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Shiv Nadar University is a comprehensive, multidisciplinary, research-focused, and student-centric University offering a full range of academic programs at the undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral level. With state-of-the-art infrastructure, the University comprises of academic wings, sophisticated labs, international standard sports facilities, amphitheaters, auditorium, conference rooms and smart classrooms. The University&rsquo;s goal is to become internationally recognized for the quality of its research and creative endeavors and their applicability to improving quality of life, generating new insights and expanding the boundaries of human knowledge creativity. Committed to excellence in teaching, research and service, the University aims to serve the higher education needs of India and the world beyond.

Shiv Nadar University

This paper undertakes a hauntological reading of time and existence, in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019). Hauntology, Jacques Derrida’s portmanteau coinage (haunt-plus-ontology, or haunted-ontology, Spectres of Marx, 1994), is a concept that avers that “this instant…is not docile to time, at least to what we call time.” Therefore positing existence as something of “doubtful contemporaneity,” simultaneously contemporaneous and intergenerational, making the present non-contemporaneous, detecting in the present both past and future. Unlike Heidegger’s “care” where the individual is finitely contained within death’s horizon, hauntology ideates a collective global existence beyond the “living present,” enfolding “the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead.” Not to be confused with cliched ghosts, hauntology, holds time and existence as “spectral” because “effective presence” (norm, law, hegemonic discourse) and its “other” (disarticulated, invisibilised, spectralised presence- as-non-present) both constitute our existence. Gun Island, often called the “Bengali Da Vinci Code,” foregrounds 21st century’s human and eco-displacements inside a detective story. Its central query, “Desh Koi” (where’s home?), problematises our current existence into one of identitylessness, most evident in current refugee/migrant crises as-well-as ecological disasters. Ghosh avers that these are fuelled by disavowed criminal nexus between corporates, smuggling syndicates, and governments/regimes, whose closest analogues are archaic systemic oppressions, thus gridlocking us into a perennially violently unequal world. This paper asks why Ghosh theorises our contemporary constitutedness thus. It argues that Ghosh, in seeing our post-fordist contemporaneity as continuums of archaic habits of systemic injustices, considers our 21st century temporality as a cancellation of future, thus liquifying the concept of a homogeneous, empty, calendar, or teleologically linear time. Detective fiction, with its meta-reading detective figure and analeptic closure of the narratorial logico-temporal gap provides a structural shorthand for Gun Island’s braiding of past, present, and future, where medieval Bengal, and Venice, contemporary India, America, and Italy, coalesce, to detect our existences as globally interconnected continuums of transhistoric, transcultural processes, which manifest as temporal bleeds, indexing hegemonic injustices, despite their systemic disarticulations. Like Giorgio Agamben, Ghosh too believes that the hidden foundation of all regimes lies in the prestidigitated inner solidarity between imperii arcana (archaic sovereignty), democracy and totalitarianism (Agamben, Homo Sacer). Gun Island, limns these disavowed processes and avers that our conventional empirical sense-making systems remain short-sighted in noticing these connections. Ghosh asserts that until the spectral, that-is, spectres and spectre-making (spectragenic) processes, are visibilised, our identities and politics will remain congealed in unequal, violent relatedness, and time will bring forth nothing new. Gun Island imagines a just world fuelled by a collective awareness of equality without leaving anyone out. This entails transitioning from the tyranny of presences to an awareness of the spectral third, beyond the present/absent, seen/unseen totalising binaries. This third, a clarifying agent for the ineffable failure of our future, requires a spectral historiography wherein time and being is placed outside commonplace tempero-spatial fixities. This paper therefore studies Gun Island’s treatment of existence and temporality as attempts towards historicising those no-longer- here, and those yet-to-be.Keywords- Spectres, Hauntology, Detective Fiction, Temporality, Absent presences.

(SoHSS) School of Humanities and Social Sciences

Re-Temporalising the Cultural in India

Haunted Time in Amitav Ghosh's Gun Island

This paper examines the ambivalences, and tensions of the imperial project encoded in 19th century botanical codification of poisonous plants in British colonies, through the materiality of alkaloids in Sherlock Holmes stories. I argue that these tales reveal the orientalising gaze of botanical codifications which merged in the case of study of alkaloids with medico-criminal discourse on plants, that grouped indigenous plants, and indigenous people under the canopy of toxicology, constructing the native population as criminal and primitive, thereby giving imperial crimes a clean-chit. I contend that this bundling of forensics and the sociological was damage control of the faltering British self-image in the wake of Britain’s anti-opium movement and atrocities in the Boer war. The Holmes mysteries link phytotoxins to colonies’ cultural practices, thus reattaching criminality to the colonies, to re-institute British selfhood in metropolitan consciousness by creating via the flora of the colonies, a criminal Other. However, I point out that the institutional weight of imperial machinery could not fully contain the unease of Britain’s colonial contact. The anxiety of reverse-colonialism (1857 Sepoy Mutiny), continued to haunt the British psyche, appearing as exotic alkaloids that leave no trace, and can only be deduced by Holmes’ genius.&nbsp; Such that, plant poisons in these tales simultaneously repair British loss of self-prestige, as-well-as, self-subvert it. I study homicidal poisoning tales, “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot” and “The Sign of the Four,” as stories of revenant, disavowed (thereby spectral, intangible) imperial unease, using Jacques Derrida’s political idea of systemic evils as spectral (Specters of Marx, 1994). The plant-poisons of these tales, I argue, are conceptual tools, revealing spectres (not to be confused with cliched ghosts) of imperial anxieties, disturbing the stability of imperialism’s coerced archiving, gathering us under its revealing spectral shade.

The Research Post

Under a Spectral Shade: Plant Poisons and Imperial Anxieties in Arthur Conan-Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes Mysteries

Arguing for an expansion of the subject of ecocriticism beyond climate change fiction, this essay examines strategies of representation of vernacular landscapes in contemporary Anglophone South Asian literature from Pakistan and Bangladesh. It suggests that recent writing by Uzma Aslam Khan, Tahmima Anam and Kamila Shamsie recuperates Pakistani landscape from its imbrication within colonial and post 9/11 spatial discourses, enabling a zoecentric re-ordering of regional history, complicating ideas of authenticity, and engaging with deep history in ways that furnish individual affective investments in landscape instead of reiterating the difference-flattening tendency of species-thinking. Finally, it attempts to articulate the geological turn precipitated by the notion of the Anthropocene with frameworks of postcolonial ecocriticism to adapt them to specific contexts in South Asia. © 2021 South Asian Literary Association.

South Asian Review

Between Glaciers and Fossils: Landscape, Literature and the Anthropocene in Pakistan

This article focuses on the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan, founded under the aegis of the Nagari Pracharini Sabha in 1910 in Allahabad, and its active bid to establish what can be seen as the first archive of, and in, Hindi. While the Sammelan’s library functioned as a public-facing, community-serving space that housed and issued printed books, periodicals and newspapers in its reading room, the archive was imagined as an accumulation of all materials, print and manuscript, relating to Hindi, with access limited to critics and scholars. The article argues that infrastructure like the library and the archive critically contributed to the process of consolidation and legitimisation of the discourse on Hindi nationalism. It also traces the post-Independence assimilation of this library to the machinery of state bureaucracy, specifically to the institution of the Uttar Pradesh Hindi Sahitya Sammelan Act, 1956, and the central government’s Hindi Sahitya Sammelan Act, 1962, which declared the Sammelan ‘an institution of national importance’. How do these acts reflect tensions between the politicisation of Hindi as the national language and democratisation in post-colonial India? Here, the article shows that Hindi was not only being monetarily patronised in the 1950s and 1960s, but was also vigilantly monitored, drawing staunch resistance from the Sammelan, which saw itself as a moral alternative to the state. It traces the history of these legislative processes which ultimately resulted in a petition against the 1962 Act in the Supreme Court in 1973, which declared it invalid. © 2020, © 2020 South Asian Studies Association of Australia.

South Asia: Journal of South Asia Studies

The Hindi Library and the Making of an Archive: The Hindi Sahitya Sammelan from 1911 to 1973

In urbanizing India, walkability and outdoor physical activities are essential for a healthy lifestyle. Urban roads need to be assessed for walkability, and public parks need to be assessed as spaces for physical activities. Not many studies have looked at both the aspects together, and use of GIS is not prevalent. This study demonstrates use of GIS to examine various parameters of walkability and parks in the city of Greater Noida, India. GIS was found highly effective for collecting information before performing survey of selected sectors, post-field data visualization, and data integration to understand spatial variability of walkability and usefulness of individual parks. Only one of the sectors was identified as having better walkability as well as good quality of parks for physical activities. Many low-income sectors did not have parks. Walkability parameters had a spatial pattern within each sector, and urban and rural sectors differed in providing walkability. Copyright © 2020, IGI Global.

World University root node

International Journal of Applied Geospatial Research

Park Quality and Road Walkability in Greater Noida, India: A Case Study Demonstrating GIS for Assessing Barriers to Being Physically Active in Urban Areas

The Domain of the Novel: Reflections on Some Historical Definitions discusses the genre of the novel and its dialogic and dialectical characteristics through an in-depth analysis of some classic English, Russian, American and Indian novels. A collection of lectures by the distinguished scholar of literature, A. N. Kaul, it analyses the exploration of personal voices and histories within a larger socio-political landscape in these works. Drawing examples from the works of Fielding, George Eliot, Dickens, Thackeray, Melville, Hawthorne, Twain, R.K. Narayan and others, who defined and redefined the territories of the novel, this book examines the articulation of the lived social, political and material realities of ordinary individuals in this genre. The lectures situate the novels within their cultural, socio-political, and historical contexts while focusing on their historical continuity and relevance. They further demonstrate how the domain of the novel brings together a multitude of voices while discussing conflicts of class, identity, nationalism, and historiography. The volume includes an insightful critical introduction by Sambudha Sen. It will be of great interest to researchers and scholars of literature, cultural studies, post-colonial studies, literary theory, creative writing, history, and sociology. It will be especially useful for readers interested in studying forms of fiction and the 18th, 19th, and 20th century novel. © 2021 Mythili Kaul.

The Domain of the Novel: Reflections on Some Historical Definitions

The domain of the novel: Reflections on some historical definitions

Elora Halim Chowdhury & Esha Niyogi De, eds, South Asian Filmscapes: Transregional Encounters. University of Washington Press, 2020, 304 pp., $35, ISBN: 9780295747859.

BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies

Book review: Elora Halim Chowdhury &amp; Esha Niyogi De, eds, South Asian Filmscapes: Transregional Encounters

The article discusses Saritā, one of the best-selling Hindi magazines of the 1950s, and the part it played in the establishment of the Hindi 'middlebrow' reader. While a rich and vibrant journal culture in Hindi had existed since the nineteenth century, what distinguishes the post-1947 Hindi popular magazine is the emergence of the middle class as a burgeoning consumer. Saritā defied prescriptions of Nehruvian state building, as well as the right-wing discourses of nationalism and national language prevalent in the post-Independence space. In addition, it reconfigured biases towards gendered reading and consumption processes, as well as encouraging increased reader participation. This article argues for Saritā's role in the creation of a middlebrow reading space in the period immediately following Independence, since it not only packaged what was deemed wholesome and educational for the family as a unit, but also, most significantly, promoted readership in segments, with a focus on each individual's reading desires. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019Â.

Modern Asian Studies

Saritā and the 1950s Hindi Middlebrow Reader

This article explores the interplay between two seemingly contrary impulses in David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas: the mythopoeic and the postmodernist. Specifically, the article focuses on the novel’s postmodernist refiguration of the biblical myth of deliverance. Merging its biblical messianism with Nietzsche’s trope of Eternal Recurrence, the novel arrives at the figure of the eternally recurrent messiah. This article argues that the novel’s enigmatic leitmotif—the comet birthmark—serves as a symbol not only for Cloud Atlas’s recurrent messiah, but also for its interpretation of the biblical messiah as iterable, in the poststructuralist sense. The article concludes by identifying the novel’s postmodernist mythopoeia as an instance of metamodernism.

Fulltext

C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings

The Iterable Messiah: Postmodernist Mythopoeia in Cloud Atlas

The essay focuses on the uncharacteristically good production quality of the contemporary novels of master crime writer Surender Mohan Pathak by the publishing house Raja Pocket Books since 2009. Placing his novels against the contemporary pulp fiction from the small presses, the essay argues the birth of a pulp novel as an artefact for consumption by the middle classes and the implications it has on the way crime fiction is articulated in Hindi literary and production histories. © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Aakriti Mandhwani and Anwesha Maity; individual chapters, the contributors.