Nationalism is the force that has brought the world to its modern form. It has claimed to alter the social and political structures in vastly different forms from their previous versions. The concept of nationalism has never gone out of vogue since its inception. However, since the beginning of the twenty-first century, myriad factors such …
This poster brings into focus two things. The fallen statue of Lenin highlights the contemporary contestations of history. It aims to delegitimize certain ideals of the past that do not align with the present aspirations. Removing the statues of Lenin does not wipe out the history of authoritarianism in Russia. However, it condemns an uncritical …
Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?Where is your tribal memory?Sirs, in that great vault.The sea. The sea has locked them up.The sea is History Derek Walcott, The Sea is History Dubbed as a historical revisionist novel, Feeding the Ghosts is Fred D’Aguiar’s fictionalized account of the infamous Zong slave-ship massacre, an incident where more …
Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from …
The relationship between memory and landscape is often overlooked, especially while examining the impact of environmentally induced distress on people. Traditionally, grief, trauma and nostalgia were attributed to human losses in socio-political violence. But it is equally imperative in case of individual/communal memory and other emotional tribunals of natural disaster victims and climate refugees. Their …
In a Q&A session with the Booker Prize, Avni Doshi talked about the centrality of art in the narrative as such; “On the level of story, art plays a central role in how the characters develop in Burnt Sugar. The major conflicts between characters are framed by the artistic production of the narrator. On a …
The past is not dead. In fact, it is not even past. William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (1951) Amidst the clamorous turbulence, turmoil and tumult of the Partition, Basti sits in a sombre, solemn, albeit ruptured, landscape. At the outset, the reader encounters a mythic, almost mystic echo-chamber of voices of a reminiscing history …
Memory and Memoir in Intizar Husain’s Basti: A Study of Memory in Exile – Aditi Singh Read More »
What are collective memories of the past and how are they remembered? A. Assmann has argued that collective memories must be defined in terms of the function they play in society. “Just as autobiographical memories are individually held memories that bear on the identity of an individual, collective memories are widely held memories of community …
Remembering and Forgetting: Collective Memory – Angel Maria Varghese Read More »
Episodic memory is a category of long-term memory that involves the recollection of specific events, situations, and experiences. Since every individual views and understands circumstances differently and because every person has different memories of those events, episodic memory is vital to your sense of self. In a person with Alzheimer’s, there is a decline in …
The novelty of the Stream of Consciousness technique is its user-friendly nature. Its universal occurrence lends to its familiarity. The unpolished and unstructured thoughts are far from other pieces of literature, notably the Interior Monologue technique. Although similar, the Interior Monologue technique employs the structure and combines the Stream of Consciousness’s apparent incoherence and disorderly …
Circadian Novels within a Stream of Consciousness – Aayushi Sharma Read More »
The Girl in White Cotton is a debut novel by Avni Doshi, published in 2019 that explores the entanglements between memory, shared trauma and caregiving. The plot follows the fraught relationship between a mother and daughter, Tara and Antara. The daughter must care for her mother, as the latter is suffering from memory loss caused by the early onset of Alzheimer’s disease.
While Edwardian Materialists had great storytelling, their writing doesn’t allow the reader to have the level of immersion as other modes of writing. According to Virginia Woolf, materialism is when an author dedicates the setting to descriptors of only the material world and incorporates the physical solely in the process of world-building. In her essay …
