The Ramayana

The Ramayana
Author: R. K. Narayan
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2006-08-29
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1440623279

The greatest Indian epic, one of the world's supreme masterpieces of storytelling A Penguin Classic A sweeping tale of abduction, battle, and courtship played out in a universe of deities and demons, The Ramayana is familiar to virtually every Indian. Although the Sanskrit original was composed by Valmiki around the fourth century BC, poets have produced countless versions in different languages. Here, drawing on the work of an eleventh-century poet called Kamban, Narayan employs the skills of a master novelist to re-create the excitement he found in the original. A luminous saga made accessible to new generations of readers, The Ramayana can be enjoyed for its spiritual wisdom, or as a thrilling tale of ancient conflict. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Doctor and Mrs. A.

The Doctor and Mrs. A.
Author: Sarah Pinto
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2019-11-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0823286681

Just before India’s independence, a young Punjabi woman, ill at ease in her marriage and eager for personal and national freedom, sat down with psychiatrist Dev Satya Nand for an experiment in his new method of dream analysis. The published analysis documents a surge of emotion and reflections on sexuality, gender, marriage, ambition, trauma, and art. “Mrs. A.” (as she is known) turned to female figures from Hindu myth to reimagine her social world and its ethical arrangements, envisioning a future beyond marriage, colonial rule, and gendered constraints. This book explores the conversation between Mrs. A. and Satya Nand, its window onto gender and sexuality in late colonial Indian society, and the ways Mrs. A. put ethics in motion, creating alternatives to ideals of belonging, recognition, and consciousness. It finds in Mrs. A.’s musings repertoires for the creative transformation of ideals and explores the possibilities of thinking with a dynamic concept of counter-ethics. An unconventional history of gender and sexuality in late colonialism, this book reminds us that the west did not invent feminism, that psychiatry’s history of innovation and creativity is global, and that ethical thinking does not need to center on western myths or paradigms.

Reading Contemporary South Asian Literature

Reading Contemporary South Asian Literature
Author: Bidhu Chand Murmu, Somjeeta Pandey
Publisher: Ukiyoto Publishing
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2022-04-12
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9354904505

As a school of criticism, the central argument in Postcolonial studies revolves around dismantling the dominant narrative of colonial or imperial history. A colonization process not only captures the native people and culture but their lands too. Proper reading of postcolonial theory would be by understanding the epistemology of colonized environment or vice-versa. Even after decolonization the ideology of imperialism is persistent in native memory and thought. An embeddedness in native psyche not only nurtures imperialism but manifests them with the footprints of colonial masters. In postcolonial countries the discourse of social and economic justice is deeply rooted in ecology. As a consequence, environmental activists from postcolonial nations tend to see any modern policy as a disguised form of neocolonialism or imperial dominance, globalization and modernization. Since the shocks of imperialism and globalization are most strongly felt in the third world countries, most of them being former colonies, this edited volume intends to explore texts by South Asian writers examining how these writers and their characters cope with the destruction of the environment. This edited volume plans to seek out the writings of epistemological understanding of our environment. Moreover, the volume would also see a critical entanglement of race, class, gender, culture, modernization, globalization, nation and trans-nation etc. Furthermore, this book will attempt to show how different genres of literature ranging from fiction to non-fiction can bring out inimitable insights into varied understanding of postcolonial and ecocritical studies.

The Other Ramayana Women

The Other Ramayana Women
Author: John Brockington
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2016-05-20
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1317390628

This book is the first to present current scholarship on gender and in regional and sectarian versions of the Rāmāyaṇa. Contributors explore in what ways the versions relate to other Rāmāyaṇa texts as they deal with the female persona and the cultural values implicit in them. Using a wide variety of approaches, both analytical and descriptive, the authors discover common ground between narrative variants even as their diversity is recognized. It offers an analysis in the shaping of the heterogeneous Rāma tradition through time as it can be viewed from the perspective of narrating women's lives. Through the analysis of the representation and treatment of female characters, narrative inventions, structural design, textual variants, and the idiom of composition and technique in art and sculpture are revealed and it is shown what and in which way these alternative versions are unique. A sophisticated exploration of the Rāmāyaṇa, this book is of great interest to academics in the fields of South Asian Studies, Asian Religion, Asian Gender and Cultural Studies.

Ravana's Kingdom

Ravana's Kingdom
Author: Justin W. Henry
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2022
Genre:
ISBN: 0197636306

Ravana, the demon-king antagonist from the Ramayana, the ancient Hindu epic poem, has become an unlikely cultural hero among Sinhala Buddhists over the past decade. In Ravana's Kingdom, Justin W. Henry delves into the historical literary reception of the epic in Sri Lanka, charting the adaptions of its themes and characters from the 14th century onwards, as many Sri Lankan Hindus and Buddhists developed a sympathetic impression of Ravana's character, and through the contemporary Ravana revival, which has resulted in the development of an alternative mythological history, depicting Ravana as king of the Sri Lanka's indigenous inhabitants, a formative figure of civilizational antiquity, and the direct ancestor of the Sinhala Buddhist people. Henry offers a careful study of the literary history of the Ramayana in Sri Lanka, employing numerous sources and archives that have until now received little to no scholarly attention, as well as the 21st century revision of a narrative of the Sri Lankan people-a narrative incubated by the general public online, facilitated by social media and by the speed of travel of information in the digital age. Ravana's Kingdom offers a glimpse into a centuries-old, living Ramayana tradition among Hindus and Buddhists in Sri Lanka-a case study of the myth-making process in the digital age.

Graphic Novels for Children and Young Adults

Graphic Novels for Children and Young Adults
Author: Michelle Ann Abate
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 405
Release: 2017-04-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1496811682

With contributions by Eti Berland, Rebecca A. Brown, Christiane Buuck, Joanna C. Davis-McElligatt, Rachel Dean-Ruzicka, Karly Marie Grice, Mary Beth Hines, Krystal Howard, Aaron Kashtan, Michael L. Kersulov, Catherine Kyle, David E. Low, Anuja Madan, Meghann Meeusen, Rachel L. Rickard Rebellino, Rebecca Rupert, Cathy Ryan, Joe Sutliff Sanders, Joseph Michael Sommers, Marni Stanley, Gwen Athene Tarbox, Sarah Thaller, Annette Wannamaker, and Lance Weldy One of the most significant transformations in literature for children and young adults during the last twenty years has been the resurgence of comics. Educators and librarians extol the benefits of comics reading, and increasingly, children's and YA comics and comics hybrids have won major prizes, including the Printz Award and the National Book Award. Despite the popularity and influence of children's and YA graphic novels, the genre has not received adequate scholarly attention. Graphic Novels for Children and Young Adults is the first book to offer a critical examination of children's and YA comics. The anthology is divided into five sections, structure and narration; transmedia; pedagogy; gender and sexuality; and identity, that reflect crucial issues and recurring topics in comics scholarship during the twenty-first century. The contributors are likewise drawn from a diverse array of disciplines--English, education, library science, and fine arts. Collectively, they analyze a variety of contemporary comics, including such highly popular series as Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Lumberjanes; Eisner award-winning graphic novels by Gene Luen Yang, Nate Powell, Mariko Tamaki, and Jillian Tamaki; as well as volumes frequently challenged for use in secondary classrooms, such as Raina Telgemeier's Drama and Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.

VISION and RE-VISION

VISION and RE-VISION
Author: Beena. G
Publisher: Notion Press
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2019-07-15
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1645873420

How different would mythological narratives be, if women voiced their perspectives? Amidst great wars, superhuman heroes and their ‘glorious’ victories, is there a place for women? Are ‘great wars’ limited to armed conflicts between armies of men on the battlefields? Do women have their own battles before, after and beyond the confines of wars in the epic narratives of India? Both the Ramayana and the Mahabharata have integrated into our social and cultural fabric, and permeated into the myriad layers of life across genres and media. It is a common practice to revisit mythological landscapes and realign the lenses to look at them afresh from different perspectives. Re-renderings often bring in multiple interpretations that are creative and critical, adding variety and currency to the original narratives. Vision and Re-vision traces the lives of seven marginalized women from revisionist works against the central motif of war. It follows the pursuits of Ganga, Surpanakha, Uruvi, Sita, Urmila, Satyavati and Draupadi to understand their struggles and victories as women. Analyzing textual spaces provided to women, it explores their marginalized voices and their resistance patterns. These, in turn, establish new narratives of subversion and reclaim the voices and identities of women from the margins. A sound theoretical framework enables a comprehensive understanding of feminism and its distinct Indo-centric identity.

Chandrabati’s Ramayan

Chandrabati’s Ramayan
Author: Chandrabati
Publisher: Zubaan
Total Pages: 102
Release: 2020-01-25
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 8194721873

Chandrabati, the first woman poet in Bangla, lived in the sixteenth century in Mymensingh district in present day Bangladesh. She was also the first poet in the Bangla language to present a retelling of the Ram story from the point of view of Sita. Idolised as a model of marital obedience and chastity in Valmiki’s Ramayan, Chandrabati’s lyrical retelling of Sita’s story offers us a fresh perspective. Written in order to be sung before a non-courtly audience, mainly of womenfolk of rural Bengal, Chandrabati’s Ramayan adds new characters and situations to the story to provide new interpretations of already known events drawing richly on elements of existing genres. Its location in the tales of everyday life has ensured that Chandrabati’s Ramayan lives on in the hearts of village women of modern-day India.

Transcultural Negotiations of Gender

Transcultural Negotiations of Gender
Author: Saugata Bhaduri
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2015-09-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 813222437X

Transcultural Negotiations of Gender probes into how gender is negotiated along the two axes of ‘belonging’ and ‘longing’– the twin desires of being located within a cultural milieu, while yearning for either what has passed by or what is yet to come. It also probes into the category of ‘transculturality’ itself, by examining how not only does it pertain to the coming together of cultures from diverse spatial locations, but how shifts over time and changing performative modes and technological means of articulation, within what may be presumed to be the same culture, can also lead to the ‘transcultural’. The volume comprises four sections. Part I, ‘(Be)longing in Time’, examines negotiation of gender through transcultural acts of myths, rituals and religious practices being revised and revisited over time. Part II, ‘(Be)longing in Space’, studies how gender is renegotiated when people from different spaces interact, as also when public spaces and domains themselves become sites of such negotiations. In Part III, ‘Performing (Be)longing’, such transcultural negotiations are located in the context of changing modes of performance, considering particularly that gender itself is performative. The final section, ‘Modernity, Technology and (Be)longing’, traces how gender becomes transculturally negotiated in a space like India, with the advent of modernity and its companion technology.