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Papers by Kamayani Kumar

International Journal of English Language, Education and Literature Studies, 2024

Routledge eBooks, Feb 9, 2024

urviving in a world fraught with terrorism defines our lives today, for 'terror' is no longer a d... more urviving in a world fraught with terrorism defines our lives today, for 'terror' is no longer a distant threat, but has become ubiquitous. India, especially, is a space teeming with horrific acts of terror. The last few decades have witnessed Punjab, Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), the North East, and Mumbai becoming rife with invasive acts of terror. Given this scenario, the articulation of trauma induced by terror has become imperative. While post-terrorist fiction has lent voice to 'troubled testimonies', cinema, too, has not been far behind, with the farreaching impact of 9/11 on film and cultural studies, in particular. Film studies courses, such as 'Post-9/11 Cinema: A Cultural History of the Present', and 'Alienation, Revolt and Terrorism', among others, have mushroomed in response to 9/11. Hence, it is not surprising that films focusing on terrorism are also on the rise. We are witnessing what Benjamin Barber calls 'Jihad vs. McWorld' (1995). Since a majority of post-terrorist films are from the Third World, the same merits critical attention. Meenakshi Bharat's Shooting Terror: Terrorism in Hindi Films is an engaging study SHOOTING TERROR: TERRORISM IN HINDI FILMS

Dogo Rangsang Research Journal’ , 2023

Northeast has been simmering against the dual yoke of insurgency and armed forces hostile, violen... more Northeast has been simmering against the dual yoke of insurgency and armed forces hostile, violent and often unwarranted reprisal of insurgency. The poets of the Northeast such as Thangjam Ibopishak, Robin Robin Ngangom (Manipur), and Nongkynrih (Meghalaya), have used their poetry to enunciate how the centre-state deadlock has generated a major existentialist crisis for the citizens of these states. The paper seeks to examine how literature has become a conduit to map the psychic, cultural, economic, and corporeal violence inflicted on people. Almost all cultural and literary artifacts produced since the ascendency of insurgency allude to the almost dystopic conditions that the people of Northeast have been facing. Literature of the North East, indeed, has emerged as a very radical discursive space assertively articulating the suffering of a people forgotten and left alone 'in a corner of the world,' to battle insurgency, violence, crumbling infrastructure, economic hardships, ecological disaster, debilitating ethnic cultural heritage and political apathy to AFSPA sponsored excesses. It is this sense of 'black' despair at a sickening and pervading sense of poverty, marginalization and decaying infrastructure that these poets have articulated in their poems. These poets have also pointed out the ecological devastation that has accompanied the demands of separatism and government's agenda to curb all demands at any expense. The result is a deadlock which has almost left language incapable of voicing the invasive and intense cultural trauma.

Routledge, 2023

Partition of India generated intensive cultural trauma. Post-memories and prosthetic memories of ... more Partition of India generated intensive cultural trauma. Post-memories and prosthetic memories of the horrific division continue to inhabit the collective consciousness of millions in the subcontinent. Narratives on Partition abound despite which a lot remains unsaid. This paper has its focus on how art from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh has approached and represented Partition. The artists whose works have been referred to in this paper are victims, witnesses, and survivors, 1.5 generation as well as those who were born much later but who nonetheless have been claimed by the legacy of divisiveness, rupture, and trauma. The paper also studies how art has emerged as a very potent testimony to the pain of millions who were dispossessed in the wake of 1947 and 1971.

Millennial Asia, 2016

Vishwajyoti Ghosh (Ed.). 2013. This Side That Side: Restorying Partition. New Delhi, India: Yoda ... more Vishwajyoti Ghosh (Ed.). 2013. This Side That Side: Restorying Partition. New Delhi, India: Yoda Press, pp. 327. ₹695. ISBN: 93-82579-01-X.

Film, Media, and Representation in Postcolonial South Asia, 2021

Filming the Line of Control

Public memory is the fundamental mechanism via which the collective identity of society is constr... more Public memory is the fundamental mechanism via which the collective identity of society is constructed. In India, there is no ‘public memory’ of Partition, although it survives as private memory in the lives of millions, even decades later. There is no institutional memory of Partition: the state has not seen fit to construct any memorials, to mark any places-unlike in the case of Holocaust memorials or memorials for the Vietnam war. Nothing at the Indo-Pak border marks a place where millions of people crossed borders of newly formed nations, no plaque or memorial at any of the sites of the refugee camps, nothing that marks a particular spot as a place where Partition memories are collected. Rather, the traumatic experience of Partition has been relegated to the realm of collective amnesia. Post-Partition public memory is shaped by a paradoxical dichotomy-the victims are caught between ‘Silence and speech. Memory and forgetting. Pain and healing’ (Butalia 1998: 356). Any attempt to express the agony of Partition has been so fraught with anxiety: ‘…is it better to be silent or to speak.?’ As Claude Markovits states, Though historical and literary work on the trauma of Partition gradually emerged, yet cinema, as an important document of cultural memory, was prominent by its absence. Barring a few imaginative endeavours, such as M. S. Sathyu’s Garam Hawa (Hot Winds, 1973), Partition in cinema seemed to have been avoided rather than confronted. Commenting on the silence that defined post-Partition trauma, Mahey points out: This ‘silent mourning’ was, however, broken by the epic vision and sublimity of Ghatak’s movies, whose three films-Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud-capped Star, 1960), Subarnarekha (The Golden Line, also a river in Jharkhand; 1962) and Komal Gandhar (E-flat, 1961) unwittingly form a trilogy and are a scathing indictment of the mindless act of Partition. His films address the trauma of Partition from a victim’s perspective; they enquire into Partition as a continuing experience, as Butalia views it, the continuing presence of the past in our lives today, a history which refuses to fade away and whose dark shadows of pain and trauma still define our ‘present’. It is this sense of hollowness that Ghatak’s films strive to portray. Within a rich tapestry of images and motifs, his films encapsulate the intensity of human agony that Partition generated. Ghatak addressed the predicament of homeless refugees for whom Partition did not end in 1947, for whom, rather, its consequences had just begun to shape their lives.

Millennial Asia, Apr 1, 2018

Book Reviews by Kamayani Kumar

Literary Encyclopedia, 2024

Kumar, Kamayani. "Children of the Hidden Land". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 16 Apr... more Kumar, Kamayani. "Children of the Hidden Land". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 16 April 2024 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=41335, accessed 17 April 2024.]

Books by Kamayani Kumar

Taylor and Francis, 2024

The volume addresses the pertinent need to examine childhood trauma revolving around themes of wa... more The volume addresses the pertinent need to examine childhood trauma revolving around themes of war, sexual abuse, and disability. Drawing narratives from spatial, temporal, and cultural contexts, the book analyses how conflict, abuse, domestic violence, contours of gender construction, and narratives of ableism affect a child’s transactions with society. While exploring complex manifestations of children’s experience of trauma, the volume seeks to understand the issues related to translatability/representation, of trauma bearing in mind the fact that children often lack the language to express their sense of loss. The book in its study of childhood trauma does a close exegesis of select literary pieces, drawings done by children, memoirs, and graphic narratives.

Academicians and research scholars from the disciplines of childhood studies, trauma studies, resilience studies, visual studies, gender studies, cultural studies, disability studies, and film studies stand to benefit from this volume. The ideas that have been expressed in this volume will richly contribute towards further research and scholarship in this domain.