Science, Culture, Integral Yoga

Tagore as a post-modern storyteller by Debarati Badyopadhyay

Dr Debarati Bandyopadhyay is a senior lecturer in the department of English and other modern European languages at Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, West Bengal. Her areas of interest include fiction, literary theory, Indian literature and other literatures in English. She is working on her first novel.

In this short article, Bandyopadhyay revisits a number of Tagore’s better-known short-stories to show their innovative qualities of postmodern literature, marked by ambiguity and multiple interpretations and giving evidence of a variety of worlds in the making.

She can be reached at abdebarati@rediffmail.com.

Gilles Deleuze’s Bergsonian Film Project by Donato Totaro

Both Gilles Deleuze and Henri Bergson were, to extremely varying degrees, philosophers interested in cinema who used cinema to suit their particular intellectual needs. In the case of Bergson, he cultivated his ideas during a zeitgeist that included the invention of cinema (late 19th century). To a large extent, Bergson’s philosophical ideas were shaped by the same cultural, economic, and technological climate that gave rise to narrative cinema. Deleuze on the other hand, erected a two-volume Bergsonian philosophy of cinema toward the end of the century that stands as one of the most stimulating studies of time and cinema. Although a self-professed Bergsonian, Deleuze’s sprawling philosophical style is in stark contrast to Bergson’s precise and systematic philosophical system. Deleuze’s postmodern style is part of its appeal -playful, mercurial, and open to creative interpretation. Terms that are meant to carry critical weight are introduced offhandedly and then left hanging for pages. One neologism gives birth to three others. In a sense, Deleuze’s style, forever Becoming, is more Bergsonian than Bergson.

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Lawsuit filed by Sraddhalu Ranade, Raman Reddy, and others against Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trustees

On August 23, 2010, five Ashram inmates (Sraddhalu Ranade, Raman Reddy, Niranjan Naik, Sudha Sinha, S. Ramanathan) filed an affidavit at the Puducherry District Court against the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust and its five Trustees (Manoj Das Gupta, Dilip Kumar Dutta, Dilip Mehtani, R. Prabhakar, Albert Patel).

Sraddhalu Ranade, Raman Reddy and their fellow petitioners claim in their affidavit that the Trustees committed a gross breach of trust by allowing a non-believer [Peter Heehs] to reside in Sri Aurobindo’s Ashram….” Based on this premise, the petitioners conclude: “Due to the misconduct and breach of trust committed by the Trustees, the beneficiaries of the Trust have lost total confidence in the Trustees’ ability and willingness to execute the trust and its properties as per the Trust’s objects…. In the circumstances, the present Trustees have to be removed and new trustees who will protect the interest of the trust have to be appointed….” In other words, the petitioners are seeking the court’s intervention in the management of the Ashram because the Trustees have not expelled Peter Heehs (author of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo) from the Ashram. This action not only publicly challenges the integrity and authority of the Trustees, but opens the Ashram to further division and negative publicity in India and the world.

The New India: Ashis Nandy, post-colonial theory and India’s middle class

Nandy levels a charge of colonialist complicity at the Indian middle class visa vie the tribals and dispossessed. al…

“Taking many subtle measures of “post-colonial consciousness,” he finds India mending and Britain still warped and wounded by its old habit of domination. But colonialism, as Nandy observes it, does not end when the colonists are finally forced out. The “hidden message of colonialism” and the beguiling message of Ashis Nandy’s most famous book, The Intimate Enemy, is that “what others can do to you, you also can do to your own kind.” In the deep emotional compact that is colonialism, native elites learn to play by the rules of the hegemon’s game — the game known today, in a word, as “development.” With the result that in our post-colonial world, “the colonial mantle is now worn by native regimes” on most of the planet, “who are willing to do what the colonial powers did.”

Another great interview in the new India series from Radio Open Source

Encountering the Orient/ Islam: re-reading cyber narratival heteronormativity by Terenjit Singh Sevea

This paper examines how heteronormativity operates as a mechanism of representation in cyber-narratives.1 I insinuate that post-structural analyses should be further appropriated in understanding cyberspace as a realm of power/discipline. Cyber-narratives on the “Muslim woman” for example are complex processes of disciplining into being “mute as ever” (Spivak 1988: 294). This paper ultimately re-reads cyberspace as a heteronormative realm imbricating “sexuality” and “race” (as technologies), and regularly re- presenting the normal/abnormal, white/brown, man/woman as unproblem- atic, fixed categories (Butler 1990). Paraphrasing critiques of visual filmic narratives, the subsequent sections unravel how cyberspace creates unprob- lematic gendered and racialized “naked [read objective] bodies” of brown/white/men/women (Jameson 1990: 1). Michel Foucault (1978) and Ju- dith Butler (1990, 1993), in their genealogies of sexuality, have examined how visual objectivity of the body itself are processes of control/discipline. This paper is an endeavour towards adapting such genealogies to cyberspace.

This paper departs from scholarship since William Gibson’s (1984) term- ing of cyberspace that presupposes being “on-line” as a transcendental experience from the body.2 Re-reading cyber-narratives is a method locating cyberspace as always imbricating processes like colonialism, Orientalism, ra- cism and sexism. For example, this paper pursues Edward Said’s concerns about proliferating information in “Orientalism Now” (1978) to explore how cyber-narratives re-present Occidental encounters with the Orient/Islam. Subsequently, this paper unpacks the World Wide Web’s role in creating “sexed bodies” (Butler 1990). Here, I draw upon scholarship that has been aware of how realities such as the September 11 event and post-event War/Liberation/Freedom have been hegemonically created by cyber-textual strategies (Der Derian 2004; Puar and Rai 2002; Derrida 2001; Baudrillard 2003). Unlike critiques of a repressive order of “Western” hegemonic cyber- narratives, I am concerned here with how Orientalists and the West to white- ness itself have produced through cyberspace (Rai 2004: 4). The conclusion will highlight this paper’s scepticism about cyberspace and suggest engaging alternative narratives to problematize cyberspatial reification of heteronor- martivity. This does not aim at detaching the represented “Muslim woman” from the real subject for example (Alloula 2000), but is a mere attempt to facilitate further genealogies.