Authors:Edgar Tello Pages: 41 - 55 Abstract: This article deals with Akhil Sharma’s latest work, Family Life (2014), where Birju’s dead body, after a pool accident, shows the possibility of living after mental death. This work analyses the different therapies doctors, gurus, and spiritual leaders try upon his body, while his sorrowful mother and his alcoholic father are least able to bear them: the family cannot afford the cost of American clinics and specialists either. This criticism was also shown in Akhil Sharma’s previous novel, An Obedient Father (2000), where moral and political corruption invades all strata of life in India. In the end, the farce of mysticism becomes evident. I relate this family life with some classical theories from Hindu tradition (Veda, Brahmana, Upanisads), and with other Western traditions (compassion and nihilism, in J.C. Mèlich, and R. Ávila’s works). I conclude by asserting that, according to these novels, it is egotistical illusion, instead of mysticism, which sheds a light upon political or social bodies. PubDate: 2018-01-16 DOI: 10.5565/rev/indialogs.82 Issue No:Vol. 5 (2018)
Authors:Clara Ballart Pages: 57 - 70 Abstract: Manto's writings are hardly as controversial and ground-breaking as his series of short stories about Bombay's prostitutes and the world surrounding them. My paper aims to give at least two readings of the story of Saugandhi and “the insult” she receives when being rejected by a client. Her burst of pent-up rage, helpless but terrible, can be interpreted either as a positive act of realization of her own condition or as a reaffirmation of powerlessness in the face of the dominant. Using the tools of the canonic and original concept of the subaltern, with Gramsci (1916) and Spivak (1985) delimiting its oppressed (non)identity, Saugandhi's consciousness of herself becomes the voice which the subaltern cannot utter. Manto's essays (1955) show major concern with the desperate state of sexual workers, and it is through his feminism that this paper will discard the abstract notion of subalternity and highlight how gender makes “the woman who didn't have a father's shelter, had no education, ...a broken pebble from the pavement” (Manto, 2014: 204). The short story is not, as it may seem in abstract terms, empowering; it is a wretched cry that ends in silence —there is nothing to be done. PubDate: 2018-02-20 DOI: 10.5565/rev/indialogs.101 Issue No:Vol. 5 (2018)
Authors:Regiane Corrêa de Oliveira Ramos Pages: 71 - 88 Abstract: The aim of this paper is to raise awareness of the humanity of hijras through their autobiographies. The Truth about Me: A Hijra Life Story (2015) by A. Revathi will shed light on transsexuality in India. The hijra literature in English is gaining space, albeit small, in the literary milieu with its main character, a trans woman, who narrates her story challenging the heteronormative world. Not bending to gender norms, Revathi sought her place in the world, becoming not only a hijra, but also a political agent in her community. Her writing/telling reveals the bruises and wounds of a body violated by a deeply hierarchical society and her activism evidences that trans people are not passive recipients of forces acting upon their lives. They deploy agency in a variety of ways showing how their lives are located at the intersection of caste, class and patriarchies. These structures along with heteronormativity not only oppress them but also make them invisible under the heterosexual, family and reproductive model. In order to understand the hijras communities, it is important to analyze this through the intersectionality of social markers--gender, sexuality, class, caste, generation, region, religion, kinship and etc--interacting them at multiple and often simultaneous levels (Reddy 2005). Moreover, one must think of the terms izzat (honour) and asli (authenticity) that permeate Indian culture. PubDate: 2018-03-14 DOI: 10.5565/rev/indialogs.110 Issue No:Vol. 5 (2018)
Authors:Laura Molina Vicente Pages: 89 - 104 Abstract: The present article analyzes Kinetic Drawing, a piece developed by Heather Hansen since 2013, in which dance, yoga and painting are fused through performances. It is the result of the search of how to download the movements directly on the paper in an organic way, using the body as the only instrument, yoga and dance as a creative means and meditation as a process of interiorization and dis-intellectualization to initiate artistic development. As a result of this work, combining dance, painting and yoga, we contemplate Heather Hansen's encounter with herself taking the movement of her body as an element of artistic expression. PubDate: 2018-02-20 DOI: 10.5565/rev/indialogs.98 Issue No:Vol. 5 (2018)
Authors:Víctor Vélez Pages: 107 - 115 Abstract: This essay examines the concept of nation-branding in the Indian context PubDate: 2018-01-26 DOI: 10.5565/rev/indialogs.100 Issue No:Vol. 5 (2018)
Authors:Oriol Jiménez Batalla Pages: 121 - 126 Abstract: A study of the limits of human in Indra Sinha's Animal's People PubDate: 2018-01-08 DOI: 10.5565/rev/indialogs.102 Issue No:Vol. 5 (2018)
Authors:Albert Muñoz Varela Pages: 127 - 132 Abstract: A comparison between the main characters of Indra Sinha's novel Animal's People and Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist PubDate: 2018-01-08 DOI: 10.5565/rev/indialogs.103 Issue No:Vol. 5 (2018)
Authors:Paola Nicolás Flores Pages: 133 - 137 Abstract: An analysis of the physical disability of the character Animal in Indra Sinha's Animal's People PubDate: 2018-02-21 DOI: 10.5565/rev/indialogs.107 Issue No:Vol. 5 (2018)
Authors:Ôscar Port Jordà Pages: 139 - 144 Abstract: A study of how the image of a damaged body in Animal’s People can be seen as the representation of a corrupted natural environment PubDate: 2018-01-15 DOI: 10.5565/rev/indialogs.106 Issue No:Vol. 5 (2018)
Authors:Helena Style Muñoz Pages: 145 - 150 Abstract: An analysis of the limits of humanity in Indra Sinha's novel Animal's People PubDate: 2018-01-18 DOI: 10.5565/rev/indialogs.104 Issue No:Vol. 5 (2018)
Authors:Joan Martínez-Alier Pages: 153 - 160 Abstract: A review of Sunita Narain's recent book and a discussion of the Green Movement in India PubDate: 2018-02-21 DOI: 10.5565/rev/indialogs.109 Issue No:Vol. 5 (2018)
Authors:Ioana Luca Pages: 161 - 165 Abstract: A review of Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru's recent study of the work of Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy and Vikram Chandra PubDate: 2018-03-20 DOI: 10.5565/rev/indialogs.111 Issue No:Vol. 5 (2018)
Authors:Linda Anne Hemphill Pages: 9 - 27 Abstract: The earliest genre of Indian film, the Mythological, presented the gods and heroes from the myths and epics of Hinduism in a new medium, with all the entrancing corporeality that the cinema screen suggested. Audience reception, to be found in an energetic culture of newspaper review, over time expresses not only the changing tastes of a maturing filmic critical faculty, but the way in which this feedback influenced cinematic portrayals, often leading to an eventual transmogrification of beloved characters. The physical representation on the screen of the bodies of divinities and avatars presented different problems to producers as their concerns grew to encompass not only censorship, but competition from other increasingly popular genres; such as the social genre film, in which sexuality could be scrutinized by the audience while pruriently censured. Films of such genres came to accommodate those physical types that had long been a staple of the Mythological genre, its champions and villains, along with its stories; without the growing confusion that the Mythological genre displayed in the physical portrayal of characters, or in faithfulness to character histories or even names. The alterations over the period of the genre’s dominance and decline, to clothing, sexuality and personal relationships, extended to the representation of myth and epic in other mediums, that of picture books and television, the two worlds in which the Mythological genre was reincarnated. PubDate: 2017-11-26 DOI: 10.5565/rev/indialogs.85 Issue No:Vol. 5 (2017)
Authors:Óscar Figueroa Pages: 29 - 40 Abstract: Among the religious traditions that developed in ancient India, the Tantric tradition offers one of the most vigorous efforts at vindicating the powers of the imagination. A key term in this context is bhāvanā, literally the “act of bringing something into being”, used to indicate a disciplined cultivation of the mind’s natural capacity to form images. This brief article addresses the meaning of bhāvanā in the Vijñānabhairava Tantra (VBh), a short scripture written in the spirit of the Śaiva Tantric Trika tradition around the first half of the 9th century CE. In this text, as the article shows, bhāvanā is understood not only as a human faculty but now also as a divine power with important ontological and soteriological implications. In this way, the centrality of the imagination common to many Tantric texts reaches a remarkable zenith in the VBh, anticipating the view of later influential thinkers such as Abhinavagupta and Kṣemarāja (10th-11th centuries). PubDate: 2017-11-26 DOI: 10.5565/rev/indialogs.89 Issue No:Vol. 5 (2017)
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