Huzaifa Pandit | University of Kashmir, Srinagar, J&K, India (original) (raw)

Papers by Huzaifa Pandit

Urdu Studies , 2024

The short stories of Sadat Hassan Manto, who is acknowledged to be one of the pioneers of the Urd... more The short stories of Sadat Hassan Manto, who is acknowledged to be one of the pioneers of the Urdu short story, have been read variously as resorting to obscenity to demonstrate the obscenity of partition and attendant nationalism. The paper examines the short story ‘Toba Tek Singh’ arguably Manto’s most well-known and translated story, to understand the interrogation of ‘home’ in the post-colonial future which is perpetuated through the fiction re-interpreted across time, space, and different frameworks. By focusing acutely on traumatized and split subjectivities, Manto demonstrates the performative potential of cultural memory to serve as a testimony of the enduring power of memory. Moreover, it depicts the determination and disruption of current imaginings of a ‘self’ shaped by a perpetual dialectic of exclusion and inclusion, lately accelerated by the rise of muscular nationalism. Manto’s short stories protest the perpetual denial and postponement of the question of ‘home’, and hence provide a valuable insight into the postcolonial dilemma of imagining the nation as a coherent and linear space. This paper approaches this aesthetic of denial by examining the wide semiotic range of possibilities offered by an examination of the vocabulary of Manto, and thereby illuminate the contours of Manto as a practitioner of writerly writing.

JSL, 2021

In studies on Agha Shahid Ali’s work, there has been a discernible tendency to read his poetry as... more In studies on Agha Shahid Ali’s work, there has been a discernible tendency to read his poetry as a chronicle of longing and rootlessness as experienced by a diasporic poet keen to reclaim his roots. This paper differs from such reading, and focuses especially on two collections ‘Half Inch Himalayas’ and ‘Nostalgist’s Map of America’ to argue that the depiction of home, specifically Kashmir in ‘The Country without a Post Office,’ is a continuation of multiple exiles and (re)inhabitations that mark his earlier collections. In Half Inch Himalayas home is presented not only as a natural by-product of diasporic longing, but also as a performance of a literary tradition of diaspora that affords his representation of ‘home’ a mobility and multiplicity. Drawing on the multiplicity afforded by the double bind of the self and the performed self, Nostalgist’s Map of America is read as offering a nascent blueprint of employing poetry as a counter to erasure of subjectivities and histories, positing poetry as an archive of what is sought to be erased. This rehoming provides a blueprint on understanding that Shahid’s amorphous and contesting representations of home in his later work does not mark a distancing or rupture from earlier work, rather it exists in a continuum of literary tradition, nostalgia and personal history.

Himalaya, 2020

The act of translation is not a linear and static process but a circulatory and dynamic process t... more The act of translation is not a linear and static process but a circulatory and dynamic process that permits an enriching negotiation of meaning. One of the ways in which a text can be translated is by trusting that its meaning can be employed outside the local contexts in which it was produced, and employed to comment on contexts far removed from it in time and space. This trusting then allows for the translated texts to intervene in the negotiations between poly-systems, as marginal poly-systems seek a more pronounced space in the literary and cultural networks in a particular space. This negotiation would constitute the restitution of meaning which is the key to a successful translation. By an analysis of translations, and a close reading of the translated poems, this paper proposes to illustrate this strategy as involved in the production of resistance poetry in Kashmir. Resistance Poetry can be conceived of as a poetry produced to oppose and archive subjectivity produced under conditions of subjugation and occupation – military and politically. In such a scenario, translation can serve as an invaluable tool to illustrate the subjectivities produced under conflict. Through an explanation of the mechanisms of translations of two poems: Nasir Kazmi’s ghazal: Kuch tau ehsaas-e-ziyaan tha pehlay (کچھ تو احساسِ زیاں تھا پہلے) and Saaqi Faruqi’s nazm (a poem in Urdu which is written on a single subject and employs both rhymed, blank and free verse) Khali boray main Zakhmi Billa (بورے میں زخمی ِبلا (خالی. I propose to demonstrate that the latent possibilities and potentialities in the source text can be adequately employed to enrich the Kashmiri English literary poly-system.

The paper proposes to study R Raj Rao's 'National Anthem and Other Poems', to explore how Rao's w... more The paper proposes to study R Raj Rao's 'National Anthem and Other Poems', to explore how Rao's work constitutes a subversive discourse that illuminates the landscapes of queer desire constituted from the wide range of formulations of the queer self in post-colonial urban India. The paper argues that the texts are performative acts that create eroticised topographies created by and from the performance/consummation of sexual acts. Drawing from a close reading of selected poems, the study seeks to illuminate the politics and performance of a subversive aesthetic forged from an intersection between radical queer aesthetics, and the evolution of a queer subject both at odds and complicit with masculine right wing nationalism in contemporary India, a curious mix of free market liberalism, and celebratory post-colonial right wing majoritarianism that has strengthened the old heteronormative mores, rather than dissolving them even as India has decriminalised homosexuality.

Journal of Faculty of Arts, AMU, 2019

One of the ubiquitous features of Indian Hindi cinema has been the film song. Over the years, the... more One of the ubiquitous features of Indian Hindi cinema has been the film song. Over the years, the structure of the song has changed from being lip-synced to forming a background score. Traditionally, the song has not received much attention in film-studies and literary studies circles, as it contributes little to the narrative or plot. This paper, however, differs from this approach and proposed to analyse selected songs from different eras of popular Hindi Cinema to understand song as a marker of multiple subjectivities, and instrument of space creation. Drawing upon a detailed study of semiotics of songs like Chod Do Aanchal, teri Jhuki Nazar, Aa Janeja and yeh dosti hum nahee todenge, the paper argues that the song portrays the slippages in the narrative towards an overtly patriarchal attestation of a highly eroticized phallocentric economy. Simultaneously, in a contrarian motion, the songs involve a queering of desire which is at odds with the heteronormative mores of the formula Hindi film. The paper will argue that the song consequently permits the creation of as a subversive space where a destabilization of external order is enacted by performance of desire. The song, therefore, is not a mere cosmetic measure added to compliment a story, but an autonomous narrative that merits detailed study.

The Urdu Marxist poet Habeeb Jaalib once entreated with his fellow writers: Artists of this land/... more The Urdu Marxist poet Habeeb Jaalib once entreated with his fellow writers: Artists of this land/ Rage, rage against the dying of the light/Art ill suits the bed of Tyranny. /This doomed sorrow is our inheritance. The sentiment is certainly not new, as art has always found a way to write back to power. This sentiment is has especially strengthened since the latter half of twentieth century when art began increasingly to engage with the body politic. 'Bullet Train and other Loaded poems' by Ravi Shankar N' who goes by the non de plume Ra Sh must be understood to be located in the same tradition of ideological art. The slim volume of poems published by Hawakal comprises of 28 poems of searing anger and protest. The renowned poet and critic K Satchidanandan in his foreword suggests that the poems "expose the pornography of majoritarian totalism". I am intrigued by the use of the word pornography, because pornography is primarily phallic in nature, and so the bullet train becomes a new phallus that moves in and out of the 'bharat mata', a performance that provides an orgasmic delight to the 'nation'. In that sense, the expose is less about pornography, as pornography after all is dramatized, and divorced from real life. What the book confronts then is not pornography, rather a new dystopian reality, one that is a strange species of mutated democracyone that exposes the innate conflicts of democracy. And how does the book do it? It basically maintains the formal façade of a poemthe line breaks, the alliterations, the half rhymes but subverts the underpinning base on which poetry restsits lyricism. These are hardly lyrical poemsit is broken prose, anti-metaphorical and immediate. In their refusal to be lyrical, the poems draw attention to the impossibility of poetry after holocaust becomes routine.

Akademos , 2018

The London based Turkish novelist Elif Shafak’s ‘Forty Rules of Love’ received widespread adulati... more The London based Turkish novelist Elif Shafak’s ‘Forty Rules of Love’ received widespread adulation for preaching a story of platonic love, in an increasingly loveless world, between the much venerated Sufi scholar – Jalal-ud-din Rumi and his mentor – the eccentric dervish Shams Tabriz. The relationship between the two is projected as a representation of the humane version of Islam- Sufism. This version is assumed as the binary opposite of Wahabism which is perceived to desire a fanatic political system based on a selective and parochial interpretation of ‘shariah’ –religious law. The novel attempts to steer clear of this fanaticism, invoking it repeatedly only to establish the desirability of the ‘Sufism’ it establishes it as an alternative. However, a close reading of the novel reveals several contradictions that raise questions on the nature of intervention proposed by the novel. This essay will examine the novel as reifying oriental myths and misogynist tendencies largely with respect to the treatment of women. The novel reverts back to the oriental representations of Arab-Islamic cultures fuelled “by the slant of the Christian West and the Islamic East, which provided an added fantasy in the Orientalist mind – the “othering” of the Muslims. Such orientalist representations of subaltern Muslim women further calcified and institutionalized their subhuman identity and subalternized them to both local patriarchy and their western sisters.” (Hasan 2005)

International Journal of Communication and Social Research, 2017

This paper will demonstrate a rudimentary application of narratological devices to a chapter “The... more This paper will demonstrate a rudimentary application of narratological devices to a chapter “The Caterpillar’s Advice” from the popular children’s fantasy book ‘Alice in Wonderland.’ By Lewis Carroll. The book has attracted much critical attention, and it has been interpreted variously. This paper, however, intends to interpret the selected
chapter by examining the formal structure of the text, and delineate how these structures fuse together effectively to create a fantastical world that has enthralled readers and critics alike over time. The chapter will be examined to examine structures like the narratorial nature, framing, and Time.

LangLit, 2017

In one of his freewheeling interviews with Indian Express, R Raj Rao-Professor English at SP Univ... more In one of his freewheeling interviews with Indian Express, R Raj Rao-Professor English at SP University of Pune, renowned novelist and poet, and one of India's first gay academicians refused to call himself a gay writer. He argued that he prefers himself as a Queer Writer "because when you stay queer, you are destabilizing normativity. It is much better to destabilize normativity, as we know it, than become normative ourselves." This paper analyses selected short stories from his book of short stories "One day I locked my flat in soul city" first published by Rupa in 1995 and then as a revised and enlarged edition by Harper Collins India as unique manifestations of this queer radical aestheticism founded on the precipice of desire and subversion. These short stories permit exploration of queer sensibilities that rebut the universal gay paradigm. Rather, they locate the characters within a very local and immediate context that is far removed from the western straitjacketing. These narratives explore alternative sexual relationships and the new morality values and rules instituted as a result. Unsurprisingly, the discourses yielded are far from conventional and stereotyped images of homosexual love in a culture that privileges heteronormativity. "To be or not to be-that is the question" the famous soliloquy in Hamlet suggests. Over the years, the quote has evolved into a shorthand for a dilemma, and hence choice. The quote is one good way to approach the question of writing when the author is strongly wedded to a political perspective, and derives identity from this political view. Must politics trump the aesthetic or the literariness of the text in order for the 'political message' to reach the reader, or must it be the other way round: prioritizing art, and politics relegated to sidelines. This is hardly a fresh question, as the dilemma is an old one: art for art's sake versus motivated art. Yet, the question remains unanswered as ever, as writers steeped in strong political ideas are often typecast and stereotyped that reflects in the myopic reading of their works. Works of such authors are often taken to be manifestations of their politics, and not analyzed on the basis of their literary merits-a privilege extended to their non-political counterparts. Hence, when R Raj Rao-an avowedly gay academic pens a book of short stories, they are celebrated on account of the 'gayness' of the content, and a celebration of mainstreaming of gay voices. Such a celebration ails to delineate and understand the radical politics of the texts that completely resist any such pigeonholing and restriction to a single ideological trajectory.

The Creative Launcher, 2017

The paper seeks to locate the politics of Hoshang Merchant's ground breaking anthology-Yaraana-ga... more The paper seeks to locate the politics of Hoshang Merchant's ground breaking anthology-Yaraana-gay Writings from India. Through a close reading of the texts, and the status of the contributors the paper traces the politics of the text. Drawing from a variety of approaches ranging from Wilde's utilitarianism to Foucault's analysis of power, the paper argues that Merchant strives more towards a homonormative world order, which forecloses the subversive potential of queer writing. Such a position however risks pathologizing the queer subject as they are closely related with the anti-gay genocidal nexuses of thought that populate cultures. The divorcing of gayness, a political position, from homosexual practices is therefore an overlooking of the obsolesce of this theoretical framework, which plays back into the nature vs. nurture debate, and locates queer practice as simply a sexual preference, and entailing no questions of identity, and therefore giving a lie to the various variant discourses of identity politics that emerge in the everyday life of a homosexual individual. This position of denial would closely conform to the minoritizing view referred to by Sedgwick. Hoshang also closely parallels Gide in rarifying art as an imitation of life, following from the Arnoldian notion, and thus an essentialist assumption, locating art completely within the bourgeois 'good art'.

Proceedings of ‘Interpreting Short Stories of the Post 1950’s at M D Shah Mahila College, Mumbai , 2017

The paper attempts to trace the intertextual connection between the selected poems of the Pakista... more The paper attempts to trace the intertextual connection between the selected poems of the Pakistani poem: Kishwar Naheed and the Indian short story writer: Mahshweta Devi. The paper argues that the writers share a common thematic concern with destabilizing hegemonic masculinist discourses that get reflected in the exploitation of subaltern and disempowered classes symbolized through the class of women. Both Devi and Naheed represent the class of intellectuals, Gramsci termed: organic intellectuals, the class that articulates and theorizes the subaltern class. A comparison of the selected works of the two writers, would offer interesting insights into the psyche of the ‘sub-continental female’. The premise of exploration of the sub-continental woman, essentialist as it sounds, follows from the premise of gynocriticism, as propounded by Showalter who argued that it entailed a “feminist study of women’s writing, including readings of women’s texts and analyses of the intertextual relations both between women’s writers (a female literary tradition), and between women and men. (Showalter). Drawing from Showalter, I shall try and examine a set of images, metaphors and themes, “which connects” the writing of Devi and Naheed, across the different periods of their composition, and builds it into something as cohesive and as intertextually rich as the traditionally sanctioned male literary canon”. Through her fiction, Devi examines the discourse of modernization and the sustained counter-insurgency between the locally sprung guerilla warfare groups influenced by radical Marxist ideologies, and espouses the case of the displaced tribal populace displaced by capitalist industrialization. With an eye for minute detail, she weaves her stories around her tribal protagonists, fictionalizing real-life incidents to offer a succinct commentary on the treatment of the post-colonial totalizing nation of the subaltern tribal populace. For the purposes of this analysis, I shall consider the short stories “Draupadi” and “Douloti – the Bountiful”. A similar case can be made out of the poem “We Sinful Women”, by Kishwar Naheed. Naheed’s poems question the masochistic subordination that characterizes legitimate femininity in a patriarchal discourse sanctioned by religion. For example in the poem We Sinful Women the act manifested in “Sin” is mapped along the value laden hierarchy of collective morality like virtue - its binary opposite, and constitutes a voluntary refusal to conform to a behavioral code.

Summer Hill , 2018

The paper argues that the hostile reception of Arun Kolatkar’s Jejuri, does not take in account t... more The paper argues that the hostile reception of Arun Kolatkar’s Jejuri, does not take in account the rich complexity of the poems that conceal a dynamic interplay of power relations in an attempt to reconfigure the subaltern discourse. Locating Jejuri through a post-structuralist discourse, we argue that Jejuri emerges, not therefore, as an urban satire on rural belief but an interstitial space where the urbane rationality clashes with the depth of the representational networks etched in the belief system, and emerges with a new hybridized outlook that does more justice to it.

The essay is an attempt to place the poetry of Kishwar Naheed within the modern feminist discours... more The essay is an attempt to place the poetry of Kishwar Naheed within the modern feminist discourse by examining how it corresponds to various feminist theoretical constructs and displaces traditional phallocentric modes of writing and versification in her inimitable style of poetry. The essay will try to analyze the ideological moorings of the feminist poet and explore whether or not she borrows from the popular discourse of another transgressive school: The Progressive Writers Association. The objective is to read the selected poems closely and by an investigation of their syntactic and semantic transgressions observe the pragmatic shift in her poetry and analyze whether she is able to bring in a fresh perspective of the collective experience of the women in Post-Colonial Pakistan in specific and the sub continental women in general.

Miraas , 2014

The Paper is an attempt to locate the exact cultural locus of English poetry in Kashmiri society ... more The Paper is an attempt to locate the exact cultural locus of English poetry in Kashmiri society considering that the local newspapers and online magazines have mushroomed in the last few years since Bekaar Jamaat (Idle Company) emerged as a major hit on Facebook during the curfew of 2009. The paper argues that Kashmiri English Poetry needs a dismantling of old sensibilities and embrace fresh motifs and intertextual metaphors and images such that an authentic Kashmiri poetic discourse is formulated that is independent of the nostalgic diaspora tinted poetry of Agha Shahid Ali which is no longer suitable to Kashmiri sensibility. The paper attempts to illustrate the various fault lines in contemporary Kashmiri English poetry and thereof posits what I perceive as the positionality to be adopted for better expression of the Subaltern voice.

The emergence of the concept of "grammars of English with its usage of plural foregrounds the rec... more The emergence of the concept of "grammars of English with its usage of plural foregrounds the recognition of the diversity of language and its speakers. The plural is also a recognition of the vast array of approaches that exist to examine the grammar of any language including English. This essay is an attempt at explaining one aspect of this plurality by engaging in a brief comparative analysis of a part of speech -noun, as presented by a traditional grammar -High School English Grammar and Composition by Wren and Martin and a modern grammar -A University Grammar of English by Quirk and Greenbaum.

The Underground Man marks a threshold in the advent of the modernist literature by its effective ... more The Underground Man marks a threshold in the advent of the modernist literature by its effective adoption and refinement of the technique to structure the written details in such a manner that increases the proportion of indeterminacy in the text. The Underground Man is able to do so on account of its resistance to formation of illusions of fixed or definable in the text. Notes from the Underground is structured in such a manner that every detail contradicts the other ostensibly, and consequently resists and frustrates our desire to picture the whole -a primary characteristic of linear narratives. The resistance emerges mainly from two factors: the restless shifting of the narrator from one view point to the other conditioned by an acute consciousness of the self that presupposes a powerful causation leading to an intense intellectual masturbation -a building up of the climax and deriving an acute perverted pleasure from this orgasmic outbursts. We therefore find our gestalt -the essence or shape of the narrative's complete form to continually disintegrate and distort into an unfamiliar shape. The text of the novel thereof is polysemantic and fissured as we move beyond the traditional configurative meaning into an acute consciousness of the richness of the text that completely takes a precedence over any restrictive and definitive meaning. The speech acts are configured in such a way that each word, figure, colour or accessory yields an alien association -the impulse of the other that resists every attempt of immediate integration into our gestalt. Subsequently the text that emerges is inevitably grounded in a dichotomy between the I and the other -the gestalt formulated by deciphering the perceived thematic concerns of the text and the other over-riding impulse of an alien associated attributable to the other consciousness embedded in the text independent of any authorial or dogmatic control. It follows naturally then that the reader has to play a more active part in the formation, evaluation and interpretation of the text since he has to resolve this inherent ambivalent dichotomy to realize the aesthetic experience involved in an interaction with the text.

Book Reviews by Huzaifa Pandit

Luxembourg Review, 2015

To read “Of Gardens and of Graves” is to witness the coming to life of Yeats’ famous line: “A ter... more To read “Of Gardens and of Graves” is to witness the coming to life of Yeats’ famous line: “A terrible beauty is born”. It is to be reminded, if ever a reminder was needed, of the lingering pain that seeps slowly and eternally through the flooded scars of Kashmir, the scowl of the last half a century that darkens the fate of every subject, born under the auspices of its melancholic sky. It is hard to classify the book into a genre as it repudiates traditional hierarchies by refusing to be neatly categorized into one – it is simultaneously a memoir, a critical commentary, an anthology, collaboration, and a history all rolled into one, held together by a single source- Kashmir.

Kashmir Ink, 2017

Mirza Ghalib once sarcastically suggested in a couplet that his poetry was meant only to placate ... more Mirza Ghalib once sarcastically suggested in a couplet that his poetry was meant only to placate a whim, and so must not be judged on its skill. Songs of Light, Ayaz Rasool Nazki’s debut venture into English poetry, appears to be inspired by Ghalib’s dictum. Nazki says he scarcely follows conventional wisdom and, therefore, hardly ever revises his poems. The spontaneity thus engendered is apparent in his work. That is its strength; its greatest failing, too. Some poems are charmingly fresh, others barely rise above cliché.

Polis Project , 2018

Review of Feroz Rather's novel The Night of Broken Glass

Urdu Studies , 2024

JSL, 2021

Himalaya, 2020

Journal of Faculty of Arts, AMU, 2019

Akademos , 2018

International Journal of Communication and Social Research, 2017

LangLit, 2017

The Creative Launcher, 2017

Proceedings of ‘Interpreting Short Stories of the Post 1950’s at M D Shah Mahila College, Mumbai , 2017

Summer Hill , 2018

Miraas , 2014

Luxembourg Review, 2015

Kashmir Ink, 2017

Polis Project , 2018

Review of Feroz Rather's novel The Night of Broken Glass

Wande Magazine, 2017

Review of Shahnaz Bashir's collection of short stories - Scattered Souls

Indian Literature , 2018

A review of Nabina Das' book of poems - Sanskarnama

Indian Literature , Mar 2013

– A review of ‘A Depressingly Monotonous Landscape’ and ‘Lullaby of the Ever Returning’ A Depre... more – A review of ‘A Depressingly Monotonous Landscape’ and ‘Lullaby of the Ever Returning’
A Depressingly Monotonous Landscape: Hemant Divate –translated from Marathi to English by Sarabjeet Garcha: POETRYWALA : Rs 250
Lullaby of the Ever Returning: Sarabjeet Garcha: POETRYWALA: Rs 250