Volume 61, Issue 1

Starting from an anthropological and psychological reconsideration of what happens in human contact zones, this article first points out in some detail the profoundly ambiguous implications of sensual contact. It then arranges the process of ‘contact’ as a sequence of seven stages, from communication to connubium, before expanding on the strategies and tactics regulating and shaping colonial and postcolonial contact. Finally, the paper briefly locates and assesses the potential services and limitations of the role of literature in ‘pre-visiting,’ establishing and reflecting on intercultural and transcultural contact zones

The present paper argues for a plurality of perceptions in understanding the nineteenth-century colonial encounter in Calcutta. While the colonised perceived the coloniser and the land of the coloniser largely through the literature that was made available to them under the new educational curriculum, the coloniser’s perception was largely experiential. The sense of exile and alienation replaced the earlier perception of the highly romanticised notion of the east. In tracing the variety of voices and perceptions in nineteenth-century Calcutta, when talking about a phenomenon like the colonial encounter, one realises the inadequacy of labels like Westernisation, modernisation or indianisation. Calcutta in the nineteenth century can be best described as a city in transition; a city coming to terms with its existence as a result of cultural exchange and negotiation. Many of these transitional and ambivalent moments are voiced and can be perceived in the writings of this period.

This paper presents three close readings of Indian poems in English that were written around 1870 by members of the eminent Dutt dynasty of writers in Calcutta. The readings of Govin Chunder Dutt’s “Vizagapatam,” Greece Chunder Dutt’s “The Soonderbuns” and Toru Dutt’s “Sonnet - Baugmaree” centre around the question how the poets’ perception of Indian reality was affected by the English conventions of poetic diction and poetic voice available at the time. By way of conclusion, the three poems are then assessed with regard to their creative strategies for encountering the Other of the English poetic tradition in the light of the categories mimicry, hybridity and identity

The emergence of Marathi theatre in its upper caste, urban and commercial form in the 1850s was also the beginning of the search for a refined form of theatre. One aspect of this process was revealed in this theatre’s engagement with diverse forms including Western genres, extant local forms and classical theatrical models. The other important aspect was its engagement with the notion of respectability. Additionally, the practice of female impersonation nurtured by this theatre contributed significantly to the transformations in the fashioning of gender normativity in colonial India. I contextualise the text and performance of Sangit Saubhadra as it exemplifies the intersected field of these negotiations and hope to show the forms of appropriation and exclusion involved in them

Deep into the second half of the twentieth century the traditionalist definition of India as a country of villages remained dominant in official political rhetoric as well as cultural production. In the past two decades or so, this ruralist paradigm has been effectively superseded by a metropolitan imaginary in which the modern, globalised megacity increasingly functions as representative of India as a whole. Has the village, then, entirely vanished from the cultural imaginary in contemporary India? Addressing economic practices from upper-class consumerism to working-class family support strategies, this paper attempts to trace how ‘the village’ resurfaces or survives as a cultural reference point in the midst of the urban

In Rana Dasgupta’s recent novel Tokyo Cancelled (2005), a group of strangers meet at an unnamed airport and spend the night telling each other stories. In this article, I will examine Dasgupta’s narrative strategies that help to establish a connection between the passengers of a cancelled flight. The idea of a shared, albeit temporary, community, I will argue, is illustrated in Dasgupta’s novel by the act of communication through storytelling. Dasgupta leaves the storytelling to the voices of strangers and thereby provides a means to overcome the unfamiliarity of the situation depicted in the frame tale, while simultaneously inviting the reader to engage with the strange and disturbing tales that make up the core text. In its totality, the novel moves between the two poles of conviviality and strangeness but never falls into the trap of fetishizing the figure of the stranger and thus strip it of its particularity and cultural significance