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General
Vol. 9 No. 1 (2024)Editorial
This issue of Samyukta: A Journal of Gender and Culture brings together a collection of articles delving into the intricacies of social, political, and mediated narratives that construct and inform women's lived realities. Challenging the socially normalized perceptions of women's identities and experiences, the articles provide valuable insights into how women assert their agency in a male-dominated world plagued by social and political violence. “Woman and Militant Nationalism: Srijit Mukherji’s Rajkahini and the Issue of Partition” by Tania Chakravertty unsettles the Madonna-Whore binary through a reading of Rajkahini that depicts the active participation of prostitutes in a brothel in scripting a form of militant nationalism during the Indian Independence Movement. “Battling Binaries: The Psychosocial Endurance of Gender Constructs in West Asian War Fiction” by Manisha Bhadran challenges the grammar and vocabulary used to navigate the experiential world of conflict zones in the contemporary world. The paper problematizes the stereotypes of the binaries like civilian / combatant and home / front to situate women in war zones as active participants in the conflict. “Survivor Narratives and the Politics of Echmukutty’s Memoir” by T. Amiya and “Voices of Resistance: Caste and Gender in Meena Kandasamy's Poetry” by Karthika S are discussions of powerful narratives of and by women that further challenge the victim / survivor binary. Echnukutty’s memoir as well as Meena Kandasamy’s poems are verbal attacks against the violence of casteist and patriarchal discourses by women who refuse to be bogged down by discrimination and violence. Visual narratives disseminated mostly through broadcast and digital media play a seminal role in conditioning social perceptions. In this hypermediated world of visual narratives, “Virtual Discrimination: Advertisements and Self Image” by Corrine Rita War discusses the tropes and metaphors frequently used in advertisements that aid and abet the patriarchal structures. As any discussion of women’s issues cannot be confined to a select set of disciplines but demands a trans-disciplinary approach. “Empowering Women through Self Help Groups led Microcredit: A Novel Initiative” by Veena Renjini K K takes us through the new forms of economic interventions targeted towards enhancing the empowerment of women. This issue concludes with a paper that challenges the prevailing paradigm of feminist discourse, which frequently restricts itself to explicit gender debates. “Exploring the Division of Labour in the Family: Insights from Women in the Service Sector in Darjeeling Town” by Ritu Mangar is a sociological study of the negotiations of working women with the gendered spatialities of the domestic sphere. In "Celebrification through Media Spectacles: Emerging Forms of Performativity in Indian Politics," Lakshmi Sukumar offers a critical examination of the burgeoning mediated culture of political performances in India. The analysis reveals that while the narrative constructions of male politicians are characterized by power and control, the representations and performances of female politicians continue to emphasize their femininity.In conclusion, this issue aims to redefine the boundaries of contemporary academic discussions on women's issues through an analysis of diverse narrative constructions. To maintain the academic rigour of the discussion, texts from varied domains—literary, visual, and social—have been included. This approach aids in mapping the fluid boundaries of literary and cultural texts, thereby challenging conventional patriarchal rhetoric that offers a reductive understanding of women's agency.
G. S. Jayasree
Chief Editor
Samyukta: A Journal of Gender and Culture
https://samyuktajournal.in -
General
Vol. 8 No. 2 (2023) -
Gender & Nationalism
Vol. 8 No. 1 (2023)ISSN No: 2583-4347
Editorial
The January 2023 issue of Samyukta: A Journal of Gender and Culture attempts to read the protracted relationship between the nation and gender in the Indian subcontinent, in the time period stretching from the 19th century to the recent past. The key assumption here is that nationalist discourse anywhere in the world is gendered; particularly so in the Indian subcontinent. We have examined how the differential power relations between the sexes were played out in this vast region, from the 1850’s when the collective life of the populace was/is under both threat and rapprochement.
We have in this number original papers which present a revisiting of the brutal massacre at Jallianwala Bagh or a reading of the state intervention and militarism that erased thousands from the face of the earth in Sri Lanka or even a critical commentary on the energetic resistance staged by women against the naked power of the state in Shaheen Bagh in recent times. The idea of the nation looms large behind all these confrontations. A close reading of such instances show us that the women participants were not ‘feminists’ fighting for equal rights with men, but active players in movements defining citizenship or claiming the rights of both men and women, who inhabit a particular stretch of land.
Narratives like these take us to the front line of the struggles for freedom, in the broadest sense of the term. We strongly feel the need to revisit his-story from this perspective, in the light of feminist historiography. We have included papers that look beyond the rhetoric of inclusion and exclusion. We have not insisted on any theoretical analysis, as we preferred to leave it to the scholar to decide how s/he would prefer to structure the paper.
G. S. Jayasree
Chief Editor
Samyukta: A Journal of Gender and Culture
https://samyuktajournal.in -
General
Vol. 7 No. 2 (2022)ISSN No: 2583-4347
Editorial
In keeping with the policy of Samyukta to bring to the fore the protracted culture of Kerala over the last 1000 years, may be too ambitious a project, we have included in this number two papers spanning the period from the 14th to the 20th century. Pyari Suradh discusses the Kerala School of Astronomy and Mathematics, an important intellectual circle which disintegrated and died out after the European invasion of India. She hints at the extent to which colonial control of knowledge creation and distribution robbed the original Indian thought in the field of mathematics for centuries till the contribution of Madhava of Sangamagrama was brought to the fore by mathematicians in the 20th century.
Taking a lead to the 20th century, we have also included the paper by N Sasidharan, Build up of Class Consciousness: Agitational Politics in Malabar, which is based on the idea that the ‘social and political radicalism’ in Kerala had its origins in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He goes on to posit that the Communist Party of India (Marxist) has its roots in the early radicalism that covered the length and breadth of Kerala in the first half of the last century. Sasidharan contends that “This was due to the impact of modernisation and became what could be termed as Kerala sub- nationalism”. The paper goes on to examine its intersections with caste system , land relations and 19th century religious revival in this interesting study of the spread and reach of radicalism in Kerala.
G. S. Jayasree
Chief Editor
Samyukta: A Journal of Gender and Culture
https://samyuktajournal.in -
Beginnings of Gender Discourses in Modern Keralam: Revisiting Early Women's Magazines
Vol. 7 No. 1 (2022)ISSN No: 2583-4347
Guest Editorial
This number is about early women’s magazines in Keralam that mark an important phase in the history of women’s writing, feminist movement, and modern gender formations. The last decades of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century witnessed an explosion in women’smagazines in the major languages spoken in the Indian subcontinent. Susie Tharu and
- Lalitha in their landmark work Women Writing in India (1991) identify the period as “a high point of women’s journalism.” They note that in the regional languages, women edited magazines for women. This trend across languages was generally the result of the projects of colonial modernity and reformist movements.
Curiously, many of the early women’s magazines in Keralam were edited and published by men. This changed subsequently as magazines were launched by women editors and publishers, many of whom had benefitted from the colonial education system. These editors were mostly first-generation scholars from the upwardly mobile castes. The complex social formations which were a result of the colonial rule, the English education, the rise of print media and press, the freedom struggle and the reformations which oscillated between tradition and modernity, had urged women to rethink their position in the society. The early women’s magazines from Keralam reflected this cultural turn, critiquing hierarchical relations of authority between women and men that had historically functioned to the disadvantage of women.
Magazines got published in Malayalam from the 1840s by missionaries and social reformers. However, women’s magazines started appearing in Malayalam only towards the last decade of the 19th century, and continued through the first three decades of the 20th century. Most economically and socially privileged communities which came to the fore during this period had their own women’s magazines. Several magazines such as Keraliyasugunabodhini (1886), Sarada (1904), Lakshmibai (1905), Mahilaratnam (1916), Mahila (1921), Sahodari (1925), Mahilamandiram (1927), Malayalamanika (1931), and Stree (1933) were in circulation during this period.
Early women’s magazines have played a crucial role in the formation and structuring of modern gender identities and social relations. These interventions of a generation of women who stood at the crossroads of tradition and modernity tell us about the negotiations, revolts and resistances they encountered in carving out a space for themselves. The women’s magazines urged women to recast femininity, instructing them on the new social/sexual contracts and duties. Women from the non-privileged sections of the society like dalits, tribals, transgenders, and sexual minorities did not figure in these discussions directly. It was as recent as the 1980s and 90s that the early women’s magazines were researched and studied closely, drawing attention to the sidelining of the non-privileged.
As more than hundred years separate us from the early women’s magazines in Malayalam, it is essential to revisit them to understand the significant factors that have shaped the formative period of modern gender identities in Keralam. The discourses that unfolded in the pages of the early women’s magazines interrogated the ways gender identities were constituted differently in different social classes/castes/sections. The present issue of Samyukta examines women’s magazines of the long nineteenth century, and reviews the ways these magazines imagined and advocated gender identities in Keralam as notions of gender are intrinsically linked to structures of gender relations in any society.
Guest Editor - SHALINI M
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Peace and Education
Vol. 6 No. 2 (2021)ISSN No: 2583-4347
Guest Editorial
Peace is a deliberate, hard to make, at times 'impossible' choice; it's not something that simply 'happens'. It's the responsibility of all, not the duty of a few. The most effective way to instil this knowledge in an ever-conflicted world is undoubtedly to include Peace Studies in the curriculum.
Efforts at introducing Peace Education (PE) began in 1945 with the UNESCO declaring that “since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed”. Peace Education was contended to be the only means to create and sustain a long-term change in the thought and action of future generations which could possibly result in the absence of violence and the presence of social justice. PE was therefore designed to cultivate the knowledge, skills, attitudes, norms and behaviours conducive to the emergence and sustenance of peace, and also to aid the creating of systems that would actualize non-violence, non-discrimination, social justice, environmental care and sustainable development. The scope of PE later on widened to incorporate Gender Studies, Human Rights Education, International Relations, Non-violence Studies, Culture Studies, Disarmament Studies,
Environmental Studies and such other programmes. The efficiency and the impact of Peace Education interventions in schools and institutions of higher learning have been widely assessed and they have proven to result in decreased violence as well as improved attitudes and cooperation among pupils.
However, there is a conceptual dilemma of Peace Education which is most consequential, and which needs to be critiqued. Quite a number of theories of peace use conflict as their point of departure and the absence of violence as their dominant objective. By setting “conflict” at the crux of theories of peace and “conflict management” as its supreme goal, Peace Studies has moved away from its primary objectives which are —to explore the nature of peace as well as the possibilities of peace building; to give sufficient attention to the nurturing of the inherent capacities of citizens, organizations, communities, civil societies and governments, not just to prevent violence but to form harmonious relationships; to build a civilisation of peace— just and peaceful, diverse and united, benevolent and prosperous, environmentally healthy and technologically advanced, knowledge rich and morally strong.
The present issue of Samyukta has two major sections – (1) Peace Education – that is, education or the teaching/learning of peace related material, and (2) Education for peace, which is a holistic way of education which aims at instilling the notion of peace among individuals, communities and countries. We have included articles on the theoretical conceptualisation of Peace Education as well as the practice of it like transformative education and practical diversity, from all parts of the world. The purpose of this issue is to incite reflection on the very nature of peace as well as to the various approaches to Peace Studies; to suggest new directions for the debates on peace education; to identify questions that might generate discussion among a wide audience and stakeholders such as the necessity to ‘teach’ peace when violence comes naturally; to imagine that ‘one world’ where peace is the way of life; to encourage collaboration between different disciplines towards the practice of peace; and to offer practical suggestions and solutions that will engender lasting peace which is vital to the contemporary world.
Editors: Sreedevi K. Nair (Managing Editor) & Parvati Menon (Guest Editor)
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Life Writing
Vol. 6 No. 1 (2021)ISSN No: 2583-4347
Guest Editorial
This edition of Samyukta: A Journal of Gender and Culture comes at a crucial time in global history. The pandemic is a significant stakeholder in the lived and imagined realities of human and non-human participants everywhere. It will soon be well-nigh difficult to fashion a narrative outside of the impact it has had. Long days of lockdown, quarantines- mandated or self- imposed, the politics of vaccines and oxygen precarity, dialectics of homelessness, domestic migrants, narratives and perceptions of development, the questions of citizenship and participative governance are looming large over memory and history. These are sure to find expression in the times to come, thus changing the landscape of Life Writings in a rather metamorphic manner.
Life Writing refers to the ability to inscribe the personal with the script of history – to ensure that a certain time and experience does not pass without leaving a mark, without telling the story from a different angle. The experiential is as important as the political, cultural, spatial milieu that somehow will find their way in. The voice that narrates- the I or the third person- resonates on accounts of the tone or empathy, not just the levels of accuracy. That is ofcourse an aspect that has been oft debated upon in Life Writing- the question of accuracy. And is a person really obliged to tell us the truth about the most intimate, possible embarrassing moments of their life? Or if they choose to leave these segments out, then is that even a rounded, fair narrative of their life? And what did they actually set out to do? What separates a biography from a hagiography? When does a voice stop sounding rational and the finger-pointing start? And do those who get painted the villains in these stories ever get to make their clarifications? How does history treat them? what is a fictionalized biography? Is a fictionalized autobiography a genre of the novel?
There are these and many more questions that routinely get asked in the course of Life Writing studies. Despite these grey areas, Life Writing is an eminently saleable genre, with ‘tell -all’ books doing extremely well. The lives of the rich and famous, the doyens in various spheres of human achievement put their stories out there. The tendency to confess, that Foucault refers to, continues to this day. Perhaps, it’s the voyeur within us- perhaps, it is the need to feel in control by participating in the narrative that makes the author vulnerable, relatable- human- that makes Life writing such a popular genre.
Be it to inspire, to vilify, clarify, justify or to immortalize, Life Writing holds immense appeal.
I view Life Writing as an important segment of a philosophical conceptualisation of the world. It contributes greatly to the intuitive understanding (Bergson) that one needs in order to correlate elemental conversations that lie at the bottom of
the way we construct our societies, incorporate nuances of language and create stratified memories. The obsession with multidimensional Time and the visualisations of time travel that we see in contemporary culture could all be manifestations of this intense desire to actually see what it was like, to change the course of events and feel the thrill of relevance- in short, to live the lives that are being written about.
At this pivotal moment in our history, it is considered important to retain a memory of things as they were because, the vocabularies that we shall apply to ourselves, the yardsticks with which we measure time, lives, social dynamics is on the verge of change. The unpredictability of it all makes the past seem more stable than it actually was. In this aspect, Time is like cement. It sets and settles into epochs and eras and develops characteristics- a pre-calamitous- calamitous, post-calamitous continuum. Reading lives becomes as important as writing them. there is often a danger of anachronistic readings that are quick to judge and which seek revisionist redactions. There is a need to understand the instability and vulnerability of Time, Society and People. When written and read from this vantage point, Life Writing opens up spatial tunnels that run between the lines and outside the pages. Time becomes truly multidimensional and multinarrative. Polyphony, which is the purest form of both order and anarchy becomes emergent as a rhizomatic entity.
The current issue of Samyukta draws from life, art, film, experience- and curates a valuable archive of scholarship that looks into the relevance of these works, the arcs of narratives these lives have created. The world shaped by these lives and thoughts and vice-versa is worth remembering, studying and viewing with empathy.
Kukku Xavier - Guest Editor
Assistant Professor at the Department of English, All Saints' College,Thiruvananthapuram
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Literature and Popular Culture
Vol. 5 No. 2 (2020)ISSN No: 2583-4347
Editorial
In this number of Samyukta, with its focus on Literature and Popular Culture, we have included papers on the unsung heroes battered by the bigotry of mainstream culture, A Ludo-Narrative Analysis of The Construction of the Cyborg Player in Transistor, and the Representation of Cannabis in Selected Hindi Film Songs.
However, the highlight of this issue is a hermeneutical analysis of the art and craft of photography. As a medium of representation, photographs capture our attention and constantly confront us at emotional, rational, physical and interpersonal levels. The paper Pause, Click: Photography, an Introductory Reading by Farah Zachariah primarily sees photographs as visual texts and looks into how readers or viewers negotiate meanings from them. It analyses a set of photographs on conditions of violence and trauma by engaging the principles of critical hermeneutics to interpret and give scope for multiple readings. As mentioned in the paper, “Photography can be treated as a language, acquiring meaning through the cultural conventions, and conscious and unconscious processes, which cannot be merely reduced to subject matter, visual style and authorial intentions”.
Any discussion of popular culture, at present, would appear incomplete without looking into Harry Potter both as a fictional text and cinema. We have included in this number two papers on the ‘magic’ of the Harry Potter narratives, House-Elves in Harry Potter: Slaves by Themselves by Annu Sabu Palathingal and Locating the Grotesque: A Meta-theoretical Reading by Prasida P. The objective of Annu Sabu Palathinga’s paper is to understand and examine why the house-elves remain as slaves to wizards even though they have superior magical capabilities. The article by Prasida P. seeks to comprehend the multidimensional understanding of the term ‘grotesque’ with reference to the different ideologies, disciplines, thought practices and representations in sync with the spirit of the age it is associated with. For such representations, the ‘grotesque’ is artfully brought to fore as an adept tool by authors and artists, as the most efficacious artistic weapon for mirroring the intricate reality and inherent contradictions in human life.
G. S. Jayasree
Chief Editor
Samyukta: A Journal of Gender and Culture
https://samyuktajournal.in -
Reading Thathri Narratives
Vol. 5 No. 1 (2020)ISSN No: 2583-4347
Guest Editorial
What do Sherlock Holmes, Count Dracula, the Vietnam War, the Holocaust and the two World Wars have in common? Apart from the elements of inherent drama and trauma that all of them share in varying degrees and measures, they have proved to be fecund sources for Hollywood and the flow of movies based on them is far from over. If we accept the existence of a public imagination and collective memory, we can postulate that this assorted group of fictitious characters and historic events somehow resonate with the viewers in a way that is not easy to explain and demonstrate. Perhaps every culture has its own spaces and zones with an enduring appeal which an outsider is almost always bound to lose sight of.
In the context of Kerala, and of course elsewhere, women have been forced to play a strange role. While she is the default homemaker and servant in most domestic spaces, the onerous responsibility of preserving and perpetuating the honour of families, tribes, castes and clans has fallen on her shoulders. Though in all probability there had been a period when women were revered as the sacred agents of procreation, modern age has systematically sought to downgrade her both as a locus of lust, a seat of sin and the source of sexuality which is sure to wreak havoc unless properly regulated. Malleus Maleficarum, a handbook written in 1486 by German Dominican monks Jakob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer, says: “All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which, in women, is insatiable.” Centuries later we see a surprisingly similar sentiment echoed in many parts of Kerala in the form of the Smarthavicharam. While it was a standard and perhaps justifiable practice to mete out severe punishments for crimes such as murder and robbery, which generally caused loss of money or property, the Smarthavicharam would inflict more harrowing punishments on the women of Namboothiri community if and when a shadow of doubt was cast on their chastity. The woman was never executed; so were the men found guilty of adultery. But for most people involved in the business of such a trial, death was a more welcome choice.
Our attention was first drawn to the custom through the Malayalam movie Parinayam (1993). As students we appreciated movie—its sentimentality, music, visual depth—but did not know anything about the institution of Smarthavicharamand much about the actual condition of women in the Namboothiri community. We believed that both the sexes of a privileged community were equally privileged. In fact for a few years we thought the custom of subjecting a woman to such an inhumane trial was a figment of the writer’s imagination. Later we realised things were not so. Thathri’s trial attained greater clarity with the records in the Regional archives along with the knowledge that Kunnimel bungalow where she had been housed and which became the stage to her trial is the present day Hill Palace at Tripunithura and we have many living amongst us who were directly or indirectly affected by this event. As research scholars and teachers, we came to know a lot about the practice from conflictingly different sources. These descriptions were often downright wrong or exaggerated. So, with a view to grasping the institution and making sense of its larger socio-political context, we began to collect as many essays, books and memoirs on the topic as possible. To our amazement the result was more than satisfactory. A lot of primary materials and secondary reflections poured in from a wide variety of sources. Then we thought it would be great to have a serious academic discussion on the facts and facets of this extinct custom. It took the form of a national workshop. There was a kind of poetic justification in geographically fixing Maharaja’s college, Ernakulamwhich is situated literally next door to the archives which houses all the records of the state sponsored Thathri trial as the venue. Of course we did not feel Thathri’s spirit hovering around us!To our surprise, not only teachers from other departments but also a lot of men and women not affiliated to the academy turned up, and sat through the whole program in rapt attention, intervening and engaging in the sessions productively. Literally there was never a dull moment. In hindsight there was nothing surprising about the enthusiasm. Even today Smarthavicharam, specifically that of Thathri in 1905, and its dramatis personae hold out a unique charm to Malayalis. We may perhaps have succeeded in unobtrusively tucking away memories and allusions to this woman in the recesses of time, but definitely we have not exorcised her!
In the workshop we tried to translate and edit as many documents on the Smarthavicharam as we could and succeeded in producing a handful of drafts which were later revised and edited.
Guest Editor
P.K. SREEKUMAR & PRIYA JOSE K
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Contemporary Literatures
Vol. 4 No. 2 (2019)ISSN No: 2583-4347
Editorial
This number of Samyukta is an eclectic collection of papers covering the intersectionality of gendered spaces. In keeping with our interest in popular fiction, we have included a different reading of Harry Potter Series that looks into rewriting desire into canon in Harry Potter Slash Fanfiction and Women’s Writing. It examines slash fanfiction based on the Harry Potter series as a form of women’s writing. As stated by Lakshmi Menon in the abstract, “In doing so, it seeks to explore the ways in which slash fanfiction as a genre, with its queering of canonical content and often explicitly sexual narratives, represents an avenue for women to explore ideas of desire and sexuality while separating it from the female body”. This issue is rich in the scholarship of gender politics as we have included papers on the female body as a site of power and resistance, and gender incongruity and trans-identity.
To complement the study of resistance and inclusivity in the narratives of those kept away from the mainstream, we have a very sensitive reading of Pulayathara by Paul Chirakkarode. Published in the year 1962, Pulayathara was the first novel in Malayalam to give a graphic description of the Dalit Christian condition. Set in the Kuttanad region of Alappuzha in the 1930s, it unveils the unfinished agenda of the social reform movement that was ripping apart the fortifications of caste system in the state, when the momentum of the whirlwind of changes was delayed by the rise and spread of the Communist movement. The novel was largely ignored by the reading public and critical establishments. S Devika maintains in her paper an exposition of the dialectics of proselytization foregrounded in Pulayathara as a strategy of resistance against the enslavement, ill treatment and exploitation of the Dalits. It discusses the futility of the strategy of conversion to Christianity used by the Dalits to extricate themselves from the morass of casteism and to upgrade their social status, It brings to light the disjuncture between the promised sense of equality and the lived experience of discrimination that conversion to Christianity had in store for the downtrodden people.
G. S. Jayasree
Chief Editor
Samyukta: A Journal of Gender and Culture
https://samyuktajournal.in -
Literature and Literariness
Vol. 4 No. 1 (2019)ISSN No: 2583-4347
EditorialThis number of Samyukta examines the complex registers of literature and literariness. Defining the terrains of the ‘literary’ has always been a contested act. Narrating the lives of those who are kept away from the mainstream has hardly ever found a space there. Therefore we have included a paper by Shimi Shajan A that brings together the problematic aspects of queer identity and black citizenship. Mainstream cinema has largely ignored homoerotic relations between the ‘non-white-skinned’ people. The film under discussion, Barry Jenkins’ Oscar winning film, ‘Moonlight’(2016) , addresses the homophobic tendency within the Black community. The film also talks about the issue of normative masculinity and the difficulty faced by young boys to live up to the societal expectations. In keeping with the professed editorial policy of Samyukta, we include papers that attempt a re-reading of established critical positions. Laura Mulvey, in her canonical essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema “, has naturalised male gaze prompting everyone to look at the world through the eyes of men. This has in fact had the opposite effect from what Mulvey might have intended. In the paper “Photographs as Cultural Text: Decoding Mary Ellen Mark’s Falkland Road: Prostitutes of Bombay “, Gopika Gopan discusses the work of the American photographer, who used her photographic proficiency to challenge the discourses concerned with prostitution. Through her female gaze she exposed the unnoticed world of prostitution in India. Her photos of the prostitutes of Kamathipura presented the condition of women who were used for the sexual gratification of men. Mary Ellen Mark gave the world a new style of photography, that of unapologetically documenting the vulnerable sections of society.
We have also included Sreya Miriam Shaji’s paper which discusses a uniform taxonomy and theory of Fanfiction, a new genre that is garnering attention in the digitization of literary spaces. It is a popular form of fan labour and is an enormously popular genre with a niche audience.
G. S. Jayasree
Chief Editor
Samyukta: A Journal of Gender and Culture
https://samyuktajournal.in -
Poems on Resistance
Vol. 3 No. 2 (2018)ISSN No: 2583-4347
EditorialThe focus of this number is on poetry which are representations of resistance. Samra Fuad’s paper “Mulligatawny Dreams: Encountering the No-Man’s Land Between the Mother Tongue and Post-Colonial Language” views the rejection of colonial rules of language as one of the most obvious manifestations of deliberate anti-colonial actions in the battle to reclaim a national identity post colonisation. In a multicultural state like Keralam, this becomes a difficult exercise. We celebrate bi-lingual writers like Kamala Das who wrote in their mother tongues as well as English. Swetha Antony’s paper “A Journey with no Return”: Kamala Das and the Poetic Manifesto of Flânerie” engages with the evolution in the critical approaches towards understanding the poetry of Kamala Das in English, beginning with how her poetry was perceived as an epitome of Modernism within the discourse of postcolonialism. The focus of this paper is on redefining her literary identity by imbibing the nuances associated with the notion of flânerie.
G. S. Jayasree
Chief Editor
Samyukta: A Journal of Gender and Culture
https://samyuktajournal.in -
Poems on Resistance
Vol. 3 No. 1 (2018)ISSN No: 2583-4347
EditorialSamyukta has been deeply interested in issues related to translation since its inception. When it comes to the poetry, it is considered untranslatable by Sreedevi K Nair, who, in her article “Is Poetry Lost in Translation?” differentiates between a poet and a translator. A poet expresses her own emotional, imaginative, or intellectual apprehension of facts and experiences while in the case of a translation, the original work stimulates the translator so much that she experiences a deep affinity for the work which in turn prompts her to create a version of that experience in her language. It is true that no one can think another’s thoughts or feel another’s feelings exactly and in totality, but this is not what is expected of a translator either. The basic qualification that a good translator should meet is that she should be able to peruse a literary work in such a way that she can make a sensible reading of it.
G. S. Jayasree
Chief Editor
Samyukta: A Journal of Gender and Culture
https://samyuktajournal.in -
Creative Writing from the Islamic World
Vol. 2 No. 2 (2017)ISSN No: 2583-4347
Guest Editorial
This issue marks quite a divergent path for Samyukta which has so far been engaged in publishing critical analyses of literature and culture. The idea of this unique issue on creative writing from the Islamic world, evolved from the deliberations and discussions generated by the previous issue on Islamic Feminism. Those deliberations were a timely aide-memoire that we in the Indian academia were yet to constructively engage with religious life worlds, especially from the Islamic/ Muslim milieu. As academicians, the present political turmoil also provoked us to recognise how Islamophobic public discourses have been furthering communal distrust and divide. Of late, more public intellectuals and academicians are engaged in analysing how geopolitical structures of statist violence, increasing economic inequality, and unjust wars have left the Muslim populations ravaged and though scant, there are attempts at documenting its wide-ranging impact on the everyday life of Muslims. This important yet difficult task has been more daunting for the difficulty in developing new incisive critical apparatus with existing theories and terminologies which are biased. But it is an indefatigable truth that even when we are challenged in academia by the absence of appropriate terminologies, the ebb and flow of creative articulations are not stemmed by such challenges. In this special issue we have tapped into that possibility of a 'non-academic' language to deal with the myriad hues of the Islamic world. This special issue of Samyukta completely focuses on creative voices from the Islamic world that would provide an insight into the life worlds that the world at large perceives to be different by virtue of faith. It is by design that we used the term Islamic world in lieu of Muslim world; to keep it open for all voices that adhere to/ engage with Islam; rather than to use battered media categorizations that would limit the scope of this volume to specific geographic locations or cultural specificities that are usually seen only as Arab and hence Muslim. Universalizing Muslim belief and tradition has been the prevalent media practice, though Muslims in different parts of the world live very different lives and talk about being Muslims in different ways. A key point is that there are not only diverse varieties of 'living-as-a-Muslim' but also differences of opinion among people who identify themselves as Muslims in their understanding of "Islam". The bouquet of articulations put together here stands testimony to this fact. This volume brings together a series of searing political commentaries and personal narratives very varied in their flavour and thrust. I believe these articulations would contribute towards such an understanding and engagement, resulting in positive transformations.Guest Editor - VARSHA BASHEER
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Islamic Feminism
Vol. 2 No. 1 (2017)ISSN No: 2583-4347
Guest Editorial
I approach the subject of ‘Islamic feminism’ as a historian whose life-long scholarship has focused on feminisms in the Middle East and broader Islamic world. Over the decades, operating in multiple locations, I have continued to examine feminisms that women in the Middle East and Islamic worlds have created for themselves/ourselves.Historically, feminisms emerged simultaneously in the East and the West. Feminism was not patented in the West. Feminism is not ‘Western.’ The myth that feminism is Western finds stubborn persistence among many Westerners who charge that Muslim societies and Islam itself are irredeemably sexist. The myth exists as well among Islamists and conservative Muslims living in the West who, like their counterparts in Africa and Asia, discredit the notion of an egalitarian Islam. Ironically, the canard that feminism is Western is even repeated by some Muslim gender equality proponents in the West who insist that feminism is a Western colonialist meta-narrative and in so doing, mirror precisely what arch patriarchal Islamists profess. For such individuals, the notion of an Islamic feminism is anathema.
Critical to understanding feminisms in Muslim societies is recognising the fluctuating connotations of the terms, ‘the secular’ and ‘the religious’. These terms must be historicised as their meanings have shifted from the late nineteenth century when the word ‘secular’ first appeared in Muslim societies in parts of Africa and Asia. In the Middle East, straddling Africa and Asia, the words ‘secular’ and ‘secularisation’ were introduced in the context of socio-cultural, economic, technological, and political transformation starting in the early 19th century in Egypt during processes of modern state-building. During the consolidating of the modern state, education and law, with the exception of personal status or family law, were typically removed from the jurisdiction of religious authorities and placed under the aegis of the state. While religious interpretation on matters relating to the family remained the purview of the religious authorities, such readings to be legally applicable by the state were translated into statutory law, called either ‘Muslim personal status law’ or ‘family law’ issued by the secular state as the Egyptian case illustrates. There was thus a confluence of ‘the secular’ and ‘the religious’, although the will of the state remained decisive. While ‘the secular’ connoted separation of religion and state (however imperfect) it also signified ‘the national’. Secular feminism in Egypt, thus, indicated Egyptian feminism.
The rise of a new egalitarian discourse of Islam called ‘Islamic feminism’ in the 1990s and its growing acceptance produced contradictory reactions within the world of Muslim women. The creators of the gender-egalitarian discourse of Islam, identified as ‘religious’, in the main, initially objected to the term ‘Islamic feminism’. They accepted the allegations perpetuated by Islamists and conservative Muslims that feminism was Western and therefore alien to Islam. Secular women with a feminist orientation, including, those who initiated the term Islamic feminism, marshalled the discourse in their campaigns to reform Muslim family laws. There were also Muslim women among the ranks of the secular feminists who rejected the possibility of an egalitarian Islam.
Because the terms ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ or ‘Islamic’ have been highly loaded, and the term ‘feminism’ has been widely misunderstood, terminology has fuelled contention. The answer, I argue, is not to jettison the terms but to clarify meanings and to be aware how ‘the secular’ and ‘the religious ‘are constituted (even mutually constituted) and contextually situated, and to acknowledge that feminisms have emerged organically from deep within Muslim societies. The challenge now globally and especially locally is not so much further elaborating a gender-egalitarian and gender-just Islam as practicing Islamic feminism and sharpening and putting into action an effective politics. Such a challenge is helped by understanding the wide range of experience over time and place. Samyukta’s special issue on Islamic feminism aims to contribute to this.
Guest Editor - MARGOT BADRAN
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Women in the Indian Performance Tradition
Vol. 1 No. 2 (2016)ISSN No: 2583-4347
Guest Editorial
The Samyukta special issue on 'Women in Indian Performance' is a continuation of the research focusing on women in Asian performance which I started in 2013.. Being a performer and researcher on Kutiyattam from India, I am specifically interested in studying the contribution of women to Indian performance traditions and this special issue is the culmination of that ambition. The volume brings together eight essays and two interviews contributed by scholars from India, the United States and Italy. The contributions also cover a range of highly interesting topics, from the interview of Kalanidhi Narayanan about her initial years of training and career, to a critical review of Nirbhaya, a play on the Delhi gang rape written by Yael Farber in 2013.
Essays and interviews this volume feature offers a radical reassessment of the place of women in Indian performances. What is the purpose of this special issue beyond the personal reasons listed above? Indian performance practice have been an active area of study among theatre scholars and practitioners all over the world for several decades, exerting substantial influence on the contemporary performance practices and actor-training methods. Nevertheless, critical debates and studies that aim at investigating and reassessing the role of women and their contribution to artistic practices in the Indian performance scene are relatively limited. Given the fact that Indian performances are broad and varied in number and style, such studies only marginally address the place and contribution of women in Indian performances. Critical work generating a more comprehensive view On women in Indian performances and mapping a broader territory in this relation is indeed necessary. Therefore, Samyukta special issue on 'Women in Indian performance is a novel attempt at initiating thoughts, generating scholarly work and critically reassessing the contribution of women in Indian performances.
Complexities involved with assessing the place of women in Indian performances are manifold and I am attempting to simply map the territory. Academic essays and interviews published in this special issue aim to acknowledge the creative contributions of women practitioners in Indian performances. I genuinely hope that this volume will make significant contribution to the area of gender studies in India.
Guest Editor - ARYA MADHAVAN
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Theories of Affect
Vol. 1 No. 1 (2016)ISSN No: 2583-4347
Guest Editorial
It is difficult to summarise either these rich and complex papers or (an equally difficult task) attempt to represent the event that triggered them, the international seminar "Decolonizing Theories of the Emotions" held in Thiruvananthapuram in November 2015. What follows is an attempt to engage in a conversation with the papers for this special issue.It is clear, and certainly obvious in the whole field of affect studies, that as scholars we are highly invested in generating taxonomies to provide a scaffolding for rational categorisation of what might generally be termed the non-rational or, perhaps more productively, what exceeds the rational.
What was certainly clear from the seminar is that there is no clear-cut divide between 'Western' and 'Indian' theories of the emotions since many of the papers referred to overlapping theories and theorists. What one can say, in general terms, is that Western scholars need to become more informed about and to engage with traditions in Indian philosophy and aesthetics and we hope this special issue will facilitate that project.
Guest Editor - SNEJA GUNEW