(SoHSS) School of Humanities and Social Sciences

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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.

English

Re-Temporalising the Cultural in India

Haunted Time in Amitav Ghosh's Gun Island

The chapter traces the development of Recalling Jewish Calcutta, an early example of a digital public memory project that houses artefacts pertaining to the history and memory of the Jewish community in the city of Calcutta. As a collaborative project, it sees the active participation of independent researchers, academics with institutional affiliations, students, and the wider public. In the building of this project, several lessons are learnt; this chapter provides a reflection on those issues and locates three pedagogical moments to illustrate the importance of practice-based scholarship. The first discusses the value of digital collections and the need for openness in scholarship; the second focuses on the transition of the digital humanist from a user of electronic resources to a maker of electronic collections; the third reminds us of the fragility of digital resources and highlights the need for infrastructural support.

Practices of Digital Humanities in India: Learning by Doing

Jewish Calcutta, Recalled: Lessons From Building a Digital Public Memory Resource

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

Purpose: Firms are increasingly making customers key stakeholders in their greening processes, requiring them to voluntarily use their resources to benefit the firm. In this context, this paper develops a new construct – tangible customer citizenship behaviour (CCB), i.e. voluntary participation of customer in operational processes of the company beyond normal requirements of exchange. This requires more involvement than the already documented intangible CCB. The purpose of the paper is to then explore whether service quality (SQ) (online and offline) influences such voluntary customer reciprocity in greening. Design/methodology/approach: This study used a virtual survey among 400 customers of e-commerce firms that have adopted greening practices requiring customer engagement and regressions were used to test the hypotheses. Findings: The authors find that both online and offline SQ positively impact intangible CCB but have no impact on customer greening reciprocity (tangible CCB). Additionally, the authors find that offline SQ positively impacts customer greening awareness. However, in spite of the presence of greening awareness and display of intangible CCB, SQ does not have any impact on greening reciprocity. Originality/value: This study introduces to literature a more tangible form of voluntary behaviour on the part of the customer, i.e. tangible CCB or reciprocity. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is also one of the first to study the customer as an important stakeholder and participant in a business-to-consumer firm’s operating processes, particularly in greening which has no direct impact on the firm’s core offering. The focus on greening in the Indian context is also novel given the greening costs and requirements and the price competition are very different in emerging market contexts where e-commerce firms are experiencing the maximum growth. © 2021, Emerald Publishing Limited.

World University root node

Finance, Accounting and Control

(SME) School of Management and Entrepreneurship

Economics

International Journal of Quality and Service Sciences

Customer reciprocity in greening: the role of service quality

Most of the design activities, today, are focused toward solving issues related to a smaller section of society with average or high-income levels, and the needs of a bigger section of society, belonging to the bottom of the pyramid, are ignored by and large. This is one area of research that requires urgent attention and appropriate design intervention. This paper is an effort to cater to the unaddressed needs of one such section of society that is involved in gardening-related activities. The paper reports a case study on how the issues related to storing and managing the gardening tools and equipment have been addressed. It presents the design development and evaluation from a sustainability point of view. The study involved two gardeners working at a University campus who participated during different stages of designing the new product that addressed their needs and aspirations. The paper also discusses the economic and environmental sustainability aspects of the solution in the light of materials and manufacturing processes used. In the first part, the paper explains the brief background of the user's needs. The second part of the paper analyzes the different aspects of the problem and elaborates on the design process. The paper finally concludes with a discussion on the assessment of the new storage system. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Design

Lecture Notes in Mechanical Engineering

Design of Storage System for Local Gardeners: A Case Study

I examine the effect of decision-making processes on the dynamics of bargaining over a fixed pie by comparing the share received when individuals are subject to reference-dependent preferences, loss-aversion, and probability-weighting, to the share they would receive on choosing by maximising expected utility instead. I show that: (i) reference-dependent preferences are unambiguously advantageous, (ii) loss-aversion does not have any effect, and (iii) probability-weighting is unambiguously disadvantageous. Finally, when these three features come together so that the decision-making process is described by cumulative prospect theory, then a higher share is obtained if and only if the advantage conferred by reference-dependent preferences is stronger than the disadvantage imposed by probability-weighting, and I present a precise necessary and sufficient condition that expresses this trade-off. © 2022 Elsevier B.V.

Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control

Expected utility versus cumulative prospect theory in an evolutionary model of bargaining

Mining for minerals, while a good source of income to the local economies, results in significant environmental damages. The Aravalli Mountain Range in India protects Delhi and adjoining areas from desertification risks posed by the Thar desert through acting as a physical barrier. However, it has become degraded over time due to persistent illegal mining and encroachment by real estate developers. Restoring the Aravallis will not only reduce the threat of desertification but also help generate valuable ecosystem services, such as water supply, to the nearby cities. Yet restoration efforts undertaken thus far have remained largely unsuccessful due to a lack of sufficient financial incentives. This study asks whether financial incentives for afforestation, such as desertification prevention permits and water-based payments for ecosystem services, can promote restoration of mineral rich commons in the Aravallis. It further seeks to explore the role of risk of restoration failure in discouraging conservation effort amongst communities. We design an incentive structure through which local communities benefit from water and land based payments resulting from restoration. We develop a dynamic optimization model of afforestation decisions in presence of land use change related risk from mining and real estate mafia to derive implications for the long run sustainability of the commons. Results indicate that desertification prevention permits and water payments can be useful towards incentivizing communities to take up protection of the degraded lands. However, when presented with the threat of failure of the restoration project due to illegal mineral extraction, community's optimal afforestation level declines considerably. © 2022 Elsevier Ltd

Resources Policy

Optimal restoration of common property resources under uncertainty

Government hospitals are the main pillars of the public healthcare services in the country. But due to the ever-growing number of patients and the inadequate infrastructure facilities, they are overburdened and unable to provide proper and prompt medical help to the patients. Medical treatment may include consultation, admission, diagnosis, surgery, drug administration, nursing, blood bank service, ambulance service, etc. The patients/attendants have to follow hospital protocols and processes to avail the required treatment. But they are not acquainted with hospital processes, rules, norms, timings, and other relevant information. They also vary from hospital to hospital. Hence, the visitors need to contact touchpoints like reception counters to help them for the help. But they are always overcrowded with people queued up in lines. In addition, the reception, registration/ entry counters, different departments, diagnosis centers, and other utilities are too scattered within the hospital premises (different buildings, floors, rooms, etc.) to be figured out by anyone. It is a puzzling and helpless situation that inevitably delays the treatment process. The delays could be reduced by providing patients/attendants, relevant, quick, and reliable information. But hospitals can't allocate a part of their limited workforce for this purpose. In the given context, a mobile-based app can play an important role. This paper proposes a new app-based system that streamlines treatment at government hospitals. It reports the general problems faced by patients at government hospitals. It explores the feasibility of a mobile app system, that would provide patients with reliable information, in real-time. The paper finally concludes by discussing the limitations and future scope of the proposed system. The designed app also finds special relevance in the present pandemic situation where every second is critical for the patients. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Designing Mobile App Interfaces for Facilitating Medical Treatment at the Government Hospitals

This paper studies the effects of asymmetric punishment of bribery on both bribery and compliance with regulations. The bribe amount is decided via Nash bargaining and regulatory compliance and whistle-blowing are strategic decisions. Moreover, investigations of bribery and noncompliance occur in a manner that may be interdependent. We show that, under symmetric punishment, inducing whistle-blowing has no effect on the frequency of bribery. When the bribery and noncompliance investigations are independent, a switch from symmetric to asymmetric punishment either makes no difference or induces more nonharassment bribery. Only when bribery detection increases the chance of noncompliance detection and asymmetric punishment leads to whistle-blowing for both types of entrepreneurs, can the shift succeed in reducing noncompliance. The result is robust to the case where legalization of bribe-giving is not feasible for nonharassment bribes. © 2022 The Authors. Journal of Economics & Management Strategy published by Wiley Periodicals LLC.

Journal of Economics and Management Strategy

Can asymmetric punishment deter endogenous bribery

Using a massive malaria eradication program in India during the 1950s as a natural experiment, we examine the effects of disease environment on child health outcomes and fertility. We harmonise a rich dataset on malaria endemicity with fertility histories of women to exploit the cohort level variation in exposure to the program. We find that the program leads to a significant decline in infant and neonatal mortality and leads to a significant increase in the probability of birth during adolescent years in high malaria endemic regions. We confirm that a fall in the mother’s age at first birth in the post-eradication period drives the fertility response. © 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.