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Modern South Asian women’s writing wells up to the stirring surface of contemporary literature in now globally recognizable forms of fiction and memoir, inter alia, the novel, the poem, the biography, the autobiography. Yet, beneath these topmost layers of colonial and post-colonial literary tides flow undercurrents of precolonial women’s writing, often in radically other figurations of lettered expression. Even further down than the familiar temporal strata of the Vaiṣṇavite and Śaivite religious poetry written by the dozen authoresses ranging from Muktābāi to Rūpa Bhavānī between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries, there exists another place in the deep, like an underwater lake, of a much older women’s writing penned by Tantric women gurus. The majority of this archaic Buddhist literature streamed out of the Swat valley in Pakistan, a locality for no less than seven known female gurus, who lived, taught, or wrote there between the eighth and eleventh centuries. After a short prologue on Swat and its recent history, the essay surveys eleven female-authored medieval Tantric works, which range in genre from ritual treatises, meditation practice-texts, and mystic poems, to literary forms that even seem evocative of contemporary women’s gendered voices: spiritual biography and autobiography empowered by a place.
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There have been many attempts to narrate the life of Mīrābāī, the 16th-century Rajasthani princess and sant poetess. The extent of the texts centred around her life ranges from a few verses in Nābhādās’s Bhaktamāl from the beginning of the 17thcentury to the 20th/21st-century monographs. It substantially increases with time, especially in the past century, as well as does the quantity of information these texts provide to their readers. This paper compares the life writings by/about Mīrā from the two centuries after Mīrā’s alleged death with recent biographical material on Mīrā’s life and tries to classify the specific tendencies in interpreting her life in the recent publications as well as to identify the reasons behind them.
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Mary Bhore’s Some Impressions of England (Bhore 1900) forms a record of her travel to England and the basis of her argument for women’s education in India. While Bhore does not openly criticise the empire, her account of her experiences as well as her very presence in England invert the logic of imperial relations by turning the colonial subject into the ethnographic observer. Her memoir is not unlike the writing of the “England-returned” men and women in late-colonial India, but it shows a curious absence of the personal. Drawing on Foucault’s “Self Writing”, I will argue that Bhore’s text is as much “a narrative of the self” as it is about a shaping of the other; in other words, it is an attempt to turn her own experience into a kind of guide for her readers.
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During my fieldwork in Kerala in 2014 and 2015, made possible by the financial support of the National Science Centre in Poland, I was able to collect several manuscripts by women authors as well as some very rare printed editions of their works. From the collected sources I have decided to choose a poem based on the Santānagopāla theme, a story about a pious Brahmin and his wife losing one child after another. It recurs in the oeuvre of at least three women writers living at the turn of 19th and 20th centuries. We know very little about the lives of the authoresses but the selection of such a theme perhaps was not fortuitous and we will be able to notice their womanly sensitivity in its treatment or scenes from their own lives and gather more information about the authors themselves. In the present paper I will concentrate on the Santānagopāla poem written by Lakṣmī Tampurāṭṭi (1845–1909).
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The aim of the present paper is to discuss the process of self-creation discernible in hitherto unpublished letters written by Wanda Dynowska-Umadevi to Tadeusz Szukiewicz, her literary representative in Poland, acting on her behalf in 1938–1939. Besides discussing the documentary value of the letters, which, for instance, shed some light on Dynowska’s relationship with Tadeusz Pobożniak and her other eminent contemporaries, or contextualize the origin of selected volumes published afterwards with Biblioteka Polsko-Indyjska (Polish-Indian Library), I also try to show that the manner of Dynowska’s self-creation in the personal documents that predominantly concern the efforts to publish her articles intended to popularize India in Poland could have been shaped by the particular addressee of her letters, and thus culminated in Dynowska projecting herself in her own writings.
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This article examines the autobiographical writings of Lila Majumdar, 1908–2007, a writer most famous for zany, fantastical, defamiliarizing, speculative fiction for children and young adults. Majumdar was an influential maker of cultural history. While her natal Ray/Raychaudhuri family comprised master entertainers who simultaneously brought reformist, innovative values into the public sphere of the arts, the leading woman writer from this milieu, in her autobiographical and memoir-based volumes Ār konakhāne (‘Somewhere Else’, [1967] 1989), Pākdaṇḍī (‘Winding, Hilly Road’, [1986] 2001), and Kheror khātā (‘Miscellany’ or ‘Scrapbook’, [1982] 2009), imaginatively created utopias. These ‘otherwheres’, to use a word that captures utopian connotations that she creates in her writing, give voice to the marginal and the liminal. We find in her autobiographical writing the dual urge of longing for a utopian elsewhere, and a dissatisfaction with all the places one finds temporary mooring in.
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In her latest book, Gujrāt Pakistān se Gujrāt Hindustān tak (2017), Krishna Sobti (b. 1925), one of the best-known writers active on the Hindi literary scene, presents the reader with an autobiographical account focused on the events of 1947, where her personal experience of the Partition is reworked and presented in the guise of a novel. This paper proposes to analyse the stylistic devises (double frame approach, switching between the third-person and the first-person narratives, use of the dialogue, etc.) employed by the author to achieve her aim by drawing on the vast body of academic work on partition, violence, trauma and memory both in the local as well the global context.
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The article in the opening section foregrounds theoretical debate on autobiography with particular reference to women’s writing in South Asia. Subsequently, it presents motivations for recent interest in the genre amongst women writing in Hindi and, eventually, it looks into the narrative strategies employed by Krishna Agnihotri (Lagtā nahī ̃ hai dil merā (‘My heart is not in it’), 1996; Aur, aur... aurat (‘And, and… woman’), 2010) and Maitreyi Pushpa (Kasturī kuṇḍal basai (‘Kasturi and Her Jewel of a Daughter’), 2002; Guṛiyā bhītar guṛiyā (‘A Doll within a Doll’), 2008). Agnihotri and Pushpa authored two volumes of autobiographies and the article further analyses their various strategies of constructing their ‘narrative selves’ and of particular arrangement of their life stories in two separate volumes.
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This article aims to explore embodiment as articulated in Prabha Khaitan’s autobiography Anyā se ananyā, inscribing it in a philosophical journey that refuses the dichotomy between Western and Indian thought. Best known as the writer who introduced French feminist existentialism to Hindi-speaking readers through her translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Prabha Khaitan is positioned as a Marwari woman, intellectual, successful businesswoman, poet, novelist, and feminist, which makes her a cosmopolitan figure. In this article I use three analytical tools: the existentialist concepts of ‘immanence’ and ‘transcendence’—as differently proposed by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir; Julia Kristeva’s definition of ‘abjection’—what does not ‘respect borders, positions, rules’ and ‘disturbs identity, system, order;’ and the satī/śakti notion—both as a venerated (tantric) ritual which gains its sanction from the scriptures, and as a practice written into the history of the Rajputs, crucial to the cultural politics of Calcutta Marwaris, who have been among the most vehement defenders of the satī worship in recent decades.
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Phoolan Devi (10.08.1963–25.07.2001), the famous Bandit Queen still appears in stories about famous Indian women. However, while in India, mainly among poor villagers, she is usually described as a heroic defender of the poorest, in the West Phoolan is seen primarily as another victim of Indian patriarchal culture. Moreover, although most of books about Phoolan are based on interviews with her, every version of her biography differs from one another, which raises the question whether these differences are the consequence of a conscious manipulation of a person who tries to justify certain dark aspects of her life, since the famous dacoit owes her fame to her bloody act of revenge on Thakurs in the Behmai village, which was the biggest crime committed by bandits in India until then.The most popular story about Phoolan’s life is the film Bandit Queen made in 1994 by Shekhar Kapur, based on the book India’s Bandit Queen. The True Story of Phoolan Devi by Mala Sen, who is also the author of the screenplay. The autobiography of Phoolan Devi, who tried to stop the release of the Bandit Queen, claiming that it shows a false story, was written in response to those two works. By constructing her image in the autobiography, Phoolan Devi tries to appear as a very strong woman who could achieve a lot, in spite of adverse conditions. Yet it is hard to resist the impression that the autobiography of Phoolan Devi, despite of its very realistic elements, is to some extent a false testimony. The question remains whether it was the publisher, who decided to construct the story this way to satisfy the tastes of the Western readers and respond to their needs, just like the movie of Shekhar Kapur, or maybe Phoolan, deliberately or unknowingly, presented herself as a victim in search of sympathy after the massacre in Behmai.
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The word mneme, “memory”, appears 16 times in the Histories of Herodotus. The author, using the philological analysis of all its occurrences, investigates not only its significance in specific contexts but also defines and names functions that the word has in its place of use. Finally, the author classifies the identified meanings of the word mneme (in combination with the accompanying verbs) and compares its functions (as defined by the context).
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The peach (Prunus persica [L.] Batsch) is a tree native to the region known today as Northwest China, where its fruits were known around 2000 BC. Inhabitants of the Mediterranean Area came into contact with the peach probably between the 6th and 4th century BC thanks to the contacts with Persian Empire. In the western part of the Mediterranean Region the peach appeared later (ca. 1st c. AD). In the period under study there were many varieties of the peach, and they were eaten in many different ways – e.g. raw, dried, boiled etc. They could be consumed without any other ingredients, or as an element of more complicated dishes. Ancient and early Byzantine authors, who wrote their treatises between the 1st and 7th c. AD, and dealt with medicine (Dioscorides, Pliny the Elder, Galen, Oribasius, Aetius of Amida, Paul of Aegina, Athimus and others), described dietetic properties of a peach with details. Moreover, they left some information about a medical use of this fruit. This aspect of their works is an element of a wider and well-known phenomenon, i.e. an important role of all groups of aliments in the ancient art of healing.
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This essay investigates the extent to which Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh, and Indian literature as a whole, address the challenge of ecocriticism’s attempt to preserve India’s dying ecological crisis. The novel nostalgically discusses possible dimensions from which Rushdie reconnects readers with the once beautiful environment in order to suggest alternatives that may inspire a nation’s caring for its fast dying environment. Given that ecocriticism attempts to link and synthesize literary criticism and the environment by examining the various ecological crises in eco-literary discourses, this paper discusses possible axioms where conceptual problems can be raised and suggests the need for an expansive ecological representation in literary discourses. The attempts to preserve the physical environment and paintings depicting eco-heritage suggest a green politic of national eco-consciousness. Such heritage conservation and preservation in literature reveals Rushdie’s composite vision of the future of the methods of living, habitation and habitats across geographical boundaries. Rushdie’s green politics which interrogates the role of literature in the discourse of the environment re-echoes artistic postcoloniality as an alternative view that requires the participation of everyone in conserving the degrading environment.
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An essay on the social impact of the transformation of the medium of books, as seen in the light of Marshall McLuhan’s observation “The medium is the message.” The author shows that books, as a medium, are irreplaceable in the Western culture, which is ‘the culture of the written word,’ and points that despite their varied infl uence on this culture they still represent—to the Western mind—the values of truth and beauty.
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Marshall McLuhan, one of the most interesting but also most underestimated thinkers of late-twentieth-century, was mainly concerned with the impact of the media on individual and social human life. Although, in his interpretation, the term ‘medium’ is understood very broadly and covers all human products regardless of their purpose, McLuhan certainly focused on those elements of human production that serve communicating and passing information. As a representative of the so-called technological determinism he assumed that invention and dissemination of new ways of communication has far-reaching consequences not only in direct interpersonal relations, but also in the shape of the society and culture in which the new media operate. In this context, an interesting theme of McLuhan’s reflections is the use of movable type in the printing press introduced by Johannes Gutenberg and the related sequence of events that changed the face of Western culture. Mechanization of the printing process influenced, among other things, the way books function in the sociocultural milieu. According to McLuhan, the book is a medium of particular importance. This view may be related to his rootedness in literary studies and his personal fascination with literature, or, perhaps, simply to the fact that the book is “the most powerful object of our time,” as Keith Houston observes. What is the printed book that it has ousted the handwritten one? How does the printed text of the book influence its readers? What is, in this context, the difference between printing and handwriting? And, above all, what is the future of books in the age of electronic media? McLuhan has attempted to answer these questions in two of his best-known works: The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media. Among the different interpretations of the views presented in these volumes, the opinion of their Polish commentator who refers to the actual end of the existence of printed books seems particularly interesting.
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The article comprises a set of observations, as well as reflections, on broadly conceived artistry of books and it is written from the point of view of an art historian, as well as a book researcher and a bibliophile. Diverse aspects of the artistry of books have been discussed, among them the obvious ones related to the field of visual arts, as well as ones that tend to be underestimated, i.e., those of materials (paper, parchment, leather) serving as base surface to the text, illustrations or bookbinding decoration. In each case the problem is scrutinized by tracing the ‘way’ leading from the ‘inside’ of the book to its ‘outside.’ Hence the first objects of analysis are parchment and paper (including different grades of decorative papers); then the research focus is shifted to other aspects, namely, writing (handwriting and printed text), page compositions, illumination and book graphics, illustration printing, graphic books, book bindings, and finally new trends in the art of the book. The text concludes with an attempt to define the direction the artistry of books and bibliophilia will take in the 21st century.
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The article deals with meaning, scope and structure of the occasional adverbs, describes two groups of occasionalisms used in contemporary modernist poetry by the New York Group of poets. The research has been conducted on the basis of occasional adverbs consideration. The adverbs have been considered as the ones created within the framework of modern poetic text aesthetics. Purpose is examination and analysis of the content, reasons for using specific verbal components, occasional adverbs, that represent certain stylistic nominees, experiments with the word, influence the language creation, function as significant elements of relevance to the poetic text modern aesthetics. Methods cоmbine general scientific apprоaches that are inductive and dеductive as wеll as the methоd of interdisciplinary study. Results. Ukrainian language involves a lot of linguistic innovations, among which prominent place is occupied by occasional adverbs. New poetic forms allow presenting a poetic image originally, emotionally, precisely, assisting to create necessary stylistic effects. For this purpose the word-building potential of the language is involved, semantic and stylistic accents are changed. Experiments with the word make the poetry of the New York Group of Poets authors a peculiar and notable phenomenon not only in the Ukrainian but also in all cultural world.
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