Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry

Introduction

D. Sudha Rani, Rachel Irdaya Raj — Wed, 13 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Everything that we see on this earth is an imitation, be it a human being, animal, or plant; each of them is a memory of something/someone who already existed. Memory studies is a multidisciplinary field of knowledge that engages in understanding the ability to use memory as a tool in remembering/forgetting the past. Memory studies as a branch of knowledge began its presence by forging concepts of cultural memory to demand special focus from scholars of anthropology, education, literature, history, philosophy, psychology, and sociology, among others. Discussing the way memory studies began growing, Roediger and Wertsch write that, “Over the past few decades, collective memory has become a topic of renewed interest in the humanities and social sciences and is now a key part of emerging interdisciplinary activity in ‘‘memory studies’’ (Roediger & Wertsch, 2008). French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1925, 1941) contributed immensely to this field of knowledge and his significant work “Social Frameworks of Memory” in 1925 holds great importance. For a long time until Maurice Halbwachs published his notable work "On Collective Memory" (1925), in which he analysed that ownership of memory need not be an individual but the individuals as a collective unit, be it family, society or community and the memory is operated thus by a community. He distinguished between autobiographical memory – memory of those events we ourselves experience; historical memory – memory that reaches us only through historical records; history – as the remembered past which is no longer important to our lives; and collective memory – the active past that forms our identities. Also, Halbwachs characterised shared memories as effective markers of social differentiation. “Collective memory is not history, though it is sometimes made from similar material. It is a collective phenomenon but only manifests itself in the actions and statements of individuals […] it often privileges the interests of the contemporary” (Kansteiner 2002)). Cultural memory conserves the heritage that involves an act of remembering.

Analysing the Role of Memory in Oral History with respect to Urvashi Butalia’s The Other Side of Silence

Chaithanya V — Wed, 13 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Partition historiography of India based on oral narratives has tried to break the silence of affirmation created by the History of India. By adding plurality to the voices of the narrator, Urvashi Butalia through her book The Other Side of Silence (1998) shatters the authoritarian voice of a single historian. Memory of the survivors and the witnesses of the ‘great’ partition of 1947 is used as the sole defense to prove that history is a dialogue between the past and the progressively emerging future. Butalia’s work of non-fiction is therefore an account of the experiences narrated orally by survivors, who are now caught between the two national identities- one created by the memories they cherish before partition and the other stamped on them after the trauma of partition. The essay aims to present the challenges faced by this oral account of history, narrated through the faculty of individual memories with all its fallacies. It therefore eliminates the elevated status enjoyed by History as a branch of literature. It further discusses in detail the reliability of memory as a source of information. Ironically, the essay also helps to prove that historiography is just another method of storytelling embedding within itself opinions, individual interests and preferences.

Art as Storyteller

Soutik Chakraborty — Wed, 13 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Scroll painting and narrating tradition has been present in India from ancient times. The picture showman tradition consisted of displaying painted scrolls and narrating the story in the form of singing. For centuries, patachitras have dispersed mythical oral narratives in villages and towns of Bengal and have played an essential part in creating Bengal’s cultural identity. Just like other Indian knowledge systems, the narration as a part of the performance is retained in memory and passed over generations. Patachitra of Pingla had chronicled the religious as well as the political and social happenings throughout the history and thus occasioned the remembrance of cultural memories. Pingla patachitra has survived the Western cultural invasion and has been carried to future as symbolic of cultural identity through digital proliferation. In the digital age, devoid of performance, patachitras have got new meanings as standalone painting pieces, yet they function as agents of cultural memory that represents the culture itself. The paper aims at a holistic understanding of the modes of storytelling and cultural preservation by Naya village patachitra through the lens of Memory Studies.

In Search of the Fragments of Recollection

Divyasree J S, B. Sajeetha — Wed, 13 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Culture, memory, and identity are intricately connected terms. Memory is not just an individual experience but plays a prominent role in the establishment of both individual and cultural identity. Jan Assmann, in his essay “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity”, has defined cultural memory as “the characteristic store of repeatedly used texts, images, and rituals in the cultivation of which each society and epoch stabilizes and imports its self-image; a collectively shared knowledge of preferably (yet not exclusively) the past, on which a group bases its awareness of unity and character” (15). Storytelling is a universal act of preserving the cultural aspects of a community. The works selected for the present study are The Caliph’s House and In Arabian Nights written by the travel-writer Tahir Shah. This paper intends to analyze the connection between cultural memory and cultural identity as presented in the selected works from two levels. Firstly, it studies how the author reaffirms the cultural identity of Morocco by exploring the cultural elements and the art of storytelling, and secondly, how he ascertains his personal identity through his explorations and experiences as a traveller.

‘Stories To Stay, Stories To Subvert’

Urmi Sengupta — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The indigenous communities of Canada have transmitted their traditional knowledge of survival from one generation to another through oral storytelling sessions since the pre-colonial times. This knowledge has remained encapsulated within their collective communal memory in the form of stories of ancestors, tales of tricksters, dream-vision narratives, ceremonial songs, and ritualistic recitals. But forces of Euro-Canadian colonization have encroached upon their right to autonomy through a coercive imposition of the colonizers' language (English) and the colonizers' medium of expression (writing) upon them. The starkly different consciousness of ‘history’ that governs the worldviews of the dominant and the dominated have only served to aggravate the imbalance of power even more. The late twentieth century has seen the literary productions of these communities’ strife to reclaim their cultural and thereby political autonomy by inscribing the ‘oral’ within the ‘written’ and reworking the semiotics of the foreign tongue, imposed upon them to incorporate the specific nuances of their traditional language-culture within it. By looking into Ravensong (1993) and Whispering in Shadows (2000) penned by writer-activists Lee Maracle (Salish) and Jeannette Armstrong (Okanagan) respectively, this paper aims to explore the subversive potential of this collective cultural memory in resisting the colonial atrocities, the erosion of identity and the political disempowerment that has plagued the Native-Canadian existence for centuries.

The Popular Tale

Athira Manoharan — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In On Media Memory; Collective Memory in New Media Age, cultural memory is described as “a version of past, defined and negotiated through changing socio-political power circumstances and agendas" (qtd. in Bosh TE 3). The popular entertainment of every age is obliged to incorporate elements of cultural memory in it to remain popular. The paper seeks to interrogate the role played by the integration of cultural memory in the popular American science fiction web series, Stranger Things, and the latest production of Marvel Cinematic Universe, Miss Marvel. The Stranger Things series, written and directed by the Duffer brothers is set in the mid-1980s. The age is recreated through certain elements that constitute cultural memory. They are placed within the context of the Ukraine crisis which urgently necessitates anti-Russian narratives in American popular entertainment. Miss Marvel appeared as a fresh wind in MCU, questioning the collective mistrust towards the Pakistani Muslim community and addressing the scars of partition as well as migration in third-generation Pakistani-Americans. The two web series featured on Netflix and Disney Hotstar are compared and contrasted to elucidate how popular entertainment can act as a soft power for the retention and deconstruction of cultural memory.

The Aspect of Memory in Oonya Kempadoo’s All Decent Animals and Buxton Spice

Isha Banerjee — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Oonya Kempadoo, a Caribbean novelist of mixed racial and cultural heritage, has harnessed the power of memory in her novels. Her fresh approach and representation of Caribbean life provoke a sense of familiarity even in the most distanced reader, owing to the inclusion of true-to-life representations of socio-cultural experiences. The facets of diversity, socio- political relations, familial ties, and psychological implications are explored in the novels. In this paper, the study will focus on the instances of collective cultural memory, individual memory, material memory, and socio-cultural memories surrounding displacement in All Decent Animals (2013) and Buxton Spice (1998). Existing at the intersection of diverse, melismatic ethnic groups, the novels under consideration pulsate with dynamic portrayals of characters, experiences, and events. The microcosmic representation of multiculturalism as observed in the novels shall also be examined through the lens of memory studies, while also exploring the ways that memory manifests itself as a palpable construct.

“The Test of Knowledge” (1919) by Rabindranath Tagore

Saptaparna Roy — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Section-Editor Samrat Sengupta writes:

In the present issue of Sanglap, we are publishing the essay “Vidyar Jachai” by Rabindranath Tagore from his collection of reflections on the state of education in Bengal titled Siksha. Translating this essay in a journal titled Sanglap (which means dialogue) holds enormous significance not only by its content but also as a critical reflection on the ambiguous relationship between colonial pedagogy and the act of translating cultures and Dr. Saptaparna Roy has carefully chosen the essay and undertaken this challenging work. Critical discourses have always functioned upon the clearing of ambiguity but are also built upon ambiguity itself, particularly when it creates contradictions and liminality in different cultural spaces. On one hand, translation engages in a dialogue, but it also announces a failure of conversations. Tagore’s present essay focuses on the colonial mimicry of the western knowledge paradigm in Bengal. While in postcolonial scholarship, such discussion has become a cliché, there are some salient points made by Tagore that demand attention. While the essay written in 1919 can be cited as an antecedent to the major anti-colonial pedagogues like Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, or N’gugi wa Thiongo, the work written in Bengali primarily addresses the second or third generation English-educated natives of Bengal – the foster grandchildren of T. B. Macaulay, who introduced English education en masse in Bengal. It does not obsessively discard the relevance of reading English writers and thinkers but becomes suspicious of our ways of reading them. The essay is a commentary on syllabus making and framing of knowledge rather than a polarisation along the East-West binary. The strategies of reading and dissemination of knowledge through a framework adopted from the West is something that Tagore proposes to reconsider. Unlike veteran nationalists like M. K. Gandhi or Bal Gangadhar Tilak, he was not proposing an outright rejection of Western epistemology for a purely “Indian” one but harping on the necessity of a strategy of reception where “wherever the material is sought, the responsibility to examine is in one’s own hand.”

The translation of this essay in the present moment is an act of writing back to the postcolonial debates on pedagogy and knowledge system, which, even in its act of rage against the worlding of the critical discourse by the erstwhile colonies, adopts a framework born and cultivated in the west. The word “jachai” in the original title of the essay means testing and possibly suggests the intellectual framework derived from the west for testing knowledge. But “jachai” may also mean verification, and Tagore tries to verify the colonial episteme itself in the essay. The essay connects with Tagore’s well-known text “Totakahini” or “The Parrot Story,” where an average Bengali learner in the colonised education system is described as a parrot who is tutored to mimic what is being said by the pedagogue. We have been “practicing handwriting by tracing on a specimen script,” and that causes an intellectual failure. The essay can continue the critical dialogue on colonial pedagogy in the present moment by understanding the ways of adopting critical discourses from the west in the Indian classroom without considering the historical and political situatedness. In the age of AI and ChatGPT, knowledge becomes anything that has greater visibility and archiving and is controlled largely by countries with better economic and cultural resources, and we still feel the need to ask, like Tagore – “but will this be how things turn out forever?”