Sharon Pillai | Jesus & Mary College, Delhi University (original) (raw)
Uploads
Papers by Sharon Pillai
Women’s and Gender Studies in India: Crossings , 2019
Women’s and gender studies departments and centres have come a fair way from their marginal exist... more Women’s and gender studies departments and centres have come a fair way from their marginal existence in the 1970s and 1980s to become more regular features of universities and institutions of higher education across India today. The significant uptick in their numbers, however, is the work often of a policy push through UGC and other government agencies or, in more recent times, the corporate play to commoditize and vend tertiary education. This chapter focuses on questions of not just what gets taught as part of different WGS initiatives but also how it is taught, and further how WGS (re)configures the academic space, comprehends the teacher-taught equation and defines its pedagogical activity. Pedagogies are seldom hermetic assemblies of instructional precepts, evaluative protocols, discursive proclivities and research methodologies operating in a vacuum. Instead, they are philosophies in action: diversely encoded disciplinary practices that consciously or unconsciously reflect, reinforce, rework and/or rescind world views and values generated by the dynamic interplay of various determining forces at any given conjuncture. Periodical rethinks are crucial to prevent WGS from lapsing into a merely ‘disciplined’ and ‘disciplinary’ curriculum answering to establishment norms and market imperatives. The present chapter is a small attempt in that direction.
Women's and Gender Studies in India: Crossings, 2019
Women’s and gender studies (WGS) is at a critical juncture in India today. What is at stake is it... more Women’s and gender studies (WGS) is at a critical juncture in India today. What is at stake is its very survival as an ethically charged practice of knowledge. The old ways of doing things will no longer serve, not if the aim is for WGS to remain what it was always meant to be: a driver and catalyst for discursive and social transformation. The challenge for WGS, therefore, is to take honest stock of the situation and remap its course, if not its causes. This chapter is a review of these concerns. In looking back, it seeks to assess the evolving role of the dominant factors that have influenced and/or controlled the women’s and gender studies narrative in India so far. Since current conditions, if used well, are rich with possibilities, the essay in closing will not only flag significant issues plaguing WGS but also point to desirable workarounds for them with an eye to the future.
Mirza Muhammad Hadi Rusva is best remembered today for Umrao Jan Ada, his Urdu novel about a Luck... more Mirza Muhammad Hadi Rusva is best remembered today for Umrao Jan Ada, his Urdu novel about a Lucknavi courtesan by the same name, published in 1899. More than a century on, Umrao Jan Ada is praised, on the one hand, for being the first proper novel in Urdu. On the other, the novel is lauded for its accomplished portrayal of Lucknow a few years before and after the watershed events of 1857. Much of the Anglophone critical evaluation of Umrao Jan Ada, however, displays a singular preoccupation with the question of realism. The critical consensus around realism has metamorphosed from a useful framework for parsing Rusva’s novel from multiple vantage points into a hardened carapace of convention that in fact obstructs fresh engagements with the text. This essay argues for the need to move beyond the debates around realism. It attempts to ask new questions and seek different narrative possibilities in Umrao Jan Ada. Its principal contention is that despite ostensible evidence to the contrary, Umrao Jan Ada is a consciously contrived text straining after a novel poetics of expression, a poetics of indirection, which given the character and the times makes especial historical and situational sense. The novel also constitutes a significant bid at aesthetic experimentation in the face of prevailing indigenous and colonial modes of narrativity, something for which Rusva is not always given nearly enough credit.
Mirza Muhammad Hadi Rusva is best remembered today for Umrao Jan Ada, his Urdu novel about a Luck... more Mirza Muhammad Hadi Rusva is best remembered today for Umrao Jan Ada, his Urdu novel about a Lucknavi courtesan by the same name, published in 1899. More than a century on, Umrao Jan Ada is praised, on the one hand, for being the first proper novel in Urdu. On the other, the novel is lauded for its accomplished portrayal of Lucknow a few years before and after the watershed events of 1857. Much of the Anglophone critical evaluation of Umrao Jan Ada, however, displays a singular preoccupation with the question of realism. The critical consensus around realism has metamorphosed from a useful framework for parsing Rusva’s novel from multiple vantage points into a hardened carapace of convention that in fact obstructs fresh engagements with the text. This essay argues for the need to move beyond the debates around realism. It attempts to ask new questions and seek different narrative possibilities in Umrao Jan Ada. Its principal contention is that despite ostensible evidence to the contrary, Umrao Jan Ada is a consciously contrived text straining after a novel poetics of expression, a poetics of indirection, which given the character and the times makes especial historical and situational sense. The novel also constitutes a significant bid at aesthetic experimentation in the face of prevailing indigenous and colonial modes of narrativity, something for which Rusva is not always given nearly enough credit.
U. R. Anantha Murthy’s Samskara has been predominantly read in terms of a temporal-ideological en... more U. R. Anantha Murthy’s Samskara has been predominantly read in terms of a temporal-ideological encounter in which an older, essentially fixed tradition faces off against the dynamics of a fledgling modernity. While there are instances in the text that lend themselves to such inference, the broad matrix within which the interpretations find articulation slants one’s reading of the novel in telling ways. This essay argues that the central dialectic in Samskara is not between tradition and modernity but between two forms of traditional thinking that conceive value and (human) reality differently. In making this argument, the essay offers an alternative, culturally oriented frame for reading Samskara in which narrative structure, form, and sense cohere to present a markedly different interpretive and moral trajectory.
My essay is about the often unremarked legislative control exercised by a certain set of modern/i... more My essay is about the often unremarked legislative control exercised by a certain set of modern/ist assumptions in contemporary Anglophone Indian literary-critical discourse. Its chief aim is to call for and contribute towards rupturing this modernist hegemonic. The essay identifies the major traits of the critical consensus and then discusses its harmful effect on Anglophone Indian literary studies. First, in the hope to persuade that such a consensus indeed exists and second to encourage a fresh re-examining of the terms of debate that currently monopolize Anglophone Indian literary studies. The latter task, it suggests, is not just desirable but urgent.
Studies in The Novel, 2012
Anantha Murthy’s novel Samskara has achieved translated recognition nationally and internationall... more Anantha Murthy’s novel Samskara has achieved translated recognition nationally and internationally as a modern classic of Indian literature. Though it has generated much critical comment, insufficient attention has been given to its gender representation. Discussions of the novel’s gender politics have either focused on its positive representations of feminine beauty and initiative or have taken a bleak view of its sexist arrangements. Re-scrutinising the novel’s gender representation through culturally coloured lenses, this article uncovers other sites of gender discrimination and identifies a subtext that can offer a more positive inflection to Samskara’s gender politics.
Vaasanthi’s Birthright has been read predominantly as a propaganda novel for the feminist campaig... more Vaasanthi’s Birthright has been read predominantly as a propaganda novel for the feminist campaign against sex selective abortions and female infanticide in India. This essay seeks a wider scope for Birthright’s intervention. Arguing that the term “birthright” is inextricably tied in modern Indian cultural memory with the word “swaraj” (self-rule), it reads Vaasanthi’s novel as an attempt to articulate a gender-just swarajya (condition or state of self-rule) premised on a transformed understanding of the self–other equation. Ultimately, it is such swaraj, this essay contends, which is held out both as our birthright and as the necessary condition for generating any humane personal and/or social politics in the present and foreseeable future by Vaasanthi’s Birthright.
This essay attempts to morph the graph of the “Nation” in Anandamath into a graph of multiple des... more This essay attempts to morph the graph of the “Nation” in Anandamath into a graph of multiple desires. That is, it concerns itself with some of the personationalities of desire which find graphic relief in the novel. The main purpose of the essay is to tease out some of the gender implications of Anandamath’s national/notional con/figurations. To that end, and in the process, the essay also offers an alternative perspective on the structural and thematic coherence of the novel; a re-reading of its moral anchor and emphasis; a fresh look at its coding of the political.
Book Reviews by Sharon Pillai
Women’s and Gender Studies in India: Crossings , 2019
Women’s and gender studies departments and centres have come a fair way from their marginal exist... more Women’s and gender studies departments and centres have come a fair way from their marginal existence in the 1970s and 1980s to become more regular features of universities and institutions of higher education across India today. The significant uptick in their numbers, however, is the work often of a policy push through UGC and other government agencies or, in more recent times, the corporate play to commoditize and vend tertiary education. This chapter focuses on questions of not just what gets taught as part of different WGS initiatives but also how it is taught, and further how WGS (re)configures the academic space, comprehends the teacher-taught equation and defines its pedagogical activity. Pedagogies are seldom hermetic assemblies of instructional precepts, evaluative protocols, discursive proclivities and research methodologies operating in a vacuum. Instead, they are philosophies in action: diversely encoded disciplinary practices that consciously or unconsciously reflect, reinforce, rework and/or rescind world views and values generated by the dynamic interplay of various determining forces at any given conjuncture. Periodical rethinks are crucial to prevent WGS from lapsing into a merely ‘disciplined’ and ‘disciplinary’ curriculum answering to establishment norms and market imperatives. The present chapter is a small attempt in that direction.
Women's and Gender Studies in India: Crossings, 2019
Women’s and gender studies (WGS) is at a critical juncture in India today. What is at stake is it... more Women’s and gender studies (WGS) is at a critical juncture in India today. What is at stake is its very survival as an ethically charged practice of knowledge. The old ways of doing things will no longer serve, not if the aim is for WGS to remain what it was always meant to be: a driver and catalyst for discursive and social transformation. The challenge for WGS, therefore, is to take honest stock of the situation and remap its course, if not its causes. This chapter is a review of these concerns. In looking back, it seeks to assess the evolving role of the dominant factors that have influenced and/or controlled the women’s and gender studies narrative in India so far. Since current conditions, if used well, are rich with possibilities, the essay in closing will not only flag significant issues plaguing WGS but also point to desirable workarounds for them with an eye to the future.
Mirza Muhammad Hadi Rusva is best remembered today for Umrao Jan Ada, his Urdu novel about a Luck... more Mirza Muhammad Hadi Rusva is best remembered today for Umrao Jan Ada, his Urdu novel about a Lucknavi courtesan by the same name, published in 1899. More than a century on, Umrao Jan Ada is praised, on the one hand, for being the first proper novel in Urdu. On the other, the novel is lauded for its accomplished portrayal of Lucknow a few years before and after the watershed events of 1857. Much of the Anglophone critical evaluation of Umrao Jan Ada, however, displays a singular preoccupation with the question of realism. The critical consensus around realism has metamorphosed from a useful framework for parsing Rusva’s novel from multiple vantage points into a hardened carapace of convention that in fact obstructs fresh engagements with the text. This essay argues for the need to move beyond the debates around realism. It attempts to ask new questions and seek different narrative possibilities in Umrao Jan Ada. Its principal contention is that despite ostensible evidence to the contrary, Umrao Jan Ada is a consciously contrived text straining after a novel poetics of expression, a poetics of indirection, which given the character and the times makes especial historical and situational sense. The novel also constitutes a significant bid at aesthetic experimentation in the face of prevailing indigenous and colonial modes of narrativity, something for which Rusva is not always given nearly enough credit.
Mirza Muhammad Hadi Rusva is best remembered today for Umrao Jan Ada, his Urdu novel about a Luck... more Mirza Muhammad Hadi Rusva is best remembered today for Umrao Jan Ada, his Urdu novel about a Lucknavi courtesan by the same name, published in 1899. More than a century on, Umrao Jan Ada is praised, on the one hand, for being the first proper novel in Urdu. On the other, the novel is lauded for its accomplished portrayal of Lucknow a few years before and after the watershed events of 1857. Much of the Anglophone critical evaluation of Umrao Jan Ada, however, displays a singular preoccupation with the question of realism. The critical consensus around realism has metamorphosed from a useful framework for parsing Rusva’s novel from multiple vantage points into a hardened carapace of convention that in fact obstructs fresh engagements with the text. This essay argues for the need to move beyond the debates around realism. It attempts to ask new questions and seek different narrative possibilities in Umrao Jan Ada. Its principal contention is that despite ostensible evidence to the contrary, Umrao Jan Ada is a consciously contrived text straining after a novel poetics of expression, a poetics of indirection, which given the character and the times makes especial historical and situational sense. The novel also constitutes a significant bid at aesthetic experimentation in the face of prevailing indigenous and colonial modes of narrativity, something for which Rusva is not always given nearly enough credit.
U. R. Anantha Murthy’s Samskara has been predominantly read in terms of a temporal-ideological en... more U. R. Anantha Murthy’s Samskara has been predominantly read in terms of a temporal-ideological encounter in which an older, essentially fixed tradition faces off against the dynamics of a fledgling modernity. While there are instances in the text that lend themselves to such inference, the broad matrix within which the interpretations find articulation slants one’s reading of the novel in telling ways. This essay argues that the central dialectic in Samskara is not between tradition and modernity but between two forms of traditional thinking that conceive value and (human) reality differently. In making this argument, the essay offers an alternative, culturally oriented frame for reading Samskara in which narrative structure, form, and sense cohere to present a markedly different interpretive and moral trajectory.
My essay is about the often unremarked legislative control exercised by a certain set of modern/i... more My essay is about the often unremarked legislative control exercised by a certain set of modern/ist assumptions in contemporary Anglophone Indian literary-critical discourse. Its chief aim is to call for and contribute towards rupturing this modernist hegemonic. The essay identifies the major traits of the critical consensus and then discusses its harmful effect on Anglophone Indian literary studies. First, in the hope to persuade that such a consensus indeed exists and second to encourage a fresh re-examining of the terms of debate that currently monopolize Anglophone Indian literary studies. The latter task, it suggests, is not just desirable but urgent.
Studies in The Novel, 2012
Anantha Murthy’s novel Samskara has achieved translated recognition nationally and internationall... more Anantha Murthy’s novel Samskara has achieved translated recognition nationally and internationally as a modern classic of Indian literature. Though it has generated much critical comment, insufficient attention has been given to its gender representation. Discussions of the novel’s gender politics have either focused on its positive representations of feminine beauty and initiative or have taken a bleak view of its sexist arrangements. Re-scrutinising the novel’s gender representation through culturally coloured lenses, this article uncovers other sites of gender discrimination and identifies a subtext that can offer a more positive inflection to Samskara’s gender politics.
Vaasanthi’s Birthright has been read predominantly as a propaganda novel for the feminist campaig... more Vaasanthi’s Birthright has been read predominantly as a propaganda novel for the feminist campaign against sex selective abortions and female infanticide in India. This essay seeks a wider scope for Birthright’s intervention. Arguing that the term “birthright” is inextricably tied in modern Indian cultural memory with the word “swaraj” (self-rule), it reads Vaasanthi’s novel as an attempt to articulate a gender-just swarajya (condition or state of self-rule) premised on a transformed understanding of the self–other equation. Ultimately, it is such swaraj, this essay contends, which is held out both as our birthright and as the necessary condition for generating any humane personal and/or social politics in the present and foreseeable future by Vaasanthi’s Birthright.
This essay attempts to morph the graph of the “Nation” in Anandamath into a graph of multiple des... more This essay attempts to morph the graph of the “Nation” in Anandamath into a graph of multiple desires. That is, it concerns itself with some of the personationalities of desire which find graphic relief in the novel. The main purpose of the essay is to tease out some of the gender implications of Anandamath’s national/notional con/figurations. To that end, and in the process, the essay also offers an alternative perspective on the structural and thematic coherence of the novel; a re-reading of its moral anchor and emphasis; a fresh look at its coding of the political.