Department of Humanities and Social Sciences

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 109
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    Hinglish Cinema
    (Springer, 2014) Prateek
    About September 1994, the character of Bollywood underwent a change with a deluge of movies such as Bomgay (1996), Bombay Boys (1998), Split Wide Open (1999), Everybody Says I Am Fine (2001), Leela (2002) and Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi (2003). Myopically acknowledged only as a change in the linguistic character of Bollywood, as manifested in its portmanteau name ‘Hinglish’, this transfiguration was often considered lusterless and sans consequences, or another addition to the long list of names representing a blend of English and Hindi:
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    Inward Bound Self-referentiality in Bombay cinema
    (Taylor & Francis, 2016) Prateek
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    Articulating Female Angst in Manipur: A Study of Mythical Surrender
    (Taylor & Francis, 2017-12) Prateek
    If the “unconstitutional” inclusion of Manipur in the Indian union in 1949 left the Manipuris in shock, then the implementation of the 1958 Indian Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act left them speechless and traumatized. In response a new type of Manipuri theatre emerged, which we call “neues theatre.” We examine the reasons for the rise of “neues theatre.” We locate the narrative of a recent Manipuri play Mythical Surrender (2011) in a social and cultural context, explain the ontogeny of Manipuri theatre, and present a gendered analysis to support our views on the impossibility of the unification of North India and the North East.
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    Naturalizing ‘Queerness’: A Study of Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy
    (Rupkatha Journal, 2014) Prateek
    If the representation of same-sex sexuality in punitive terms leaves gays in shock, then the legitimizing of Article XVI Section 377 (which bars gay sex) in India made gays all over the world, especially in South Asia speechless and traumatized. In response to this universally misconstrued image of an ‘unnatural’ man, Shyam Selvadurai, a Canadian-Sri Lankan writer creates a narrative which not only offers an ‘innocent peek’ into the biased perspectives of heterosexuals towards queers but the use of a child narrator is a deliberate ploy with which he deconstructs the craving for a so called ‘healthy’ text.’ Thus, this article, by musing on Selvadurai’s most acclaimed text Funny Boy (1994), attempts to examine how and why ‘unhealthy’ texts are constructed. Secondly, it elaborates on the subtle literary strategies used by Selvadurai to debunk pre-conceived notions of a heterosexual literary text. Finally, the article while locating a gay narrative in the social and cultural context of Sri Lanka, presents a gendered analysis of homosexuality in Sri Lanka.
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    Hubble-Bubble of Transcultural Encounters: A Study of the Social Life of the Hookah.
    (Journal of Media & Culture, 2017-02-17) Prateek
    This article traces the cultural history of the hookah in Indian culture from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century, focusing on its imbrication in cultural practices and cultural narratives. In proximity with thing theory’s idea of the agency of “chance interruption” to disclose the “physicality of things” (Brown 4), I argue that chance interruptions of monetisation turned hookahs as “objects” into hookahs as “things.” In the first part of the article, I trace the origin of the hookah culture and then examine one such interruption of monetisation – the patronage system of the Nawabs – that made the hookahs’s thing status evident and recognisable. Moreover, in the first section, I further elaborate Bill Brown’s use of the term “chance interruption” and how it links to the “physicality” of the hookah in the wake of the Nawabi system. Interacting with the posthuman idea of how the material environment forms and transforms human beings, I explore the thingness of the hookah in the context of a “bazaar of thingness” (Appadurai 18) present in India. To underline this metamorphosis, in the first part of the paper, I demonstrate two things: a) an object becomes a thing through “a sequence of encapsulations” (Connor 18); that is, the production of a “thing” is directly associated with the production of a chain of significations connected to the thing itself, and b) thingness is not inherent in things but it is the effect “of recognitions and uses performed within frames of understanding (which may be markets or ad hoc negotiations of action or desire or bodily skills as much as they may be intellectual formatting or sedimented codes)” (Frow 285). To put it differently, an object evolves into a thing if it is humanly recognised. Broadly, I argue in the first section that transcultural encounters are responsible for “thingifying” hookahs. In the second part of the paper, I analyse the second interruption of monetisation, the mercantile system of the British. Furthermore, I contend that by employing the thing status of the hookah in his play, The Play of the Hookah Smoker: A Farce in Four Acts, Thakur Jagmohan Singh (1857–1899), an Indian playwright writing on the cusp of modernity, has created one of the first myths of Hindi nationalism. This myth feminises and demonises Bengalis, speakers of the Bengali language, so that Hindi can be extolled as the national language of the country
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    Reinterpreting passion: A study of Habib Tanvir's theatre
    (Australasian Drama Studies., 2016-04) Prateek
    This article examines the theatre of Habib Tanvir, a playwright, actor and director from India, and through this analysis demonstrates the emergence of the new definition of 'passion as resistence' in the 1970s in India. Although the idea of 'passion as resistance' arose during the colonial period as Indian writers assimilate this meaning. In his postcolonial theatre, Tanvir presented the viewpoint of the people against the established urban definition of acting that privileged the 'voice of the Artist' over the 'voice of the people' (to borrow the terminology from Rustom Bharucha), as well as the 'vachik abhinaya' (acting through speech) over the angik abhinaya (acting through bodily movements).
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    East Meets East: Recycling Brecht in India
    (Boydell & Brewer, 2018) Prateek
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    Articulating Mountains Through Mofussil Aesthetics
    (Taylor & Francis, 2019-07) Prateek
    This article investigates the crucial role of operatic theatre tradition in representing the mountain culture of Uttarakhand, a region that became the twenty-seventh state of the Republic of India in 2000. Uttarakhand culture is extremely diverse, so in this article I solely examine the performance practices of the Kumaoni community and, in particular, a Kumaoni opera called Rajula Malushahi, which is based on a folk mountain legend. This article problematizes and expands the range of influence of mountain cultures by drawing on a version of this story by Indian director Amit Saxena, performed on 17 January 2017, at the Sri Ram Centre for Performing Arts, Delhi. The first part of the article traces the emergence of the Kumaoni opera tradition and its ability to articulate the voice of these mountain people. In the second and third parts, I examine the dramaturgical practices of Rajula Malushahi and demonstrate how it diverged from mainstream Indian dramaturgies, and how this voiced the anxieties and dilemmas of peripheral mountain cultures. These strategic diversions reimagined the idea of mountains and the female gender. I argue that Kumaoni operatic theatre tradition, which is based on folk narratives, continually connects mountains, human bodies and modern environmental discourses, and thus offers a critique of entrenched modern divisions between humans and non-humans.
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    The politics of dark ecologies in Deepan Sivaraman’s Peer Gynt
    (Taylor & Francis, 2020-06) Prateek
    This article analyses Deepan Sivaraman's 2012 production of Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt (1876) and argues that the production's scenography evoked scepticism toward the Indian nation-state. This scepticism came as a direct consequence of the scenography's ability to alienate the audience through the formation of dark ecological environments, with the help of three characters: the elf princess, the son of the elf princess, and a hell hound, a concept invented by Sivaraman while adapting the verse play of the Norwegian playwright into Malayalam and English. The dark ecological aesthetics of the production functioned like Bertolt Brecht's Gestus and Verfremdungseffekt, offering a dialectical point to the audience to reterritorialize their understanding of the Indian nation-state and its ecology. In the first part of the article, I analyse the Indian dramatic form of bhana used by Sivaraman to articulate the discourse of what Timothy Morton calls ‘dark ecology,' and argue that the bhana's satirical narrative remained central to writings of Otherness. In the second part of the article, I demonstrate how the production mounted imbricated narratives of ecological awareness on the stage through the figures of the elf princess, her son, and a hell hound that relentlessly witnessed the capitalist journey of Peer. By offering an active agency to these figures through the scenography, Sivaraman's production interrogated the Indian nation-state's definition of ecology. Significantly, in its choice of a non-human witness, the production destabilized the human centre and pointed towards a post-human ecological turn. Although Ibsen's aesthetics have been used countless times in India to stage the anxieties of the female gender and minority communities, this was the first time they were employed in India to stage dark ecology; Sivaraman's production began where Ibsen's play ends. In the first scene itself, the audience members found themselves face to face with Peer's spirit - rather than the flesh and blood Peer of Ibsen’s play - begging God for another chance at life so that he could become a better man. When Peer is offered a second chance, he uncannily uses it to become a non-resident businessman involved in mining. The performance showed how scenography could be used to articulate a dark and depressing ecological awareness.
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    Emergency’s children: satire in the hindi comics of Hawaldar Bahadur
    (Taylor & Francis, 2022-02-15) Prateek
    This article explores an unusual connection between the poetics of ancient Sanskrit drama and Hindi comics. This interconnection highlights how satire was used in Hindi comics after India’s twenty-one-month Emergency was declared from 1975 to 1977. I argue that Hawaldar Bahadur comics negotiate with the ancient Vidushaka tradition of Sanskrit drama to overcome the angst of the post-Emergency world. In the first part of the article, I analyse the function of Vidushaka, a humorous character considered to be the personification of laughter, by first looking into its earliest example, the Sanskrit satire play, Bhagavadajjukiyam (The Ascetic and the Courtesan). I then study the modern rendering of the Vidushaka tradition through an analysis of Habib Tanvir’s 1975 production of Charandas Chor (Charandas the Thief). In the second part of the article, I demonstrate how Hawaldar Bahadur of Manoj comics deploys the idiom of Vidushaka to create a new model of resistance, which in turn critiques the mainstream discourse of resistance – that is, of the ‘angry young man’ popularised by Bahadur of Indrajal comics. Overall, I examine satire in Hindi comics to understand how humorous characters have contested the discourse of an autocratic nation-state.