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Showing posts with the label Vrinda Nabar

Indian Writing to Recognise the Real India

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India has been grossly misrepresented by diasporic writers, and Indian writers who seek to voice the authentic India through literary means are often drowned out in the cacophony of the former. Elucidating her topic of discussion, which was Writing India Right: Indian Writing in English and the Global Market, Professor Vrinda Nabar (Visiting Research Professor Programme under the Baakibab Borkar Chair) notes the story of an Indian poet who managed to have his work accepted by a Western literary journal by adding that his writing had been translated by him from an Indian language. ‘This story, whether apocryphal or otherwise, captures the experienced realities of Indian writing from the ‘margins’, a term which has ironically increasingly come to mean India, even in today’s globalised world. Ironic because it is Indian writing you speak of and it is India that has become the margin,’ says Prof Nabar. In this age of globalisation, however, the Indian poet mentioned would have had to meet

A Confluence of Feminism, History and Literature

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When we look back on history, we are able to perceive the effect a particular era has had on the people living in that period to the extent of colouring the character and thought of individuals. Women are singular in the bearing history has had on their lives and the lack of acknowledgement of their recordings of their times. Women have written from the earliest years, but they have received no place in a male dominated world. Despite the presence of the Buddhist theris’ literary works thousands of years ago, they became accessible only in the 20th century. The Bhakti poets Mirabai, Bahinabai and Janabhai were stylistically unique but they wrote in the vernacular about the everyday routine of life and their devotion. For example, Bahinabai recounts having a low caste mentor in Tukaram, while she came from a Brahmin family, and the repercussions of the situation. Dalit Marathi poet Hira Bansode’s poem in the late 20th century, Yashodhara, brings back before us the travails of the abando