Nandita Ghosh | Fairleigh Dickinson University (original) (raw)

Papers by Nandita Ghosh

Critical Humanities , 2024

This article examines the concept of schizophrenia as a cultural metaphor in order to analyze the... more This article examines the concept of schizophrenia as a cultural metaphor in order to analyze the Hindu Right’s contradictory language-framing politics within the public domain, particularly in relation to building mega dams on rivers Narmada and Bhagirathi. In so doing, it intends to examine the nature of the public domain itself that enables such framing politics within the context of late 20th-early-21st-century global capital.
Language battles in the public domain have intensified during this period, especially through various forms of digital media. The term “public domain” is used here to denote a common space shared by inhabitants of the nation through their reading texts, specifically news reports in various media: magazines, national dailies, and specific websites. These texts are treated as speech acts that perform their own politics and whose affects in circulation depend greatly on the power and location of the speakers.
In India, the various groups that form the Hindu Right have often mixed the languages of religion and capitalism to embrace free market policies that conflict with environmental concerns. This paper focuses on their mixing of such languages regarding dam-building, encapsulating all contradictions of national development when land is submerged, indigenous cultures are uprooted, aquatic flora and fauna are lost, subsistence agriculture becomes market-oriented, and inter-state water conflicts erupt.
This article is divided into four parts. The first part discusses the Hindu Right’s differential treatment of the two dams. The second investigates the politics and context for mixing languages. The third investigates the connotations of the term “schizophrenia” in the light of its use by scholars in describing the Right’s language framing politics. The fourth part examines the public domain.

Springer eBooks, 2018

Using the idea of a border as a method, this chapter examines three late twentieth- to early twen... more Using the idea of a border as a method, this chapter examines three late twentieth- to early twenty-first-century literary and news stories that narrate the ‘New Woman’ as a signifier that destabilizes established meanings of femininity within India. Gulnari (Partap Sharma’s Days of the Turban, 1986) breaks codes of respectability when she joins the Akali movement as a revolutionary and interacts with men of different castes and faiths. Akhila (Anita Nair’s Ladies Coupѐ, 2001), a 45-year-old income-tax clerk, breaks conservative Tamilian Brahmanical norms governing her behaviour when she decides to explore if a woman can live feasibly without marriage. In news stories of the Park Street rape case (2012), Suzette Jordan—a single, working mother—challenged a number of norms when she was gang raped: her right to be out late, to accept drinks at a bar, and get a ride home without being raped. These women’s choices serve as flashpoints within a nation, problematizing its self-definition as modern.

South Asian review, Dec 1, 2005

Abstract My dissertation examines the decade of the 1980s in India, which witnessed major upheava... more Abstract My dissertation examines the decade of the 1980s in India, which witnessed major upheavals. The dominant mood in the country was one of pessimism about the goals of modernization. The violence, that affected all Indians, was repeatedly taken up in the ...

International Feminist Journal of Politics, Dec 1, 2007

... Farhana Sultana notes how poor rural women often walk long distances to fetch clean drinking ... more ... Farhana Sultana notes how poor rural women often walk long distances to fetch clean drinking water for their families in Bangladesh when well ... Julie Sze's critical essay on the US/Mexican border reveals how chemical saturation of female bodies poisons babies in their mothers ...

Routledge eBooks, Aug 11, 2015

Jouvert: A journal of postcolonial studies, 2001

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Strident Voices, Dissenting Bodies: Subaltern Women's Narratives. Ed. Samraghni Bonnerjee. Advances in Feminist Studies and Intersectionality Series. Routledge, 178-194., 2021

This paper developed from my listening into a conversation between Faustina Bama, G.N. Devy, & Ri... more This paper developed from my listening into a conversation between Faustina Bama, G.N. Devy, & Ritu Menon at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC on 12 March 2011. The panel titled "The Majority on the Margins" was at a festival of India called Maximum India. On that panel, Devy and Bama expressed distinctly different points of view regarding the translation of Dalit literature into English. As a Dalit Christian, Bama writes her stories in Tamil; her stories are then translated into English, the language of the pan-Indian, urban, middle-class. In seeking a wider audience, Bama expresses her comfort in and acceptance of being translated into English: J.S.: How about translation of your works into English? BAMA: Most of my works have been translated into English and has been published by Oxford University Press-India. My translators tried their level best to keep the spirit and flavour of my writings. I do appreciate their hard work and I'm happy with them.

Rethinking New Womanhood: Practices of Gender, Class, Culture and Religion in South Asia. Ed. Nazia Hussein. London: Palgrave, 25-46. , 2018

Advances in Feminist Studies and Intersectionality Series. Routledge, 2021

In Routledge Handbook on Contemporary India. Ed. Knut A. Jacobsen. Chapter 27. Routledge., 2015

Working USA: The Journal of Labor and Society. 15.1: 35-50., 2012

This article focuses on the complex interplay between the migrancy of laboring bodies in the info... more This article focuses on the complex interplay between the migrancy of laboring bodies in the informal sectors of various economies, the spaces they inhabit, and the gendered experiences of their lives. It does so by comparing two literary works that present various forms of narratives: Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa and The White Tiger by Indian novelist Aravind Adiga. Both works present powerful images of gendered rural migrants who travel to cosmopolitan locations where their labor is consumed and erased. La Frontera deals with Chicana characters who cross over from Mexico to the U.S. in search of daily wage-based work. The White Tiger focuses on Balram Halwai, a taxi driver, who travels between rural and urban India. Thus, in using literary narratives, this article seeks to understand how these stage the commoditization and erasure of labor in its production of space even as these texts undergo their own processes of production, consumption, and commoditization in global circuits of exchange.

International Feminist Journal of Politics, Nov 21, 2007

Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf ... more Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article maybe used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution , reselling , loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

Salman Rushdie remarks on the defanging of Gandhi from a passionate opponent of technology and in... more Salman Rushdie remarks on the defanging of Gandhi from a passionate opponent of technology and industrialism to a harmless, toothless image that is circulated within globalized circuits: In another article, "Gandhi Credit Card Deal Abandoned," Ralph Cunningham notes how Tushar Gandhi at first permitted but later refused to allow CMG Worldwide, a U.S. personality rights company, from selling his greatgrandfather's image to its client, an international credit card company. Both Rushdie and Cunningham point to a worldwide phenomenon in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: the increased proliferation of images of Gandhi in public discourses to promote products representing marketoriented ideologies that perhaps Gandhi would have himself opposed. This essay provides a reading of fiction (Upamanyu Chatterjee's English August: An Indian Story), news reports, and articles of the 1980s in India in order to develop a broader argument about the circulation of signs of Gandhi within discourses on development in the media that reveal the contradictions of late twentieth century global capital. The figure of Gandhi occupies an important place in modern Indian history, fusing together ideas of political freedom and economic self-reliance with moral uprightness. In his letters to various people, Gandhi asserts that economic independence "is not a product of industrialization of the modern or the Western type" (Political and Moral Writings 371). In his opinion, industrialism results in imperialism and enslavement of the globe (515). Capitalist forces drain the wealth out of villages to concentrate it in the hands of a few city-A thin Indian man with not much hair sits alone on a bare floor, wearing nothing but a loincloth and a pair of cheap spectacles, studying the clutch of handwritten notes in his hand. The black-and-white photograph takes up a full page in the newspaper. In the top left-hand corner of the page, in full color, is a small rainbow-striped apple. Below this, there's a slangily American injunction to 'Think Different.' Such is the present-day power of international Big Business.. .. Now Gandhi is modeling for Apple. ("Mohandas Gandhi" 1)

My dissertation examines the decade of the 1980s in India, which witnessed major upheavals. The d... more My dissertation examines the decade of the 1980s in India, which witnessed major upheavals. The dominant mood in the country was one of pessimism about the goals of modernization. The violence, that affected all Indians, was repeatedly taken up in the ...