pain and trauma with disinterest. Sula’s strength to live life on her own terms is best
expressed: “‘Yes. But my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else’s. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain’t that something?  A secondhand lonely’” (143).

Many commentators have argued that Sula’s conscious disinterestedness provokes unease and this illustrated when she admits that she is thrilled and “interested” (78) to see her mother burn and also when Ajax has left her, she recognizes that she would have liked to tear “the flesh from his face” (136) to get to the secret of his blackness and beauty.  Barbara Johnson’s brilliant reading of the novel draws our attention to Sula’s puzzling disinterestedness particularly focusing on the moment when Nel discovers Jude and Sula together. All Nel does is looking at them in disbelief at the adulterous scene before her and waits for one of them to say something by way of explanation: “I waited for Sula to look up at me any minute and say one of those lovely college words like aesthetic or rapport, which I never understood but which I loved because they sounded so comfortable and firm” (105). Johnson argues that the novel functions as a test for the reader of readerly aesthetics or rapport, interest or disinterest in the succession of horrible images, painful truths and losses, that it articulates and interrogates the readerly response to the horrible images we see and hence, asks “What is the nature of our pleasure in contemplating trauma?” (171).

Sula’s determination to live one’s life in one’s own term certainly made her disregard the usual constraints that socialization involves, but such a disregard for convention made her pay a heavy price, especially in the last chapters, the novel is explicit about the pain and suffering that Sula, disinterested as she seems, has not managed to leave behind. The aspect of Sula that we see by the second part of the novel seems “to have become a repository of pain – personal, local and cosmic” (Matus). Such an assumption about her could be drawn on the basis of the fact that Sula perceives even the act of lovemaking surprisingly, as a way to find “misery and the ability to feel deep sorrow” (122) and seeking out the “eye of sorrow in the midst of all that hurricane rage of joy,” she locates at the center of “that silence … the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning” (123). It is then that she wept: For loneliness assumed the absence of other people, and the solitude she found in that desperate terrain had never admitted the possibility of other people. She wept then. Tears for the death of the littlest things: the castaway shoes of children; broken stems of marsh grass battered and drown by the sea; prom photographs of dead women she never knew; wedding rings in pawnshop windows’ the tidy bodies of Cornish hens in a nest of rice” (123). Sula’s sense of cosmic grief as evident from the references above draws our attention towards an incident or rather an accident, a case of specific trauma of her past that involves the death of Chicken Little. One could ascertain that Chicken Little’s death is the central symbol of loss in the novel. As the narrator puts forth, with a “bubbly laughter,” he was there for one moment as Sula swings him, holding him by the wrists, but he is gone the next moment “The water darkened and closed quickly over the place where Chicken Little sank. The pressure of his hard and tight little fingers was still in Sula’s palms as she stood looking at the closed place in the water. They expected him to come back up, laughing” (61). The effect of Chicken Little’s death is as if “something” is “newly missing” and at the funeral, the women mourners connect to the event by identifying with the child as “innocent victim” and are also reminded of the “oldest and most devastating pain there is: not the pain of childhood but the remembrance of it” (65). The funeral foregrounds the notion that the boy’s death is a symbol of Sula’s own childhood hurt.

Chicken Little’s accidental death is one of the key moments in the novel and is an incident that introduces us with the notion of the pain of losing innocence and also through Shadrack’s promise to Sula, the permanence of childhood secured and captured by death. Realizing that Shadrack has seen the accident, Sula runs to his shack and all she gets to hear from him is the one consolidating word he utters, “always.” The notion of permanent peace in Chicken Little’s long sleep of water returns to Sula shortly before her own death. She dies with the dominating feeling of “being completely alone – where she had always wanted to be – free of the possibility of distraction” (149).

When Shadrack remembers of the exchange that he had with Sula, he promises her not ostensibly the sleep of water, but a stay against change and the “falling away of skin, the drip and slide of blood. He had said ‘always’ to convince her, assure her, of permanency” (157). When he sees Sula’s corpse, he realizes that yet another whose face, he knew has died and finally the hope preserved in his sense of “always” disappears. A heavy sense of despair propels him so much so to the point that he starts doubting whether his suicide day has helped to keep order in the universe. One could undoubtedly infer that Sula’s death sets off the chain of circumstances that leads to the deaths of many of the Bottom’s community members.

In her final conversations with Nel, she says “Being good to somebody is just like being mean to somebody. Risky. You don’t get nothing for it” (144-45). What becomes clear about Sula, having lived life on her own terms, is that she has not avoided pain, but simply objected to order or school her feelings to go with conventional practices. She finds the cult of womanhood that conditions, proscribes and prescribes emotions to be not worth following. In a most shocking declaration, Sula asserts that there will be a time when the world will actually love her: ‘Oh, they’ll love me all right. It will take time, but they’ll love me. … After all the old women have lain with the teen-agers; when all the younger girls have slept with their drunken old uncles; after all the black men fuck all the white ones; when all the white woman kiss all the black ones … then there’ll be a little love left over for me. And I know just what it will feel like’ (145).

Sula’s thought in the stated speech is distinctively about taboo breaking, iconoclasm and moreover, the shattering of social and sexual conventions. We find that Sula is comprised of voices echoing with delayed reactions, dissociations, repressed memories and above all, the “psychic discontinuity” of event and affect (Johnson). There are a series of moments in the text that contain incidents witnessing that discontinuity – Shadrack’s reaction to the experience of the battlefield, Nel’s response to discovering her husband Jude committing adultery with her best friend Sula, and Sula’s response to the drowning of Chicken Little – to mention a few examples. It could also be highlighted here that indeed many characters in the novel experience the disjunction between the immediate event and the registration of its psychic effects. Eva is the best example to point out, for the narrator describes how Eva feels when Boyboy leaves her and she doesn’t know what she feels and then suddenly it strikes her that she hates him: “It hit her like a sledge hammer and it was then that she knew what to feel. A liquid trail of hate flooded her chest” (36). There is a fascinating structural pattern that is formed by the accumulation of such delayed effects and Eva’s just one to be pointed out here. Barbara Johnson remarks: “While the chapter headings promise chronological linearity, the text demonstrates that lived time is anything but continuous, that things don’t happen when they happen, that neither intentionality nor reaction can naturalize trauma into consecutive narrative” (169). Robert Grant offers further input to such an observation by stating that the wrought, “quasipalindromic” structure of the novel is testimony to its concern with delayed effects: “Sula divides precisely into two equal parts and characters introduced and developed in ‘I’ are brought back in ‘II’ in inverse sequence. The novel begins in memory and concludes with Nel’s crucial remembrance of Sula” (95).

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2015/11/anti-conventionalism-in-sula/

By Syed Mahmoud Nawaz

The 46th IFFI opened with the film ‘The Man Who Knew Infinity’, which is directed by Matthew Brown and is produced by Edward Pressman of the Pressman Films, Joe Thomas and others. The film which took almost ten years to make and had a budget of around 10 million dollars is based on a book by the same name written by Robert Kanigel on the life and times of Ramanujan. ‘My aunt presented me Robert’s book and I was fascinated by the depth with which Indian Mathematics Genius Ramanujan pursued his dream-his journey was so inspiring that I decided to make this film’ said Matthew Brown, the director. He added, ‘I found the personal relationships that Ramanujun had, to be amazing and I loved the idea that for the man, his mathematics was infused spirituality, at the same time I don’t mean to equate it with some far off mystic way that some westerners might perceive it to be’. In spite of having no formal training, Srinivasa Ramanujan proved to the world that he very well understood the nuances of the complexity of mathematics. He went on to become a Fellow of the Royal Society. Though he lived for only 32 years in this world, Ramanujanleft an indelible mark on the world of mathematics. The genius compiled nearly 4000 identities and equations. He was invited to the University of Cambridge by Professor G.H. Hardy after he saw the samples of his theorems. Hardy became his mentor and was instrumental in bringing his brilliance to the fore and in revealing his genius to the world. This was not easy for Hardy as he had to really work hard in convincing others about Ramanujanand convincing Ramanujan about the importance of coherent proofs to go along with his mathematical results. When asked what his greatest contribution to mathematics was, Hardy replied that it was the discovery of Ramanujan.

After staying in Cambridge, Ramanujan came back to India to be with his family but could only survive for around a year. Around 100 pages of notes from his last year made their way to England later and were added to the Ramanujan archives at the Wren Library at Trinity College, Cambridge. Today physicists and mathematicians are making use of them in their research on string theory, black holes and quantum gravity.

Robert Kanigel once said, “The Man Who Knew Infinity is not only about mathematics; it’s about the powerful bond between Ramanujan and Hardy and how it shaped their lives”. The director of the film Matthew Brown who himself is a writer said that he had no reservations about Kanigel’s book. In fact he praised Kanigel for being very supportive to the film project. “Robert opened up all his research for me and we became instant friends” added Brown. In the film the character of Ramanujan is played by the young and talented Dev Patel and that of his wife Janaki by the graceful Devika Bhise. The famous actor Jeremy Irons plays the role of Professor GH Hardy. Others in the cast include Kevin Mcnally, ArundhatiNag, Dhritman Chaterji, Shazad Latif, Anthony Calf, Roger Narayan, Jeremy Northman, Stephen Fry, Toby Jones and others.

Inputs from expert mathematicians also added authenticity to the whole project. Swati Bhise, a leading Bharatanatyam dancer, who is well acquainted with the Iyengar culture, also used all her talent in contributing creatively towards the making of the film apart from being one of its executive producers. Films like ‘The Man Who Knew Infinity’ make us cherish our legacy and remember the contributions made by great people like Ramanujun who in spite of facing difficult times in their lives never allowed the environment to stop them from achieving great heights and from showing light to the world. The work of Srinivasa Ramanujun will always keep inspiring people all across the world. (PIB Feature)

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2015/11/46th-iffis-opening-film-the-man-who-knew-infinity/

By Birkarnelzelzit Thiyam

Many scientists pray when their results are out of track. Why? Why these leaders admit the fact of being unable to tell why the dead breath? Over the ages, there have been mysteries that make all of us cry out for the exact result. Almost every religion speaks of the life after death. To neutralise the fact of being unable to control the naughty humans, people make up stories i.e. ghost stories. From the early life, we are with these stories which make us develop the feeling of getting scared of the dark. 70% of the world’s population propagates that there is nothing called ghost. I don’t mean to all go back to the drawing board. What about the case of Emily rose’s exorcism? Why the science cannot explain this? I don’t think the scientists were so busy that they cannot put their hands on this matter. Of the original team of archaeologists who were present when the ancient tomb of the boy king Tutankhamun was opened, only one lived to a ripe old age. Why is the dead of this little king so famous? Is this because of the curse? Mohammed Ibrahim, Egypt’;s director of antiquities, in 1966 argued with the government against letting the treasures from the tomb leave Egypt for an exhibition in Paris. He pleaded with the authorities to allow the relics to stay in Cairo because he had suffered terrible nightmares. The boy himself came up to him in his dream and told him to stop, if not he showed him how he will die. Ibrahim left a final meeting with the government officials, stepped out into what looked like a clear road on a bright sunny day, was hit by a car and died instantly. Is this just a story? In 1969, Richard Adamson lost his wife within 24 hours after speaking out against the curse. His own son also broke his back in a plane crash when he also spoke the same. Do you think its coincidence? What about the haunt in Eastern State Penitentiary, Pennsylvania, United States and Waverly Hills Sanatorium – Kentucky, United States? To believe this is a great challenge, I know. But if we know where do we go after we die or what happens after death then we are sure to believe all these things. To show the light that science somehow support life after death was projected by Einstein. As said by Einstein, “energy cannot be destroyed, energy cannot be created, it just changes from one form to another,” all the mysteries become realistic now. The electrical energy which creates our heart beat, where does this energy goes after we die? This is the question? Is ghost the new form of energy that is formed from those energies? Most of the parapsychologist believe that people those who have the sixth sense are the ones who mostly experience this. When the energy comes, he/she relates which his/her past experiences and starts to see unnatural things called ghost.

Even if we don’t believe in ghost stories, we still like to hear things related to those supernatural elements. The Americans started a thing call “ghost hunting,” making teams of ghost hunters to create an element of suspense to the public. But off the shot, there are cases of getting calls from people who have already died, shadows following, etc. Leaving all these mysteries behind now we move on to another talk called reincarnation which no one could explain. Anne frank’s reincarnation is the most famous one. Ten years after she passed away at the concentration camp, a girl called Barbro Karlen was born in a Christian family in Sweden. When Barbro became three, she told her mom that her name was not Barbro but Anne frank. Her parents told her to called “Ma and Pa” but she refused to say and told them that they are not her real parents, she told that her real parents will come to take her. At first her parents thought it was just a fantasy but it holds true at last. All likes and dislikes of Anne and Barbro were same.

Personal experiences are another cases and the scientific views stand on the other side. We are surrounded by mysteries. Majority believes the view of Einstein. No one knows the other world beyond science, the world of negative and positive energies.

The evidence of ghosts that we have today are no better than those we had centuries ago. May be because ghosts are not real or may be because we are not developed enough to put our hands into their world. Even if all these issues are burning, we still go to watch horror movies.

The writer can be reach at birkarnelzelzitthiyam3073@gmail.com

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2015/11/hungry-souls-something-beyond-the-reach-of-science-sometimes-end-is-the-new-beginning/

By Sheikh Noorul Hassan

Let me clarify a few things: India moved away from the European form of secularism (They grew tired of centuries of interference by the church and hence distanced religion from the state). India, on the other hand, considered secularism to be about providing equal footing for all religions. Gandhi probably plumped for this as he used religious motifs in all his campaigns. His discourses and bhajans eulogised all religions. This stance is also due to how Independence happened from India’s perspective.

Now, let’s take this complaint about appeasement as this will also be clarified if you study the path of independence. If you read about freedom movement especially in the 1920-1945 period you will see a gradual polarisation along communal lines. Cow protection, Hindi-Hindu-Hindutva, ghar wapsi -Shuddhi etc., took root even as the Muslims hardened their stance in parallel with their own version of tabligh and Tanzim (there was even a tussle for language. Urdu was main language in United Provinces in the 19 century. The Hindu literary movement started in the late 19th century and with the growth of local printing press and publication helped distance Hindi from Urdu which increasingly became a Muslim language. Now this beautiful language is almost nearing extinction in India). Cong tried to keep the two groups together with Gandhi trying hard even though the British found it useful to keep up the feud (For e.g. in the 1931 riot in United Provinces, some 42 mosques and 18 temples were razed. And a highly respected congressman like Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi was killed). All this led Jinnah to grow suspicious and demand Pakistan. The role of Gandhi and Nehru was projected as anti-patriotic by the Hindu right. The fact is: These fights between the Hindu groups and Muslim groups almost made it difficult to look for any reconciliation. In such a situation, Nehru and Gandhi took the view that India will be for all religions even as Pakistan became an Islamic state (more so later with rise of Zia ul haq). India on the other hand, wanted to convince the minorities that they will be safe. Congress, post Independence tried hard to keep everyone’s interest. Gandhi and later Nehru became a villian in the eyes of Hindu right.

In such a situation, a uniform civil code was a difficult attempt. Forget the marriage law, even if you take inheritance law, you will find each religion (including the HUF laws of Hindus) have their pluses and minuses. Which one to adopt? So, the founding fathers took the easy way by keeping all of them including what seems today to be an illiberal law like polygamy and triple talaq. Uniform Civil Code is a great hope but for that you need to create an environment of trust and also an educated populace. Not the way Modi and BJP wants to push down.

Haj subsidy is a bit of a narrative propaganda by the RSS and BJP. Air travel was costly and even limited (state controlled by AI) and many Muslims were poor and in that background it entered (Even as late as 1995-96, you needed govt. pull to get telephone lines). Just for balance, Hindu temples also get lot of grants and supports even now. A lot of temple upkeep is with govt.  For example, take TN and you will find Hindu priests also get salary and perks. There is also this insinuation that Mosques are in Muslims hands while Hindu temples are controlled by govt. One example, the Hindus used to feud over admin of temples as Hindus are decentralized (unlike Waqf or SGPC). Some temples were rich and complaints of stealing was regular. I remember the Tirpati temple infightings. I am sure if your society members fight, the govt. provides admin. Same happened to Hindu temples.

Now coming to politics and its influence in so called appeasement. In Nehru’s time there was hardly an opposition worth its name. The one internal mistake he made was to force Hindi in the south. This effectively resulted in Congress losing out in TN and that’s how regional parties grew. The first feud happened when Indira Gandhi took over. Her nationalisation efforts, Indo-Bangladesh war won her admirers (this gave her Bharat Ratna when the nation was in a exuberant mood having discovered a great PM). I guess all that got into her head and her insecurity resulted in emergency. She also cut down the leadership pipeline in Congress which it suffers to this day. Janta party gained power with the exuberant JP movement but they could not hold on. In fact, what is remembered of that period is the ousting of MNC like Coca Cola etc., Even JWT became HTA. Indira came back until Punjab boiled over and consumed her (in turn caused the 1984 riots). Rajiv came in that backdrop with lots of youthful energy. Alas, his inexperience was a let down (one of his worst decision was the Shah bano case that sort of made Congress seem as appeasing Muslims though they kept their befuddled indifference) and that’s how India gave a second chance to the coalition. So many governments formed and it was a painful period as VP Singh brought in Mandal commission.

Mandal changed the election arithmetic resulting in the growth of regional parties in Hindi heartland. Obviously, the upper class was angry as this catapulted the lower castes upwards.

After Rajiv’s assassination, Rao changed India’s economic landscape with liberalisation policies. This was the time when Advani found a way to unite Hindus using Ayodhya working with VHP. As usual, the fence sitting Congress slept as UP bled with the polarisation. This polarisation enabled Vajpayee to take power. Vajpayee’s tenure ended with the Gujarat pogrom.

The entire 21st century is marked by electoral arithmetic of caste and religious grouping to grab power. India’s economic growth in 2003-2007 period also brought in corruption which has become endemic.

If you see in this backdrop, you will realize that Congress is reactive party while BJP is an opportunistic party which uses whatever it suits to win sometimes socialism and self reliance (JP movement), sometimes communalism and even parochialism. Historically, all sangh groups depended heavily on Marwari generosity (even pre Independence). Trade groups rarely got directly involved in national movement as their trade depended on the British benevolence. Of course, there were a few exceptions like GD Birla, Bajaj etc., So, in a way the sanghis have little to prove their patriotic credentials. So, they need to steal from history by misrepresenting it. So they invent all sorts of villians from Aurangzeb and Tipu Sultan using today’s yardstick of morality with the aim of proving Hindus have been wronged.

So, if you see from this background you will see the need to create a narrative of strong Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan. Development has been added by Modi to make it palatable to all and that’s is masterstroke to gain the creditable victory

However, as you see, I really want politicians to focus on social and economic development since a youthful India is quite liberal and western looking (at least the urban ones). This is much tougher as we have not really built much of social and liberal society overall what with poor literacy and poverty. So its much better to make people feud on silly things like Ghar wapsi, beef, Tipu Sultan and so on.

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2015/11/politics-and-its-influence-in-so-called-appeasement/