Lci 2019 Book of Abstracts

International Conference Region/Nation/Trans-Nation: Literature-Cinema Interface

31 January – 02 February 2019

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BOOK OF ABSTRACTS

International Conference

Region/Nation/Trans-Nation: Literature-Cinema Interface

31 January – 02 February 2019

Department of Humanities and Social Sciences

BITS Pilani, K K Birla Goa Campus Zuarinagar, Goa, India – 403726 INDIA

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Table of Contents

Conference Theme ...... 4 Organizing Committee ...... 6 Conference Schedule ...... 7 Plenary Speakers ...... 21 List of Presenters ...... 41 Abstracts ...... 43 BITS Goa Campus Map ...... 108 Names & Contact Numbers of Taxi Operators ...... 113 Sponsor ...... 114

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Conference Theme

This conference traces the various modes of engagement that exist between some of the globally dominant literary and cinematic forms, without limiting itself to the age-old domain of adaptation. It tries to locate these engagements and negotiations across three geopolitical formations and locations of culture, namely region, nation and trans-nation. These three locations work as contact zones where the literature- cinema interface manifests in various forms. With the emergence of transnationalism and comparative film studies as methods in cinema studies, multiple modes of literature-cinema negotiation are becoming increasingly evident with cinema studies borrowing concepts such as ‘world literature’ and ‘comparative morphology’. In the Indian/South Asian context, these locations are entangled with issues such as the language question, regional nationalisms, the crumbling idea of a federal republic with an increasingly stronger unitary governance, linguistic identity politics as manifested in popular cinemas and literatures, translational politics and the formation/development of certain national centres for the production of various modes of translation, India’s cultural/literary/cinematic negotiations with the trans- nation before and after globalization/economic liberalization etc. With contemporary India as its primary site of inquiry, the conference moves towards inter-continental geopolitical engagements without considering Indian regional/national and literary/cinematic questions in isolation. Apart from thematic and ideological associations with the trans-nation, it involves participants beyond the borders of the Indian nation (from Sri Lanka and Bangladesh), transforming itself into a discursive space where the conceptual apparatus meets with the narratives that inform and shape the former. Narratives from the margins will also significantly feature in the conference, with panels and plenaries on and from the Indian North- East. Moreover, panels will be devoted to Goa and its distinctive history of colonial and postcolonial politico-cultural engagements as manifested in indigenous literature and art.

Sub-themes include, but are not limited to, the following:  Transnationalism as Method  Comparative Cinema Studies and the transnational question  South Asia’s Cultural Engagement with the ‘West’

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 Cultural/Literary/Cinematic Migration within South Asia  Idea of India and the Language Question  Linguistic Identity Politics in South and North-East India  North-East India and the Politics of Translation  South Korea’s Cultural Penetration into the Indian North-East  Goa’s legacy as an erstwhile Portuguese colony  Goa’s engagement with other Portuguese colonies (Brazil, Cape Verde, Mozambique)  Goa as a contact zone of culture  Histories of colonial, anti-colonial and postcolonial cultural negotiations in Goa  National and Transnational Cultures in South Indian Cinemas  Regional Militancy in National (Popular) Cinema  Trans-Nation and Indian Modernity  Trans-Nation/Translation  Subtitling/Fan-Subbing/Dubbing/Remake as Cultural Translation  Internet Sharing in the Age of Post-Cinema  Formative Years of Film Industries and the Cultural and Literary Translation(s)  From Adaptation to Cultural Translation and Beyond  State and Non-State Actors in translation

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Organizing Committee

Coordinators

Parichay Patra and Amitendu Bhattacharya

Head of the Department

Reena Cheruvalath

Faculty Members

Basavadatta Mitra Bidisha Banerjee Geetha Bakilapadavu Hareesh A. G K. A. Geetha Mohan Kumar Bera Nilak Datta Rajiv Kumar Chaturvedi Rayson K. Alex R.P. Pradhan Sayantani Sarkar Shalini Upadhyay Solano Jose Savio Da Silva

Research Scholars

Ashish Krishna Gokul Sisir Gnana Bharathi Hajara Abdul Hameed Hemant Sharma Neethu Prakashan Neha Yadav Nithya Gopi Priteegandha Naik Sandhya Basu Sebastiao Anthony Rodrigues Sunkara Sairam Sushant Kishore Tanna Shilpa Shirishkumar Thomson C S

Office Assistant

Vijay M. Lamani

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Conference Schedule

DAY 1: 31 January 2019 (Thursday)

REGISTRATION AUDITORIUM FOYER 8.30 AM

INAUGURATION AUDITORIUM 9.00 AM  Welcome Address and Introduction to the Conference: PARICHAY PATRA, Conference Coordinator  Introduction to the Department: REENA CHERUVALATH, Head, Dept. of Humanities & Social Sciences, BITS Pilani – K.K. Birla Goa Campus  Address by the Chief Guest: G. RAGHURAMA, Director, BITS Pilani – K.K. Birla Goa Campus  Vote of Thanks: AMITENDU BHATTACHARYA, Conference Coordinator

PLENARY ADDRESS 1 AUDITORIUM 9.30 AM

 Speaker: SUPRIYA CHAUDHURI, Jadavpur University, Kolkata Title: Borderlands: The Margins of Cinema  Chair: RAVI S. VASUDEVAN, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi

TEA BREAK AUDITORIUM FOYER 10.30 AM

SESSION 1A DLT-7 11.00 AM

Topic: Global/Transnational in Indian Cinema: Aesthetics and Exhibition Chair: Parichay Patra

1. Veena Hariharan India@Doc-Leipzig 2. Srirupa Chatterjee Beauty Politics and Aesthetic Labour in Post Millennial Indian Cinema 3. Kuntal Bag India through Trans-national Gaze: A Case Study of Slumdog Millionaire in the Context of Global Flow 4. Smriti Avinash The Development of Transnationalist Elements in Indian Cinema

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SESSION 1B DLT-8 11.00 AM

Topic: Narrating Terror: From Regional to Global Chair: Sourit Bhattacharya

1. Mrinalini Sharma The Other Side of History: Terrorism & Human Nature 2. Vivek Sachdeva Narrating Terror Through The Sound Image in Chauthi Koot 3. Vidhi Mehra Regional Militancy in Newton 4. Aashima Jain Transnationalism in Question: Movement from a Local to a Global Condition of Surveillance in Post 9/11 World

PLENARY ADDRESS 2 DLT-7 12.15 PM

 Speaker: RAVI S. VASUDEVAN, CSDS, New Delhi Title: Short Film and Documentary: Archives and Genealogies of Informational Film Use, India c. 1910-1960  Chair: BRINDA BOSE, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

LUNCH DLT LOBBY 1.15 PM

SESSION 2A DLT-5 2.00 PM

Topic: Look East: Cultural Penetration in the Indian North-East Chair: Dibyakusum Ray

1. Abhirup Sarkar From 'Indianization' to 'Koreanization' : South Korea's Cultural Penetration in North- East India 2. Meshabaker Umdor South Korea’s Cultural Influence on the Syiem North East India 3. Vidisha Mukherjee South Korea’s Cultural Penetration Into The & Indian North East Naila Nasir 4. Hannah Rachel Growing influence of the Hallyu Wave in Abraham North East India

SESSION 2B DLT-6 2.00 PM

Topic: Cinema and the Politics of Representation Chair: Arka Chattopadhyay

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1. Jeetumoni Constructing the Bodo National Identity: Basumatary Literature and its Role 2. Nirmala M.N. Linguistic Identity, Regional Cinema and Unionization of South Indian Film Workers 3. Kalplata Jungle Book: The Question of Other 4. Tanushri Banerjee Representation of Transnational Identity of & Gunjan Gupta Second Generation Immigrants in Select Episodes of Master of None

SESSION 2C DLT-7 2.00 PM

Topic: India and the West: Negotiations through the Cinematic Lens Chair: Anuparna Mukherjee

1. Chinmaya Lal Violence and Non-Violence in Regional Thakur Nationalism: Reading the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army in/and Rang De Basanti 2. Ruth Susan Mathew Globalisation and the Changing Representation of Christian Women Characters in Selected Hindi Films 3. Rani Jana UNIndian Diaspora and Engagement with the West: A Reading of Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham and UNIndian 4. Chaitra Indian Popular Culture and its Engagement Nagammanavar and Confrontation with the West

SESSION 2D DLT-8 2.00 PM

Topic: Cultural Politics and Identity in the Indian North-East Chair: Amitendu Bhattacharya

1. S. Elika Assumi Locating Identity and Naga Modernity in Films from Nagaland 2. Hemchandra A Re-reading of Shakespeare's Macbeth in the Nameirakpam Context of Vaishnavisation in Manipur 3. Kaushik Thakur Remnants of an Empire: Cinema as Archive in Bhuyan Twentieth Century Colonial and Post Colonial Assam (1900-1990) 4. Simona Sarma Humour and Cinema: A Study of Language & Sukrity Gogoi Politics in Assam

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5. Gautam Chandra Voices from the Margins: Reflections from Roy Prantabashir Jhuli: Goalparar Lokjeeban O & Juthika Das Gaan

PLENARY ADDRESS 3 DLT-7 3.15 PM

 Speaker: KANCHUKA DHARMASIRI, University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka Title: The Many Phases of Ravana: Transcreations and Revisionings of Ravana in a Post-Colonial Sri Lankan Context  Chair: ASHA KUTHARI CHAUDHURI, Gauhati University, Guwahati

SESSION 3A DLT-5 4.15 PM

Topic: Margins of City, Region and Nation: Politics and Representation in Bengali Literature and Cinema Chair: Arka Chattopadhyay

1. Arka Chattopadhyay Sandipan Chattopadhyay's Bharot Borsho: Nationalism and Desire 2. Sourit Bhattacharya Outside of the City: Food Crisis and Aesthetic Commitment in Post-Famine Bengal 3. Anuparna Mukherjee Maps and Memories: Imagined Cities and Untranslated Worlds

SESSION 3B DLT-6 4.15 PM

Topic: Translating Culture: Adaptation and Interface Chair: Brian Mendonca

1. Ahmed Tahsin The 'New Original' through Cultural Shams Translation: Kaafiron Ki Naamaz, the Journey of Pastiche From Postmodern Stage to Indian Cinema Screen 2. Poulome Panja Adapting O'Henry in Hindi Cinema 3. Meghna Bera Adaptation as a Means Of Cultural Translation 4. Betsy Thomas Mr. Darcy in a Sherwani: What is Lost (and Found) in Translating Austen to the Indian Screen?

SESSION 3C DLT-7 4.15 PM

Topic: Nation/Trans-Nation and the Cinematic Domain Chair: Solano Jose Savio Da Silva

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1. Manisha Mishra Tracing Colorism in Bollywood Song Sequences from the Early Eras to the Present Times 2. Jayshree Singh & National and Transnational Cultures in the Chitra Dashora Selected Films of Mira Nair (Monsoon Wedding and Namesake) 3. Sreenivas Andoju Issues of Nation and Trans-nation in Film Adaptation of Vikas Swarup's Q&A 4. Malavika B. & The Images of Nationalism and Hildegard Transnationalism in Malayalam Cinema Annemaria

TEA BREAK DLT LOBBY 5.30 PM

PLENARY ADDRESS 4 DLT-7 5.45 PM Special Plenary on 50 years of The Hour of the Furnaces (Getino & Solanas, 1968)

 Speaker(s): MARIANO MESTMAN (UBA & CONICET, Argentina) & JAVIER CAMPO (UNICEN & CONICET, Argentina)

Titles: 1) Tracing the Winding Road of The Hour of the Furnaces in the First World (Mariano Mestman) 2) Revolution Palimpsest: The Hour of the Furnaces (Getino & Solanas, 1968) (Javier Campo)

 Chair: PARICHAY PATRA, BITS Pilani Goa Campus

DAY 2: 01 FEBRUARY 2019 (FRIDAY)

PLENARY ADDRESS 5 DLT-7 9.00 AM

 Speaker: KAUSHIK BHAUMIK, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi Title: Literature and Cinema between Region, Nation and the World: Thinking about Satyajit Ray’s Nayak  Chair: KANCHUKA DHARMASIRI, University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka

SESSION 4A DLT-5 10 AM

Topic: Cinema and Cinepolis: Exploring the Small Town Chair: Ananya Parikh

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1. Andrea Rodrigues The Transnational City of Pondicherry: Elite Identity Crisis and Cortes’ Receding French Image 2. Pawan Sharma Intervening in the Existing Language Dynamics and Authenticating Spaces: The Language and Dialect Politics Represented in Small-Town Based Popular Hindi Cinema 3. Sayanty Chatterjee Reimagining the Polis and Oikosin Indian Small Towns: Representation of Women Workspaces in Contemporary Hindi Films 4. Paromita Unbearable Intimacies: Cartographies of Chakrabarti Female Desire, Sexuality and Transgression in Literature and Cinema

SESSION 4B DLT-7 10 AM

Topic: Journey beyond the Literary Text Chair: Geetha Bakilapadavu

1. Bhawna Shrey The Two-Way Bind: Virginia Woolf, Cinema and the Space of Trans-textual Negotiation 2. Hiya Chatterjee From Fiction to Film and Vice-Versa: A Comparative Study of Deepa Mehta and Bapsi Sidhwa’s Works 3. Jijo C. George Lost in Translation: The Loss of Substance from the Book to the Screen 4. Arnab Kumar Sinha The Author as Novelist, Filmmaker and Performer: Meera Syal’s Anita and Me

SESSION 4C DLT-8 10 AM

Topic: Cine-Franchise and the Indian Nation Chair: Mohan Kr. Bera

1. Reema Chowdhary From Devdas to Dev D: A Case for Literary, Cultural and Palimsestuous Adaptation 2. Sandipan Ray The Baahubali Franchise: Cinema-Literature Choudhury Interface and Textual Transformations 3. Shishu Bala Raazi, Consenting to Untold Suffering for the Idea of a Nation in Popular Cinema 4. Layla Mascarenhas Re-Creating India's "Glorious Past": The Baahubali Films

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TEA BREAK DLT LOBBY 11.15 AM

PLENARY ADDRESS 6 DLT-7 11.30 AM

 Speaker: MOINAK BISWAS, Jadavpur University, Kolkata Title: That Which Flows: Between Fiction and Film  Chair: M. ASADUDDIN, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi

SESSION 5A DLT-5 12.30 PM

Topic: Emerging Questions in Film & (New) Media Cultures Chair: Parichay Patra

1. Dibyakusum Ray Utopia=Dystopia: Violence, Entropy and Horror in the Speculative Fiction of the Global South 2. Neha Jain Human/Machine Rights: The Agency of Machine in Question 3. Elloit Cardozo Desi Hip Videsi Hop: The Need for a Hip-Hop Studies Framework in India 4. Sachindev P. S. 360 Degree Video: Implications of a New Video Culture on Transnational Media

SESSION 5B DLT-6 12.30 PM

Topic: The Regional in Literature Chair: Sayantani Sarkar

1. Vanisha Pandia Universalism of Human Condition and National Consciousness Studied Through Jeet Thayil's Selected Poems 2. Anindita Mukherjee The Language of Seduction in the Works of Vijayadan Detha 3. Afrinul Haque Khan Translation, Adaptation, and Transnationalism: Revisiting Premchand's Godan through Text and Cinema 4. Sudesh Manger On Transliteration and Translation of Inscriptions of Ancient Nepal: A Hermeneutic Study of Maligoan Inscription of Jayavarman

SESSION 5C DLT-7 12.30 PM

Topic: Colony and Its Aftermath: Voices from the Margins Chair: K. A. Geetha

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1. Ashwati C. K. Post-Colonial Anxieties: Interpreting Modern India's Changing Patterns of Citizenship Dilemma 2. Lizbeth Shine Articulating the 'Region' and the 'Nation' in narratives from the margins: Nana-A tale of Us and A New Chapter 3. Chhavi Rohingya Crisis: Transnationalism or Kulshreshtha Crime?

4. Harshad Santosh What Happened to the White Man's Burden? Pore Freedom Writers, Romper Stomper and Recolonizing the Colonizers

SESSION 5D DLT-8 12.30 PM

Topic: The Various ‘Others’ Chair: Rajiv K. Chaturvedi

1. Shravya Aradhyam Evaluating the Success of Chick Flicks in Indian Cinema and Literature 2. Shreelata Prasad Transnationalism through the lens of Mira Nair - A Global Filmmaker of Indian Origin 3. Amit Kumar Muslims in Bollywood: Dilution of issues in the process of ‘Otherness’ 4. Shirin Rais Sway of Indian Cinema in Diffusing Environmental Sentience

LUNCH BREAK DLT LOBBY 1.30 PM

PLENARY ADDRESS 7 DLT-7 2.15 PM

 Speaker: BRINDA BOSE, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi Title: Beckett and Avikunthak: Lineages of the Avant-Garde  Chair: MOINAK BISWAS, Jadavpur University, Kolkata

SESSION 6A DLT-5 3.15 PM

Topic: Normative and Alternative: Cinema and the Gender Question Chair: K. A. Geetha

1. Santanu Das The Public-Private Dialectic and the Definitive Stand on Homosexuality: Dissecting Abdellatif Kechiche's Blue is the Warmest Color

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2. Anu Antony Constructs of Class and Gender in Adoor Gopalakrishnan's Naalu Pennungal (The Four Women) 3. Meera Krishnadas From Cornwall to Wagamon: The Similar, yet Differing Narratives of Rural Space and Masculinity in Straw Dogs and Varathan 4. Kashyapi Ghosh The Gastronome Woman in Cinema: Gender, Culture and Transnationalism 5. Halim Hussain Towards New Roles: Women and Revolution in Mahasweta Devi's Mother of 1084

SESSION 6B DLT-6 3.15 PM

Topic: Regional Cinema and the Interface Question Chair: Bidisha Banerjee

1. Sukanta Barman Satyajit Ray's Sonar Kella and Jai Baba Felunath: How Regional Literary Cinematic Consciousness Enters the National Consciousness 2. Aswathy Das Wordsworthian Realm in Malayalam & Amritha. G Literature-Cinema Interface: Unsung Heroes of the Mollywood 3. Prerana N Cinema - A Gateway to Power Politics in Tamil Nadu 4. Rajendra Marathi Films and Their Return to Relevance Nargundkar

SESSION 6C DLT-7 3.15 PM

Topic: Translation/Transliteration and the Language Question Chair: Kanchuka Dharmasiri

1. Januka Edirimanna Dubbing and Subtitling as a New Type of Literal Mohotti Translation: A Study Based on Japanese Film 100 Yen Love in to Sinhala Language 2. Saman M. Wisdom the Lankan Indigenization Failed to Kariyakarawane & gain from Santiniketan: A Cultural Reading of S.S.A Senevirathne the Loss of Cosmopolitanism in the Contributions of Sunil Santha and Ediriweera Sarachchandra 3. S.S.A Senevirathne & A Poli-Cultural Reading on the Concept of PS Manthrirathna ‘Home and the World’: With Special Reference to

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Rabindranath Tagore’s The Home and the World (1916) 4. Monika Kaushik Play of Language: Indian English in Selected Plays of Mahesh Dattani

SESSION 6D DLT-8 3.15 PM

Topic: Transnational Movements: (De)coding Adaptations Chair: Hareesh A.G.

1. Christina Placing the Oneiric and the Para-oneiric as Dhanasekaran seen in Akira Kurosawa's Dreams, Select Poems of Pablo Neruda and Egyptian Mythology, in the Arms of Morpheus 2. Shweta Kushal Great Tragedies Go Desi: Vishal Bharadwaj's Intervention into Shakespeare 3. Karthika S. B & Decoding of Shakespeare's Macbeth in Jisha Elezaba Throne of Blood and Jayaraj's Veeram 4. Bashabi Gogoi Adaptation is a 'Profound' process: Reading Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief and Spike Jonze's metafilm adaptation

TEA BREAK DLT LOBBY 4.30 PM

PLENARY ADDRESS 8 DLT-7 4.45 PM

 Speaker: M. ASADUDDIN, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi Title: Premchand, Ray and the ‘Game of Chess’: Some Reflections on Adaptation from Literature into Film  Chair: FAKRUL ALAM, East West University, Dhaka, Bangladesh

DAY 3: 02 FEBRUARY 2019 (SATURDAY)

PLENARY ADDRESS 9 DLT-7 9.00 AM

 Speaker: FAKRUL ALAM, East West University, Dhaka, Bangladesh Title: The Partitioning of Bengal, 1971, and National Identity Formation in Tanvir Mokammel’s Films  Chair: SUPRIYA CHAUDHURI, Jadavpur University, Kolkata

SESSION 7A DLT-5 10.00 AM

Topic: The Cinematic Partition Chair: Rayson K. Alex

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1. Seema Jena Nation, Narration and Cinema, Inclusions and Exclusions with Special Reference to films on the Indian Partition (1947 Earth and Train to Pakistan) 2. Jyoti Tabita Ethnic and Communal Violence: Hermit Archetypes of the Victimised Body in Ruskin Bond's A Flight of Pigeons and Bhisham Sahni's Tamas 3. Deepa Prajith Notion of Nation: Critical Gleanings from Partition Cinema 4. Prakriti Arora Contesting Imaginations of Nation and Region through the Use of Language in Saadat Hasan Manto's Toba Tek Singh 5. Ashutosh Kant The Train and the Tanker: Boarding the Prabhakar Promises

SESSION 7B DLT-6 10.00 AM

Topic: Cinematic & Literary Texts: Transnational Readings Chair: Rajarshi Mitra

1. Barun Naha Representation and Cultural Politics: Interface between Sankar's Seemabaddha and Satyajit Ray's Film Adaptation 2. Sananda Roy Ghosh's Chitrangada: Inscribing the Body, Translating the Self 3. Koushik Mondal Postcolonial Turn towards the Rhetoric of Transnationalism in the Films of Rituparno Ghosh

SESSION 7C DLT-7 10.00 AM

Topic: Goa as a Region: Relocation and Interrogation Chair: Solano Jose Savio Da Silva

1. Vinayak Yashraj & Deconstructing the Stereotypes: Priyanka Tripathi Representation of Goan Femininity through Dressing-up in Select Hindi Films 2. Tanvi Bambolkar Transportation of Goan Cultural and Linguistic Complexities in Poltodcho Munis, adaptation of Mahabaleshwar Sail's Adrusht

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3. Amrita Biswas Cartography of Goa: An Analysis of the Tangible Loci of Culture in the Cartoons of Mario Miranda 4. Foyez Ahmed Syed Interrogating Goa's Legacy as an Erstwhile Portuguese Colony in Asif Currimbhoy's Goa 5. Tulika Anand Tourism Goa's Torchbearer of Multiculturalism

SESSION 7D DLT-8 10.00 AM

Topic: The Regional Ambivalence and the Literary Language Chair: Mohan Kr. Bera

1. Medha Deshpande Rishab Shetty’s Sarkari Hiriya Prathamika Shaale Kasargodu and Debates on Linguistic Hegemony in South India: The Gadinadu Kannadigas of Kasargodu, Kerala 2. Deepak Saroha Musical Mir: Interpreting the Journey from Textual to Visual Medium 3. Chintha Pavithrani Effect of the Influence of Eliot’s Poem The Waste Land towards Siri Gunasinghe’s Poetic Composition titled Mas Le Nethi Eta

TEA BREAK DLT LOBBY 11.15 AM

SESSION 8A DLT-5 11.30 AM

Topic: Exploring Narratives in the Goan Space and Time Chair: Layla Mascarenhas

1. Eltrin D’Souza Mining Mania: Neo Colonial Enterprise through Literature and Films 2. Brian Mark The Un-Indian Space: Goa's Challenge to Mendonca the Hindu Nation 3. Tara Saldanha An Examination of Claims to Authenticity and Taboo in Selected Food Narratives of Postcolonial Goa 4. Hridaya Parag Geo-Polyphony and Goa: A Comparative Ajgaonkar Study of Asif Currimbhoy's Goa and Homi Adjania's Finding Fanny

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5. Prachi Prabhu Sexual Labour, Social Reform and Temple Economies in Portuguese Goa; History of Gomantak Maratha Samaj

SESSION 8B DLT-6 11.30 AM

Topic: Relocating the Sleuth in Postcolonial Times Chair: Nilak Datta

1. Stotropama Post Colonialism and Detective Novels Mukherjee 2. Manisha Gangahar The Chronotopic Imagination: Self- Definition as Liminal Politics in Harud 3. Atul Stanley Hermit Dynamics of Cinematic Adaptations; Examining Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows and Dibakar Banerjee's Detective Byomkesh Bakshi

SESSION 8C DLT-7 11.30 AM

Topic: Reading Culture: Identity in and beyond the Nation Chair: Rayson K. Alex

1. Konika Mukherjee Land in Literature 2. Sangeeta Jawla Pot, Potters and Pottery: Revisioning the Narratives 3. Imran Mulla Quest for Ethnicity in Transnational Cinema: The Question of 'True Identity' 4. Louiza Rodrigues Socio-cultural Milieu of the Willingdon Sports Club: Transnational British Colonial Culture

SESSION 8D DLT-8 11.30 AM

Topic: Film History Writing: From Early Cinema to the Studio Era Chair: Veena Hariharan

1. Pankaj Kumar Dhanamjaya's Conception of Dramatic Art Verma and the Dramaturgy of Early Hindi Cinema 2. Anil Ashok Negotiations and Consumption in the Early Sonawane Indian Cinema 3. Ananya Parikh Language and Early Indian Silent Cinema

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4. Rajarshi Mitra The Nation Between Generations: Dui Purush and the 1940s

LUNCH BREAK DLT LOBBY 12.45 PM

PLENARY ADDRESS 10 DLT-7 1.30 PM

 Speaker: ASHA KUTHARI CHAUDHURI, Gauhati University, Guwahati Title: Then and Now: Nation and Transnational Identity in Jyoti Prasad Agarwala’s Sati Joymati (1935) and Jahnu Barua’s Ajeyo (2014)  Chair: KAUSHIK BHAUMIK, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

VALEDICTORY DLT-7 2.30 PM SESSION

 Concluding Remarks: KAUSHIK BHAUMIK  Vote of Thanks: NILAK DATTA

***

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Plenary Speakers

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Supriya Chaudhuri is Professor of English (Emerita) at Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Her research interests include English and European Renaissance literature, cultural history, modernism, critical theory, translation, and cinema. Among recent publications are Commodities and Culture in the Colonial World (co-edited, Routledge, 2018); and essays in Revue des Femmes Philosophes, No 4-5 'Intellectuels, philosophes, femmes en Inde: des espèces en danger' (2018); The University Unthought: Notes for a Future (Routledge, 2018); A Companion to Virginia Woolf (Blackwell, 2016); and Celebrating Shakespeare: Commemoration and Cultural Memory (Cambridge UP, 2015). She has translated modern Bengali poetry and fiction, one of the instances being the translation of Rabindranath Tagore’s Yogayog for the Oxford Tagore Translations Series (2005). In 2018 she was TORCH Mellon Visiting Professor at the University of Oxford.

BORDERLANDS: THE MARGINS OF CINEMA My paper will seek to interrogate the key terms proposed by the conference title in the context of current debates surrounding ‘world literature’ on the one hand and ‘transnational cinemas’ on the other. The idea of the ‘transnational’, derived from the apparently scrupulous sequence of ‘region/ nation/ transnation’ appears as a more discriminating, less exclusionary and less hegemonic alternative to the adjectival use of ‘world’ or ‘global’ in the context of film, art or literature. In fact it could be argued that ‘world literature’ (like world art and world cinema) is an

Page 22 of 114 invention of recent date, one that is perhaps nearing its end. But the alternative of overlapping, or contesting, ‘geopolitical formations and locations of culture’, with all their inherent contradictions and uncertainties, leaves us with the unresolved question of borders, a question that is also posed by the idea of an ‘interface’ between different types of expressive form or media. My paper will therefore attempt to read at and from the border. It will look at borderlands as sites of representation where struggles between region and nation, citizen and refugee, local and global, are played out. At the same time, borders or ‘interfaces’ bear witness to the instability of artistic form, as it transitions between literature, still images, cinema, video, sound and installation art, each embedded in global networks of circulation. The literature- cinema interface appears today to be less compelling than that between cinema and various kinds of digital, performance and installation art. My presentation will draw upon literary texts by Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay and Saadat Hasan Manto, as well as upon contemporary cinema and art, concluding with a discussion of the British/ Bangladeshi artist Naeem Mohaiemen’s film Tripoli Cancelled (2017).

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Ravi S. Vasudevan is Professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), New Delhi, where he directs the media and urban studies programme SARAI. He is editorial advisor to journals such as Screen and co-founder/editor of the Sage journal BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies. Vasudevan has edited Making Meaning in Indian Cinema (2000) and a collection of his writings has been published as The Melodramatic Public: Film Form and Spectatorship in Indian Cinema (2010, 2016).

SHORT FILM AND DOCUMENTARY: ARCHIVES AND GENEALOGIES OF INFORMATIONAL FILM USE, INDIA C. 1910-1960 This presentation will explore what documentary film has meant over the years, and how genealogies of short film practice point to the importance of the simple instructional film along with genres of travel, and of political information (topical, newsreel), as key reference points for how a discourse of documentary came to be configured. I consider different sites for film use, in which a basic function, with varying degrees of elaboration, lay in the imparting of information to specific audiences with specific goals in mind. Films were made for audiences in the imperial metropolis, in British India’s burgeoning cities, in small towns and rural areas. These circuits involved

Page 24 of 114 exhibition by government of films of instruction, in health, agricultural improvement, in industrial safety; promotional films made by industrial houses, plantation businesses, and other trades to demonstrate the making of a product, and to demonstrate welfare policies for workers. More generally cinema houses and mobile cinema vans showed topicals, an incipient kind of newsreel, before newsreels took off as a particular genre. Travel and pilgrimage films became key items at cinema halls and in a wider circuit of exhibition. War time became particularly important for reportage from various fronts for use in newsreels and short propaganda films, and by the Second World War involved the setting up of army filmmaking units who were to prove influential. The geography of such formations could be quite extensive, both in the importation of equipment and film material, in the itinerary of film professionals and experts as they travelled in the subcontinent and beyond, and in the circulation of films in a local, regional and wider imperial and then post-national setting. The presentation will suggest that if this kind of film economy provided the building blocks for short film practice, even as more elaborate forms and claims came to emerge for the documentary, especially by the 1950s, they remained crucial to the life of the career filmmaker. Particularly important, for a longer historical perspective, is the archival function of this film material, to consider what range of information it offers, for example, of material life, infrastructures, landscapes, urban formations, social stratifications, trades, professions, and work practices; how it constructs and constitutes political iconicities of governmental authority, political mobilization and mass constituencies; and how such film material might be braided with later instances approaching the same topic or field of experience. Significant here is the way film was not only stored, but how it was reused subsequently, and how such reuse provides occasion to reflect on the historiographical functions of the archive of cinema: what temporality does it hold, what relation of then and how does it configure, how does it acquire significance in the contemporary.

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Kanchuka Dharmasiri divides her time between academia and theatre practice, teaches in the Dept. of English at the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka, has directed several plays including a Sinhala adaptation of Ionesco and edited a selection of Gamini Haththotuwegama’s writings.

THE MANY PHASES OF RAVANA: TRANSCREATIONS AND REVISIONINGS OF RAVANA IN A POST-COLONIAL SRI LANKAN CONTEXT The “Ramayanaya is not merely a set of individual texts, but a genre with a variety of instances,” claims A.K. Ramanujan. In fact, these instances are so multiple and varied that one is bound to get astounded in attempts to navigate these narratives. In recent years, the Ramayanaya, or more specifically the figure of Ravana, has gained significant importance in Sinhala and Tamil communities in Sri Lanka and has become a familiar sign in the cultural imaginary. While the narratives in Sinhala construe a history of Ravana that predates Vijaya, who is seen as the Indo-Aryan ancestor of the Sinhala people, the Tamil narratives construct Ravana as a Dravidian hero who safeguarded his community from invaders. In an attempt to establish a historical claim to the island, both communities appropriate Ravana as their own

Page 26 of 114 hero whereby he accrues a variety of significations ranging from the protector of the ‘original’ inhabitants of Lanka, a powerful Tamil King, a technologically advanced man to an alien. While narratives of the nation and national origin are created around this character who quite intriguingly cannot be contained within a single national boundary, the figure of Ravana is likewise co-opted by the tourist industry in an attempt to lure travellers to visit historical sites. The purpose of this paper is to explore the recent transcreations and revisionings of Ravana in the popular cultural context of Sri Lanka—in literature, theatre, and film—and to examine the socio- political and economic workings of these retellings which render Ravana a hero in both Sinhala and Tamil literary, theatrical and cinematic texts. It will examine how ancient and modern myths of Ravana are entangled in ideologies of nationalism, neoliberalism and power and how the image of Ravana is always already in a process of transformation.

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Mariano Mestman is one of the principal researchers at Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET), the Argentine national research council, and at the Instituto de Investigaciones Gino Germani (IIGG), Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), Argentina. He is also the director of the Master’s Program in Communication and Culture at UBA. One of the most widely published and translated film and cultural historians from Argentina, his most recent edited volume is Las rupturas del 68 en el cine de América Latina (2016).

TRACING THE WINDING ROAD OF THE HOUR OF THE FURNACES IN THE FIRST WORLD This paper traces the transnational journey and the curious histories of exhibition of Getino and Solanas’ seminal 1968 film The Hour of the Furnaces in Europe and North America, critically exploring some of the politics of the festival space in the late 1960s turbulent Europe. Then it moves towards the various accounts of its political screenings across the First World (mostly in France, Canada, Spain and Italy) and the varying, often contradictory and mutually exclusive responses to the film. The Third Worldist dialogues between the film or the Manifesto Towards a Third Cinema (1969) and the European or North American political cinema groups, and the discussions around Peronism in the Argentine context by those leftist groups are some of the issues that have been explored in detail, with the help of the author’s archival research in different countries and interviews with European organizers that unearthed informative yet unusual documents such as catalogues from parallel distributors, letters, testimonies and press notes, among other things.

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Javier Campo is a researcher at Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET), the Argentine national research council, and a professor of film aesthetics at Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires (UNICEN), Argentina. He is the associate editor of the Sage journal Latin American Perspectives, co-director of the magazine Cine Documental, and his recent publications include Revolución y Democracia: El cine documental argentino del exilio (1976-1984) (2017) and the coedited volume A Trail of Fire for Political Cinema: The Hour of the Furnaces Fifty Years Later (Intellect, 2019).

REVOLUTION PALIMPSEST: THE HOUR OF THE FURNACES (GETINO AND SOLANAS, 1968) Making a four hour long film in three parts is risky, its clandestine mode of making has been dangerous and its palimpsest-like structure that articulates various languages, perhaps, signifies madness. And yet the experiment was successful. The ‘68 in Latin America is marked by the premiere of a "film-lighthouse", La hora de los hornos (Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas, 1968). Made with heterogeneous elements, La hora needs to be understood as a work that begins with the Marxist left with foquist sympathies and Frantz Fanon and Ernesto Guevara as torch-bearers and ends with the wider context of the Peronist Movement where its makers shared space with other militants coming from different backgrounds. The monumentality of La hora was revalidated by its contemporary and more recent Argentine films as

Page 29 of 114 the aesthetic and thematic influences were revealed through their following of some of its formal characteristics, repeating of some of its slogans and use of clips from the film as archival material. This presentation will introduce and discuss the Third Cinema Movement through this legendary film and it is based on the book that I edited recently, A Trail of Fire for Political Cinema: The Hour of the Furnaces Fifty Years Later (Intellect, 2019, UK).

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Kaushik Bhaumik is Associate Professor in Cinema Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. A film-historian specializing in the histories of the emergence of Bombay film industry between 1896 and 1936, Bhaumik has published widely on early cinema, bazaar arts and modern Indian art and artists. He served as a research fellow at the Ferguson Centre for African and Asian Studies, Open University, UK, and as the Senior Vice President at Osian’s Connoisseurs of Art and the Deputy Director of the Osian’s Cinefan Festival of Asian and Arab Cinema. Bhaumik guest-edited Marg special issue on ‘100 years of Bombay Cinema’ and co-edited Indian Cinema Book (2008), Visual Sense: A Cultural Reader (2009) and Project Cinema/City (2013).

LITERATURE AND CINEMA BETWEEN REGION, NATION AND THE WORLD: THINKING ABOUT SATYAJIT RAY'S NAYAK The paper will approach the issue of region and transnationalism through evidence from the literature/cinema interface in the negative. I am interested in querying the oeuvre of a filmmaker for the point at which he gives up his usual practice of adapting literature for his films and writes his own script to make a film out of. The director in question here is Satyajit Ray and the film his 1966 classic Nayak. The film remains one of the rare occasions when Ray makes a film from his own script. However, the film becomes interesting to read from the point of view of the subject of the conference for its very surface diegetics that speak of a transition of Bengali modernity from region to the nation and in the stylistics of Ray's cinema that

Page 31 of 114 explicitly converses with the filmic language of the new European postmodern avant-garde which in turn redefine the nation-region dynamic as now determined by a new international countercultural avant-gardism. Ray had earlier done the same with his 1962 film, Kanchenjungha- connecting a self-scripted film with an explicit avant-gardism of European film styles. And I shall discuss Kanchenjungha in brief here. Nayak however, in the very story it tells, adds an explicit layer of contemplating this avant-garde style being beyond the realms of Bengali literature by positing that Bengali popular cinema as a whole marked by the stardom of Uttam Kumar in particular is now transiting to something beyond the literary regional to a modernism that only cinema as a hyper-modernist medium can contain. Here, not only do we need to consider the addition in the regime of Uttam Kumar's popular stardom a modernist sharp angularity through the decade of the 1960s but we would also need to consider the limitations of the linguistic horizons of Bengali literature, a product in the last instance of brahmanical ritualism, that cannot contain a certain material modernism defined by avant-garde design. Nayak is very clearly the first postmodern film of Indian cinema, that is postmodernity read in one register as the absolute formalization/finalization of the modernist avant-garde gesture in the commodity, that is, when commodity design and avant-garde converge in a simulacral minimalism of industrial form. However, what needs to be acknowledged is Nayak’s continuity with Ray's adapted works raising questions about cinema always ‘exceeding’ literature in his films as well as Nayak being literary in the sense of Ray's oeuvre being marked by literature in general without exception. Here, the film indeed becomes a harbinger of a literature-to- come-in-cinematic-times. Nested in this filmic trajectory connecting Bengal to the international or the transnational of film festival avant-gardisms of New Wave Cannes, Venice and Berlin of the 1960s is Delhi, the capital of the modernist developmentalist Indian nation, to which the postmodern design hero journeys from Calcutta, the erstwhile capital of colonial India. Destination Delhi therefore enables us to see the national as mediating the region-transnation axis through awards and selection of regional culture to be presented to the world at film festivals, as mediating Uttam Kumar’s stardom in Bengali cinema transforming into a new definition of national culture. This definition of national culture by the postmodern avant-garde gesture would in some ways be posited by Ray in Nayak as being beyond the bounds of Bengali literary modernity. Cinema would however capture this space easily being itself directly part of the adventure that design avant-gardism of postmodernity is all about (however, the promise of a literature-to-come in the region remains intact here). The shift in the material textures of national culture towards the avant-garde postmodern is signalled precisely in the foundation of FTII aimed to produce an avant-garde cinema for the nation. This cinema-postmodernity axis is signalled, in the final

Page 32 of 114 instance, and on the most explicit image surface of the film itself, by the fact that the hero is travelling from Calcutta to Delhi on a train that uncannily predicts the supermodernism of the Rajdhani Express (the fastest, smoothest and most vacuous/non-place train in India until recently) that would be inaugurated in 1969, three years after Nayak was made. Having presented the framework of the paper it will dwell upon the brute fact that Ray is not positing the crisis of the regional literary modern confronted with a postmodern history qua regional but as firstly, arguing for the crisis of the regional as central to the formation of world cultures since world cultures are very substantially defined by the regional (for example, the definition of world cinema through regional film movements such as Italian New Wave cinema and then Ray’s own status as world master of cinema making films in a region), and secondly, for the crisis of cultural regime change in the region-nation-transregion continuum as not that of literature alone but of regional literature and cinema together (including a crisis for his own brand of cinema) in its world cosmopolitan forms. Finally, the paper will place the discussion around Nayak around the speculative postulation that more than ever before the avant-garde postmodern definitions of world cultures are in contrast to an erstwhile world modernism absolutely determined by the regional, for in the very definition of postmodernity is an avant-garde gesture that says that the centre has dissolved. What this formulation bodes for what happened after 1966 to the regional in Bengal is something that I shall invite you all to think through. As we shall see that it is not in the decline of the regional per se but in the elision of the term ‘nation’ in the Nayak continuum region-nation-transnation, the dissolution of this centre, from the 1970s onwards, where the ironies of the transformation of region, of its literatures and cinemas, from the modern to the postmodern lie.

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Moinak Biswas is Professor, Dept. of Film Studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. He edits the departmental publication Journal of the Moving Image (JMI) annually, is in the editorial board for the Sage journal BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies and the coordinator of the Media Lab in the university. He has published a monograph on Chaplin in Bengali and edited two volumes of Hemango Biswas’ writings and a collection of essays entitled Apu and After: Revisiting Ray’s Cinema (2006). He debuted as a filmmaker by co-directing Sthaniya Sambad (Spring in the Colony, 2010).

THAT WHICH FLOWS: BETWEEN FICTION AND FILM This paper considers films that adapt tales of the river. The tales here originate in Bengal, but they seem to cross borders in more than one sense. We take a look at Titas ekti nadir nam (Ritwik Ghatak, 1973) adapted from Advaita Malla Barman’s novel (1956), Jago hua savera (A J Kardar, 1959) based on Manik Bandyopadhyay’s Padma nadir majhi (1936), and also Megh Mallar (Jahidur Rahman Anjan, 2016), adapted from Akhteruzzaman Elias’s short story ‘Raincoat’ (1997?). The last is not about rivers, but has a deep connection to water. We shall look for the presence of elements that seem to connect forms and territories in these works. We also ask what logic of transformation informs the content as the material moves from one shape to another, from fiction to film. And we try to connect all this to the construction of worlds in terms of regions and borders.

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Brinda Bose is Associate Professor, Centre for English Studies, School of Language Literature and Culture Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her research interests lie primarily in gender/sexuality and culture studies in South Asia, feminist/queer theory and writing, literary modernism and contemporary Indian cinema. Her The Audacity of Pleasure: Sexualities, Literature and Cinema in India (2017) has been published from Three Essays Collective. Bose has co-edited The Phobic and the Erotic: The Politics of Sexualities in Contemporary India (2007), and edited volumes such as Gender and Censorship (2006) and Translating Desire: The Politics of Gender and Culture in India (2002).

BECKETT AND AVIKUNTHAK: LINEAGES OF THE AVANT-GARDE Being, Seeing, Waiting, Churning. I will attempt to think about a set of avant-garde inheritances and progeny floating in the penumbra around and between Samuel Beckett and Ashish Avikunthak, a generation and nations apart. I will begin by looking at the only film Beckett wrote and conceived, Film (1965), which he said was about ‘perceiving’; it featured Buster Keaton and commemorated Buñuel and Dali’s 1929 surrealist film with the razored eye, Un Chien Andalou. Beckett’s avant-gardism may be strung upon his ‘Fail again. Fail better’ maxim, one that leaches into and trips up action – of speaking, writing, seeing, doing – even as one awaits an ending that fails to come. ‘Better’ is always ironic, being relative and subjective, latched to failure, and never proven. Silence or babble, rather than speech, makes for ‘better’ communication, as does not setting eye on eye. In Film, Keaton was directed never to look at the camera. His tasks were to cover up the seeing eye and not see/be seen. In Beckett’s well-known literary text, Waiting for Godot, his protagonists wait for the one who cannot be seen. It is likely that they will fail to see Godot; their waiting will be better for this failure, as it will never be fulfilled. If Film is an avant-garde

Page 35 of 114 masterpiece in moving images, Waiting for Godot is its literary equivalent: both are about perceiving and being perceived, and the failure of both. Ashish Avikunthak has brought Beckettian avant-gardism to Bengali cinema in two film adaptations: a short, Antaral (End Note, 2005) based on Beckett’s one-act play, Come and Go, and a feature, Kalkimanthankatha (The Churning of Kalki, 2015), based on Waiting for Godot. Both explore waiting, and watching, and the ruptures as well as fleeting raptures of perception and communication, doomed to fail, perhaps to ‘fail better’. Does Avikunthak’s cinematic engagement with the literary Beckett signify a ‘transnational’ churning of the avant-garde, like the one across generations and nations that Beckett himself had initiated with his Film? Does the avant-garde travel well, or does it ‘fail better’?

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M. Asaduddin is a Professor of English at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, whose areas of interest include world literature, translation and postcolonial studies. He has received India’s highest literary award, the Sahitya Akademi Award, for his translation in 2004, apart from A. K. Ramanujan Award, Fulbright and Charles Wallace Trust fellowships.

PREMCHAND, RAY AND THE ‘GAME OF CHESS’: SOME REFLECTIONS ON ADAPTATION FROM LITERATURE INTO FILM The dependence of films on literature is a subject much discussed in recent times. At the core of a good film lies an interesting and arresting narrative, usually sourced from literature. The process of adaptation from literature into film is a subject that requires deep understanding of both the art forms. A substantial number of Satyajit Ray’s films, in fact more than 80 per cent, was based on literary narratives, mainly Bengali. His solitary foray in the world of Hindi feature film consists of his adaptation of Premchand’s story ‘Shatranj ki Baazi’ for his film Shatranj ke Khiladi. The short story dealing with the last days of Wajid Ali Shah as the nawab of Awadh does not have enough material to make a full length feature film. So, Ray had to take recourse to the method of ‘expansion’ (his word) by adding a substantial part of the material on his own. The narrative voice and the tone of the film are also quite different from those of the story, resulting in making quite a different impact on the mind of the audience than that left by the story on the mind of readers. The paper will analyse the process of adaptation in an effort to understand if and why the changes were necessary and how the story and the film complement each other.

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Fakrul Alam is a former Professor of English literature at the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh, and currently serving as the Pro Vice-Chancellor of East West University, Bangladesh. A renowned translator and academician with a wide-ranging publication profile devoted to Rabindranath Tagore and other Bengali poets, Alam has received the SAARC Literature Award in 2012.

THE PARTITIONING OF BENGAL, 1971, AND NATIONAL IDENTITY FORMATION IN TANVIR MOKAMMEL’S FILMS My presentation will concentrate on the films of Tanvir Mokammel, one of the few filmmakers of Bangladesh focusing on forging an alternative tradition of filmmaking in the country to explore issues related to national identity formation in the light of key moments in its history, such as the partition of Bengal in 1947, and the birth of Bangladesh in 1971. Mokammel’s films, as well as his published work, are dedicated to representing some of the traumas associated with these divisive, decisive movements in Bangladesh’s history, and the diasporas and marginalization of minorities that ensue from them. With sympathy as well as insight, and making use of classics not only of Bangladeshi literature but also of masterpieces of the western tradition, he traces the impact on individual lives of events in the region, which transcend borders and fissure relationships, unsettling seemingly moribund ways of life. In particular, my paper will highlight Mokammel’s sympathy for refugees, subalterns, and doubly colonized sections of Bangladesh, and depict his filmic response to their plight. In the process, I hope to present to conference participants a filmmaker who deserves more attention than he has got outside Bangladesh, where he has already received some major awards for his works.

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Asha Kuthari Chaudhuri is Professor in English, Gauhati University, Guwahati, Assam and specializes in Drama, Theatre and Film Studies. Her PhD was on the American dramatist Edward Albee. Among her varied publications are Mahesh Dattani (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press India, 2005), and Ideas of the Stage: Selections from Drama Theory (Ghy: GUPD, 2010). Recipient of the Fulbright Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Award in 2015-16, she worked at The Graduate Center, CUNY, New York doing theatre research. Along with academics, she has also been doing research, scripts and narration for television documentaries for the last two decades, and co-manages Bolchobi, the GU Film Forum.

THEN AND NOW: NATION AND TRANSNATIONAL IDENTITY IN JYOTI PRASAD AGARWALA’S SATI JOYMATI (1935) AND JAHNU BARUA’S AJEYO (2014) The notion of ‘transnation’ in its contemporary currency implies various conceptualizations of border-crossings, globalization and cosmopolitanism. This paper explores the possibility of reading back the notion to a time when the idea of India was in its nebulous epoch; when various sub-national categories, peoples, tribes, religious groups were moving towards a nation-state as the newly independent India was emerging. Both centripetal and centrifugal forces seem to be at work here, especially if we consider representations of this historical space in two specific Assamese films. Sati Joymati (Agarwala, 1935) and Ajeyo (Barua, 2014) address the same time-space- nation conundrum – while the former is in the thick of nationalism narratives and speaks from there, Jahnu Barua’s Ajeyo is a revisitation, a re-imagination of the

Page 39 of 114 partition stories of Assam in 1947. Both grapple with ideas of identity and borders: the Ahom kingdom vis a vis the Naga tribal amalgamation in Joymati and religious identities in Ajeyo. Many of the issues resonate today as it had in 1947; there is also the added layer of the Assam Agitation of the 1980s and after to consider when we analyze such revisitations.

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List of Presenters

Aashima Jain 44 Christina Dhanasekaran 59 Abhirup Sarkar 44 Deepa Prajith 60 Afrinul Haque Khan 45 Deepak Saroha 61 Ahmed Tahsin Shams 45 Dibyakusum Ray 61 Amit Kumar 46 Elloit Cardozo 62 Amrita Biswas 46 Eltrin D'souza 62 Ananya Parikh 47 Foyez Ahmed Syed 63 Andrea Rodrigues 48 Gautam Chandra Roy 63 Anil Sonawane 48 Gunjan Gupta 64 Anindita Mukherjee 49 Halim Hussain 64 Anu Antony 49 Hannah Rachel Abraham 65 Anuparna Mukherjee 50 Harshad Santosh Pore 65 Arka Chattopadhyay 50 Hemchandra Nameirakpam 66 Arnab Kumar Sinha 51 Hiya Chatterjee 66 Ashutosh Kant Prabhakar 52 Hridaya Parag Ajgaonkar 67 Ashwati CK 52 Imran Mulla 67 Aswathy Das, SA Narayanan & 53 Januka Edirimanna Mohotti 68 Amritha G. Atul Stanley Hermit 54 Jayshree Singh & Chitra D. 68 Barun Naha 54 Jeetumoni Basumatary 69 Bashabi Gogoi 55 Jijo C George 70 Betsy Thomas 55 Jisha Elezaba & Karthika S B 70 Bhawna Shrey 56 Jyoti Hermit 71 Brian Mendonca 57 Kalplata 71 Chaitra Nagammanavar 57 Kashyapi Ghosh 72 Chhavi Kulshreshtha 57 Kaushik Thakur Bhuyan 72 Chinmaya Lal Thakur 58 Konika Mukherjee 73 Chintha Pavithrani 59 Koushik Mondal 73

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Kuntal Bag 74 Sananda Roy 91 Layla Mascarenhas 75 Sandipan Ray 92 Lizbeth Shine 75 Sangeeta Jawla 92 Louiza Rodrigues 76 Santanu Das 93 Malavika B & Hildegard A. 77 Sayanty Chatterjee 93 Manisha Gangahar 77 Seema Jena 94 Manisha Mishra 77 Shirin Rais 94 Medha Deshpande 78 Shishu Bala 95 Meera Krishnadas 79 Shravya Aradhyam 95 Meghna Bera 79 Shreelata Prasad 96 Meshabaker Umdor Syiem 80 Shweta Kushal 97 Monika Kaushik 80 Simona Sarma & Sukriti G. 97 Mrinalini Sharma 81 Smriti Avinash 98 Neha Jain 81 Sourit Bhattacharya 98 Nirmala M N 82 Sreenivas Andoju 99 Pankaj Kumar Verma 83 Srirupa Chatterjee 99 Paromita Chakrabarti 84 SSA Senevirathne & PS 100 Manthirathna Pawan Sharma 84 Stotropama Mukherjee 100 Poulome Panja 85 Sudesh Manger 101 Prachi Prabhu 85 Sukanta Barman 102 Prakriti Arora 86 Tanvi Bambolkar 102 Prerana N 87 Tara Saldanha 103 Rajarshi Mitra 87 Vanisha Pandia 103 Rajendra Nargundkar 88 Veena Hariharan 104 Rani Jana 88 Vidhi Mehra 104 Reema Chowdhary 89 Vidisha Mukherjee 105 Ruth Susan Mathew 89 Vinayak Yashraj 105 Sachindev P. S. 90 Vivek Sachdeva 106 Saman M. Kariyakarawana 90

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Abstracts

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TRANSNATIONALISM IN QUESTION: MOVEMENT FROM A LOCAL TO A GLOBAL CONDITION OF SURVEILLANCE IN POST 9/11 WORLD Aashima Jain, Christ University, Bengaluru The September 11 attack in the United States broke the world into two temporal times, pre 9/11 and post 9/11. Affecting the world radically, the attacks had both immediate and long-term impacts, some of which continue to this day. In the face of this change, U.S. government administered quasi-isolationist tendencies and colossal immigration policy measures to obtain national security. Immigrants who came to state with the idea of climbing up the economic ladder were reinstated as second-class citizens who lived in oppressive conditions hence, sharing the context of the postcolonial which then ultimately became the issue of subjugation and exploitation. With the idea of citizenship made meaningless for them, they underwent strict surveillance and constant paranoia of being watched. New databases were set up linking biographic, immigration and criminal histories of each American Muslim. Marina Budhos novels, Ask Me No Questions and Watched depict how thousands of immigrants who lived in the U.S. for many years suddenly lost their legal status. Questioning the definition of Transnationalism in the terms of ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ the paper engages with questions of nation-state and state citizenship. Though the theoretical framework of the paper is postcolonial theory, it will also take insight from theories of surveillance and human psychology to study the state of people struggling with ‘between cultures’. Thereby the aim is to problematize the singular notions of freedom, justice, and opportunity by analyzing the psychological trauma undergone by the immigrants in the novel.

FROM 'INDIANIZATION' TO 'KOREANIZATION' : SOUTH KOREA'S CULTURAL PENETRATION IN NORTH-EAST INDIA Abhirup Sarkar, Christ University, Bengaluru The first Korean wave that hit the country was economic, as Hyundai, LG, Daewoo and Samsung shook the Indian market. The second wave was rather culturally driven. All the Asian countries experienced the “Hallyu” almost at the same time, and so did Manipur, in North East India. It was in 2000, when the Revolutionary People’s Front ordered a ban on Hindi films and television channels to ‘stamp out Indianization’ that Manipur turned towards alternatives. The cultural proximity, similarity in religious structures, philosophy of traditional music, folk games played an important role along with similarities in physical features as well as the societies which were mostly Mongoloid stock and based on clan communities, as the “Meitei” turned towards Korea to fill in the void. It began with Arirang TV, a 24-hour English network channel based in Seoul. As years passed by, Manipur slowly found its way to the hugely marketed and by then, the immensely popular world of K-drama, K-pop, K-movies; and most importantly the Korean culture, including their unique fashion and styles. Eighteen years later, the Korean wave that hit the North East India, is now enraging throughout the rest of the subcontinent, due to upscaling of the “Look East Policy” as the “Act East Policy” by the current government, as an effort to cultivate extensive economic and strategic relations with the South- East Asian nations. This paper, explores in detail, the roots and causes leading to the penetration

Page 44 of 114 of Korean culture in and via the North-East India, and also, digs up the possibility of a neo- colonial penetration of the Southeast Asia into the Indian subcontinent.

TRANSLATION, ADAPTATION, AND TRANSNATIONALISM: REVISITING PREMCHAND'S GODAN THROUGH TEXT AND CINEMA Afrinul Haque Khan, Nirmala College, Ranchi University, Jharkhand If the opinions of all the Indian critics were tabulated, there can be little doubt that Munshi Premchand's Godan would be voted the best novel in Indian literature. Written in 1936 in Hindi, the novel presents a comprehensive picture of the crumbling Indian agrarian rural economy in the colonial period and is a striking illustration of Premchand's mastery and expertise in handling realistic social concerns. Godan was translated in English in 1957 by Jai Ratan and P. Lal, made into Hindi cinema in 1963, again translated in English in 1968 by Gordon C. Roadarmel and made into a T.V. series that was broadcast on Doordarshan in 2004. However, despite the canonization that Godan has earned and sustained over the years in India, the popularity, acceptance and circulation of the text in west is still a matter of concern. A classic of Indian literature, Godan, has not acquired a transnational status and reputation. Is it because, to use Gayatri Spivak's words, as a "discourse of cultural specificity and difference" it is not "packaged for transnational consumption" or is it because what Mufti says, "cultural objects from non-western societies can be grasped only with reference to the categories of European cultural history, as pale or partial reflections". The present paper proposes to examine some of these questions through an exploration of Premchand's Godan, both as a text and cinema.

THE 'NEW ORIGINAL' THROUGH CULTURAL TRANSLATION: KAAFIRON KI NAAMAZ, THE JOURNEY OF PASTICHE FROM POSTMODERN STAGE TO INDIAN CINEMA SCREEN Ahmed Tahsin Shams, Notre Dame University, Bangladesh Adaptation is the "freest form of translation where Source Language is (SL) converted to the Target Language (TL) culture" (Newmark, 1988). In the film Kaafiron Ki Naamaz (2013), writer and director Ram Ramesh Sharma portrayed the postmodern aesthetics of stage in the context of Kashmir, India. In this Indian cinema, Sharma critically borrowed the stylistics from Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party, thus established a balanced negotiation between literature and cinema. Sharma, also, liberated the original "language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation." (Venuti, 2000). Moreover, the discourse of stage has been projected in the frames of this film, and the characterization, especially of the duo-protagonists, in this film reflects relationship perceived in Estragon-Vladimir and Goldberg-McCann in Waiting for Godot and The Birthday Party respectively. Such adaption, from stage to screen, through "multi-medial text type" (Venuti, 2000), has given birth to a new context that offers a "new original" (Venuti, 2000) through cultural translation. Starting from

Page 45 of 114 the beginning to the end, this film challenges absolutism and established notions of Indian politics and history, hegemonized societal ideologies that exists in Indian context, maintaining the aesthetics of plot construction, postmodern discourse projected by Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter in their postmodern plays. This paper critically brings forth the philosophy how cultural translation and contextual adaption of literature to cinema creates a 'new original' text that requires no reference of earlier adapted texts as it happened in the case of Kaafiron Ki Naamaz. This research will also point out in qualitative approach how the literature discourse achieves new body in cinematic "afterlife" (Venuti, 2000) through transculturalism giving reference to the film Kaafiron Ki Naamaz that apparently seems a pastiche adaption of Waiting for Godot and The Birthday Party in Indian socio-political context, yet an original text.

MUSLIMS IN BOLLYWOOD: DILUTION OF ISSUES IN THE PROCESS OF ‘OTHERNESS’ Amit Kumar, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi Cinema is a representation of society and it is rightly referred as the mirror of society. Society and its inherent features are replicated in Cinema too. Cinema plays a vital role in the social and cultural life of this country and shapes our consciousness in many ways. Elements like power, subjugation, subversion and hierarchy can well be represented in cinema too. Scholars like Jack. G. Sheehan had argued that Hollywood movies have stereotyped the image of Arabs as negative characters generating Islamophobia in the process. Likewise, in India, scholars like Sanjeev K. H.M. have argued that the Post-independence Bollywood movies portrayed Muslims as feudal, rich and anti-modern characters steeped in tradition. They over emphasized Muslims as a conservative homogeneous community without any internal differentiation. This paper seeks to delineate the transition in the projection of Muslims as ‘others’ in Bollywood cinema in two phases: Post-independence till Babri Masjid demolition (1948-92) and Post- Babri Masjid demolition (1993-2017). In understanding these transitions, this paper argues that in a certain way the depiction of the Muslim characters in movies has strengthened the Hindutva political agenda of stereotyping the Muslims as the ‘conservative inward looking other’ by contextualizing them in visual binaries of communalism and secularism. In the process, the chances of cultural exchange and inter- cultural dialogue have received a huge setback. Though movies as a creative medium of expression are not just influence but are also influenced by the society in which they originate. This paper contends that in the context of Muslim community, they have disproportionately influenced the society by reinforcing the already existing stereotypes, thereby increasing their marginalization.

CARTOGRAPHY OF GOA: AN ANALYSIS OF THE TANGIBLE LOCI OF CULTURE IN THE CARTOONS OF MARIO MIRANDA Amrita Biswas, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

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Envisaging Goa as a cultural interface, this article will employ the cartoons of Mario de Miranda to explore the kaleidoscope of sensory stimulations that Goa accommodates by studying the cultural matrices and sub-cultural interstices that represent its various tactile sites such as ports, bazaars and streets. The kinetic world concocted by Miranda comprises of proximity and density, with massive crowds compressed into a finite space that renders Goa as an organic entity. His sense of humour permeates the mundane textures of daily life to suture the global influences that punctuate Goa with the local cultural significations that enliven it. While the space of the bazaar is infused with perceptual contradictions, the port is exemplified by the erratically navigating tourists who both imbibe from and lend to the cultural currency of the region. Miranda posits the ports as tangible points of entry into Goa, brimming over with incidental strangers and hippies who suffuse the area with a vibrant heterogeneity. The artist’s works emphasize on figurations of crowd and community which accrue fluidity in the streets where the mere movement of human forms, during carnivalesque processions and fiestas, construct the domain of spectacle. By analyzing Miranda’s depictions of the varied cultural hotspots of Goa, this article seeks to map the histories and the contemporary contours of the local resistance to cultural homogenization as well as the acceptance of global cultural flows and sub-cultural contraflows that have marked the essence of Goa.

LANGUAGE AND EARLY INDIAN SILENT CINEMA Ananya Parikh, Symbiosis School for Liberal Arts, Pune A central issue haunting early silent cinema scholarship in India is the lack of film prints and a limited archive of film documents and material, making it very difficult to write a history or provide a framework and method to study it. Therefore, Indian film history has been largely limited to broad generalized studies or a linear chronology of dates and significant films. Recently, there has been an attempt to move away from this and provide a more critical approach into the formative years of Indian cinema. Looking at the questions of stardom, genre, early sound technology, image formation and aesthetics, industry etc. recent film histories in India have made possible complex interactions between cinematic and other archives. While this has opened up the field, it is does not completely address the complexities of the multiple narratives of film in India. In my paper, I wish to argue that due to the absence of a cinema archive, one needs to look for an alternative archive to study this period and that archive, I propose, is language (both oral and literary). Language, in this project, refers to practices in the vernacular that are performative, literary, dramatic and even, visual that fed into the cinematic image and narrative. Thus, to better understand the histories of cinema in India, especially the silent period, the question of language becomes crucial to address. In my paper, I will focus specifically on the language practices of Gujarati and Marathi to explore this interaction between the literary and the cinematic and argue that it provides us with a new critical lens to view the debates around cinema, literature and culture in India.

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THE LITERARY CITY OF PONDICHERRY THROUGH THE LENS: THE UPSHOT OF THE RECEDING TRANSNATIONAL IMAGE Andrea Rodrigues, Christ University, Bengaluru Pondicherry of the early 20th century had the French identity growing into its regional identity, so much so that it blurred the idea of a ‘nation’ for its people. When the French colonial rule was lost after 1954, the post-colonial situation became a breeding ground for regional identity crisis and found expression in literary renditions. The research paper looks at the portrayal of the receding transnational French culture of Pondicherry in Sebastian Cortes’ photography and essay compilation, ‘Pondicherry’. The argument is that texts like these establish that the fading transnational identity in Pondicherry drew a parallel in the receding state identity, thereby leading to an upshot of a fragmented present with an uncertain idea of the nation.

The series of Cortes’ photographs have become cinematic in the depiction of Pondicherry’s history. This is a postmodern approach to view the present city in the text as encapsulating ‘the past’, i.e. the transnational French Pondicherry. The book has three essays where the gaze of the transnational essayist depicts the transition of institutions like the Sri Aurobindo Ashram into the space of the trans-nation, the social psyche’s recurrent outcry for the French city, and, the longing for organic French borders which in the past became a line of distinction for Pondicherry, a line that had lent a new organized transnational identity and replaced the uncertain national one. In the area of regional studies, the positive influence of the initiator of a transnational culture is often undermined in the post-colonial approach. However, this paper looks at the literary depiction of the Colonial French as a pluri-cultural negotiator and then maps Pondicherry’s cultural un-colouring with the fading trans-nation, thereby establishing the argument first made.

NEGOTIATIONS AND CONSUMPTION IN THE EARLY INDIAN CINEMA Anil Sonawane, University of Mumbai, Mumbai The Indian Cinematograph Committee Report (1927-28) and film journals like Filmland, The Cinema, Varieties Weekly, Filmindia, published in the 1930s show that Indian cinema in its early years was transnational as artists like Himansu Rai and Niranjan Pal collaborated with British and German technicians in the 1920s and 1930s to produce silent films as well as talkies. There were European and American technicians that came to India to market their products and train Indians in using them. Wilford Deming, Elis Duncan (known in the southern part of India as Dungan), Franz Osten, Joseph Wirsching, T. Marconi are the names that appear in the archival material available in India. However, their presence also gave rise to the discourse surrounding native productions and productions involving non-Indians. Himansu Rai, Niranjan Pal and Franz Osten’s collaborative efforts, The Light of Asia, Shiraz, and A Throw of Dice (all made in the late 1920s), were called non-Indian films. But their technical superiority earned the makers ‘symbolic capital’ (Pierre Bourdieu), that later got transformed into producers in

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India investing in Bombay Talkies Studio, of which Himansu Rai was in-charge. For foreign manufacturers of the technical equipment India was a market to compete for. Paul Perry, an American cinematographer, is reported to describe India (mainly Bombay and Calcutta) as an important market to capture by British manufacturers of film equipment (The Cine Technician, Vol. III, April-May 1937). The distribution of Indian cinema in the early years crossed the ‘national’ boundaries. A look at processes of production, distribution and consumption of early Indian cinema suggest that there is more than nationalist discourse to the history of early Indian cinema.

THE LANGUAGE OF SEDUCTION IN THE WORKS OF VIJAYADAN DEHTA Anindita Mukherjee, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi The aesthetics of language and cinema are deeply rooted in the charismatic chasm of seduction. The politics of (re)writing folktales can be significantly related to the (re)making of films. The paper would like to take into account the cultural and critical poetics of Vijayadan Detha’s short story ‘Duvidha’ and critically talk about both 1973 movie directed by Mani Kaul and 2005 movie directed by Amol Palekar named Paheli. The focus of the paper would not only encompass the significance of seduction in the apparent content but how the discourse of seduction insinuates its strategies of representation at the level of language. It would also be an interesting way to contemporanise the reading of both the texts and the cinematic representation to talk about the status or rewordings of language in literature as well as study ‘seductive modernities’ of twenty first century. The translatability of cinematic experience through literary depictions show the fine lines on which politics of seduction rests. It is important to investigate the forms of depiction of seduction both on virtual and literary medium to talk about if modernities in its spatio-temporal realities manifest or bridge the essential difference in what comprises a seductive image and a seductive language.

CONSTRUCTS OF CLASS AND GENDER IN ADOOR GOPALKRISHNAN'S NAALU PENNUNGAL (THE FOUR WOMEN) Anu Antony, University of Calicut, Kerala The representation of power regimes attains significance in the contextual reading of films of Malayalam film director Adoor Gopalakrishnan. The film Naalu Pennungal (Four Women) act as a metanarrative with artistic freedom in the coneptualisation of cultural transitions in the history of modern Kerala. The study examines the argument that all levels of society share in the circulation of power and how it is textualised in a narrative. The aesthetics of the film and the explication of power operations mutually contribute to the reading at multiple levels to achieve the signification. The Althusserian Marxism and Foucauldian concept of power are central to the analysis. It represents underlying contradictions and antagonisms and responds to the social anxieties and collective wishes. The struggles of the marginalised and the subaltern become frame of references for the understanding of the characters in the film. The characters

Page 49 of 114 who are not fit to the conceptual frameworks dictated by the society and the fragmentary nature underline the postmodern perspective of the four different stories in the film. The critical underpinnings of cultural studies are explored to read the multifunctional dimensions of power contestation, inextricably bound to Kerala’s social and political history. The concept of power becomes paradoxical in the concepts of resistance and freedom. It encompasses an analysis of relationship between economic, political, social and cultural aspects of the society. The four women represented in the film Naalu Pennungal belong to the different periods in the cultural history of Kerala. The oppression and resistance showcased in the film goes well in tone with the central plot of discussion. The film is read for how they reveal the economic and social relations as they produce ideology and represent power or subversion. The power dispersion is inherent in a society and the study attempts to make an understanding how the society is subjected to it through ideological and repressive apparatuses.

MAPS AND MEMORIES: IMAGINED CITIES AND UNTRANSLATED WORLDS Anuparna Mukherjee, Australian National University, Australia Cities as conjunctural spaces, function, according to Bill Ashcroft, as interstices between “the nation and the world”. They mirror the nation to the world and yet, in their constant churning and chaotic “openness”, cities create zones of dissent and contestation that undercut any monolithic narrative of identity, be it national or regional. Narrativizing an urban space, thus braids together contradictory concerns based on how different populations claim their stakes in the urban space. Extending this argument in the context of Calcutta as a global city in the 19th century, I will evoke the repository of urban texts in the Anglophone and Bengali tradition to locate how they reflected the transnational imperial project and, simultaneously, depicted distinctly regional character which marked the aspiration of the local. My paper will address the mottled maps of the city sketched, both literally and in the extended sense, by the vernacular writers in the margins of colonial culture in the 19th century, that sometimes reinforced, but most often creatively challenged the hegemonic “representation of space” in Calcutta. This paper sets out to explore the city and its affective environment in the contending models of life- worlds that might be posited against each other. It attends to the question about the “worldings” of the city in and across languages and how their imports translate transculturally. Here “mapping” is used in an extended and creative sense to refer to the reimagining of the everyday landscapes within textual spaces such as songs, stories and poems. The examples are chiefly taken from two distinctive genres—street poems and songs drawn from the oral tradition and in the nakshas of the 19th century.

SANDIPAN CHATTOPADHYAY'S BHAROT BORSHO: NATIONALISM AND DESIRE Arka Chattopadhyay, IIT Gandhinagar The paper will read Indian-Bengali author Sandipan Chattopadhyay’s novel, Bharotborsho (1999) in the context of nationalism and its regulatory dynamic vis-a-vis human desire. The

Page 50 of 114 novel mixes political reality with dystopian fantasy as it delves into the 1992 demolition of Babri Masjid in Ayodhya as a political watershed in the history of India’s postcolonial nationhood. It crisscrosses between the public and the private by juxtaposing the demolition with a non-consensual sexual intercourse that takes place between Harun and Sudeshna. After watching the BBC live telecast of the demolition, the ever-quiet Harun pounces upon his best friend’s (the narrator) wife Sudeshna and the ‘rape’ that leads to the birth of an illicit child, resembles the divided social fabric of India as a nation. As the title itself suggests, Sandipan aims at a political allegory of the nation which gets consolidated by the bestial fantasy trope. In a complex interpenetrational narrative, Sandipan traces a mysterious transformational dog- epidemic which acts as an extended metaphor for the bloody communal riots that struck the country blind after the Babri demolition. This epidemic that literally transforms all human beings into dogs after prolonged physical suffering, spreads from the Karsevak’s accumulated bricks, imported in preparation of the Babri demolition. In the paper, I examine the trope of eroticism vis-a-vis nationalism by first looking at the relational triangle of Harun, Sudeshna and Pinaki and then taking this dialectical tension through the deployment of the ‘animal’ and the ‘non-human’ motif in the allegory of the dog-epidemic. As the reference to Freud and the allusion to an imaginary erotic epic that tries to find a cure to the epidemic through sex suggest, the conflict of nation and desire is at the heart of this novel. I demonstrate how this dialectic is staged by way of a non-linear charting of the national space whereby we move in a kaleidoscopic way from Kolkata to Ayodhya and then Lothal as the valley of death in Gujarat. The spatial matrix climaxes with a transnational reference to the ‘Ibom’ dog tribes at the margin of Papua New Guinea. The paper traces this contrapuntal spatial design in relation to the dynamic of nation and desire where allocating as well as curbing the enjoyment of the citizen is part of the nation-state’s manipulation of control.

THE AUTHOR AS NOVELIST, FILMMAKER AND PERFORMER: MEERA SYAL’S ANITA AND ME Arnab Kumar Sinha, The University of Burdwan, West Bengal The role of an author in the interface between a literary text and its filmic representation is very significant. If the author as an entity is not just a novelist or a playwright, but also a filmmaker and a performer, the whole issue of literature-cinema interface assumes a problematic dimension. Meera Syal’s Anita and Me (1996) is a glaring example of a filmic representation of a literary text where the author (Meera Syal) attempts to produce a film that seeks to truly capture the spirit of the original novel. The film, Anita and Me (2002) presents the character of Meena, who is a Punjabi girl in her teens living in a village of England during tmohe 1960s. As a second generation diasporic character, Meena struggles to develop a friendship with Anita, who is a white English girl. The novel and the film, quite succinctly, represent the crisis experienced by the Punjabi diasporic community living in England during the post-world war II scenario. In the film, Syal appears as a Punjabi woman playing the role of Meena’s aunty, who is highly conservative and does not support Meena’s modern outlook. The film has been co-produced by Syal and she also has written the screenplay of the film. Thus, these multiple functions of an author complicate the aspect of authorship, especially in the diasporic context.

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In fact, Syal’s film is an instance of “accented cinema” (Hamid Naficy 4) that seeks to address questions related to authorship and “autobiographical inscription” (Hamid Naficy 33). This paper, therefore, will make an attempt to use the concept of “accented cinema” to argue that Syal’s representation of the diasporic experience in both the novel and the film is problematic from the point of view of authorship.

THE TRAIN AND THE TANKER: BOARDING THE PROMISES Ashutosh Kant Prabhakar, Ambedkar University Delhi Partition in nation-state archive holds denotative memory that compensates the experience with a policed account of concepts on the events and their dedication to the national dreams. But simultaneously there has been literature, textual, oral and cinematic that ruptures our sense of integrity irrespective of our moral and religious conceit. Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun and Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan are two such stories on Israel-Palestine and India- Pakistan partition that bequeathed people their darkest disorientations. The ‘train’ in “Train to Pakistan” and the ‘tanker’ in “Men in the Sun” are symbols of shared disorientation and dehumanisation that resulted in the wake of a conceptual utopia of nation and progress. Mano Majra (the village) and Abul Khaizuran (the driver/smuggler) are siblings in their victimhood and perpetration. Their pre-partition souls are tormented at their post-partition transformation. Simultaneously their cinematic adaptations in 1998 and 1972 added layers of stimulation and sutures the audience back to the horrors in that awakening.

This Paper will attempt to undertake a comparative study of the two texts and their cinematic adaptations. It will try to unearth lines of shared experiences, disorientations dichotomies that people across cultures underwent as a universal anomaly to a human bond and relationships, and also discuss possible resonances in the cinematic milieu and their approaches to the text.

POST-COLONIAL ANXIETIES: INTERPRETING MODERN INDIA'S CHANGING PATTERNS OF CITIZENSHIP DILEMMA Ashwati CK, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi This paper aims to comprehensively analyse the usage of cinema as an effective medium for political consciousness and mobilization of electoral power in Tamil Nadu. The rise of Tamil nationalism through the Dravidian movement in the region has been swift yet dramatic. The primary features of Dravidian politics can be identified based on linguistic, ethnic and cultural identity. Post the elections of 1967, the strategic use of cinema as a form of mass communication has resulted in more public participation in the socio-political development of the state. Targeting vast electorate groups, actors of the Tamil industry have successfully created heroic personalities through films and political activities of fan clubs. Various politicians like M G Ramachandran, Karunanidhi, Annadurai and Jayalalita have enhanced the association of cinema with Tamil ethnicity, carefully building a platform of rhetoric for political activities. With effective portrayal of elements of political ideologies in films, the lines

Page 52 of 114 of political authority and cinema had been blurred from 1967 till 2016, marked by the death of actress turned Chief Minister, Jayalalita. With a power vacuum that exists currently in Tamil Nadu politics, the space for ethnic and linguistic rise from cinema to a position of bureaucracy can be interestingly compared to the same setting that existed post-independence in peninsular India. With speculations of stars like Rajinikanth and Kamal Hassan entering politics, the paper tries to disseminate the appeal of competitive populism and altruism that artists create to promote Dravidian politics centred on Tamil identity and language.

WORDSWORTHIAN REALM IN MALAYALAM LITERATURE-CINEMA INTERFACE: UNSUNG HEROES OF THE MOLLYWOOD Aswathy Das K V, S Ambadi Narayanan and Amritha G., Vishwa Vidyapeetham

The waves of romantic renaissance gradually hit the shores of Kerala by the late nineteenth century, antecedent to the eighteenth century Romantic movement in England. Consequently, metrical compositions got constrained to narratives of moderate length from the extensive neoclassical Mahakavya. Malayalam cinema industry started flourishing as celluloids replaced theatrical plays. This paper aims to light up the Romantic ideology underlying the works of the maestros of regional Malayalam literature as well as the classical scenarists namely O.N.V. Kurup (1931-2016) Vayalar Ramavarma (1928-1975), Thakazhi Shivasankara Pillai (1912- 1999) and M T Vasudevan Nair (1933). The concept of nature rather triggered within them an involuntary paganism. They found themselves answerable to an unseen force in nature which bestowed the celestial glory to “meadow, grove and stream,” as Wordsworth believed. O.N.V. Kurup and Vayalar Ramavarma, true romantics in the history of Malayalam Literature flooded Malayalam film industry with their romantic poems. M T Vasudevan Nair and Thakazhi Shivsankara Pillai changed the dimensions of Mollywood with their screenplays which would have won global recognition. M.T dives into a rushing river and redirects its course by rewriting the epic Mahabharata (Randamoozham,1984). M.T with his Shakespearean talent of characterization explores the unimaginable perspectives of folklores in Oru Vadakkan Veeragatha (1989) and Kerala Varma Pazhassi Raja (2009). Thakazhi embellished the natural beauty and mundane life through Chemmeen (1965). The recent floods in Kerala once again reminds us of Thakazhi’s In the Flood. Both the scenarists evolved from neoclassical doctrines to the all-embracing meadows of romanticism in their screenplays and other works. This paper further analyses the literature-cinema mergence as they co-exist in Mollywood and also the resemblances between O.N.V. Kurup’s Kothambumanikal and Wordsworth’s The Solitary Reaper (1807), Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood (1807); Coleridge’s Dejection; An Ode (1802). A wider acclamation of these writers would have enlightened the world about a land, culture and its people, unique to itself.

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DYNAMICS OF CINEMATIC ADAPTATIONS; EXAMINING GUY RITCHIE'S SHERLOCK HOLMES: A GAME OF SHADOWS AND DIBAKAR BANERJEE'S DETECTIVE BYOMKESH BAKSHI Atul Stanley Hermit, Ewing Christian College, Allahabad The intellectual arena has been hostile to film adaptations of literary texts considering them to be damaging for the aesthetic and formative qualities of a literary work. However, scholars have been continually lured towards unearthing a treasure of novel ideas from an unexplored territory of so-called entertainment which will have a democratizing impact on the socio- cultural ethos. Since last few decades, detective fiction has emerged has a dominant genre in the literary realm where their cinematic adaptations have captured the ideas and themes of the original literary texts. Where some aspects of the detective fiction cannot be transported to the screen, readers have expectations regarding authenticity of the descriptions in the books. Manipulation of narrative structure, condensation and exaggeration are the techniques used by the movie makers which make the author question the fidelity of the text. The genre of detective writing has entailed deciphering mystery through cognition and formulaic ordering. The famous 19th century English detective Sherlock Holmes of Conan Doyle has often been compared to Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay’s famous Bengali investigator Byomkesh Bakshi on the basis of exhibiting similar personal traits in the narratives. Holmes and Bakshi, the quintessential detectives not only solve mysteries but their narratives also record the social and political situations prevailing at that time. In this paper, I intend to analyse Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows and Dibakar Banerjee’s Detective Byomkesh Bakshi, focusing on the structural elements and adaptation techniques involved in the two movies which further increase the social and cultural value of the text.

REPRESENTATION AND CULTURAL POLITICS: INTERFACE BETWEEN SARKAR'S SEEMABADDHA AND SATYAJIT RAY'S FILM ADAPTATION Barun Naha, Surendranath College for Women, Kolkata In Sankar’s novel Seemabaddha, Shyamalendu, a bright scholar of English literature, leaves the job of teaching in a college for that of a sales manager in a multinational British export agency. He had earned the covetous job by means of his knowledge of Shakespeare. Shakespeare has been, time and again, projected by the author as Shyamalendu's conscience, his moral other self, from whom he distances himself when his aspiration to be a director of the company is materialised at the cost of another's life. The author has repeatedly tried to project the world of Shakespeare-centric life as the only desired alternative to the neo-colonised upper -middle-class Bengali life. The present paper tries to interrogate the authorial representation of Shakespeare, a British cultural icon, in the novel, keeping in view its cinematic adaptation by Satyajit Ray. It also examines whether Ray’s adaptation can be read

Page 54 of 114 as a postcolonial critique of Sankar’s colonial bias in making Shakespeare, and no Bengali cultural icon, the moral and cultural doppelganger of his protagonist.

ADAPTATION IS A 'PROFOUND' PROCESS: READING SUSAN ORLEAN'S THE ORCHID THIEF AND SPIKE JONZE'S METAFLIM ADAPTATION Bashabi Gogoi, Tezpur University, Assam Adaptations are not a new phenomenon, and certainly not new to our time. The history of the prestigious Academy Awards would reveal that films based on literature have always been appreciated. The present paper will endeavour to study the interrelation between the two discourses- text and film- and discuss the profundity of the adaptation process through an analysis of Susan Orlean’s non-fiction book The Orchid Thief and Spike Jonze’s metafilm Adaptation. The paper will try to offer insights into the seemingly problematic relationship between literature and its celluloid representation. Orlean’s book narrates mankind’s enduring fascination with orchids and the lengths that hunters go to in order to collect the perfect specimen (the rare ghost orchid in this case). It also illustrates Charles Darwin’s ideas about natural selection and profiles an orchid hunter called John Laroche, who is intrigued by Darwin’s theories; but the central narrative premise of the film is the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’s efforts to faithfully adapt the book into a film, albeit with a number of fictitious elements thrown in. Laroche, the orchid hunter in the movie Adaptation while talking about the mutability of plants, terms adaptation as a “profound process”, meaning that “you figure out how to thrive in the world”. The title of the movie is actually a pun on the word, referring both to Darwin’s theory of natural adaptation and the challenging task of adapting a book into a film. The paper will discuss how the film Adaptation gives a cogent understanding of the “process” and the “problems” of adaptation and also provides a satirical commentary on the process of adaptation. It will further analyse how the film reveals through its metanarrative construction, the problems and disillusionment faced by a screenwriter who tries to be faithful to the original text while at the same time, also audaciously dramatizes and tries to make an interesting script out of a rather banal non-fiction book.

MR. DARCY IN A SHERWANI: WHAT IS LOST (AND FOUND) IN TRANSLATING AUSTEN TO THE INDIAN SCREEN? Betsy Thomas, Pondicherry University, Pondicherry It is a truth universally acknowledged that the oeuvre of Jane Austen is a world of possibilities in search of movie adaptations featuring zombies and detectives, and of famous first lines, waiting to be borrowed by lesser mortals. Austen's novels are an example of how certain literary works with a specific point of origin transcend spatial and temporal boundaries. This paper tries to trace the cultural import of Austen's novels into three (and a half) different linguistic and cultural environments within Indian cinema, comparing them with their source

Page 55 of 114 texts and with each other. It centres around Bride and Prejudice, Kandukondain Kandukondain and Aisha, based on Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Emma respectively. These movies are not a mere shadow of the original, they try to recreate their source texts by filling the gaps, creating new voices and sometimes, by being brave enough to depart from the written word. So when Kandukondain begins in a war-stricken Sri Lanka or Bride and Prejudice shows its characters in Goa for some important scenes, it is not incidental but a conscious choice of asserting their location as independent entities within the Austen universe and outside of it. This paper is also an attempt to look at extratextual facets like the complicated question of colonial leftovers, the clash of cultures and the notion of nation. In trying to join these dots, I intend to find the meeting points between the text and the movie, the past and the present and finally, literature and cinema.

THE TWO-WAY BIND: VIRGINIA WOOLF, CINEMA AND THE SPACE OF TRANS-TEXTUAL NEGOTIATION Bhawna Shrey, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi Virginia Woolf; the priestess of High Modernism, prophetic in her literary endeavours and illustrious in her employment of disparate narratives, almost vehemently announces in her essay titled simply “Cinema” in July of 1926: “People say that the savage no longer exists in us, that we are at the fag- end of civilization, that everything has been said already, and that it is too late to be ambitious. But these philosophers have presumably forgotten the movies. They have never seen the savages of the twentieth century watching the pictures.” (2) In spite of the vehement dislike that one can apprehend from this essay, Woolf’s literary writings were filmic in nature. They held in their kernel core visuality, a deep sense of mobility and a desire to not just ‘tell’ but ‘show’. A case in point would be the eponymous Mrs Dalloway, drawing the reader/viewer’s eye to the gigantic aircraft which suddenly started writing audacious toffee advertisements in the sky; Woolf keenly employs the modalities of cinematic storytelling in her narrative structure. This paper, however, strives to look beyond this one sided trajectory of influence and attempts to explore a circuit. It attempts to question why is it that Woolf’s writings attain the attributes of Cinema, a medium she was at best uncomfortable with and unsure of, and at worst could not even begin to trust? Moreover the paper strives to study in detail two major Hollywood productions, Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992) and Stephen Daldry’s The Hours (2002). The dichotomous relationship Woolf had with cinema spills over in cinematic formulations of 21st century, the trans-cultural manifestations explored through the lens of a 100 years divide between the inspiration and its representation, bearing testimony to the trans-disciplinary nature of disjointed modes of story-telling, whether it is the text or screen or the contested space of in-between.

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THE UN-INDIAN SPACE: GOA'S CHALLENGE TO THE HINDU NATION Brian Mendonca, Carmel College for Women, Goa In the wake of the vitiated climate that pervades the country, the tentacles of intolerance seem to reign supreme. Goa, basking in the Lusophone sun seems to be removed from all this. Its character is permeated by the breezes of the coast which welcomes any traveller to this ancient land. Its poets and writers have sung of an Indian summer yet staunchly proclaiming a Goan identity. It is here that the intellectual vanguard impresses upon all who would listen that India’s strength is in its plurality. Threats to senior writers like Damodar Mauzo only serve to emphasize how imminent a danger a myopic outlook poses. Having said this I wish to problematize the binary of ‘India’ on the one hand and ‘Goa’ on the other. In what way is Goa ‘Un-Indian’? When we speak of Goa do we view it as a composite of Hindus, Muslims and Catholics? Is Goa’s perceived ‘challenge’ tacit or obvious? Why this touristy mythification of Goa that so enamours the Indian (read Hindu) sensibility? Does Goa as a region cock a snook at the nation? Surely others in the Goan diaspora globally animate this narrative in various ways? Ultimately the nation become a notion. This paper will attempt to address these questions. I will also draw on my experience as a traveller-poet who has travelled widely across India and now resides in Goa.

INDIAN POPULAR CULTURE AND ITS ENGAGEMENT AND CONFRONTATION WITH THE WEST Chaitra Nagammanavar, Karnataka University, Dharwad This paper examines the influence of ‘west’ on the Indian popular culture namely, cinema, literature, food, music and media along with the desi-ness present in these popular cultures. The influence of the ‘west’ means, in terms of its products, western values, western job opportunities and western settings. Popular culture is the way of influencing people towards something. In marketing most of the products desi-ness is used along with the western setting or western products are endorsed using desi sentiments. The films are hailed to be more patriotic and appealing if these two aspects are present- attachment and urge to serve the mother land or ‘selfishly’ work for self-growth in the western countries. Besides, the Desi instincts coming out in the western world hung in the peg of money. Thus, the West and India are inseparable in the popular culture, whether they confront or indulge with each other. The popular cultures examined in this paper are: advertisements of Rajanigandha and Dominos, Swades -movie, A Strange Case of Billy Biswas a novel by Arun Joshi and the songs of Indian rappers.

ROHINGYA CRISIS: TRANSNATIONALISM OR CRIME Chhavi Kulshreshtha, Manav Rachna University, Faridabad

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Transnationalism is “Extending or operating across national boundaries.” (Oxford Dictionary https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/transnational) This term was first cited by American writer Randolph Bourne in his paper “Trans-National America” in 1916. Broadly, it can be stated that Transnationalism is the movement of thoughts, folks, and resources across national borders in the modern global age. Transnationalism was materialized and popularized during 1990s as a medium to express global displacements, fiscal affairs, cultural practices, norms, individualities and societies that mark the modern time. Conceptually, it is closely related with the thoughts of globalization and the tech savvy, linked world. So, when we call ourselves a modern, we should think once that due to the advancement of technologies are we connecting to the world in general or we are strayed away. When we talk about Transnationalism and its consequences we should never forget that Crime is too closely associated with it. Let’s take the hot potato of last year ‘The Rohingya’s issue’; was it Transnationalism or crime? The meaning of Crime as described by Oxford Dictionary is “an act that you think is immoral or is a big mistake.” Yes, there were mass killings based on discrimination, houses or villages were burned, children were tortured physically and women were raped or even gang raped. It is genocide against the humanity (Rohingya Muslims) in the western Rakhine state. It was an issue of coercive transfer of masses depriving them the basic amenities. The military attack of Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) was the reason behind the forcible fled of more than 400,000 Rohingya to Bangladesh. Several of them were internally displaced. We can say that Burmese Government has its own limitations but “Deportation is recognized as a crime against humanity in each of the major international criminal instruments prior to the ICC.” (Roy Lee (ed.), The International Criminal Court: Elements of Crimes and Rules of Procedure and Evidence (Ardsley, NY: Transnational Publishers, 2001), p. 86; M. Cherif Bassiouni and Peter Manikas, The Law of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (New York: Transnational Publishers, 1996), p. 627-28 (arguing that the crime of "deportation" under the Nuremberg Charter included "all unjustified forceful transfers [including] internal displacement").

VIOLENCE AND NON-VIOLENCE IN REGIONAL NATIONALISM: READING THE HINDUSTAN SOCIALIST REPUBLICAN ARMY IN/AND RANG DE BASANTI Chinmaya Lal Thakur, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi The political methods adopted by the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army (HSRA) founded by Chandrashekhar Azad and Bhagat Singh, though also aimed at the freedom of India from British rule, have been understood in historiography to be opposed to those of the Indian National Congress (INC). The Revolutionaries, it is believed, were guided by violence while the Congress, under the spiritual-moral guidance provided by the Mahatma, was fundamentally oriented towards nonviolent politics. Recent work by Kama Maclean (A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence, Image, Voice, and Text, 2015) and others, however, has shown that the relationship between the HSRA and the INC was not based on a simple dichotomy of violence and nonviolence. Rather, it was maintained through a carefully negotiated dialectic of violence and nonviolence that often resulted in the INC being put under ‘ethical’ pressure to

Page 58 of 114 take relatively courageous (and knee-jerk) steps towards achieving the objective of the independence of India from British rule. In light of the above, this paper reads Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s 2006 film Rang De Basanti as an attempt to represent the dialectical relationship between violence and nonviolence (of the HSRA and the INC) on the silver screen. The film, for instance, not only shows the revolutionaries fasting in jail, it also depicts their contemporary counterparts as sitting on a peaceful candle-light protest at the India Gate. The paper concludes with the proposition that by re-contextualizing the freedom-fighter revolutionaries in the form of college-going youngsters in the early 2000s, the film demands of its viewers that they participate in an apparently feasible revolutionary movement that would be politically impactful and, yet, not essentially violent.

EFFECT OF THE INFLUENCE OF ELIOT'S POEM —WASTE LAND TOWARDS SIRI GUNASINGHE'S POETIC COMPOSITION TITLED — MAS LE NETHI ETA Chintha Pavithrani, Sabaragamuwa University of Sri Lanka Siri gunasinghe could be identified as a poet who was subjected mostly to argumentation within the Sinhala poetic field. His maiden poetic composition titled — Mas Le Nethi Eta˜ is considered as a land mark in the Sinhala poetic field. He succeeded in signifying his own identity, approaching a different turn than the independent device which prevailed in the second poetic generation of Colombo era and also that was introduced by G.B. Senanayake. when considering the motivational temperament of Gunasinghe enabling to create such a revolutionary change ,it appears that fundamental concentration should be extended towards western poetic tradition. —The Waste Land˜ the poetic text composed by famous modernist American poet T.S. Eliot could be considered as an important compilation in this context. This poem illustrates the psychic tragedy of the urbanite centered in a busy life. Style disowning all legitimate belongings in the social system. It appears that the poetic techniques found in The Waste Land˜ is mostly used by Siri gunasinghe in his —Mas Le Nethi Eta˜ composition. Similarly, the subject matter, the configuration vision of life and poetic techniques which are used by T.S. Eliot in his poem have been used by Siri Gunasinghe to in his composition. Therefore, there is an ability of analyzing the effect of influence comparatively by T.S. EliotZs —The waste land˜ towards Siri Gunasinghe’s — Mas Le Nethi Eta˜ poem.

PLACING THE ONEIRIC AND THE PARA-ONEIRIC AS SEEN IN AKIRA KUROSAWA'S DREAMS, SELECT POEMS OF PABLO NERUDA AND EGYPTIAN MYTHOLOGY, IN THE ARMS OF MORPHEUS Christina Dhanasekaran, Madras Christian College, Tamil Nadu This paper aims to decipher and theorize on the ‘metaphor of dreams’ as used in the film Dreams (1990), select poems of the Chilean poet-diplomat, Pablo Neruda and in the Tutu inspired Egyptian mythos. Dreams are the liminal spaces between the subject-object tension between a written word and a visual. The merging of a viewer's consciousness with the

Page 59 of 114 projected consciousness of the screen's subject is made possible by the viewer’s prior experience with dreaming that initiates a smooth transition onto the screen/word representation of the creator’s vision. Roland Barthes described film spectators as being in a ‘para-oneiric’ state, feeling ‘sleepy and drowsy as if they had just woken up’ when a film ends. This furthers a sustained participation in the metaphoric and metonymic connect between our dreams and any artistic representation. Literary texts and films are then meta-narratives of dreamy psychic states that create and recreate the universal beside the particular. Freud suggested that the analysis of dreams is the key to unlocking the secrets of the unconscious mind; this paper aims to read a little further behind the theory that dreams are contraband representations of the ‘beast within man’, smuggled into awareness during sleep. It is not a mere tactic of predicting the future or speculating a distant or a dystopian present. It paves the way for a neuro- aesthetical understanding of the mechanism and craft of dreams employed by the creator, to open neural pathways in the viewer/reader’s mind to appreciate art and critically perceive its making and its subsequent consumption.

NOTION OF NATION: CRITICAL GLEANINGS FROM PARTITION CINEMA Deepa Prajith, Government College, Quepem, Goa Cinema is not only perceived but also conceived by many film makers/producers/actors primarily in terms of entertainment. That it is also a technology that allows for “documenting history in the making” is a marginal afterthought. This is precisely why “…there has been surprisingly little notice taken of cinema itself as a possible resource to re-imagine the writing of Indian history.” Is Partition Fiction the contemporary historical novel India has been waiting for? No doubt it is located against a historical catastrophe i.e. the Partition and it is not hard to find historical figures/heavy weights of this period depicted as characters in several fictional works on Partition lending contextual pegging and authenticity to their narratives. Thereby, these stories deliver multi-vocality to the State drawn and publicly customized national narrative of history. When these stories become films, they break the boundary between the writer/book/reader to be mass consumed in social/isolation situations to re-fashion a period of national history for an audience that have heard about it, possibly read about it, but never experienced it firsthand. This on-screen representation of history is often received as a credible unfolding of historical events: the technical felicities of which converge with the inclusion of fictional setting, dating of events and other real life markers into the script to authenticate the historical periodicity of the time. This paper proposes to explore select films that engage with Partition as a mode of negotiating the nation.

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MUSICAL MIR: INTERPRETING THE JOURNEY FROM TEXTUAL TO VISUAL MEDIUM Deepak Saroha, Ambedkar University Delhi The most striking aspect of a ghazal is the ambiguity in the portrayal of a ‘beloved’. In most of the ghazals by Mir Taqi Mir, the reader remains perplexed whether the ‘beloved’ is actually a woman or the word is referred to an all pervasive ‘God’. Mir highlights the intensity of love through his couplets with the examples of a lover who is lost in love with his ‘beloved’ in such a way that he forgets himself and becomes one with his ‘beloved’. It is important to ask questions about the ghazal as a preconceived genre of Urdu poetry or its dimensions can also be accorded a completely different reading in the realm of time and space. The ghazal has evolved out of the Arabic genre of writing poetry known as ‘qasida’ therefore while contemplating on the idea of love I would also focus on the temporality of the ghazal from the time when it was written as panegyric in praise of a noble or king to the time it has been merely perceived as a genre that focuses on the idea of passionate love or the love for the almighty. It is interesting how Mir also wrote for several nobles or kings but his position always remained inconsistent despite of his odd circumstances. Is it the deliberate move of the poet to never allow the fixities to overwhelm him or it is the intentional state of living in self-exile? I would try to locate that time and space that binds the poet to be a certain kind because of the predetermined norms of perceiving the ghazal in a certain light.

UTOPIA=DYSTOPIA: VIOLENCE, ENTROPY AND HORROR IN THE SPECULATIVE FICTION OF THE GLOBAL SOUTH Dibyakusum Ray, IIT Ropar I want to talk about how the conventional meaning of 'dystopia' is subverted in post-millennial sci-fi/speculative film and fiction from the global south. This paper is on dystopia as a possible sight of freedom-- a subverted utopia-- through a violent rise of chaos within states under old, static and 'rationalistic' regime. My case studies are in three contemporaneous pairs: Fledgling (Octavia E. Butler, 2005) and Pumzi (Dir. Wanuri Kaihu, 2009), Lubdhak [Sirius] (Nabarun Bhattacharya, 2006) and The Host (Dir. Bong Joon-Ho, 2006), Zero Saints (Gabino Iglesias, 2015) and The Witch (Dir. Robert Eggers, 2015) In Towards Speculative Realism, Grahan Harman has termed this new approach as "probably the last great experiment within genre practice". In Fledgling, Butler depicts how horror and chaos can result in racial/sexual equity: the novel talks of the emergence of a new race devoted to a cluster of mixed-breed vampiric religion, fluid gender roles and symbiotic relation between ethnicities. Lubdhak imagines how the sub-human-- city stray-dogs-- plan to reject the futuristic civilization in Calcutta that uses animals for cruel scientific experiments. In Zero Saints, an ancient, violent and bloodthirsty Mexican deity aspires to immigrate into the United States to spread its rein. The apocalypse, which could also be a symbolic revenge of the hunted émigré, can only be foiled by making terms with Latino roots, ancient magic, tribal beliefs and machinations.

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Afrofuturism, dystopic Orient and Immigration Horror-- is there a connection between the three? Is the cross-continental, cross-genre strain giving rise to a new semantics of dystopic resistance against the over-rational Modernity? Does the collapse of western science and rationality signify an alternate critical system? Is dystopia=utopia?

DESI HIP VIDESI HOP: THE NEED FOR A HIP-HOP STUDIES FRAMEWORK IN INDIA Elloit Cardozo, Independent Researcher Despite having initially made forays into the Indian entertainment industry in the 1990s, the sporadic, yet, repeated appearances Hip-Hop made on the musical charts were nothing more than short-lived incursions. It wasn’t until the second decade of the 21st century that Hip-Hop music found a regular place on Indian soundtracks with Yo Yo Honey Singh’s rise to stardom and other artists such as Badshah and Raftaar gradually becoming regulars as well. While the commercialized mainstream form of Hip-Hop in India has picked up steam, a subcultural counterpart called Underground Hip-Hop has been germinating, eventually making the situation of Hip-Hop in India resonate with the dynamic in several other counties. India has finally seen a burgeoning Underground Hip-Hop scene develop over the last few years, most noticeably in Mumbai. Eminent Hip-Hop scholars such as Halifu Osumare and Sujatha Fernandes have pointed out Hip-Hop’s importance as a global culture that serves as the voice of the marginalized sections of society across the world. This paper seeks to study the Underground Hip-Hop culture in Mumbai, majorly through interactions with artists and mostly passive participation in events such as flash mobs and rap cyphers, and analyse it as a part of what Halifu Osumare calls “connective marginalities of the Hip-Hop globe”. In doing this, the study aims to locate Underground Hip-Hop in Mumbai as a part of the Hip-Hop diaspora, which travels around the globe as a culture, studying the elements of what Osumare calls “glocalization”: maintaining elements of a global aesthetic while simultaneously infusing a local flavour.

Mining Mania: Neo Colonial Enterprise through Literature and Films Eltrin D'souza, Government College of Arts, Science and Commerce, Quepem, Goa If we are in a Post-Colonial world, then what is Neo-Colonialism? Mining has been one of the main contributor of economy in many countries over the world. It is not just an enterprise in search of ores and minerals but has turned into an exploitation business exploiting humans, wildlife, society, cultures, traditions, human rights and above all nature. Multinational companies care nothing but amass wealth at the cost of the exploited. Thus creating a society of neo-colonials. As literature and films are the two most powerful expressive means, this paper makes a study of how the mining companies have created a havoc in the lives of the people affected by mining. In a bid to exploit and earn the people have lost their diverse cultures and have been rootless. The paper addresses the voice of people through words, lights, sounds and talk that has not only impacted regions but nations at large. Through select films and books the

Page 62 of 114 paper reads the mining mania in different regions by considering this to be a crisis across nations.

INTERROGATING GOA'S LEGACY AS AN ERSTWHILE PORTUGUESE COLONY IN ASIF CURRIMBHOY'S GOA

Foyez Ahmed Syed, Aliah University, Kolkata The paper wants to explore Goa’s legacy as an erstwhile Portuguese colony in Asif Currimbhoy’s play, Goa (1964). The Portuguese rulers administered Goa for around 451 years. Even after the independence of India, Goa was still held by the Portuguese administrators. Then on the night of 18th December, 1961, Goa was invaded by the Indian forces and was “liberated”. The invasion of the Portuguese colony Goa by the Indian government has been vividly represented by Currimbhoy in this play. This paper wants to investigate Goa’s legacy after the ‘invasion’ or ‘liberation’ through the performance aspects of this play. Currimbhoy has deftly embodied stage spaces/properties like the patio, taverna, balcony and provided other clues which bears testimony of the Portuguese culture. From the point of view of locale and atmosphere, the play recaptures the essence of the unique culture of Goa which derives its timbre and colour from its geography as much as from its history. The paper will analyse the interviews of the directors (Farley Richmond and Patricia Newhall) who had staged this play in the U.S.A. This article will also explore the reception patterns of the play through a critical examination of the newspaper and journal reviews stored in the family archive of Currimbhoy and other places as well as some of the interviews of the actors/actresses who performed the play on the stage.

VOICES FROM THE MARGINS: REFLECTIONS FROM PRANTABASHIR JHULI: GOALPARAR LOKJEEBAN O GAAN Gautam Chandra Roy and Juthika Das, B.N. College, Assam Prantabashi – that refers to the people living at the margins of regional/national border with distinct socio-cultural belief and practices. They live away from the mainland society often unheard, marginalised and excluded. The Prantabashir Jhuli: Goalparar Lokjeeban O Gan is a tale of the peripheral Rajbanshi community of erstwhile Goalpara region of Assam that shares boundaries with northern part of West Bengal and the colonial Rangpur district of present-day Bangladesh. The anthology carries immense significance in the present context although it was written at the dawn of independence for certain reasons. First, it was penned by the Princes of Gauripur Zamindar family about their subjects at a crucial historical phase when the question of border, nation, nationality, identity, etc. resurfaced in the Indian sub-continent. Second, it connects vis-à-vis separates two dominant bordering nationalities i.e. Assamese and Bengali. Third, the anthology resurfaces the debate over linguistic identity of the Rajbanshis in contravene to its dialect status of the Assamese and Bengali language. Apart from that, the anthology tries to trace the socio-cultural changes that took place among the community in the region because of the various internal and external reasons.

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This paper seeks to address these issues confronting the Rajbanshi community in the context of the anthology. It tries to look at how a marginal community living in a bordered region negotiates the question of identity, regionalism/nationalism, border etc.

MASTER OF NONE: A STUDY OF TRANSNATIONAL IDENTITY OF SECOND GENERATION IMMIGRANTS IN SELECT EPISODES Gunjan Gupta and Tanushri Banerjee, Sharda University, Uttar Pradesh The relation between parents and the quickly modernizing children is symbolic of the ‘gap’ which exists between the generations. How would that gap translate for the immigrant parent and their children on screen? In last 10 years, there has been a significant upsurge in fresh and authentic Indian-American voices on American small screen; be it The Mindy Project (tv,web), Sense8 (web), Quantico (tv,web), New Girl (tv) and Master of None (web). Each of these has moved away from the stereotypical “Apu” from Simpsons. Instead focus is on perspective of second or third generation Indian immigrant’s experience. Master of None, a comedy-drama sees America with romantic, second-generation eyes of an Indian-American Dev Shah. The paper would focus on episodes which have a series of flashbacks to Dev’s childhood in America (drawn parallel with his Taiwanese friend’s childhood), his friends growing up, his relation to his parents and how that has developed in a land which he calls his own and which for his parents is still not entirely theirs. After close reading of the episode, an attempt will be made to trace this ‘gap’ pointing at age and the aspect of trans-nation as being represented by the children and the parents. The paper diverts from the usual study of the first generation immigrants and their survival problems but focuses on the second generation and their struggle to carve out an individuality balancing personal and professional life.

TOWARDS NEW ROLES: WOMEN AND REVOLUTION IN MAHSWETA DEVI'S MOTHER OF 1084 Halim Hussain, IIT Guwahati While Indian writing in English has enjoyed enormous visibility in the national and international literary forums and much debate has ensued regarding this preeminence, the issues with which it has largely engaged with are those of representing the nation. In Fredrick Jameson’s much debated formulation, third world literature tends to be an allegory of the nation (Jameson 1986). Very few novelists have, however, engaged with representing political movements such as the Naxalite movement. Writings on Naxalite movement bring to light the pain and pathos of a generation of brilliant youth who killed and died without thinking of the consequences, the anguish of the helpless parents as they become mute spectators of the fates of their sons and daughters, and the ruthless domination of state and police forces to control the situation. These writings also give us an insight into the clash between ideological commitments and personal emotions. Mahasweta Devi’s Hajar Churashir Maa a Bengali novel written in 1974 against the backdrop of the

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Naxalite movement showcases the atrocities and injustices meted out by the state to the Naxalites. Be it the battleground or the respectable position inside the home, women had putatively an important role to play throughout the Naxal movement. This paper will focus on gender issues central to the movement using all three forms of Hajar Churashir Maa viz; the translated versions both in novel and play and the cinematic adaption of the work. It will also look into the various roles played by female throughout the movement.

GROWING INFLUENCE OF THE HALLYU WAVE IN NORTH EAST INDIA Hannah Rachel Abraham, Christ University, Bengaluru The Hallyu wave has arrived in India, and certainly not through the service entrance. With the popularity of South Korean entertainment rising exponentially throughout the world, it is no surprise that the number of fans in the subcontinent as well have been increasing. The fame ascribed to this word has only been augmented since smash hit ‘Gangnam Style’ and now, with Korean boyband BTS taking centre stage. It is in this context that this descriptive research paper seeks to examine how South Korean culture first entered the predominantly Bollywood dominated shores of India, and it’s beginning and concentration in North East India. It will also attempt to explore reasons as to why the North East seems to identify more with South Korean pop culture than with that of their own country. Additionally, this paper will also prove that K- Pop is the aspect of South Korean culture that has the most influence in North East India, based on surveys among a varied range of North Eastern individuals. The paper will attempt to direct attention towards the fact that Hallyu is a phenomenon that will only keep gaining traction, and how the North East of the country needs to be made more integrated with the rest of the country.

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN? FREEDOM WRITERS, ROMPER STOMPER AND RECOLONIZING THE COLONIZERS

Harshad Santosh Pore, University of Mumbai The 2007 American drama film Freedom Writers and the 1992 Australian drama film Romper Stomper deal with the same issue of race but in the ways contrary to each other. While Freedom Writers largely focuses on the lives of the people of color, Romper Stomper is about the neo- Nazi youth. While Freedom Writers ends with the victory of its protagonists, Romper Stomper ends with the defeat. The contrasting ways these two movies handle the transnational question becomes a site of enquiry in a comparativist approach. And finally the disturbing question emerges: despite the anti-west charade, who gained the most due to globalization? This paper analyzes above movies from a comparative and a postcolonial point of view. An attempt is made to evaluate whether an art inspires lives or a life inspires art and the politicization of this translation.

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A RE-READING OF SHAKESPEARE'S MACBETH IN THE CONTEXT OF VAISHNAVISATION IN MANIPUR Hemchandra Nameirakpam, Ambedkar University Delhi Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1611) could rightly be called as one of his most adapted/ adaptable plays. The relatable themes of tragedy and the representation of human’s lust for power in today’s time could perhaps be some of the possible elucidations for such a reception of the text till date. This paper will critically examine two such adaptations: Lokendra Arambam’s theatrical magnum opus, Chingkhei Napa/ Manipuri Macbeth (1997) and Raphael Adjani’s short documentary on Arambam’s adaptation, Tales of Love and War (1997) Both the adaptations use similar trope to depict the Manipuri society that is “… in a turmoil, racked by inter-tribal conflict and political insurrection.” This paper will look into both the adaptations right from their representation of the three witches in the original with seven “helloy” (angel/ witch in the Manipuri culture); to the parallels drawn between the backdrop of the Shakespearean text with the history of Manipur regarding its conversion to Vaishnavism from its indigenous Sanamahi religion in the early Eighteenth Century. Speaking of Arambam’s theatrical adaptation, not only does he manage to situate the Shakespearean play in the context of Manipur, but also succeeds in highlighting the “tragedy” of the burning of the sacred scriptures of Manipur, Puya, as part of the aforementioned Vaishnavisation process, and its consequences. Both the adaptations have ample scopes and objectives which could be taken into consideration for a larger discourse around the understanding of the Shakespearean play from the lens of Manipur, and its present socio-cultural scenario and vice versa.

FROM FICTION TO FILM AND VICE-VERSA: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF DEEPA MEHTA AND BAPSI SIDHWA’S WORKS Hiya Chatterjee, Kalyani University, West Bengal As a medium of art which has emerged with the development of technical and technological production, cinema has been patronized by literature since the former’s inception. Between the two disciplines, the younger one still suffers from a certain condescension, especially when adapted from a literary work. Film adaptation theory has primarily generated from the postmodernist discourse which disparages the ideas of a cinematic adaptation being faithful and true to the original literary text. The onslaught which film criticism has received owes itself to the brand of postmodernist theory that dispels all notions of a master narrative. Linda Hutcheon argues that film adaptations of literary works can be seen as interpretations and thus ought to be freed from the burdens of fidelity and judgmental comparisons with the original literary text. As the independence of an adapted work is still being recognized, cross-cultural adaptations are subjected to even closer scrutiny as soon as the questions of context and culture come into play. In this context, I would like to make a comparative study of Deepa Mehta’s trilogy Earth, Fire and Water, because all the three films engage with interesting socio-cultural and artistic issues.

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Apart from Earth and Fire being adaptations of two literary works—the former is based on Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy Man and the latter is loosely based on Ishmat Chughtai’s Lihaaf— the third film Water has been adapted into a novel by Bapsi Sidhwa in 2006. The literary work has generally been the source text or the original text from which a film is adapted, but in this case, since the process has been reversed, I will try to analyse which factors come into play when a finished film is converted into a book, and compare and contrast the process with the more common practice of the adaptation of a literary work into a film. I will also explore one of the major themes which recur in all the texts, the books and the films, the bond between women of different classes, communities, nationalities, and religions, thus highlighting the role of the socio-cultural and political elements in the adaptation of any work of art.

GEO-POLYPHONY AND GOA: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF ASIF CURRIMBHOY'S GOA AND HOMI ADJANIA'S FINDING FANNY Hridaya Parag Ajgaonkar, Ramnarain Ruia Autonomous College, Mumbai This paper engages with polyphony, hybridity, and the politics of voice and language as geopolitically situated in the space of Goa through a comparative analysis of Asif Currimbhoy’s play Goa and Homi Adajania’s film Finding Fanny. In a play written amidst the political restructuring of a young nation, Currimbhoy spins a Goan society set at a cusp, with Rose and other characters tumultuously embodying and signifying Goan territory. Adajania makes a metaphorical use of Goa in the journey of his characters that is mapped over and across the Goan landscape in a rusty yet functional car that holds together a cultural polyphony through characters that do not fit together but adjust nevertheless. While the play captures varied voices that represent parts of the Goan populace and thus problematizes the imagined Indian nation, the film though its use of the hybrid tongue of Goa subversively situates itself on the linguistic periphery of commercial Hindi cinema. The characterisation of the feminine in the two works is compared specifically through Currimbhoy’s Rose-Senhora Miranda pair and Adajania’s Angie-Rosie pair. The parallel between these pairs— consisting of an older, overbearing woman and a silenced, sexually desirable younger woman— engages with the negotiations of literal and metaphorical voices, silences, and utterances. This study thus excavates the relationship of characters in the two works with the creation and socialisation of the Goan space at the same time that it factors in the national, cultural, and linguistic politics of the context in which these works have been created.

QUEST FOR ETHNICITY IN TRANSNATIONAL CINEMA: THE QUESTION OF 'TRUE IDENTITY' Imran Mulla, Karnataka University, Dharwad

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The consumption of Indian films in the world is a site of complex translational engagements and a location of disjunctured processes that illuminate how Indians are imagined, created and performed. From the portrayal of Dr. Raj Koothrappali (from the popular comedy series The Big Bang Theory), an astrophysicist, who is depicted as a stereotypical shy and sly young Indian male in America to the image of India and its inhabitants depicted by the renowned standup comedian Russell Peters, who have created a superficial image of India. With examples from a few regional Indian cinema and British Asian films like Bend It Like Beckham and Anita and Me, this paper focuses on the Indian heritage which keeps on resurfacing and so does the identity of India. These articulations show that Indianess is a concept that differs inter- ethnically and intra-ethnically.

DUBBING AND SUBTITLING AS A NEW TYPE OF LITERAL TRANSLATION: A STUDY BASED ON JAPANESE FILM “100 YEN LOVE” IN TO SINHALA LANGUAGE Januka Edirimanna Mohotti, Sabaragamuwa University of Sri Lanka Records indicate that a cartoon named “Little Claus and Big Claus” which was telecasted on the 15th of February 1985, was the first Sinhala dubbed program in Sri Lanka. Even though it is almost thirty years passed since 1985, it is visible that the Sri Lankan field of Dubbing Translation has not gained any consequential touch as an entity of academic research. We can witness that the translators involve as dubbing and subtitling script writers are mostly those who have qualified in only the language proficiency but not the skills needed for the script writing. “The Jewel in the Palace” (Korea), “Oshin” (Japan) and “Dong Yi” (Korea) are classic examples for recently telecasted Tele-dramas. This research is based on the subtitling script of the Japanese film “100Yen Love” (2014) by Take Masaharu, which was translated in to Sinhala by the author of this research. It is a contrastive analysis of the original Japanese script, author’s translation and the final production. Translating cultural terms, word limit and number of lines in a single frame were challenges as the author lacks the skills and techniques of subtitling. Dubbing Translation is given less attention in Sri Lanka, when compared to the other forms of literal translations. Many of the translators have not completely realized the complexity of composing a subtitling script or a dubbing script, which seeks an economical use of words and phrases. Translators involved in Dubbing Translation requires special skills and techniques other than the literal translators who work on printed forms of literature. As some universities in Sri Lanka offer Translation Studies as a subject, the author recommends to increase the weightage of credits for Dubbing Translation as a specialized course unit under the Translation Studies for those who are willing to be the translators in dubbing and subtitling fields.

NATIONAL AND TRANSNATIONAL CULTURES IN THE SELECTED FILMS OF MIRA NAIR (MONSOON WEDDING AND NAMESAKE) Jayshree Singh and Chitra Dashora, Bhupal Nobles University, Udaipur

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Mira Nair is one of the most prominent South Asian filmmaker. She began her film career as an actor in the plays written by Badal Sarkar (1925-2011) and then turned to directing; primarily she started with documentaries and her first documentary was Jama Masjid Street Journal (1979). She explored Indian cultural and traditions in her documentaries. Her themes are mostly based on social inequality in Indian as well as the globe. She creates visually stunning films that have her own unique style and that films are also thought provoking. She has won so many awards for her films. She was awarded by the Padma Bhushan, which is one of the most prestigious award of the India and internationally she awarded by the Golden lion for the movies Monsoon Wedding and Salaam Bombay. She has projected South Asian migrants as outside bodies in ethnic context. They have been showcased as workforce in the American life and culture. She has also portrayed South Asian migrant bodies from the point of spreading Indian ethos and culture, simultaneously adapting to foreign notions of existence and self realization. This paper attempts to study the following areas of Mira Nair’s cinematic skills with regard to the presentation of art and social life of South Asians in their native homeland and their sensitivities, impressions as ethnic minorities and as labor immigrants in American social structure. This study will also take up the aspects of national cultures, which are termed in native pattern as indigenous elements, besides that it will examine the issues of the societies exciting in multi-ethnic states of transnational cultures.

CONSTRUCTING THE BODO NATIONAL IDENTITY: LITERATURE AND ITS ROLE Jeetumoni Basumatary, Cotton University, Guwahati The diversity of caste, creed, religion and language in India stands as an obstacle to one composite kind of nationalism in India. It was probably because of this that the Communist Party of India had supported the idea of a reorganization of the states on linguistic grounds right after independence. The Government of India’s failure to do so and its desire to build a great Indian nation through assimilation has only succeeded to distance many linguistic groups or regions from the centre. In a pattern similar to the above, Assamese nationalism and Assam’s attempts to incorporate and assimilate the various tribal communities existing within its territories into one identity of ‘Bor Axom’ or ‘Greater Assam’ is often understood as imperialistic. The breaking away of the Khasi and Jaintia Hills to form the present state of Meghalaya and the changing momentum of the Bodo identity movement can be traced to the introduction in Assam Assembly of the Assam Official Language Bill in 1960. My paper will attempt to look at the changing trajectory of the Bodo identity movement from its beginning in 1952 with the establishment of the Bodo Sahitya Sabha till the formation of the Bodoland Territorial Autonomous Districts in 2002. It will be an attempt to study the cultural nationalism brought about by the Bodo Sahitya Sabha through its various literary undertakings. By studying their possible political motivations, I shall attempt to establish that

Page 69 of 114 literature implicitly or explicitly plays important role in linguistic or ethnic movements or conflicts.

LOST IN TRANSITION: THE LOSS OF SUBSTANCE FROM THE BOOK TO THE SCREEN Jijo C George, Ewing Christian College, Allahabad The concept of the transition between the text and the movie has been in discussion since the conception of motion pictures. The major point of conflict in this discussion is the loss of details and the alteration of the plot to suit the restrictions of the media and the director’s sensibilities. The advocates of text over video has always been staunch on the attitude that the director takes liberties with the text and therefore the true account of the author’s intention is lost in the desire for dramatic flair. It is not entirely inaccurate to state that the transformation of a text, be it of any genre, to the screen is wrought with difficulties and limitations. The director trying to remain faithful to the book may end up making a movie that falls beyond the accepted norms and limits of duration and imagination. The author has the freedom to pile in details regarding the most insignificant of events, characters, and places but when it comes to the representation of the same in a movie or on a small screen the focus has to remain on the most important and the most relevant of points so that the audience is able to follow the most captivating plot and narrative. I will use the popular books of J R R Tolkien namely The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and their movie adaptation to bring out the deviation in the narrative and the shift in the socio- political hues in favour of dramatic flair.

DECODING OF SHAKESPEARE'S MACBETH IN THRONE OF BLOOD AND JAYARAJ'S VEERAM Jisha Elezaba, Catholicate College, M.G. University Kottayam Karthika S B, St. Thomas College Pala, Kerala This paper tries to analyse the re-readings of Shakespeare’s goriest tragedy Macbeth in the light of Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and Jayaraj’s Veeram. Adaptation and Re-reading are now becomes the catchwords of modern literature and art. The canonical and profound texts are re- read and re-invent [its philosophical layer] in a new milieu and context. Shakespeare is relentlessly re-interpreted by the artisans and thereby brings out new texts. Macbeth is one among Shakespeare’s five great tragedies, which exemplifies the wicked nature of human personalities. The Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s debut attempt on Shakespeare is Throne of Blood (1957)-adaptation of Macbeth and the Indian film maker Jayaraj retells the story of Macbeth in his film Veeram (2016). This paper examines the visual and cultural re-narration of Throne of Blood and Veeram. Both the film makers- Kurosawa and Jayaraj- decodes the traits of Macbeth so as to create their own unique filmic text.

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ETHNIC AND COMMUNAL VIOLENCE: ARCHETYPES OF THE VICTIMISED BODY IN RUSKIN BOND'S A FLIGHT OF PIGEONS AND BHISHAM SAHNI'S TAMAS Jyoti Hermit, Ewing Christian College, Allahabad The demonstration of the powers and limitations of an individual body are unique for each society. It is also true for each nation to have its own set of socio-cultural and political agendas that have to be attained by an individual self. The structure of a body is defined by the practices, representations and relationships of a society. However, there are varied archetypes of a body. Other than connoting the human figure, a body is associated with the sociological phenomenon which comprise of cultural and religious bodies ultimately extending to the national body. An event is identified as unrest if it involves violence between two or more ethnically or communally identified groups and leads to the victimization of not only the physical self but also the social bodies as well as the nation as a whole. Violence is phenomena which adopts a range of hues depending on the situation in which it takes place. The event associated with the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and the Partition of India and Pakistan have formed a huge corpus involving multiple perspectives. Ruskin Bond’s A Flight of Pigeons underlines the agony of miserable people shattered by the torments of unrest. Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas deals with the consequences of communal riots and their impact on the characters and the religious communities. In this paper, I intend to examine Ruskin Bond’s A Flight of Pigeons and Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas to analyse the suffering and victimization of a generation, capturing the political, social and national upheaval resulting from the ethnic and communal frenzy which left an indelible mark on the goodness of humanity.

JUNGLE BOOK: THE QUESTION OF OTHER Kalplata, The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad The Jungle Book, a collection of seven short stories written by Rudyard Kipling in 1894, has often been subjected to many film adaptations. This paper is interested in studying Jon Favreau’s 2016 translation of Jungle Book into a film. By combining live action and animation, the film narrates the story of Mowgli, an orphaned “man-cub” who is raised in the jungle by wolves. More than just a simple story of Mowgli, an orphaned “man-cub” who is brought up by wolves in the jungle, the stories of The Jungle Book have become metaphors for British colonial rule in India. This paper attempts to delve into the political discourse of us vs them proliferated by the power equations present in the cinematic narrative of Favreau. The construction of us vs them is dealt from the perspective of the theories of Orientalism and the other. Also, the aim of this paper is to study the relations of inclusion and exclusion manifested through the diverse and dynamic interpersonal relations among animals in the jungle. Mowgli is a human, and not of the animal species in the jungle and yet he is considered and accepted by the animals as their own until Shere Khan, the powerful king of the jungle, labels him as “other” and demands the wolf, Akela, that the boy be surrendered to him. This paper explores

Page 71 of 114 the trans-national and trans-cultural question of the “other” and its space in Favreau’s cinematic incarnation of Jungle Book. Does this interpretation respects the “difference”.

THE GASTRONOME WOMAN IN CINEMA: GENDER, CULTURE AND TRANSNATIONALISM Kashyapi Ghosh, IIT Tirupati “Usually when you see females in movies, they feel like they have these metallic structures around them, they are caged by male energy.” - Bjork Julie and Julia (2009) and The Lunchbox (2013) released four years apart; depict a starkly different view of the female figure in the cinema than the one elucidated by Bjork (Mckenzie, 2014) Both the films, can be bound together in the transnational frame; one essentially American, the other quintessentially Indian. Julie and Julia delineates the simultaneous struggles in the life of Julia Child, as she takes on the challenges of the male-dominated food industry and that of, Julie Powell who resorts to cooking albeit “dangerously” after a disastrous job at a call centre post 9/11. These women are diametrically opposite to the neglected, lonely homemaker residing in cosmopolitan Mumbai, in The Lunchbox in which Ila does not have a ‘real’ job apart from cooking food and looking after her daughter single-handedly. What is interesting in the three portrayals is the difference in their representation from the transnational angle but similar in the way food is central to their identity. The proposed paper intends to understand the dynamics that the women share with food and how they are diverse in terms of nation, culture and self. A woman in 1950s Paris will be different from a working woman of a post 9/11 America or an economically dependent woman in a third world country like India. The paper attempts a comparative study of the films and observe the differences created within the cinema as a text. Besides, the Bechdel Test, popularized by American cartoonist Alice Bechdel in her comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For (1983-2008) to analyse the female representation in various media, will be deployed to evaluate the comparative representation of the gender in films. The paper aims to undertake a wide comparative study of the two films mentioned using the multiple frameworks of transnationalism, gender, culture.

REMARENTS OF AN EMPIRE: CINEMA AS ARCHIVE IN TWENTIETH CENTURY COLONIAL AND POST COLONIAL ASSAM (1900-1990) Kaushik Thakur Bhuyan, North Eastern Hill University, Meghalaya Language is a major signifier of identity of people and communities across societies of the world. Language, both as the agency and product of social existence and social transformation therefore evokes specific forms of expression, varied in meanings and contexts across the world. In the context of India, specifically North east India with its plurality of languages and as many sub dialects, presents interesting possibilities to read its history. In addition, print and

Page 72 of 114 visual technology today is constantly blurring the lines between fiction and fact, myth and reality, literature or history. As such, cinema today has succeeded in proliferating ideas and meanings over and above the written record while community memory preserved in oral traditions and oral histories dating to both pre and post colonial period continues to add inspiration to literary works and personalities that have shaped discourses leading to ideologies of ‘region-nation’ still in the ‘making’ in the early twenty first century. Twentieth century history of Assam is characterised by introduction of education, colonial social reform, rise of nationalism in which language has remained a common marker of contestation as well as unifying force. This paper intends to discuss significance of Assamese language cinema as a source in shaping middleclass sensibilities in twentieth century in India, with special focus on Assam. We shall try to contextualise how literature, folklore, oral history, and films of a specific language come together to affirm or challenge existing dominant historical narratives and become the site of preservation or contestation of both state and popular ideologies in addressing identity construction and maintenance of the colonial empire in the twentieth century in India.

LAND IN LITERATURE Konika Mukherjee, Government Degree College, Nainbagh Partition Studies is gradually gaining acknowledgement in academia, as theorists, sociologists, and historians of post-partition migration have begun to accept that Partition also created several issues that have severely affected the development of society. One of these issues is that post Partition people moved to nearby ghettos composed of co-religionists. This displacement has set pattern for the preceeding displacements that took place during the 2002 and 2014 riots, in Godhra and Muzaffarnagar, respectively. Joya Chatterji in her illuminating paper, "Partition Studies: Prospects and Pitfalls", insists that Partition Studies should be inter-disciplinary, without which it would stagnate. In support of her view, it can be postulated that literature contributed heavily in describing the effects and the events of Partition, perhaps better than historians. Ian Talbot pronounced that: "Novelists, unlike historians, have fully addressed the human agonies which accompanied partition. Hundreds of novels, short-stories, and plays have taken these as their theme." Not just Talbot, other notable academics have similarly seconded this opinion like, Prof. Alok Bhalla, S.Setlar, I.B.Gupta. In my paper, I propose to understand how literary narrative was affected by Partition. For this purpose, I would closely read Upendranath Ashq's Girti Deewarein and Kamleshwar's Kitne Pakistan; the former written and set in the Pre-partition Era and the latter in the Post-partition period. I believe that the study would reveal the psychological and perceptual dissimilation.

TRANSNATIONAL COSMOPOLITANISM IN THE FILMS OF RITUPARNO GHOSH

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Koushik Mondal, Visva Bharati, Santiniketan Rituparno Ghosh, though primarily a filmmaker from Bengal, worked with different language- speaking actors to make films in Bengali, Hindi and English simultaneously. Taking his cue mostly from literature both Eastern and Western, Ghosh often elevated the regional literature into world-class cinema. He crossed the cartographic limitations through the aesthetic as well as the economic means, wallowing in the market of the economic liberalisation of India. Motivating the big corporate production houses to invest in Bengali films, Ghosh played a major role in the corporatisation of Tollygunge industry. Though the immediate context of his films is Bengal, the humanitarian contents - such as the condition of the gendered and sexual subalterns - in them remain relevant beyond border. While Ghosh remains culturally rooted to the literary and cultural tradition of Bengal, his films expose a transcendental philosophy of cultural assimilation of both Eastern and Western worldview. Though his films critique India’s parochial nationalism which is deeply embedded in the hypermasculine and heteronormative discourses of colonialism, they never indulge in the desperate assertion of the civilizational alterity. In spite of offering a postcolonial resistance of the colonial modernity in India, his films never celebrate third world cultural nationalism. Either through domesticating the West or assimilating the Western avant-garde technique with the indigenous mythological structure of storytelling, Ghosh accomplishes a cultural hybridity, a transnational cosmopolitanism. The transnational relevance of Ghosh is reflected not only in the commercial and critical success of his films both in India and abroad, often bagging national and international awards quite effortlessly, but also in the adaptation of his films in English, in the publication of scholarly article and books in English language from international publishers and in the organisation of literary seminar on his films across the globe.

INDIA THROUGH TRANS-NATIONAL GAZE: A CASE STUDY OF SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE IN THE CONTEXT OF GLOBAL FLOW Kuntal Bag, University of Kalyani, West Bengal Traditional Marxist discourses on narrative films as cultural products are often criticized of being nation-centric wherein nation as a concept or form becomes the main subject of study. Such discourses assume nation as a geo-political concept (nation-state) or ideology serving capitalism and subsequently understands cinema as an apparatus for perpetuating this ideology. According to criticism, such discourses are not devoid of limitations. One such limitation is its failure to locate cinema in the grid of transnational flow of culture and capital in the age of global networking. Neo-Marxism offers a solution to overcome this limitation by providing a structural extension to the earlier thesis that cinema serves as an apparatus of the capitalist ideology by attempting to theorise the hybridization process that national cinema is subject to as a result of global trade policies. The present paper seeks to apply this up gradation in the field of adaptation studies by attempting a case study of the changes that were imparted during the process of adapting Vikas Swarup’s novel Q&A (2005) into a film Slumdog Millionaire (2008). By breaking the film (while assuming it to be a construct) into its basic elements: image (frames, scenes, shots), text

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(source text, film dialogue, film script) and sound (both diegetic and non-diegetic) the paper proposes to study the first two elements as potent sites for interrogating the changes. Since this interrogation into the changes is based on an extension of an earlier thesis the concept of nation still remains a relevant tool for research but rather than identifying ‘nation’ an ideology or concept this paper attempts to read ‘nation’ as an object (reproduced through a transnational gaze).

RE-CREATING INDIA'S "GLORIOUS PAST": THE BAAHUBALI FILMS Layla Mascarenhas, V. M. Salgacor College of Law, Goa The epic fantasy films, Baahubali: The Beginning and Baahubali 2: The Conclusion, have introduced a visual imaginary of India’s “Glorious Past” on a scale much larger and more vivid than the 1970s Amar Chitra Katha (ACK) comic books ever did. It is reported that the director of the films, S. S. Rajamouli, was greatly influenced by the ACK comic book series. This paper explores the icons created by the filmmaker in the two popular films and draws parallels with the icons presented in the ACK series. The paper also draws attention to the fact that the circulation of such images of masculinity and never-say-die warrior ethos in popular culture helps to create a sense of national pride. Although the films were initially produced in the “regional” languages of Telugu and Tamil, the films were dubbed into Hindi, Malayalam, and a few foreign languages. This aggressive marketing and distribution of these media products has widened their reach. The runaway success of the films at the box office tells us that the regional, national and trans-national audiences have lapped up these fantastic representations of India’s past. More than a need for a good story well told, perhaps these films offer a validation of an honorable, glorious Indian past that both Indian audiences and worldwide audiences are happy to see. With more and more similarly themed media products entering the market and the circulation of such images of a “Glorious Indian Past,” the lines between history and myth are easily blurred.

ARTICULATING THE 'REGION' AND THE 'NATION' IN NARRATIVES FROM THE MARGINS: NANA-A TALE OF US AND 'A NEW CHAPTER' Lizbeth Shine, Mangalore University, Karnataka The paper looks into two works from Northeast India: Nana, A Tale of Us a film from Nagaland and a short story 'A New Chapter' by the Naga writer Temsula Ao. The narratives from the Northeastern parts of India are being recognised throughout the country for geo-political, economic and cultural reasons. Nana-A Tale of Us, a commercially successful political film in Nagaland, was made in support of the Clean Election Campaign in the state. The film is in dialogue with the different tribes of the state to come together for a better future and is also a cultural translation for the mainstream India to understand what 'the present' means to the people of Nagaland. Ao's 'A New Chapter', shows how a new class of Nagas emerged in the 1960s, who were the middlemen who had contacts with both the Indian army and the

Page 75 of 114 underground army of Nagaland. The story shows how it was this exploitative class who later entered politics and began a corrupt administration which films like Nana try to warn the people against. The paper attempts to see how there in an interface in the films and literature coming from these margins. It analyses questions of Identity, Politics and Nation as portrayed through such narratives. It also focuses on understanding how such narratives deal with the present concerns of its people. In the process of reading the texts, the paper attempts to understand the changing meanings of identity, belonging and regional nationalism in the margins today.

SOCIO-CULTURAL MILIEU OF THE WILLINGDON SPORTS CLUB: TRANSNATIONAL BRITISH COLONIAL CULTURE Louiza Rodrigues, Ramnarain Ruia Autonomous College, Mumbai The Willingdon Sports Club (WSC) was founded in 1917 in Bombay by Lord Willingdon, then Governor of Bombay in association with the Maharajas of India. His ideal vision was to provide a “Home away from home”. Right from the beginning, the Club served the purpose of being an institutional culture where sociability and intermixing of Indians and the British was encouraged unlike the other clubs of Bombay which were specifically for Europeans. The Club therefore served as a space for the exchange of thoughts and ideas and the establishment of a social network between the two groups. By adopting mixed-race membership guidelines, the Club transcended cross-race social intercourse forming a “bridge” between the Indian and British communities. As social entities, they filled an important space outside of the home. The WSC was considered as the ideal location for various distinguished groups and organizations of Bombay to hold dinners in the honour of prominent personalities. “At Home” parties were extremely popular and the WSC played host to a majority of such bonanzas. It was the dining room, ballroom, bar and other areas became lavishly decorated spaces in which celebrities of the empire could be adequately entertained. Food being central to culture, the Club did their best to provide European cuisine. This is well reflected through a couple of dinners of a certain status organized at WSC. The Club bar, the Magnificent Ball, the Concerts and cinema shows was always a centre of attraction. The aim of the paper is to give an account of the socio-cultural life of the elites, both Indian and British in the WSC and show how the transnational culture of the British elite transforms the Indian elites who adopted the lifestyles of the Europeans. It is argued that the Club allowed individuals to associate with each other and thus form a community of people known to one another who created a social network leading to collective identity as ‘Elites’. The paper is based on primarily on the newspapers especially Times of India and supplemented with contemporary literature.

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THE IMAGES OF NATIONALISM AND TRANSNATIONALISM IN MALAYALAM CINEMA Malavika B, Sree Keralavarma College, Kerala Hildegard Annemaria, St.Aloysius College, Karnataka Due to globalisation and other political reasons, there has been a massive migration from Kerala to middle east countries and America, which in fact had changed the economic strata of the state. Even though it was a migration broadly over economic reasons; it later turned out to have socio, economic and cultural impacts on the lives of people back in Kerala and those residing in faraway places. Movies such as Pathemari, ABCD, Bangalore Days, Take Off, Arabikatha etc shows this shift of transnationalism, nationalism, diaspora, migration etc. These movies not only shows the socio cultural momentum of the society but also explains on the transgressions and changes adhering to the society. hence this paper explores on nationalism and trans nationalistic motives and digressions occurring in Malayalam film industry.

THE CHRONOTOPIC IMAGINATION: SELF-DEFINITION AS LIMINAL POLITICS IN HARUD Manisha Gangahar, GGDSD College, Chandigarh What are the subconscious expectations and interpretations with which a movie-goer watches a film about Kashmir? The cinematic imagination, more or less, has been marked by the popular sentiments along the lines of the romance with the landscape, awakening of national consciousness, or a sense of terror. But Harud, a short film by Amir Bashir, a Kashmiri himself, sets out to dismantle the expectations of the popular collective. My paper, through the reading of this film text, traces the contours of a contemporary Kashmiri identity as an ordinary youth negotiates the past and the present to come to terms with his Self, only to find it fragmented. Within the theoretical framework of Mikhal Bhakhtin’s concept of chronotope, the paper examines the central role that time-space play in offering a meaning to the narrative. The word ‘harud’, which means autumn, is a metaphor for the decay of life, primarily the psychological decay, with the focus being on Kashmiris and not on Kashmir issue. ‘Autumn’, in fact, becomes a chronotope, whereby the spatial and temporal frame of a narrative is closely integrated. The space, which is Kashmir as a disputed territory, is a trace of time and, on the other hand time, the season of autumn becomes a marker of space that Kashmir has become. Within this spatial- temporal frame or chronotope, production of meaning, identities, values and boundaries take place.

TRACING COLORISM IN BOLLYWOOD SONG SEQUENCES FROM THE EARLY ERAS TO THE PRESENT TIMES Manisha Mishra, Rama Devi Women’s University, Bhubaneswar

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India has completed 71 years as an independent country. But are we free from British colonialism? Postcolonial hangover persists in many spheres of our life. It does not spare the entertainment sector too. Post globalization, Indian films have borrowed many concepts from the West. Perhaps, the only thing quintessentially Indian in Indian movies has been the song and dance sequences.

Supposedly, the first full-length Indian film Raja Harischandra included a dance sequence, and the first Indian talkie Alam Ara contained seven songs. But, sadly, many of these songs display an ardent love for lighter skin complexion that goes into the lyrics of many of our song sequences till today.

Right from “Gori tera goan bada pyara [Your village is very endearing O fair one]” to “Gori hain kalahiyaan tu lade mujhe haari haari chudiyaan [My wrists are fair, so get me green bangles]” to “Gore gore mukhde pe kala kala chasma [Black glasses don your fair face]” to “Chitti hai kalaiyaanve [Fair are my wrists]”, the obsession for fairness in Bollywood songs subordinates the typical feature of Indian cinema that makes it peculiarly Indian. This is the paradox. Even when Bollywood is moving towards some original Indian concept films like Dangal, Raazi, Toilet, Padman, Bareily ki Barfi, Badri ki Dulhaniya etc that reek of Indian soil, culture and tradition, colourism in song sequences are not lessening. In fact, it can be assumed that five out of 10 songs in Bollywood include the word ‘Gori’ [fair].

My paper will trace the evolution of colourism used in Bollywood lyrics since 1950s, the reasons for it and the reception and response of Indian audience towards such a trend. My methodology shall chiefly be archival research.

RISHAB SHETTY’S SARKARI HIRIYA PRATHAMIKA SHAALE KASARGODU AND DEBATES ON LINGUISTIC HEGEMONY IN SOUTH INDIA: THE GADINADU KANNADIGAS OF KASARGODU, KERALA Medha Deshpande, IIT Gandhinagar For Kasargod, the reorganisation of Indian states according to linguistic practices in 1956 meant that it would no longer be a part of Karnataka state. Consequently, a significant number of native Kannada-speaking people were now merged with Kerala, which predominantly operates in Malayalam. Moreover, an aura of exclusion looms over the Kasargod Kannadigas, in social as well as systemic dealings. In light of their condition, there have been several activist groups who have assumed the duty of speaking for the systemic repression of these Gadinadu Kannadigas ( i.e., Kannadigas living outside of Karnataka). Amidst the cries of these activist groups, one ‘wish’ clearly rings out: a call to unify Kasargod district with Karnataka. However, there is an arguably problematic point in the larger rhetoric of this activism, which is a nuanced conflation of the meanings of language, culture and ideology of Karnataka state. Shetty’s 2018 film makes an important statement as it attempts to bring the larger discourse to a more organic level by purely highlighting the problem of linguistic hegemony. It resists

Page 78 of 114 temptation to make grand claims about unifying with a ‘motherland’ or a native culture per se. Unlike the conflated rhetoric of the activist groups, the film’s narrative singles out the issue of institutional repression: imposition of Malayalam language in a Kannada-medium school in Kasargod. Against the backdrop of ongoing activism as well as Shetty’s film, the paper will draw from discourses on linguistic hegemony, identities of minorities, and the idea of ‘motherland’ in the South Indian context.

FROM CORNWALL TO WAGAMON: THE SIMILAR, YET DIFFERING NARRATIVES OF RURAL SPACE AND MASCULINITY IN STRAW DOGS AND VARATHAN Meera Krishnadas, Amrita University, Tamil Nadu 1971 saw highly violent and controversial films like Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs and Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange which were path breaking and changed the history of films as we know it. Amal Neerad’s Malayalam movie Varathan (translated as ‘The Outsider’), a critical and commercial darling of 2018 and an unofficial remake of Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, presents an interesting engagement with the former narrative sticking to the universal theme of male gaze and yet making it largely regional. The paper explores how Varathan goes beyond being a mere remake into a cultural adaptation of stark relevance in today’s Kerala - even more so than it would have in 1971. Both films speak about the seedy underbelly of seemingly pristine, unadulterated villages visited by the protagonists. The stark insider-outsider dichotomy explores the idea of a hostile rural space. The omnipresent voyeur being a part of that space increases the threat to the victim who is an outsider. In fact, the rural space itself becomes a character in the movie, more in the latter than in the former. While Straw Dogs concentrates on the characters, Varathan shifts the focus to the hostility of the enclosed space in rural Kerala. The unnamed space combined with the universal theme transcends any regional boundaries and transforms Varathan into a cultural translation of the Straw Dogs. The absence of the crime being shown on screen in Varathan as opposed to the highly controversial rape scene in Straw Dogs only thickens the air of unspeakable horror. The paper also looks at how the femininity which is usually attributed to the villages as opposed to the masculine city space is shattered in Varathan, where the countryside assumes a highly masculine identity, with the noticeable absence of more female characters. Varathan is thus an almost Kubrickian adaptation of Peckinpah’s transnational tale carrying enormous relevance in present day Kerala.

ADAPTATION AS A MEANS OF CULTURAL TRANSLATION Meghna Bera, Christ University, Bengaluru

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Translation is a forever continuous negotiations and now it is dialogue. From transliterating to translating a culture, the field of translation studies has undergone a major shift in its paradigm and over the last few decades, translation studies as a field has become more prolific and gained more visibility. With the transaction between two languages, translation became the vehicle of the culture as well. Hence, in a paradigmatic departure, translation has somewhat become a complex negotiation between two cultures than just two languages. But in this diverse world, cultural translation is not enough. It is very important to go beyond the words and sentences, to extract the meaning and situating it in a particular cultural context, wherein Adaptation plays a pivotal role as a tool for translation and especially, for cultural translation. This paper studies the process of adaptation as a means for cultural translation as it is a procedure that can be used when the context referred to in the original text does not exist in the culture of the target language/text. Translation is the entry point into the dynamics of a culture and cultural identity and there is an urgent need to protect and preserve the little cultural spaces in the world as newness constantly enters through the cultural translation. In the very lack of single ready- made equivalent words in the target language, lies the importance of the availability of the technique of adaptation for the process of cultural translation. Adaptation, hence, becomes the closest way to retain the essence of the original culture in the translated text in this brave new dystopian world of cultural translation.

SOUTH KOREA'S CULTURAL INFLUENCE ON THE NORTH EAST INDIA Meshabaker Umdor Syiem, Christ University, Bengaluru The Korean Wave or Hallyu, is a phenomenon which marks the flow in global popularity of the South Korean culture which includes almost every entertainment forms from music, movies, dramas to fashion and Korean cuisine since the1990s. Northeast India is known to be the heart of the “Korean Wave” in the country, therefore this study will mainly focus on the adoption of the Korean Culture that is the popular culture, focusing on k-Drama and K-pop, in the North-East India. Other parts of India was introduced to K-pop only after Psy’s viral hit Gangnam Style in 2012, while in the Northeast, people were already familiarized with the genre through Korean drama, available in CDs and DVDs at very low costs ranging from Rs.100- 300. In the recent times, when ‘idol’ groups started emerging in Korean music industry, the fan-base grew wider, and the frenzy became bigger. In Manipur, the imposition of the ban of Hindi movies and channels is the root cause of their growing craze for the culture, while in the state of Nagaland, the music scene has been popularized when the Government of Nagaland brought about the annual Hornbill Festival, which is one of the biggest cultural festivals in India. The recent follow-up of the K-pop culture is facilitated by the media and social media, and this growing influence among the youth today, is perhaps driving them away from their own culture by idealizing and idolizing the famous faces of the K-pop industry.

PLAY OF LANGUAGE: INDIAN ENGLISH IN SELECTED PLAYS OF MAHESH DATTANI

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Monika Kaushik, IIT Mandi With the demise of colonialism and consequently emerging of an independent India, multilingual nation, the problem of the language, that is, whether to use regional languages or whether to continue with the legacy of colonial language for literary expression, lingered on for a long time. This resulted in the usage of various devices by Indian writers to contextualize aspects of indigenous or nativized English meanings in their writings. Mahesh Dattani’s usage of Indian English to authentically convey India’s modern socio-cultural realities and sensibilities is one such successful experiment. The noticeable thing about the experimentative quality of his writing is that it never hampers the lucidity of language rather it gives significance to the meaning and the sense as a result of its propinquity with the audiences. The study focuses upon the various socio-linguistic devices like code switching, code-mixing, and transliteration employed by Dattani by critically analysing a couple of his plays, Seven Steps Around the Fire and Tara. The aim is as much to understand the cultural translation that occurs through language.

THE OTHER SIDE OF HISTORY: TERRORISM & HUMAN NATURE Mrinalini Sharma, Manipal University, Karnataka History is what we have read in school and what is available through books and documents. History is often dry and deals with only facts and dates of past events. It neither takes into account the emotions of the humans, nor how it affects the psyche of the victims. However, literature and films take a different view on this. The cinematic medium is far reaching and even touches the illiterates. The impact of audio-visual medium on humans is one of the strongest. The paper ‘The Other side of History: Terrorism & Human Nature’ will focus on this issue. The recent history that we have come across in books or news can be manipulated to fulfil a particular aim. For the purpose of this paper, I have chosen two films -- Gulzar’s Maachis (1996) and Amu (2005) by Shonali Bose. Both deal with 1984 riots and its aftermath. Maachis deals with the making of a terrorist and the circumstances that lead to it. It talks of how there is no coming back for these terrorists in the mainstream, they have become outcasts. While Amu deals with the victims of 1984 riots, the aftermath and the guilt of those who were a part of it directly or indirectly. The movies also analyse the issue of displacement and orphanhood. While in Maachis the innocent are forced to become terrorists and flee their homes, in Amu – the main character comes from the US to India looking for her roots. This opens up a lot of hidden layers and focuses on questions of guilt, hatred and forgiveness.

HUMAN/MACHINE RIGHTS: THE AGENCY OF MACHINE IN QUESTION Neha Jain, National Institute of Technology, Silchar

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This paper explores issues concerning the making of the ‘human’ in the debate over ‘rights’. I want to talk about how artificially-intelligent machines work concurrent and sometimes contrapuntal to human conscious paradigm in popular American science fiction. My case studies are 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) [based on The Sentinel (1951) by Arthur C. Clarke], Blade Runner (1982) [based on Do androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) by Philip k. Dick] and, I, Robot (2004) [based on I, Robot (1950) by Isaac Asimov]. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) traces the struggle of man against machine where man emerges victorious after terminating the machines. In Blade Runner (1982), machines are imitations of humans and the dividing line between them is thin. The film portrays the rise of a neo-noir protagonist, Roy Batty who asks important questions about the meaning of humanity as he craves to be like a human with a larger lifespan. I, Robot (2004) dismantles the binaries of the self and the other and establishes the non-human faction as a separate community. The film opens way for the recognition of non-humans and delineates a possibility of constitution of non-human rights for the robots. Struggle for existence and the question of ‘right’fulness of machines is the mainstay of all the films and I will further elaborate on the nature and evolution of the struggle over ‘rights’ in the debate on (non) humanity. What makes one ‘human’? Better still, which degree of ‘humanity’ makes an entity ‘right’ful? Does the paradigm of non-human rights find a suitable conclusion at the dawn of the third millennia? Or, is the voice of the robot recognizable because it recognizes humanity as a necessary ally speaks its language and exonerates itself in the eyes of human-law?

LINGUISTIC IDENTITY, REGIONAL CINEMA AND UNIONIZATION OF SOUTH INDIAN FILM WORKERS Nirmala M N, Christ University, Bengaluru When film arrived in British India in the late 1890s, it took root in mostly the three major metropolises, Bombay, Calcutta and Madras. Of the three major Centre’s for film production within India, the southern industry in Madras was the largest in terms of number of studios, capital investment, gross income, and number of people engaged in production. The end of the silent era also marked the birth of a new entity - South Indian cinema with Madras as the Centre of production. The relationship between Madras and other southern regional industries has been of ambiguous in nature, because along with nurturing the other southern regional film industries, Tamil film industry also has established a broad audience base across all the southern states, with an enviable film market almost second to the Hindi film industry in India. Despite the regional differences, there has been cross-over and synergy between the film industries in India with film workers including artistes working across languages. But after the Linguistic Reorganization of states in 1956 and establishment of cine worker unions, mobility across different film industry for cine-workers particularly those working at the bottom of the pyramid of the film industry have been restricted.

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Viewed in this context, this paper argues that the establishment of language film industries in their respective states and unionization of film workers are inter-related. Junior Artistes were among the first to organize themselves, to facilitate film production process in the language- based states that were formed, and also to legitimize the linguistic division by claiming work for the locals‘(people belonging to the region or speaking the local language). The history of unionization of Southern film industries and formation of Junior Artistes union are cited as a vital case in this article to elucidate this argument.

DHANAMJAYA'S CONCEPTION OF DRAMATIC ART AMD THE DRAMATURGY OF EARLY HINDI CINEMA Pankaj Kumar Verma, Indian Institute of Technology, Tirupati This paper intends to understand the dramaturgy of early Hindi Cinema keeping in view the most ancient Indian treatise on performing arts, the Nāṭyaśāstra, and a 10th century book on dramaturgy Daśarūpakam by Dhanaṁjaya. The concepts postulated in these two classical treatises formed the very foundation of Indian drama (Nātya) irrespective of genre and time. And, the journey of dramatic performance to silver screen is basically from the stage, therefore, the notions which ran through the self of drama were apparently present in the whole being of Hindi Cinema. The rules propounded in the aforementioned texts governed the crucial features of the dramatic representation which travelling through theatre reached the celluloid world preparing the ground for the success as well as failure of the Hindi cinema. The paper primarily focuses on the Subject-matter (Vastu), principal characters i.e. Hero, and Heroine ((Nāyaka, and Nāyikā), and the Sentiments (Rasas) as proposed and discussed in the Nāṭyaśāstra, and Daśarūpakam. Most of the early film makers of Indian cinema like Dadasaheb Phalke, Ardeshir Irani, Prithviraj Kapoor etc. were associated with Indian theatrical performances in some way or the other. Dhundiraj Govind Phalke alias Dadasaheb Phalke’s debut silent film Raja Harishchandra (1913), and many other subsequent films like Bhasmasur Mohini (1913), Satyavan Savitri (1914) Lanka Dahan etc. emanated only from the traditional source of drama, the Hindu mythology. The story of Raja Harishchandra moves according to the thematic procedure as posited in Dhanaṁjaya’s Dhaśarupaka in which the principal theme deals with the life of Raja Harishchandra as a man of truth, and incidental theme deals with the life of sage Vishwamitra who performs yajña for acquiring supreme power, and also plays a crucial role in the life of Raja Harishchandra. Ardeshir Irani’s Alam Ara (1931), the first Indian talkie was an adaptation of a Parsi theatre play. It further borne the influence of Indian classical theatre by carrying forward the legacy of romance, music and dance of Indian classical theatre. Thus, this paper, evaluating the positive and negative aspects of the concepts of classical dramatic art that influenced the Hindi cinema the most, concludes with putting forth the relation of the conceptions of classical dramatic art with the dramaturgy of early Hindi Cinema.

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UNBEARABLE INTIMACIES: CARTOGRAPHIES OF FEMALE DESIRE, SEXUALITY AND TRANSGRESSION IN LITERATURE AND CINEMA Paromita Chakrabarti, HR College, University of Mumbai In the light of the landmark Supreme Court judgement on Article 377 and its implications on gender roles, sexual identity, and the making of the national fe/male subject in contemporary India; this paper explores the ways in which women in colonial and postcolonial literature and cinema contest, claim, and make intimate spaces. The works examined in the paper are: Ismat Chughtai’s Lihaaf (1942), Meena Alexander’s Manhattan Music (1997) and Deepa Mehta’s film Fire (1996). The first section theorizes the idea of the intimate space that is both nurturing as well as uncanny. Primarily located within the traditional setting of the home, the intimate space is tightly bound by prevalent cultural values and yet, is precariously perched on the threshold of dislocation and disintegration. The second section studies the politics and poetics of both colonial homes and postcolonial locations to show how the writers and the film maker charts cartographies of desire in subjects caught between tradition and modernity, ethnic identity and racialized social spaces, sex and love. Erotic desire is mostly embodied in transgressive subjects whose sexuality is publicly guarded and privately owned. Through their intimate encounters these subjects resist, counter and transform the ways in which sex, love and desire are imagined in the private as well as in the collective. The last section will look at alternative traditions as in the affective and the performative in order to examine ways in which they can be and have been deployed to challenge the moral authority of the (post)colonial state. The paper will show how the transgressive female subject inhabits an alternate spatial universe which threaten the limits of hegemonic authority and exceed oppressive articulations of national and sexual identity, gender performativity, personal relationships, and community values.

INTERVENING IN THE EXISTING LANGUAGE DYNAMICS AND AUTHENTICATING THE SPACES: THE LANGUAGE AND DIALECT POLITICS REPRESENTED IN SMALL-TOWN BASED POPULAR HINDI CINEMA Pawan Sharma, IIT Gandhinagar As a reflection to India as a nation with its protract and the debatable idea of spatiality, Hindi cinema ceaselessly has been depicting the spaces in a binary of cities as the urban and villages as the rural India, functioning on another binary of modernity and tradition. This rigid representation of the binary between cities and villages created questionable confirmed spaces that could only embody the extreme opposites of good and bad of the twofold representation. (Sinha 2013) In this binary spatial structure in Hindi cinema, small-town spaces were left extremely unnoticed. The introduction of this new space on the silver screen came up with its own particular representation of social dynamics which complicated concepts of family, sexuality, language politics, etc. This research paper will focus upon the language politics in the cinematic representation of small-town spatiality. The nuances of the language-dialect dynamics of Bollywood films becomes more complicated with the arrival of the language politics that popular films based in small-town bring forth. Historically, dialects have been used

Page 84 of 114 to escape from the influence of urban educated class and present a proximate rural life in Hindi Cinema. However, this new cinematic space does not enter into this politics. Instead, the use of dialects authenticates the spatiality in films like Omkara (2006) and Goliyon Ki Raasleela Ram-Leela (2013). This research paper will complicate the politics of language and dialects in both fictional and rooted in the ‘actual’ small-town spatiality of Hindi cinema. Apart from the distinctive dynamics of language in vernacular space and a disparity within the narratives of globalisation, the paper will also argue how small-town spaces emerge with their own variances and particularities in Popular Hindi Cinema.

ADAPTING O'HENRY IN HINDI CINEMA Poulome Panja, St. Xavier’s University, Kolkata When a piece of writing is translated into any of the contemporary cultures - the plotline, time period, scenario, era etc. is often altered. However, what remains or must remain is the worth of it. No matter what form of art is it adapted into, the essence of it should linger in order to sense its true flavours. Similarly, American short story writer O’Henry’s two remarkable tales The Gift of the Magi and The Last Leaf were once adapted by Hindi Cinema into an Indian drama film Raincoat (2004) and an Indian period romance Lootera (2013) simultaneously. While O’Henry primarily based his tales entirely on American backgrounds, nature, names and idiosyncrasies of the people – Indian Cinema Industry has brought in certain changes to the tales, twisting them as might suit the taste of Indians. The plot of both the tales as scripted by the author hardly bears any resemblance to the film adaptations. Nevertheless, on watching the films, one can find out that the core of both the films and the tales is just the same. While for Raincoat, Rituparno Ghosh kept the genre of romance intact, adding his innovation to the plot – Vikramaditya Motwane did not prefer keeping his adaptation on The Last Leaf, a tale of two friends. Although Pakhi in Lootera also recovers from her psychosomatic disease by depending on the last leaf of the tree, instead of a friend like Sue, she is helped by her lost love Varun Shrivastav.

SEXUAL LABOUR, SOCIAL REFORM AND TEMPLE ECONOMIES IN PORTUGUESE GOA; HISTORY OF GOMANTAK MARATHA SAMAJ Prachi Prabhu, Tata Institute Social Sciences, Mumbai In the history of Portuguese colonial Goa, formation of Gomantak Maratha Samaj was a social movement that challenged caste and religious structures. The movement created an identity for the marginalised groups of temple servants. Gomantak Maratha Samaj is a community known for various artists and intellectuals who have achieved international fame in the recent past. The collective history of community reiterates narrative of sexual slavery, exploitation in the traditional temple economies and caste based society of Goa.

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This paper explores the history of this reform movement in Colonial Goa during the twentieth century based on archival sources. Members of the community migrated to Bombay during the early twentieth century in search of alternate occupations. This facilitated number of artists from the community to gain training in Indian classical music and provided with opportunities for professional growth. Some of the artists belonging to the community include Mogubai Kurdikar, Saraswatibai Malpekar, Hirabai Pednekar, Kishori Amonkar. Artists who earned respect and economic independence through music and theatre in Bombay contributed to community’s progress in numerous ways. This paper tries to analyse the impact of these opportunities in British India and its impact on the social reform in Portuguese Goa. The influence of Portuguese colonialism, migration opportunities to Bombay and the growing art industry in Bombay during the twentieth century have been influential in shaping the history of the community.

CONTESTING IMAGINATIONS OF NATION AND REGION THROUGH THE USE OF LANGUAGE IN SAADAT HASAN MANTO'S TOBA TEK SINGH Prakriti Arora, Christ University, Bengaluru The Partition of India and Pakistan in the year 1947 is not only looked back at as a traumatic memory but also something which gave rise to a considerable number of writings in languages like Hindi, Punjabi and Urdu. The writers at the time expressed their anger and disapproval by interestingly employing words to their benefit. One such famous writer was Saadat Hasan Manto. Born in British India, his own identity was a subject to constant challenges posed by the “shifting boundaries” of the nation. One of the crucial and influential works from his career that traced this turmoil was Toba Tek Singh. A short story, originally written in Urdu language, addressed the consequences of Partition faced by the inmates of a mental asylum in Lahore. Manto cleverly blurred the boundaries between a ‘mad’ world and a sane world, by questioning the latter. The text is rich with themes of colonialism, diaspora, and illustrates the atrocities faced by the people. However, the way this has been described as, gains significance. Language is used as an obvious medium of meaning production but the manner in which Manto uses it depicts a form of breakdown. He twists and turns the words as if taking the metaphorical shield of describing the way his identity and sense of belongingness has been twisted and turned by the political powers. The research paper seeks to delve upon this breakdown of language which has often been seen as a mere utterance of gibberish. The manner in which the ideas transgress the “national” and “regional” boundary drawn by the cartographer has often been seen in the light of violence inflicted upon the people but there emerges a new scope to examine the area with respect to colonialism and changing ways of expression. To establish the authorial intervention and intersection with the source text and to describe the trauma, the paper also aims to look closely

Page 86 of 114 at his representation in the latest film release, Manto. The text projects an interesting aspect to read the contesting identities which transpire as a result.

CINEMA - A GATEWAY TO POWER POLITICS IN TAMIL NADU Prerana N, Christ University, Bengaluru This paper aims to comprehensively analyse the usage of cinema as an effective medium for political consciousness and mobilization of electoral power in Tamil Nadu. The rise of Tamil nationalism through the Dravidian movement in the region has been swift yet dramatic. The primary features of Dravidian politics can be identified based on linguistic, ethnic and cultural identity. Post the elections of 1967, the strategic use of cinema as a form of mass communication has resulted in more public participation in the socio-political development of the state. Targeting vast electorate groups, actors of the Tamil industry have successfully created heroic personalities through films and political activities of fan clubs. Various politicians like M G Ramachandran, Karunanidhi, Annadurai and Jayalalita have enhanced the association of cinema with Tamil ethnicity, carefully building a platform of rhetoric for political activities. With effective portrayal of elements of political ideologies in films, the lines of political authority and cinema had been blurred from 1967 till 2016, marked by the death of actress turned Chief Minister, Jayalalita. With a power vacuum that exists currently in Tamil Nadu politics, the space for ethnic and linguistic rise from cinema to a position of bureaucracy can be interestingly compared to the same setting that existed post-independence in peninsular India. With speculations of stars like Rajnikanth and Kamal Hassan entering politics, the paper tries to disseminate the appeal of competitive populism and altruism that artists create to promote Dravidian politics centred on Tamil identity and language.

THE NATION BETWEEN GENERATIONS: DUI PURUSH AND THE 1940S Rajarshi Mitra, IIIT Guwahati This paper maps national middle class sentiments in Dui Purush (1945) – a popular Bengali film by Subodh Mitra. Based on clash of ideals between three generations, Dui Purush reflected the nation-making propensities of a middle class during a decade of searing famine, misery and political rebirth. Mitra builds his narrative through part-court-room-part-family-drama in rural Bengal. Through a deft handling of editing techniques, characters reflect their transgressions, political evolution and moral devolution. Cinematic transitions dramatize the familiar discourse of wealth versus moral character. The wealthy, poetic and politically aware Bengali middle class in Dui Purush entertains the vision of reaching out to the poor. They seem at home in colonial structures of power – which they use as platforms to voice their aspirations. They, however, neither venture into poverty nor does the film create strong symbolism to attack structures that sustain poverty. In a stark contrast to a number of visually moving films like Roti (1942), Dui Purush preserves the middle class aesthetic of a nation of sentimental hope and renewal. The conflicts in the middle class discourse of the nation – its wretchedness, poverty and corruption – are resolved as the characters embrace the Hindu aesthetic of sacrifice

Page 87 of 114 and abnegation. Their inner need for introspection and self-renewal is pitted against a narrative of collective political action. It is this well-manicured, sentimental moral narrative of a nation that they bequeath to the generation that follows.

MARATHI FILMS AND THEIR RETURN TO RELEVANCE Rajendra Nargundkar, IIM Indore Regional films in India have had their ups and downs. Marathi films are no exception. After a pioneering run in the 1930s and 40s, when they were at the forefront of Indian films, with the likes of Dadasaheb Phalke and V. Shantaram, they went into a decline, until a few years ago, a spate of realistic films like Shwaas and Court brought them back into reckoning. Some of these were India’s entries to foreign film awards including the Oscars. Serious films, realistic films and films that have revived some classic theatre productions (Natasamrat and Katyar Kaljaat Ghusli) of yesteryear have proved in recent times that well-made Marathi films are a viable and vibrant medium of bringing a variety of subjects to the screen. Viewership has also increased due to more films being sub-titled for release in non-Marathi speaking states. Sairaat broke a few box-office records and was re-made into Hindi due to its phenomenal success. This paper examines the trend in Marathi films, of selecting a variety of subjects, challenging the status quo, not afraid to tackle controversial or infrequently tackled subjects (Nude and Kaccha Limbu being a recent example).

INDIAN DIASPORA AND ENGAGEMENT WITH THE WEST: A READING OF KABHI KHUSHI KABHI GHAM AND UNINDIAN Rani Jana, Christ University, Bengaluru A nation-state enables a sense of belonging in people as they associate people who share the same geographical space as them; also share similar cultural identity. This paper has then attempted to understand how people who have moved away from their homelands perform ethnic identity through the means of ‘othering’ out of threat for preserving their own ethno- cultural self. For the purpose of this paper, the understanding of “‘weak’ diaspora concept” (Naujoks 2) has been essentially used. Weak diaspora can be understood as people – either individual or groups who “trace their roots back to one homeland” (Naujoks 2) but are located and reside away from their homeland however their ethno-cultural relation to the homeland remains intact. This paper further extends this idea and attempts to understand how the people located in a land other than their homeland engage with the space in a manner to sustain their identity and in doing so disregard the other cultures that coexist in their particular surroundings. The primary texts of the paper are Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham (Johar 2003) and UNIndian (Sharma 2015). The movies have been chosen as primary texts as both the movies revolve around families that have moved away from their homelands i.e. India in the case of both. The former focuses on an Indian couple who have not been accepted by their family due to inter- class marriage and therefore they move to London. In the latter, an Indian family resides in

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Australia however when it comes to the marriage of their daughter they disapprove of anyone who is not an Indian. Thus, through the reading of these two movies, one has attempted to understand the anxiety prevalent over sustaining one’s ethno-culture identity in a space other than their homeland; and in the process they also use the mode of ‘othering’ for the same.

FROM DEVDAS TO DEV D: A CASE FOR LITERARY, CULTURAL AND PALIMSESTUOUS ADAPTATION Reema Chowdhary, IIT Indore The purpose of this paper is to approach adaptation as a modality of literary and cultural translation that studies film’s narrative as palimpsest. The study examines the film narrative as intertextual visual manifestations of the classic text Devdas as a transformative screen adaptation into Anurag Kashyap’s Dev D. By analyzing Dev D the article investigates the film’s treatment of history and its generation of meanings produced through its varied translation, suggesting the collaborative, intertextual, and cultural – historical palimpsestuous adaptation. Although intended to be a loose adaptation of Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas, a relational reading of the screenplay and the film shows palimpsestuous emergence of themes, subthemes and character not only from the source text but also from Bimal Roy’s and Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s version of Devdas. On this basis, we argue how Kashyap’s approach to adaptation deconstructs the existing narratives and rewrites a visual narrative that constructs an alternative form of history while simultaneously alluding to ineluctable facts. The study signifies the repeated attempts to refashion the text into film that translates the cultural context subsumed to new technologies of language and vision.

GLOBALISATION AND THE CHANGING REPRESENTATION OF CHRISTIAN WOMEN CHARACTERS IN SELECTED HINDI FILMS Ruth Susan Mathew, Christ University, Bengaluru This research will attempt to understand the role of Globalization in the transition of the representation of Christian women characters in the Hindi films, Julie, Bobby, Josh and Ek Mein Aur Ek Tu from a postcolonial feminist lens. This paper presents the shift in the portrayal of Christian women characters from being ‘westernized’ and ‘common’ to more non- stereotypical depictions with Globalization. It also discusses the present sharp decline in the number of Hindi films with Christian women characters in the lead role as a result of the savarna bourgeoisie domination of the Hindi film industry with the upper class, upper caste, and patriarchal Hindu family assuming the ideological epicentre of the Hindi cinema. This paper studies the significance of Globalization in the evolution of the role of Christian women characters in Hindi films. To prove this argument, a postcolonial feminist approach with the theories of Partha Chatterjee’s idea of the role of nationalism in the representation of the ‘westernized’ and ‘common’ women; Gopal Guru’s argument of the exclusion of the minorities from the mainstream imagination of the nation, and Diana Dimitrova’s discourse of “Otherism”

Page 89 of 114 will be used. The implication of this research is that the characteristics of the ‘vamp’ are no longer associated with the depiction of Christian women characters in Hindi films as they are taken over by the mainstream heroines due to the change in the lifestyle of the middle class Indians as a result of Globalization.

360 DEGREE VIDEO: IMPLICATIONS OF A NEW VIDEO CULTURE ON TRANSNATIONAL MEDIA Sachindev P. S., The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad

360-degree video lets the viewer have a first-person experience of the scene. The viewer can either 'look around' the scene by scrolling or for the complete experience, watch the video using a head-mount display (HMD) which will place them in the scene virtually. An immersive video differs from a photograph or a film in the sense that it can place the viewer closer to the experience of the filmmaker. In a disaster, war included, humans are reduced to statistics. Through the HMD, when someone watches a war survivor/refugee up-close, there is a displacement (however slight) of war reporting narratives filled with dichotomies (good-evil, civilized-barbaric, and so on) of. However, it still is not free from the filmmaker’s standpoint or artistic pursuits, as exemplified in Chris Milk’s Clouds over Sidra. With the profusion of 360-degree reportages coming from Syria, Nigeria, Bangladesh and more, these questions arise. How do audience make their way through in a video which is less compositionally rationalised than others? How should the norms of explicitness be redefined now that violence is more up-close? Since the 360-degree video transports the audience to situations which are often happening outside their country, and they experience it as more of ‘being there’ and less of ‘seeing it’, what are the implications it has for transnational video consumption? How different is the experience of those who are filmed, being more exposed than they would be in a traditional video? These are some of the questions this paper will try to address.

WISDOM THE LANKAN INDIGENIZATION FAILED TO GAIN FROM SANTINIKETAN: A CULTURAL READING OF THE LOSS OF COSMOPOLITANISM IN THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF SUNIL SANTHA AND EDIRIWEERA SARACHCHANDRA S. S. A. Senevirathne & S. M. Kariyakarawane, Sabaragamuwa University of Sri Lanka The Lankan society from the distant past has been consisted of multi-racial identities. It is very much essential that such a society must be embodied in characteristics like concord and mutual respect. Otherwise its ruin is unavoidable due to internal conflict. Because of this the Lankan society is being gradually devastated by now. Continual conflicts are being arisen between the major race and racial minorities. The origins of most of these conflicts we experience are connected with educational and cultural interventions of colonial and post- colonial indigenization campaign. Indigenization movement that was launched with a nationalist or patriotic approach is directly responsible for this state of affairs. But what a nice surprise that many individuals who played a leading role in the second generation (1930-1960) of the

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Lankan indigenization movement were also students of Santiniketan which had based their teaching on cosmopolitanism. Martha Nussbaum who carried out the study of the thought of Tagore and the intervention had analyzed very well Tagore’s cosmopolitanism and how Santiniketan had put the doctrine into practice. This study seeks to explain whether features of cosmopolitanism were present in the thought and use of two leading men, i.e. Ediriweera Sarachchandra (1914-1996) (pioneer in the indigenous tradition of drama, in literary criticism and in dramatic art education) and Sunil Santha (1915-1981) (pioneer in indigenous music tradition) and if the answer is in the affirmative why they had not been socialized. Discussion held with five scholars, books, press cuttings, video and audio data and internet data have been made use of as sources of the study. It seems that both Sarachchandra and Sunil Santha were unaware of Tagore’s cosmopolitanism. The intervention of Sarachchandra in indigenization movement had been suffered by racial, caste and religious prejudice. In consequence he has missed cosmopolitanism approach. But on the other hand he was able to look at from a humanistic dimension at “Maname” the drama he produced. Sunil Santha very often makes his creations basing them on a cosmopolitan approach. But he seems that he couldn’t proceed with his notion in face of the forces that acted against him. The fight staged against imperialism by the first generation (1848-1830) of indigenization movement in Sri Lanka involved in internal dissention of varied nature. Racism, divisions in religion, in language, patriarchy, caste system etc. were deeply rooted in the campaign which was fundamentally of patriotism. In the prejudiced context of this country perhaps those creative artists studied herein and also took part in indigenization campaign must have found it difficult to convert into actuality the influence Santiniketan had on them. The study has revealed that Indian racialism, Marxism, Buddhist monastic culture, Christian missionary and the British control had been in action against cosmopolitanism. The absence of a conscientious national campaign can be attributed to the chief cause for the failure to deliver message of Tagore to Sri Lanka.

GHOSH'S CHITRANGADA: INSCRIBING THE BODY, TRANSLATING THE SELF Sananda Roy, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi In a globalized world translation may not only be restricted to words or different languages but also to be understood as a practice in terms of shifting or transition from one place to another, particularly to human beings and their bodies that shift from one social position or political condition, to another, allowing the cultural translation of people for a political purpose with existential consequences. It is in this context that I wish to locate Rituparno Ghosh’s ‘queering’ of one of Tagore’s celebrated plays Chitrangada (1936), where he re-images it in a way that resonates with the inscription of his ‘trans’ self and not merely as an adaptation understood within the conventional rubric. In this film-literature negotiation amounting to adaptation, extending to cultural translation and beyond, the film, Chitrangada: The Crowning Wish (2012), speaks of decoding cultural texts along subversive lines, using the ‘translated body’ as an apparatus that challenges heteronormative codes, re-imagines history, similar to gynocritics, subjecting the original text to stylistic and semantic shifts but permeating it with a queer consciousness and a reading that patriarchy had long suppressed. Adaptation studies along with

Page 91 of 114 queer theories pose as sites for performativity and mediation between binaries, calling into question the notion of adaptation/translation as a fixed category and debunking it by equating it to a similar problematic of gender as a given. The paper will thus seek to explore Chitrangada, as a metaphor for the gendered body in the indeterminate state of being where desires are fluid and shifting, evading permanence and continually succumbing to an identity in flux.

THE BAAHUBALI FRANCHISE: CINEMA-LITERATURE INTERFACE AND TEXTUAL TRANSFORMATIONS Sandipan Ray Choudhury, The University of Burdwan, West Bengal The phenomenal success of the Telugu film Baahubali: The Beginning (in dubbed versions) across India and even abroad resulted in the character Baahubali becoming an iconic figure of contemporary Indian popular culture. This was converted into a successful franchise which was carried forward by other writers and corporate institutions. Anand Neelakantan’s The Rise of Shivgami (2017) and the graphic novel Baahubali: The Battle of the Bold (2017) published by Graphic India are some of the prime examples. It is noteworthy that while the film itself was originally made with the Telugu-speaking community as its primary target audience, both Neelakantan’s book and the graphic novel were published in English for a pan-Indian and even international urban readership. This paper intends to explore the textual transformations, representational changes and ideological shifts that have taken place due to this change of target audience/readers.

POT, POTTERS AND POTTERY: REVISIONING THE NARRATIVES Sangeeta Jawla, Ambedkar University Delhi All this of pot and potter- Tell me, Then, who makes- who sells- who buys- who is the pot? Potters try to understand their roots, personal histories, community histories through pots. And the pot allows them to give a shape to the lives as it is itself given shape by the potters. This paper will be looking at the real life artefacts that are created by the potter and the creation of the narratives that surrounds this material. And these oral/textual narratives will be compared to the real life narratives that are available and will be gathered through the documentation in different places in both Rajasthan and Haryana. The craft represents an intrinsically valuable cultural experience and these experiences will be explored through the narratives of the potter community. The art of pottery making, according to the Varna system is traditionally associated with the caste of the kumhars in India. These narratives are about the pot, potters and pottery, and touch upon issue like myths of origin, life narratives, migration tales as well as their class and caste struggles. It is important to study the community knowledge and transformation in material culture and the physical properties of material culture but there is also a need to study its meaning and uses in the cultural context for understanding that particular indigenous culture.

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The story and the pot are formed by the life that has something to tell. ‘Pot’ then becomes a record of contemporary rituals, and of rural India in transition- telling stories, reflecting rituals, and illustrating the aesthetics of cultures. The methodology of in-depth interviews and a collection and compilation of myths, tales, quips, songs, and real life narratives by audio- recording of oral narrative through individual and group performances, will be followed.

THE PUBLIC-PRIVATE DIALECTIC AND THE DEFINITIVE STAND IN HOMOSEXUALITY: DISSECTING ABDELLATIF KECHICHE'S BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR Santanu Das, Jadavpur University, Kolkata The scene where Adèle (Adèle Exarchopolos) and Emma (Léa Seydoux) make love for the first time, Kechiche films that with one of the most jolting cuts in recent memory - from the women sitting together on a park to the two of them naked on bed together, entangled. Without any prior stages of intermediate seduction, the sudden transfer of intimacy from public to private life is the film's very core. Blue is the Warmest Color is a political film in the deepest sense; its harsh, unabashed physicality the very subject matter. Kechiche plays upon the ideas of tolerance, empathy and inclusion - and the terrifying, non-violent and sadistic uproar that he manages to extract - seem to be a fragment of the entire idea of inclusivity. This paper will identify this divide between the public and the private under the radar of which queer studies primarily focuses upon. It shall also engage the heterosexual fantasy of gay love - as recent reviews have questioned the director's portrayal of the sex scenes and the controversy regarding the fallout between Kechiche and his two lead actors. What positions are to be taken while depicting a queer relationship? Is it necessary to enclose homosexuality in a category of special, distinct beings? What does it mean to be gay without participating in gay culture? Does the physical and psychological fact of homosexuality entail a different place in society? These questions shall be addressed keeping the trans-national periscope of the version of psychology that speaks of the flesh.

REIMAGINING THE POLIS AND OIKOSIN INDIAN SMALL TOWNS: REPRESENTATION OF WOMEN WORKSPACES IN CONTEMPORARY HINDI FILMS Sayanty Chatterjee, IIT Madras The public sphere, or the ‘polis’ has been conceptualized as synonymous to ‘authority’ and hegemonic power structure (Habermas, 1989). The strict separation between the public space and the private space of ‘oikos’, therefore, has an underlying gendered implication since the unlimited control over the latter used to guarantee a supreme authority in the ‘polis’. However, the contestation and negotiation between the public sphere of work, politics and the private

Page 93 of 114 space of domesticity has taken on a new shape in the modern globalized world, with the inclusion of women in the previously male-dominated space of the workforce. This paper will attempt to address the question of the actual places of workspace available to women in the visual representation of contemporary Hindi films. The locale of this study is concentrated in the small towns of India. The precarious position of these physical territories can be considered as an apt commentary and a reflection on the situation of women, ‘fixed’ in the domestic sphere of ‘oikos’ (McDowell, 2003). The central focus of the paper will revolve around the public perception of working women in these small towns with relation to class, caste and gender. With instances from Hindi films like Masaan (2015), Dum Laga ke Haisha (2015), Lipstick Under My Burkha (2017), Bareilly ki Barfii (2017) and Anaarkali of Aarah (2017), the endeavour would be to understand how the public spaces of work accommodate the larger concerns of the ‘domestic’ spaces. This paper will attempt to analyse how the entry into the work space has facilitated the women to reaffirm their identity and how in turn it allows them to claim their agency and ‘authority’ in the polis, through a detailed study of the mise-en-scène of the films in question.

NATION, NARRATION AND THE CINEMA, INCLUSIONS AND EXCLUSIONS WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO FILMS ON THE INDIAN PARTITION 1947 EARTH AND TRAIN TO PAKISTAN Seema Jena, New York Film Academy, USA Contemporary theory sees nations as narrated, in the sense that beliefs about the origins and evolutions of nations crystallize in the form of stories. Cinema, as the world's storyteller par excellence, was from the outset ideally suited to relay the projected narratives of nations and empires. Just as nationalist literary fictions inscribe into a multitude of events the notion of a linear, comprehensible destiny, so films arrange events and actions in a temporal narrative that moves towards fulfilment, and thus shape thinking about historical time and national history. Narrative models in films are not simply reflective microcosms of historical processes, they are also experimental grids or templates through which history can be written and national identity created. Films can convey what Bakhtin calls "chronotopes," materializing time in space, meditating between the historical and discursive, providing fictional environments where historically specific constellations of power are made visible. My attempt will be to explore the issue of the national in the cinema and open new areas about national identity and representation. How is history replotted? How is the past imagined, constructed and narrated in conflicting sites? To what extent has this representation been critical or subversive.

SWAY OF INDIAN CINEMA IN DIFFUSING ENVIRONMENTAL SENTIENCE Shirin Rais, Aligarh Muslim University, Uttar Pradesh Celluloid can be a key tool for dissemination of environmental awareness since it reaches to the masses. In India many efforts have been made till date to communicate about environmental

Page 94 of 114 gen through parallel cinema. The parallel cinema in India, for instance, films by Satyajit Ray and others, have been able to build required realization among people, mostly about the local environmental problems in specific area/region in India. Unlike Hollywood where mainstream cinema remains a central mode of spreading familiarity about environmental dilapidation, in India, mainstream cinema seems to have kept a reasonably good distance from such issues. The paper therefore, explores the contribution of parallel cinema in India in diffusing environmental sentience and the reasons why mainstream cinema stay away from displaying environmental themes. The paper argues that parallel cinema is certainly not a powerful tool for creating awareness among masses because this mode of media cater to only selective population who are mostly aware of these issues. The paper further says that neither parallel cinema nor mainstream cinema in India are able to highlight the impacts of global warming and climate change which are noticeably depicted in Hollywood movies. The paper asserts that if Raj Kapoor would have lived in current era, then R. K. Banner would have certainly exemplified the prevailing environmental concerns through mainstream cinema and this subject would have been listened by much more audiences in India and abroad. Raj Kapoor’s vision was outstanding as he used to beautifully portray the prevailing socio-economic problems in his films.

RAAZI, CONSENTING TO UNTOLD SUFFERING FOR THE IDEA OF A NATION IN POPULAR CINEMA Shishu Bala, IIT Mandi Harinder Sikka’s Calling Sehmat is a searing tale of patriotic fervor for which the protagonist jumps into a life of espionage without thinking twice. However, what distinguishes this novel from other such spy novels is the fact that the spy is a young woman. This paper studies its cinematic representation, Raazi, in order to understand the development of the idea of nation in a young mind. Set against the backdrop of the Indo-Pak War of 1971, in the lead up to the birth of Bangladesh, it portrays how patriotism makes the young woman consent to marriage to a Pakistani soldier and embark on her mission. What is overlooked in this picture of self- sacrifice for the nation is the role of patriarchy that is underwhelming in its representation in this film. The paper critically looks at this dimension also when it analyses the young woman’s intentions and actions in this visual treat that tries to remain clear of jingoism that sometimes popular Hindi cinema resorts to in order to depict nation and nationalism.

EVALUATING THE SUCCESS OF CHICK FLICKS IN INDIAN CINEMA AND LITERATURE Shravya Aradhyam, Christ University, Bengaluru Ever since its Independence from the British, Indians have had to juggle between the conflicting ideas adopted from the West and its own traditional customs and beliefs. The ability to juggle between these different ideologies has not been an easy for Indians, more so for its

Page 95 of 114 women. This confusion is most evident in literature and cinema. Through this paper, I have attempted to study the effect of the chick-flick genre of cinema and literature on the audiences, in terms of relating to the movie characters. While movies like Gippi, Student of the Year and Aisha seem to have been hits at the box office, the effect that they have had on audiences isn’t the same as their Hollywood counterparts, which is evident from the success of such films economically and based on the audience reception of these movies. Clueless, Mean Girls, and the recent Netflix hit, Sierra Burgess Is a Loser, are examples of such well-received Hollywood movies. Readings of various papers on topics spanning the impact of globalisation on Indian cinema and its audiences, show that while women actors contribute majorly to the economic performance of a film, the message of such films doesn’t seem to prove relatable with female audiences. Ideologies and practices that are directly borrowed from western culture, are not always accepted by most, and yet the movies continue showing these stories. In the novels of Chetan Bhagat, Anju Chauhan and Durjoy Dutta as well, such western ideas are popularised, and, again, not accepted by most citizens. Through this paper, we analyse the effect of such western ideas on Indian audiences, and whether the influence of the west is actually overpowering, even though we claim to be postcolonial.

TRANSNATIONALISM THROUGH THE LENS OF MIRA NAIR - A GLOBAL FILMMAKER OF INDIAN ORIGIN Shreelata Prasad, Central University of Himachal Pradesh With the worth of visual treats, Cinema plays an important role in bridging the gap caused by the lack of interaction between cultures by imparting ideas and ideals in the void. When a film brings together narrative and aesthetic subtleties of more than one nation, it matches the concept of Transnational Cinema which surpasses national boundaries in terms of economic, social and cultural spheres. As suggested by Will Higbee and Song Hwee Lim, in an increasingly interconnected, multicultural and polycentric world that we dwell in it is imperative for the scholars of film studies to enquire and discuss about the concept of transnational cinema in order to understand the production, consumption and representation of cultural identity (both individual and collective). In this study, the concept of transnationalism will be discussed and qualitatively analyzed through the lens sight of Mira Nair, a globally noted filmmaker-of-Indian-origin who is based in New York City. As her production company, Mirabai Films, specializes in producing films on South Asian societies, mostly Indians, for an international audience, Mira Nair has directed and produced many films that investigate Indian cultural identity against the socio-cultural influx of nations in the West. Not only the narratives but the other production stakeholders such as casts and crew of her films render an aura of trans-nation. Such films that fashion their narratives, aesthetics and production dynamics in relation to more than one national or cultural territories are considered on global front as Transnational Cinema. Henceforth, some of her purposively selected films will be analyzed against the backdrop of transnational aspects for cinema. This paper will investigate how Mira Nair’s productions define and refine the concept of trans-nation on celluloids?

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GREAT TRAGEDIES GO DESI: VISHAL BHARADWAJ'S INTERVENTION INTO SHAKESPEARE Shweta Kushal, IIM Indore Filmmakers have been engaged in adapting pre-existing texts to the big screen since the dawn of Cinema. Historically, well over half of commercial films have been adaptations of literary texts, immaterial of the acclaimed quality of the text in its original field, in which the artist/director extensively employs the ideas, the form or the material of an already existing text. In the Indian context as well, this has been a common practice. This paper looks at the manner in which contemporary Cinema engages with a stalwart like Shakespeare, with special focus on the director Vishal Bharadwaj.

This paper will trace the manner in which India comes to the forefront in Bhardwaj’s adaptations through their portrayal of the worlds of gangsters (Maqbool, 2003), political goons (Omkara, 2006) and the insurgency related problems in Kashmir (Haider, 2014). It will study these great tragedies, in order to demonstrate that these essentially English texts critique the social and political problems that are deeply entrenched in the fabric of Indian society under the interventionist skill of this director. It will also argue that paradigm shifts in cinema can be engendered through cultural and contextual enrichment, by engaging in cross-cultural adaptations of literature that may originally belong to a completely alien socio-cultural milieu.

HUMOUR AND CINEMA: A STUDY OF LANGUAGE POLITICS IN ASSAM Simona Sarma and Sukriti Gogoy, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai The existence of several heterogeneous groups in North-east India has made identity politics a part and parcel of this region of the country. Understanding the diverse facets of marginalization through such identity politics, therefore, becomes important. This paper attempts to unravel the linguistic identity politics that functions through the medium of humour in mainstream regional cinema of Assam. Historically, the spoken language of ‘upper Assam’ has been constructed as the “pure” Assamese while that of ‘lower Assam’ as the “other.” This paper will strive to locate the current continuities of such linguistic hierarchies through the medium of cinema. “Othering” of the language spoken in ‘lower Assam’ (prominent through the demeaning address Dhekeri) has happened through several mechanisms. One such tool is associating this dialect only with the scenes of comedy. In this light, there is a need to look at how the dichotomy between high and low culture gets produced. Hence, through a textual analysis of Assamese regional cinema, the paper will look at the representation of comic language in it and how that feeds into the linguistic identity politics of the state. It will also analyze how a certain form of language gets associated with or cuts through the binaries of urban and rural spaces. Critical analysis of comedy will also involve looking into the gendered role of the comic persona and whether it contributes to a social critique or is limited to just comic relief?

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THE DEVELOPMENT OF TRANSNATIONALIST ELEMENTS IN INDIAN CINEMA Smriti Avinash, Christ University, Bengaluru The purpose of this paper is to explore the various aspects of transnationalism in Bollywood movies. Bollywood is, undoubtedly, more than just national cinema as it embraces audience even beyond the national boundaries. Based on the rise in Indian migration, contemporary Indian film makers have been focusing on catering to the needs of the Indian diaspora for a while now. The concept and inclusion of Non-resident Indians or NRIs has been a riveting element in Bollywood movies for more than two decades now. Purab aur Paschim (1970), Pardes (1997), Swades (2004), Salaam Namaste (2005), Love Aaj Kal (2009) are some examples of very prominent movies that tend to highlight and reinforce what exactly Bollywood means when the subject of showcasing “transnationalism in movies” and “NRI” comes up. The current aesthetics of Bollywood movies play a significant role in showing how far the Indian film makers have reached in getting over conservative themes and presenting to the audience more relatable, liberal and modern ideologies through their films. Transnationalism is one such ideology which not only adds to the aura of the movie but also shows how significant the global audience is for the Indian film industry. Through movies with transnationalist elements in them, the NRI audience is able to connect with the on-screen NRI characters. This paper chronologically explores and examines the development of transnationalist elements in Indian cinema over the years. This paper also involves the comparison of transnationalism in old movies to transnationalism in today’s movies with context to globalisation, liberalisation and the ongoing political scenarios.

OUTSIDE OF THE CITY: FOOD CRISIS AND AESTHETIC COMMITMENT IN POST-FAMINE BENGAL Sourit Bhattacharya, IIT Rourkee The literary and cultural works of the 1943 Bengal famine focus mainly on Calcutta and its suburbs. There are very few writings available on the famine and its impact in rural Bengal. On the other hand, from the 1940s till the 1970s, Bengal witnessed numerous movements, related widely with food and agrarian crisis and with jotedari exploitation. These tumultuous postcolonial socioeconomic conditions do not appear to be widely documented in literature and art (except for the Naxalite movement). While the IPTA had offered a platform for aesthetic engagement with socioeconomic and political issues in rural Bengal, by the 1970s, the medium of travelling theatre had already declined, making way for films, which however had to deal with increasing commercialisation of its genre and industry. Some of these debates on political economy and aesthetic commitment, on film and theatre, on commerce and art, and others come alive in Amalendu Chakraborty’s novel of food crisis in postcolonial rural Bengal, Ākāler Sandhāne (1982). The novel was conceived as a film script for Mrinal Sen’s acclaimed film of the same name (1980). Here, artists from Calcutta come to a remote village to achieve a

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‘realistic’ setting for their film on the 1943 famine and are exposed to the tragic condition of the famine’s transition into wide starvation and malnutrition conditions in postcolonial rural Bengal. Chakraborty engages with these aspects through a ‘postmodernist’ story-within-a-story technique and suggests that experimentation in form and style arises from a deep commitment to burning socioeconomic and political issues in one’s region/nation.

ISSUES OF NATION AND TRANS-NATION IN FILM ADAPTATION OF VIKAS SWARUP'S Q&A Sreenivas Andoju, Chaitanya Bharathi Institute of Technology, Hyderabad The Indian Foreign Services (IFS) official Vikas Swarup penned Q & A, a work of fiction that portrayed the ground realities of Dharavi, a slum in Mumbai. A few years later Danny Boyle adapted the book and created an improbable yet scintillating success making it the best British film of that decade which portrayed Dharavi’s rooftops in the most cinematic technique possible. In this context, this paper attempts to explore and analyse critically, the purpose and the socio-political connotations such adaptation reverberated by an all new portrayal of Indian story both for the local and global audiences on the celluloid. Amitabh Bachchan commented on Slumdog Millionaire that "if the film projects India as Third World's dirty underbelly developing nation and causes pain and disgust among nationalists and patriots, let it be known that a murky underbelly exists and thrives even in the most developed nations." “(Times of India & The Guardian, 2009) So, what could be the hidden purpose behind such portrayal by Danny Boyle and How were the India reactions spoken or otherwise and why? Are a few issues that are intended to explore and present in this paper.

BEAUTY POLITICS AND AESTHETIC LABOUR IN POST MILLENNIAL INDIAN CINEMA Srirupa Chatterjee, IIT Hyderabad This paper analyses the thematic of beauty politics and aesthetic labour in recent Indian cinema. By taking into account how womanhood and the politics of appearance come together in what Naomi Wolf in 1990 described as the ‘beauty myth,’ it scrutinizes select works of post millennial Indian cinema to argue that aesthetic labour keeps women under constant surveillance, often forcing them to compromise their subjectivity or face body shaming. The paper further asserts that since cinema is a visual medium, the female body displayed on screen is meant to create a spectacle and hence beauty often becomes an imperative for leading ladies in films. No doubt, given its traditional and formal aspects cinema often requires some aesthetic capital from actors. This injunction, however, largely denies women the right to be comfortable in their own skin. Focusing on Indian films (both mainstream Bollywood and regional) produced in the present millennium this paper, therefore, examines narratives where the physical appearance of the female lead forms both the primary discourse as well and a plot point. It demonstrates how on the one hand the beauty imperative demands aesthetic labour of

Page 99 of 114 women failing which they are subject to the politics of disgust, and on the other hand how appearance conscious women are often ridiculed for obsessively engaging in a frivolous endeavor. A progressive turn, however, is palpable in select modern Indian films that while highlighting the problematic of aesthetic labour also celebrate women who reject the beauty myth or cleverly manipulate it to their own advantage. Keeping these themes in mind, the present paper analyses few post millennial Indian movies that underscore as well as challenge the norms and practices of discipline, control and regimentation surrounding female bodies.

A POLI-CULTURAL READING ON THE CONCEPT OF 'HOME AND THE WORLD': WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO RABINDRANATH TAGORE’S THE HOME AND THE WORLD (1916) SSA Senevirathne and PS Manthrirathna, Sabaragamuwa University of Srilanka In the latter part of the Bengal national movement which was predominantly known as ‘Bengal Renaissance’ was transcended by Mahathma Gandhi in the polity and by Ravindranath Tagore in the literary perspective. It was a huge public mobilization with multi-faceted bitter repercussions. This paper does not intend to flourish all the complicated reasons, stake holders or results in the political momentum of so called Bengal Renaissance. This is an effort in reconsideration for only one dimension of cultural penetration created by Tagore aligned with the above mentioned moment with special reference to his novel The Home and the World (1916). This research also articulates the movie Ghare Baire directed by Sathyajit Ray in 1984. The cultural index and the political ideology portrayed by the novel, and the concept itself called ‘home and the world’ were examined through this research. The paper stresses the importance of reinterpreting the relationship between the individual personified character and the external world. This argument furnishes the plural voices endorsed into one poli-cultural entity. A person launches a battle for his/her own redemption, independence or salvation from a drive within himself/herself. Simultaneously it is visible to the external society too. Bimala, the protagonist revolts with her husband Nikhlesh in the home cantered insurrection, the premises of power, while she utilizes the assistance from Sandeep to escape from home, family and from her inner chained drives. The paper suggests that, so called controversial and overlapping hardships of that situation can be broadly reinterpreted through a poli-cultural revisiting and intends to consider its characterization, structures, socio-political and cultural scenarios occurred at the moment. The trinity of Bimala, Nikhil and Sandeep themselves visualize the concept of ‘home and the world’. On the contrary, once Gandhi organized the fragmented nations against their own micro rebels and against British Empire. The novel The Home and the World and its concept itself mirrors those two poled insurrections too. Hence, Tagore’s vision of life and the effort of penetrating invisible or concealed complexities of their national movement are widely discussed in the paper.

POST COLONIALISM AND DETECTIVE NOVELS Stotropama Mukherjee, Jadavpur University, Kolkata

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The detective genre is a product of urbanity. As Brook suggests, French Revolution brought a fundamental change in governance- hierarchical system was replaced by representational system. A genuine distrust developed for the old system but Bourgeois values were not yet fully established. There the detective genre arrived to satisfy the bourgeois desire for social order expressed through the personal. Detective stands in shady corners between being a vigilantly protector and a critic of the incompetent police or judiciary system. Under colonial occupation urbanity was forced upon a society that was essentially traditional and was not prepared for modernity. It formed a schism in formation of the idea an intelligent native. The new native could not ignore the overpowering colonial rationality regulating their daily lives nor can they ignore the tradition that builds their basics. Christophe Dony writes, In response to these exclusionary politics, many writers from various ethnic and/or cultural minorities have renovated the detective genre by reflecting on the conventions associated with their own historical situations and socio-cultural realities. (2009) A native detective represents the idea of modern man in distinction and sometimes contradiction to the colonial and other oppressor. A native detective is a man who solves social injustice through logic and local knowledge. A native detective rises from the crisis of transitional society whenever there is a predicament of distinguishing the oppressor. Literary representations of detective genre and their consecutive cinematic adaptations tell a different story of colonialism in India and its aftermath.

ON TRANSLITERATION AND TRANSLATION OF INSCRIPTIONS OF ANCIENT NEPAL: A HERMENEUTIC STUDY OF MALIGOAN INSCRIPTION OF JAYAVARMAN Sudesh Manger, Vardhaman College of Engineering, Telangana The Hermeneutic study of the inscription of Jayavarman is an attempt to explore the consequences and significance of ‘translating time’ in writing history. The question that arises here is the significance of ‘time’ in the construction of historiography. In writing any history, one cannot make sense of anything or any-event without the ‘concept of time’. Time plays a significant role in human space, without which one cannot understand the human aspect. The paper attempts to categorize the process of translation into George Steiner's four fold hermeneutic motion of 1) Initiative Trust/faith, 2) Aggression, 3) Incorporation (or Embodiment) and 4) Compensation (Restitution).The case study of the inscription of Jayavarman will explore the methodologies adopted by two groups of scholars who translated the inscription and its impact on the translation of the date. The process of assigning the dating system to the inscription would be considered as one of the aspects of the translation process. The process through which the translation provides two different dates 184/85 A.D (by one group of scholar) and 248/85 A.D. (by the other group of scholars) seems problematic to arrive at any conclusion. The paper is an attempt to reconsider the theoretical premise of the translation. The scholars of the Asiatic Society of Bengal formulated the theories of translating time in the 19th century. There have been several discoveries of the inscriptions; however, the approach towards the translation of the inscription has not changed. Therefore, the chapter

Page 101 of 114 would raise an important question on the formulation of the theory of translation that is non- Eurocentric.

SATYAJIT RAY'S SONAR KELLA AND JAI BABA FELUNATH: HOW REGIONAL LITERARY CINEMATIC CONSCIOUSNESSNESS ENTERS THE NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS Sukanta Barman, Murshidabad Adarsha Mahavidyalaya, West Bengal ‘The eye, which is said to be the window of the soul, is the primary means by which the brain may most fully and magnificently contemplate the infinite works of nature . . .’ Leonardo da Vinci

‘I do not put my faith in any new institutions, but in the individuals all over the world who think clearly, feel nobly and act rightly. They are the channels of moral truth.’ Rabindranath Tagore While the first observation is right for the eye of Satyajit Ray, the second is apt for Satyajit the individual. Ray, the great filmmaker from Bengal was also a great litteteur who turned some of his literature into some outstanding cinema of international importance. I am particularly talking about two of his novels Sonar Kella and Jai Baba Felunath which were made into detective movies of the same names. Andrew Robinson writes “Ray had a penchant for Sherlock Holmes ever since he read the stories as a boy. He and Holmes resembled each other in certain respects to a remarkable degree, though Satyajit could never have acted with the coldboodedness of Holmes. His own detective Feluda...along with his teenage side-kick Topse, are Bengali descendants of Holmes and Watson, by way of Ray”. (The Inner Eye) In this paper I propose to say how typically these two Bengali detective novels-cum-cinema mingled themselves with the national consciousness with the international models of Holmes and Watson, both in their literary forms and cinematic representations. Feluda, whose good name is Pradosh Chandra Mitter, starts his Sonar Kella adventure from Bengal and ends in Rajasthan. Jai Baba Felunath also starts its journey from the soil of Bengal and finishes it off on the banks of Ganges in Kashi. The dichotomy of literature and cinema that is to be deciphered from the reading and analysing of the two is to be closely looked at.

TRANSPORTATION OF GOAN CULTURAL AND LINGUISTIC COMPLEXITIES IN POLTODCHO MUNIS, ADAPTATION OF MAHABALESHWAR SAIL'S ADRUSHT Tanvi Bambolkar, Government College of Arts, Science and Commerce, Quepem, Goa Goa’s tribal culture (or culture for that matter) has either been selectively portrayed in mainstream media or has been misinterpreted by the film makers outside the state. A few of art forms have delved into showcasing ‘Goa beyond beaches’ and one of them is Goan film maker Laxmikant Shetgaokar’s internationally acclaimed film Poltodcho Munis, Man Beyond the

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Bridge. The film received FIPRESCI award at the Toronto Film Festival. The 2009 film is an adaptation of Saraswati Samman awardee Mahablaeshwar Sail’s novelette Adrusht (1997). Both the novella and the film deal with the plight of ‘being different’ in a strongly conventionally motivated tribal society. Located in hinterland of Goa, the film showcases tribal culture, belief systems and ecosystems of all sorts. The current paper tries to trace the journey of a novel from 90’s to a film made in 21st century by analyzing various aspects such as non- state actors in a regional cinema, translation of complexities from narrative into cinematic genre and the transportation of Goa’s cultural, social as well as gender dynamics into the genre of cinema. It is a tale of a forest guard living a lonely life who begins to take care of a mentally disturbed female and how his life takes a toll while living in a rural setup. One sees several beliefs, mentalities clashing as the protagonist struggles to find peace within and beyond. The film is also a significant portrayal of Goa’s ‘other’ side well captured by Sail in his novel.

AN EXAMINATION OF CLAIMS TO AUTHENTICITY AND TABOO IN SELECTED FOOD NARRATIVES OF POSTCOLONIAL GOA Tara Saldanha, Dhempe College of Arts and Science, Goa The proposed research seeks to understand the postcolonial hybrid space of Goa by exploring food narratives from within and outside Goa, to examine how notions of authenticity and taboo threaten the cohesive idea of a purely creative, inclusive hybrid space. The primary texts for study will include the following food narratives- a selection from Fatima da Silva Gracias’ Cozinha de Goa, an episode of the Konkani television show Ruchik, an episode each from Highway on My Plate, Floyd’s India and Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern. The analysis of these texts will focus on how claims to authenticity and taboo work as segregating forces, separating the normative from the other. The paper will also explore how a certain Goan food landscape is constructed through claims to authenticity and taboo, which might indicate the need for a more nuanced understanding of the concept of hybridity, in theory and praxis. It will also aid in the awareness of how the crafting of food narratives influences the attitude towards a place and its culture.

UNIVERSALISM OF HUMAN CONDITION AND NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS STUDIED THROUGH JEET THAYIL'S SELECTED POEMS Vanisha Pandia, Christ University, Bengaluru “We believe that an individual must endeavor to assume the universalism inherent in the human condition” (Fanon). French philosopher, Frantz Fanon accords for a Utopian state and the need for “colonized intellectual” individual to bring in the revolution against the idea of nation-state. The theory presented in The Wretched of the Earth is effectuated in a struggle against the hegemonic predicament of the nation-state. Fanon’s postcolonial framework puts the aberrant and the marginalized on the highest pedestal, as the puissant crème of the society bents into benefitting from provinces’ economic and political structure of Imperialistic rule. The paper

Page 103 of 114 attempts to explore the construction of what Fanon calls the ‘present national reality’ through the idea of revolution which is ‘debated, adjusted and implemented’; has a universal approach against the process of postcolonial nation construction. Thayil advances to bring a shift of power within the existing exploitative system and a transnational approach toward one’s national consciousness. His “language teetering wildly on the edge of some precipice, between centuries, between continents, between fleetingly improvised realms...” (Subramaniam) For the exploration of the stated research argument, poems from Jeet Thayil’s New and Uncollected poems (2003 - 2015) are taken to be studied. Poetry seen predominantly as a mode of personal inscription of one’s lived imagined and observed experiences, offers itself molded into the structure to emanate the larger social reality and present political milieu. Hence, looking at the emerging cosmopolitan impulse of the poetic language to contribute to the revolt that Fanon talks about.

INDIA@DOC-LEIPZIG Veena Hariharan, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi The Leipzig Documentary Film Festival (Dok-Leipzig) is the most important film festival to emerge out of the former GDR and continues as a significant venue for documentarians the world over, until today. Since its establishment in 1955, it has also been a significant venue for East-West relations amid Cold war geopolitics, providing filmmakers with an opportunity to interact with each other, from both sides of the Iron Curtain, as well as with filmmakers from the global south. The Festival held a special retrospective of Indian documentaries in 1988, and several Indian documentarians, including S. Sukhdev (director of the controversial India 67 (1967) and Nine Months to Freedom: The Bangladesh Story (1972)), have been jury members and have showcased their films at the festival. The paper explores the Leipzig festival as a node of cultural exchange between India and GDR during the period and as a productive site of enquiry about the transnational entanglements of image and ideology.

REGIONAL MILITANCY IN NEWTON Vidhi Mehra, Wilson College, Mumbai Popular cinema in India holds a revered position with its power to transcribe certain practices into cultural codes. When examined within the context of the nation, cinema also holds the possibility of revealing certain anxieties within the sociocultural and political scenario, which it not only responds to but also negotiates with. India's arguably turbulent political context then becomes a fertile terrain to explore these anxieties within, arising out of the regional and cultural differences. The attempt of this paper is to examine how popular Hindi cinema negotiates with the issue of regional militancy within a naxal-hit tribal land in contemporary times through an exploration of Amit Masurkar's film, Newton (2017). The linguistic

Page 104 of 114 differences ubiquitous throughout the nation also prove to be an essential ground of discussion since the protagonist struggles with such differences as he attempts to convince the miniscule population of the tribal land to vote in the ongoing elections. The paper also aims at exploring the geopolitical conflict with a focus on the question of the tribal minority groups, and their relationship to the naxals within the larger narrative of the nation-state, and the trauma arising out of this conflict of identity formation. The political identity of the minority group is entangled in this mesh of a nation-state and regional nationalism, arguably rendering them to a position outside of the narrative, to that of a mere spectator of their own lives without a narrative of their own, compelling us to return to the question, 'Can the Subaltern Speak’?

SOUTH KOREA'S CULTURAL PENETRATION INTO THE INDIAN NORTH EAST Vidisha Mukherjee, Christ University, Bengaluru The Indian North Eastern geography has suffered prolonged negligence in terms of political and economical attention thereby, allowing the influx of cultures that do not conventionally correlate to perceived Indian habits. We will look into various factors contributing to this influence which include the extensive ban imposed on Hindi films and TV channels by the Revolutionary People’s Front, in the previous decade. Economic decisions such as the Look East Policy further gave a boost to smuggling of South Korean soap operas and movies into North East. The new Korean Wave, popularly known as Hallyu, has influenced the North Eastern subculture in India since the 1990’s, Manipur being the epicentre of the diffusion of Korean culture into the lives of the locals. The paper will delve into the socio-cultural dynamism that impacted the invasion of South Korean culture within the North Eastern societies. Simultaneously, we will be drawing insights into reasons why the North Eastern population has relatively diffused their “Indian” identity due to minimal attention from the administration. Media representation and coverage has been grossly cursory thereby, contributing to their ongoing struggle for regional representation.

DECONSTRUCTING THE STEREOTYES: REPRESENTATION OF GOAN FEMINITY THROUGH DRESSING-UP IN SELECT HINDI FLIMS Vinayak Yashraj, NIFT, Patna Priyanka Tripathi, IIT Patna Viewing films from the contesting perspective of gender, voyeuristic male gaze, misrepresenting sexuality, "to-be-looked-at-ness", conceived by Laura Mulvey or the idea of women as a historical concept versus Woman as a cultural representation as articulated by Teresa De Lauretis, in either of the ways, looking at films through the lens of feminism is quite contextual. It is also evident from the theoretical insights on films and dressing-up, from the likes of Stella Bruzzi, Pamela Church Gibson, Sarah Street, that "dressing-up" and "costumes" are the cornerstones of constructing characters in film, than merely being ornamental or decorative elements as conventionally believed. Additionally, taking from the discourse on

Page 105 of 114 dress and gender, dressing-up and clothing, opens to plethora of semiotic meanings like stereotyped gendered role play, power dynamics, cultural codes, ideals of beauty, commoditisation, body image as posited by Joanne Entwistle, Elizabeth Wilson, Yuniya Kawamura et all. Taking the triangular tropes of film, gender and dressing-up, the paper is an attempt to compare the representation of (Un)Indian Goan femininity in Hindi films, where on one side stereotyped or caricatured portrayal of Goan Catholic women render Goa superficially ‘unrealistic’, and on the other, there is an attempt to locate the real essence of women rooted in the Catholic milieu of Goa in films like Trikal by Shyam Benegal through Dona Maria, Milagrenia and others and Finding Fanny by Homi Adjania through Angie, Rosalina, etc. In the parlance of the above frameworks, this paper with a comparative methodology intends to explore critically the representation of Catholic Goan Woman in Hindi films vacillating amid stereotypes and real.

NARRATING TERROR THROUGH THE SOUND IMAGE IN CHAUTHI KOOT Vivek Sachdeva, Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, New Delhi Cinema is an important medium for imagining a nation. The mainstream Hindi cinema has propagated the image of India as a Hindu nation. The issues of ethnicities, regionalism, minorities and sub-nationalities have been swept aside. The Sikh separatist movement in Punjab is one such phenomenon which has been largely ignored in the mainstream Hindi cinema, despite the movement being a crucial question in front of India as a nation-state. However, there are a few films based on anti-Sikh riots in Delhi, which erupted after the assassination of Indira Gandhi, or recently made Punjabi films glorifying the Khalistan Movement, creating binaries of representation. Gurvinder Singh’s Chauthi Koot, based on two short stories written Warryam Singh Sandhu, transcends such binary representations of Punjab by a sensitive portrayal of the people affected by militancy. Based on the period of militancy in Punjab in the 1980s, the film shows fear and terror as experienced by Hindus and Sikhs alike through an interactive relationship between sound and visuals. In the film, the filmmaker has also made the terror tangible and palpable through the use of visuals and sound, in which sound becomes an important aspect of film narration. The paper also proposes to theorize the Sound-Image and understand its role in narrating terror while exploring the relationship between literary image and cinematic image. The paper will attempt to problematize the idea of nationalism, discuss the effects of violence, terror and its representation in literature and in the film, Chauthi Koot.

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BITS Goa Campus Map

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A. Campus Map B. Location of Auditorium and Session Venues (DLT 5, 6, 7, 8) C. Directions to Session Venues

For a detailed map of the campus, please download DoJMA BITS Goa App from Google Playstore App Store

https://play.google.com/store/apps https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/d /details?id=com.csatimes.dojma ojma/id1437425090?mt=8

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Names & Contact Numbers of Taxi Operators

These are private taxies. The Institute will not be responsible for fares charged.

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Sponsor

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support received from the Department of Tourism, Government of Goa.

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