Papers by Bidisha Pal
Dalit Lekhika: Women’s writings from Bengal
Journal of Postcolonial Writing
South Asian Popular Culture, 2020
While, popular culture like films has more generalized mass appeal and flexibility of evolution w... more While, popular culture like films has more generalized mass appeal and flexibility of evolution with spatiotemporal changing dimensions of reality; folk cultures are mainly indigenous, relatively inflexible and slowly resistant to change. Popular films like Agantuk (1991) by Satyajit Ray, Barfi! (2012) by Anurag Basu and Jagga Jasoos (2017) by Anurag Basu make citations of three different tribal folk performances of Eastern India namely 'Santhali' of Jharkhand and West Bengal, 'Purulia Chhau' of West Bengal and 'Bihu' of Assam respectively. The very enactment of folk performances in the films attain the forms of 'cultural guerrillas' when the heteroglossia of indigenous marginal and minor folk culture make its existence in the majoritarian popular cultures like films and a cultural negotiation happens between two diagonally opposite cultures. 'Cultural Rigging' is a term coined by the Bengali Dalit poet Manohar Mouli Biswas to mention the tendency of a culture being performed by another culture when it becomes 'highly enjoyable' (38). The article aims to analyze the very tryst of the popular and folk culture through three intertwining concepts: acculturation, cultural resistance and cultural rigging with a select study of the films and tribal folk performances.
Historical context 'undermines the transcendent significance traditionally accorded to the li... more Historical context 'undermines the transcendent significance traditionally accorded to the literary text.' (Sinfield and Dollimore 6) Shakespeare's plays have proved themselves 'timeless' (Barry 176) in the way they are read and enjoyed in our own times and through our own manners. However, it is interesting the way the classic period pieces of sole European soil have made their immense influence in the veteran film industry of India, Bollywood. Bollywood has been an inseparable part of the cultural thread of India and has witnessed severe political upheavals. Shakespeare play also significantly enough couldn't ensure that culture cannot 'transcend the material forces and relations of production. Culture is not simply a reflection of the economic and political system, but nor can it be independent of it.' (Sinfield and Dollimore 8) This paper seeks to address the particular enmeshment of history and culture in the reflection of Shakespeare over Bollyw...
Kalyani Thakur Charal is a cyclonic Dalit feminist and social activist. She wants to be known as ... more Kalyani Thakur Charal is a cyclonic Dalit feminist and social activist. She wants to be known as a Dalit womanist who believes that writing is an act of resistance. She has four collections of poems, one autobiography and three collections of essays. She edits a cultural magazine, Nir. Her works are translated into English and many of them are on University syllabuses.This interview is the outcome of the meetings we have in Kolkata in last four months. The interview was originally conducted in Bangla.
Touching the “untouchable”
‘The problem of gender violence in India… was not a legal problem, but a cultural problem’: a conversation with comics creator Ram Devineni
Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 2021
Presented below is a conversation between Ram Devineni and Comics-cum-Gender Studies scholars fro... more Presented below is a conversation between Ram Devineni and Comics-cum-Gender Studies scholars from India. Leveraging upon these two dimensions, the scholars involved in this interview problematise ...
Bengali Dalit discourse as translational activism
The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism, 2020
What is translated; what is not translated: studying the translation process of select Bengali Dalit short stories
Translator, 2021
Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities
Dalit autobiographies in India are the oppositional resistant 'micro-narratives' that retrieve "t... more Dalit autobiographies in India are the oppositional resistant 'micro-narratives' that retrieve "the small voices of history" (Guha, 1996, p. 1-12). The narrative often takes the form of 'witness' or 'testimonial literature'; the narrator simultaneously witnesses and takes part in the events of witnessing. Unlike the Dalits of Maharashtra, Tamilnadu, Karnataka, Gujrat, and Punjab, Dalits in Bengal are the victims of the politics of exclusion in the metanarratives of history and social discourse. Interrogating My Chandal Life: An Autobiography of a Dalit (2018) by Manoranjan Byapari and translated by Sipra Mukherjee is unanimously the first published autobiography of a Bengali Dalit to appear in Bengali as Itibritte Chandal Jivan in 2014. It portrays the journey of a
The article makes an extensive study of the poetic essence of alienation and paranoia that revolv... more The article makes an extensive study of the poetic essence of alienation and paranoia that revolve around in the modern society of rupture and restlessness through select poems of Subodh Sarkar from the anthology called Not in My Name: Selected Poems (1978-2017), translated and edited by Jaydeep Sarangi and published in 2018. The poems, largely act like the microcosms of the different dimensions of socio-political scenarios that project the four corners of the world. Set within the crux of the inside-outside world of a poet, the poems happen to be the socio-political testimonies as well as mingling the aesthetic and the real truth. The disjuncture of the societal scenario of the modern world reflects in the poetical expression and sensibility in the continuum of the poems. The article proposes to make a detailed analysis of select poems from the socio-political aspect. The study wants to project how the subjective and the objective emotion and contemplation are blended and combined within the presentation of poetic aestheticism and sensibility.
“Rendering Bengali Dalit Discourse as Translational Activism: Studying a Dalit Autobiography”
The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism, 2020
Historical context 'undermines the transcendent significance traditionally accorded to the litera... more Historical context 'undermines the transcendent significance traditionally accorded to the literary text.' (Sinfield and Dollimore 6) Shakespeare's plays have proved themselves 'timeless' (Barry 176) in the way they are read and enjoyed in our own times and through our own manners. However, it is interesting the way the classic period pieces of sole European soil have made their immense influence in the veteran film industry of India, Bollywood. Bollywood has been an inseparable part of the cultural thread of India and has witnessed severe political upheavals. Shakespeare play also significantly enough couldn't ensure that culture cannot 'transcend the material forces and relations of production. Culture is not simply a reflection of the economic and political system, but nor can it be independent of it.' (Sinfield and Dollimore 8) This paper seeks to address the particular enmeshment of history and culture in the reflection of Shakespeare over Bollywood movies.
Nature is often attributed with motherly or feminine qualities of being repressive, submissive, t... more Nature is often attributed with motherly or feminine qualities of being repressive, submissive, tender, reciprocating and nurturing persona. This very basic thought gave birth to the Ecofeminist philosophy: the idea of a connection between feminism and ecology. The proponent of Ecofeminism Francois d' Eaubonne has cited arguments about the apparent relationship between nature and its exploitation with the violence and oppression of the women. Nectar in a Sieve by Kamala Markandaya vividly presents the depiction of the vandalizing and suffering of nature and women in the texts in the hands of masculine forces. Starting from the protagonist Rukmini, other female characters in the story also fall into the prey of torture, suffering, infertility and various torments. This also cites the nature/culture binary in many sequences of the novel. Very often the characters seem to give up but in the next moment they show a good amount of patience and tolerance and eventually survive from the situation. Just like the nature suffers in the hands of science and technology but finds the way of survival. The central character Rukmini is the worst sufferer so in a way she seems to be more in empathy with the nature. Sometimes the assimilation is so obvious that it may often be said to womanize the nature or naturalize the women to reciprocate the feelings of each other in a similar way. Various themes of the novel i.e. birth, education, economic crisis, occupation, marriage happen in such a manner as to throw challenges to the nature itself and so very often have also to face retributions from nature.
Book Reviews by Bidisha Pal
Books & Book Projects by Bidisha Pal
Touching the 'Untouchable': Depiction of Body and Sexuality in select Dalit Women's Autobiographies
Book Chapter, 2020
The purity-pollution system of the hierarchically casteist Hindu society in India lends a particu... more The purity-pollution system of the hierarchically casteist Hindu society in India lends a particular complexity to the conception of the pure Hindu body, especially when the female body is epitomized as an embodiment of purity, chastity, and sanctity, while Dalit people are treated as impure. Dalit women, particularly, bear the brunt of the dreaded practices of untouchability against their own bodies not only by the upper caste but also by their own community, thus being thrice oppressed and victimized. This chapter will visit the concept of body and sexuality from select Dalit women’s autobiographies namely The Prisons We Broke (2008) by Baby Kamble, Karukku (2000) by Bama Faustina Soosairaj, and the semi-autobiographical novel The Grip of Change (2006) by Palani Sivakami. These three autobiographies depict extreme forms of ‘graded patriarchy’ where violence and torments are mostly perpetrated on female bodies. These auto-narratives reject the illiteracy that is supposedly attached with female bodies and subvert the concept of purity-pollution by depicting ‘impure’ and ‘untouchable’ female bodies and sexuality. Moreover, these narratives encapsulate a unique and resistant ideology for ‘sub-subaltern’ women since Dalit women are victims to three-fold oppression and subjugation (for being women, Dalit, and finally, Dalit women), they form another subjugated category within the subaltern and are thus termed ‘sub-subaltern.’
by Rebecca Ruth Gould, Eylaf Bader Eddin, Munyao Kilolo, Aria Fani, omid mehrgan, Brahim El Guabli, Sahar Fathi, Mehrdad Rahimi-Moghaddam, Manuel Yang, Michela Baldo, Bidisha Pal, and Partha Bhattacharjee The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism provides an accessible, diverse, and in many r... more The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism provides an accessible, diverse, and in many respects ground-breaking overview of literary, cultural, and political translation across a range of activist contexts. This volume brings together case studies and histories of oppressed and marginalised peoples from more than twenty different languages, ranging across Africa, Asia, the Americas, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. Part One considers the theoretical foundations of translation and activism. Part Two examines the figure of the interpreter as an activist. Part Three examines the figure of the translator as an activist. Part Four is comprised of autobiographical reflections by translators and writers who bear witness to the stories of oppressed peoples. Part Five engages with translation and activism from a range of legal perspectives focusing on human rights. Part Six introduces a range of case studies of translations into vernacular languages. Part Seven situates translation and activism in the context of migration, with particular attention to refugee experience. Part Eight examines the role of translators in shaping revolution. As the first extended collection to introduce translation and activism from a systematically global perspective, this handbook will serve as a useful guide to translators, writers, scholars, and activists seeking to better understand the agency of language in bringing about political change.
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Papers by Bidisha Pal
Book Reviews by Bidisha Pal
Books & Book Projects by Bidisha Pal