Journal of the English Literator Society
The Journal of the English Literator Society (ISSN 2455-393X) is a peer-reviewed, international, and indexed online publication dedicated to literary and cultural studies. Published bimonthly in January, March, May, July, September, and November by Magnus Publishing, the journal adheres to rigorous academic standards while maintaining an open-access model on the World Wide Web. The journal promotes critical literary analysis while examining cultural significance, connecting textual study with socio-historical perspectives. It enriches scholarly discussions on how literature both mirrors and influences cultural identities, traditions, and evolution across regions and eras. Editor in Chief: Dr. L. Santhosh Kumar Established: December 2015 Frequency: Bimonthly
Contextualizing Transnationalism in Indian English Literature: A Study of A Suitable Boy and The Shadow Lines
This paper examines the manifestation of transnationalism in two landmark Indian English novels: Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy (1993) and Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines (1988). Through a comparative analysis, this study explores how both authors negotiate the complex terrain of national boundaries, cultural identities, and historical memory in the postcolonial Indian context. While Seth's novel anchors itself primarily within the geographical boundaries of newly independent India, it nonetheless engages with transnational forces through cultural exchange, political discourse, and the looming question of Partition. Ghosh's narrative, conversely, explicitly foregrounds border-crossing, memory, and the artificiality of national boundaries. Drawing on scholarship in transnational studies, postcolonial theory, and South Asian literary criticism, this paper argues that both novels challenge the rigidity of nationalist discourse and reveal how personal narratives transcend geographical and temporal borders. The analysis demonstrates that transnationalism in Indian English literature operates not merely through physical migration but through imaginative mappings, historical consciousness, and the perpetual negotiation between local and global identities.
Copyright (c) 2024 Journal of the English Literator Society
Healing Through Kinship: Male Friendship and Identity in Easterine Kire's Bitter Wormwood
This paper analyses the quality and strength of friendship between Mose, the protagonist, and Neituo in Easterine Kire’s Bitter Wormwood. She is considered the first Naga poet to publish in English and the first Naga novelist to write in English. In her novel Bitter Wormwood, the characters change drastically, offering a glimpse of what Nagaland was like then and of how their relationship transformed during the Naga freedom struggle. In this book, we see the friendship between Mose and Neituo as they exchange tones in wartime, share small acts of kindness, and understand the landscapes they find themselves in. This work represents their companionship with Mose and Neituo, as they used to share experiences during the war. The heroes also show skill in facing tragedy gracefully rather than becoming bitter. Throughout the story, their friendship and experiences of historical events in Nagaland are depicted. Bitter Wormwood places more emphasis on social realism rather than heroic archetypes and foreshadows the ordinary existence of people in the Nagaland pious community. Patience, as in the case of Mose and Neituo, is a nexus between individual healing and social fortitude, thus a conduit to healing. A close textual analysis reveals the emotional system that represents a stable affective scale and describes male friendship in the context of a violent historical environment.
Copyright (c) 2016 Journal of the English Literator Society
Integrating LSRW Skills in Teaching Self-Introduction: A Task-Based Approach
This study examines the integration of LSRW (Listening, Speaking, Reading, Writing) skills in teaching self-introduction in English Language Teaching (ELT) contexts, particularly for higher secondary students. Drawing on task-based language teaching principles, this research demonstrates how structured self-introduction practice builds vocabulary, grammar, sentence structure, and communicative competence. By implementing student-centered activities tailored to diverse learner abilities, the study provides evidence of practical improvements in language proficiency and real-world communication. The findings suggest that LSRW-integrated pedagogy enhances learners' confidence and functional language use through authentic communicative tasks.
Copyright (c) 2026 Journal of the English Literator Society
Windows and Mirrors: The Role of Multicultural Narratives in Shaping Empathy in Children’s and Young Adult Literature
In contemporary multicultural and global societies, children and young adults are increasingly exposed to cultural diversity in their everyday lives. Literature written for young readers plays a significant role in shaping their understanding of themselves and others. Multicultural narratives in children’s and young adult literature introduce readers to diverse cultures, identities, and lived experiences, thereby fostering empathy and social awareness. This paper argues that multicultural literature is essential for fostering empathy, reducing prejudice, and promoting inclusive attitudes among young readers. Drawing on empathy theory, reader-response theory, and social learning and identity theories, the study examines how multicultural narratives influence both the emotional and cognitive development of children and adolescents. The paper also discusses the dual function of multicultural literature: affirming the identities of marginalized readers while expanding the perspectives of readers from dominant cultural backgrounds. In addition, challenges such as stereotyping, lack of authenticity, and limited integration of multicultural texts in educational settings are examined. The study concludes by emphasizing the importance of effective practices to maximize the empathetic and educational value of multicultural literature. Overall, the paper highlights the role of children’s and young adult literature as a powerful tool for promoting empathy, cross-cultural understanding, and social inclusion.
Artificial Intelligence and Ethical Paradigms in Adolescent Cinema: Implications for Mental Well-Being and Digital Health
This paper examines the intersection of artificial intelligence, ethical considerations, and mental well-being in children’s and adolescent literature as depicted in six seminal films: The Iron Giant (1999), Big Hero 6 (2014), WALL-E (2008), A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), Ralph Breaks the Internet (2018), and Next Gen (2018). Through close analysis of these narratives, the study explores how these films address critical ethical dilemmas, including the moral programming of AI, human-AI emotional bonds, and the psychological impacts of technological dependence. Furthermore, the paper investigates the representation of mental health issues, grief, identity formation, and digital culture, particularly in young audiences. The findings reveal the potential of these films not only to entertain but also to educate adolescents about the socio-ethical implications of AI in a rapidly digitizing world. This study aims to contribute to the discourse on digital health literacy and the role of AI-driven narratives in shaping adolescent values and well-being.
Changing Revered Spaces of Rural Tamil Nadu in Perumal Murugan’s “The Last Sacrifice” and “Magamuni”: A Spatial Analysis
The paper examines the transformation and reconfiguration of rural spaces in Tamil Nadu through a close reading of Perumal Murugan’s short stories “The Last Sacrifice” and “Magamuni.” Drawing on Spatial Theory, particularly the theories of critics such as Henri Lefebvre, Robert T. Tally Jr., and Nigel Thrift, the study examines how Murugan portrays rural space as a site of tension between continuity and disruption. The paper also analyses how religious practices and ritualistic beliefs can seep into secular, neutral, everyday spaces in rural Tamil Nadu, revealing how spatial boundaries are constantly negotiated through symbolic power. While “The Last Sacrifice” illuminates the negotiations of power and belief systems within ritualized rural settings, “Magamuni” portrays the psychological and material displacements that accompany the breakdown of traditional social frameworks. Together, these narratives show how Murugan’s fiction maps the evolving textures of rural existence, capturing both the resilience and vulnerability of communities confronting transformation. The paper argues that such literary representations provide valuable insight into the lived realities and spatial imaginations of contemporary rural Tamil Nadu.
The Role of ChatGPT in Teaching Writing Skills in Language Education
Conventionally, language acquisition techniques have proved effective, based on structured classroom approaches and face-to-face instruction. Although these methods are effective, they consume significant time and resources. Thus, such approaches restrict expandability and adaptability to meet the needs of diverse learners. The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based applications has altered the paradigm. Unlike traditional methods, ChatGPT uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to provide fast, customized responses on grammar, style, and coherence. It has high-order language-processing abilities, allowing learners to refine and revise their writing. It is consistent with modern ELT theories, which focus on the implementation of technology in the classroom that would promote learner autonomy. This research examines the potential of ChatGPT in the instruction and revision of writing skills, comparing it with traditional systems and recent teaching methods. The study takes a conceptual and comparative approach, using the existing literature and pedagogical theories to examine the role of ChatGPT in writing instruction.
Illustration of Jyotish, Astrology, and Shakun Shastra in Maharshi Valmiki’s Shrimad Valmiki Ramayan
The massive tree of the Indian knowledge system has numerous widespread and intense branches of ancient beliefs and practices. Religion, science, Ayurveda, palmistry, astrology, philosophy, classical dance, classical music, mathematics, medicine, surgery, jyotish, architecture, yoga, vastu-shastra, and literature are its leaves. Diverse spheres of wisdom corresponding to the above-mentioned domains are its fruits. Maharshi Valmiki was a great astrologer and a foreseer too. He was ‘trikaldarshi’ as he could see past the present and the future. His knowledge of ‘Jyotish vigyan’ was unparalleled. My paper focuses on the depiction of Jyotish along with various planetary positions and their effects on human lives, as written in Shrimad Valmikiya Ramayanam.
Recipes of Resistance: Food as Cultural Archive and Postcolonial Identity in South Indian Literature
Food is not only basic; it is an account of cultural echoes, defiance, and identity. This paper investigates how culinary narratives in South Indian literature act as a framework to explore social hierarchy, postcolonial hybridity, and gendered exploitation. With a thorough reading of texts of Shoba Narayan’s Kitchens of Gratitude, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, and Krish Ashok’s Masala Lab, the paper studies how food functions as both a plot of revolt and nostalgia. Kitchens and recipes, frequently set aside as domestic spaces, are redefined as cultural war fragments where caste, class, and colonial settlement bisect. The paper argues that the culinary projection in these texts describes above tradition and taste, acting as a device to conserve shared memory and confronting presiding histories. In Kitchens of Gratitude, food sets off a language of connection and acknowledgement, indicating Bangalore’s cosmopolitan cultural frame. Roy’s narrative in The God of Small Things confines food to caste ordering and restrained love by making use of culinary metaphors to analyze social injustice. Ashok’s Masala Lab, while scientific in tone, recovers the cultural importance of South Indian cooking, combining humor with a postcolonial declaration of identity. By gathering the views of postcolonial theory, cultural studies, and memory studies, this paper brings out in what way food narratives represent the expanding dynamics of South Indian identification. It argues that culinary literature is not just about recipes but also opposition, recollection, and the recovery of the suppressed.
From Kitchen to Community: How Axone Exposes Racism Against Northeast Indians in Urban India
This paper examines the Netflix film Axone (2019) as a cultural text that exposes the everyday racism experienced by people from the Northeast living in mainland India's metropolitan cities. Through the symbolic use of akhuni, a fermented soybean dish central to the narrative, the film reveals how Northeast Indians' food habits and cultural differences provoke prejudice and stereotyping. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of identity politics, cultural representation, and everyday racism, this study explores how Axone depicts the struggles of Northeastern migrants in mainland India as cultural “aliens” from the far Northeast region. Using qualitative film analysis and thematic interpretation, the paper argues that Axone documents microaggressions, discrimination, and the structural exclusion of an entire region within mainland India. The film also highlights community solidarity among people from Northeast India as a vital mechanism of survival. In this context, Axone functions as a critical cinematic intervention that challenges dominant metropolitan narratives and urges a reconsideration of race, identity, and cultural coexistence in contemporary India.
Cultural Conflict in Amy Tan's Novels: Chinese Heritage and American Modernity
Through the personal prism of familial ties, Amy Tan's novels regularly depict the conflict and negotiation between Western, particularly American, modernism and Chinese cultural traditions. Her books feature second-generation women who grow up in a secular, individualistic, English-speaking United States and first-generation Chinese immigrants who carry with them memories of war, sexism, and superstition. This paper examines how Amy Tan's key works, including The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God's Wife, The Bonesetter's Daughter, and The Hundred Secret Senses, address cultural differences. By focusing on recurrent themes such as mother-daughter conflict, food, language, miscommunication, superstition, gender roles, and the quest for selfhood, the analysis demonstrates how Amy Tan's characters progressively transition from rejecting, confusing, or being ashamed of Chinese culture to more nuanced, hybrid identities. The books depict culture as a dynamic process of translation, reinterpretation, and selective inheritance rather than a straightforward East-versus-West dichotomy. In the end, Amy Tan's work implies that while cultural differences cannot be eliminated, they can become a source of creativity and resilience when characters learn to hear each other's experiences across generational and cultural barriers.
Resistance against Patriarchy and Political Oppression: A Comparative Study of Mahasweta Devi’s Draupadi and Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits
Literature serves as a mirror to every nuance of change, providing the key to the labyrinth of history. Bengali author Mahasweta Devi’s Draupadi (1978) is narrated in the context of the Naxalite movement in British India. Chilean author Isabel Allende’s debut Spanish-language novel, The House of the Spirits (1982), is set during the repressive regime of Augusto Pinochet. Although these novels are set in different national contexts, they give voice and visibility to women's struggles and convey the interplay of politics, patriarchy, and the brute force of State power. The female protagonist Draupadi in Mahasweta Devi’s Draupadi and Alba in Allende’s The House of the Spirits are victims of sexual violence perpetrated by state authorities for political reasons. The intersection of gender, violence, and political circumstances is central to the stories of the people from the periphery, as Kimberle Williams Crenshaw proposes that a particular section of society is marginalized by oppression based on different types of identity markers, such as race, gender, class, sexual orientation, religion, etc. The assaults on Alba and Draupadi represent acts of terror to gain control over not only isolated women but also the communities of women in general. Despite the hardships they endure, both characters demonstrate resistance that defies their victimization. Alba’s inner strength and Draupadi’s courageous rebellion highlight the layered nature of female agency within oppressive circumstances. The depiction of their suffering, followed by defiance in the face of fear, offers a powerful commentary on the potential for reclaiming agency in mid-1970s Bengal and the early 1980s Chilean context of systemic oppression. By comparing the experiences of the female protagonists through the lens of intersectionality, this study highlights common themes of marginalisation, suffering, and resilience, while also acknowledging the distinct cultural and political contexts within each narrative.
Narrative Refusal: Mahasweta Devi’s Characters Who Refuse Redemption
Mahasweta Devi has occupied a singular position in Indian English literature for her uncompromising engagement with political injustice, gendered violence, and state oppression. Unlike conventional narratives that move towards reconciliation, healing, or moral closure, Devi's fiction persists in resisting redemption. This paper argues that Mahasweta Devi constructs characters who refuse sympathy, transformation, or ethical resolution to disturb the dominant expectations of narration. This study proposes "narrative refusal" as a conscious aesthetic and ethical strategy rather than a failure of narration, through a close reading of Draupadi, Stanadayini (Breast-Giver), and Rudali. Her protagonists do not emerge as redeemed victims or triumphant survivors but confront the readers with unresolved trauma, bodily exhaustion, and moral discomfort. Denying catharsis and closure, Devi places the onus of ethical responsibility on the reader, compelling confrontation rather than consolation. The paper draws on insights from narrative ethics, feminist theory, and anti-redemptive literary frameworks to demonstrate how refusal is converted into a radical political tool in Devi's writing. The study furthers existing scholarship on Devi by going beyond resistance-centred and empowerment-based approaches to position her as one of the writers of anti-redemptive political aesthetics within Indian feminist and subaltern literature.
Silence as Counter-Memory: Trauma, Resistance, and Feminist Testimony in Beloved and The Story of Zahra
The modern world has seen significant social and technological progress, but this progress has also exposed deeper wounds of history and identity. Women, especially, tend to remain silent, unheard, and unseen. Generally, silence means oppression in literature. However, in feminist writing, it means remembering, resisting, and articulating that which cannot be talked about. The article studies the role of silence as memory and resistance in two significant feminist works, Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Hanan al-Shaykh’s The Story of Zahra (1980). Both authors have illustrated women ensnared in violent patriarchal worlds where their pain, guilt, and trauma are expressed in silence and not in words. The silence in these pieces is a presence where memories linger, not an absence of sound. The study looks at Cathy Caruth’s concept of the “disrupted narrative” in terms of Judith Herman’s “temporal disruption” and Hélène Cixous’ “theory of language”, through Aleida Assmann’s “corporality”. In Beloved, Sethe's immobility suggests the constant dwelling with the memories of slavery and the pain of motherhood, and how the past never goes away. In The Story of Zahra, Zahra prefers silence as a form of survival, resistance, and life in the war-torn, oppressive, violent world. In the end, silence in these novels is a kind of counter-memory. It resists the imposition of dominant histories. In addition, it offers a voice when language fails. Morrison and al-Shaykh's conversion of silence into strength reveals their engagement with testimony and memory as survival.
Exploring Miller's Unnamed Revolutionary Leader’s Sacrifice in the Resurrection Blues
This study examines the unnamed revolutionary leader’s sacrifice to both invoke and dismantle the myths surrounding iconic sacrificial figures such as Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Jesus Christ. This essay focuses on how these sacrificial figures served society and sacrificed their lives for its benefit. This analysis seeks the unnamed Revolutionary leader as the potential "messiah" figure, and is explicitly designed to invoke these historical and spiritual parallels. Arthur Miller's Resurrection Blues is not only a satirical exploration of celebrity, media, and political exploitation, but also a portrayal of a great revolutionary leader’s sacrifice and spiritual yearning in a materialistic world. In the play, the Revolutionary leader’s treatment reveals the mechanisms by which society (corporatized, media-saturated, politically cynical) consumes, distorts, and neutralizes the transformative power of such figures. This essay suggests that the revolutionary leader's service to society, despite his own risk, is commendable. The sacrifice, which thoughtfully connects the unnamed leader to such pivotal historical and spiritual figures, is both insightful and compelling. Crafting a strong academic argument about these sacrificial figures will undoubtedly yield a powerful, relevant message for society or the present generation.
Copyright (c) 2025 Journal of the English Literator Society
Voices from Foreign Land: A Study of Select Diaspora Narratives of Rohinton Mistry
Diaspora is a social formation outside the nation of its origin. Diaspora deals with the uprooting, forced or voluntary, of the mass of people from their native ‘homeland’ and their ‘re-rooting’ in the foreign land. The word ‘diaspora’ comes from the Greek composite verb diasperiein-dia (meaning ‘through or across’) and speirein (meaning to sow/scatter). Diaspora means to scatter through/across, an act of dispersion or scattering. It is an act of gathering and settlement from the homeland to the host land, which is known as the new land. The term diaspora was not in circulation before the 1980s, and there was no evidence of diaspora theory before that decade. Rohinton Mistry is a writer of the Indian diaspora who settled in a foreign land and speaks about his diasporic consciousness of his homeland through his novels set in Canada. The main objective of the research article is to reveal voices from the cross-border using diasporic narratives in the novels of Rohinton Mistry.
Nowhere Women: The Double Marginalization of Denotified Tribal Women
Nowhere Women: The Double Marginalization of Denotified Tribal Women explores the layered oppression faced by women belonging to Denotified Tribes (DNTs) in India—communities historically branded as "criminal" under colonial law and still grappling with systemic exclusion. These women endure a unique intersection of caste-based stigma and gendered violence, rendering them invisible in both policy and public discourse. The paper examines how colonial legacies, such as the Criminal Tribes Act and its successor, the Habitual Offenders Act, continue to shape their socio-economic realities. It analyzes the failure of state mechanisms to adequately recognize and support DNT women, despite schemes like SEED and recommendations from commissions. Through a critical lens, the study highlights issues of identity denial, lack of access to education and healthcare, vulnerability to sexual violence, and absence from political representation. Ultimately, the paper calls for a reimagining of inclusion frameworks that center the voices and lived experiences of these "nowhere women"—those who exist at the margins of both caste and gender justice.
Children’s Literature in the Digital Era: The Indian Scenario
Children’s literature in the modern world is undergoing sea changes. The introduction of Information Communication Technology (ICT) has had an impact even on children’s literature. There have been changes not only in the contents but also in the way literature is presented to children. Advanced science has introduced many electronic gadgets, which have prompted children to be glued to them, reading, watching, or even listening to their favourite literature. Children of today are increasingly drawn to digital screens, and literature is being written for them, making it suitable for this medium. However, whatever is being said is applied to Western countries. In the Indian subcontinent, children’s literature is not so influenced by modern gadgets or ICT. Even the genre of children’s literature is being neglected in India. If at all it is in existence, it is only in the form of short stories or pictorial cartoons. Only a few Indian characters are popular among children. Characters from epics and puraanas are still used repeatedly by children filmmakers and publishers. This paper aims to analyze these issues. An effort has also been made to compare the present status of children’s literature of the West and that of India.
Gender Equality Through the Lens of Patriarchal Literature
This paper deals with the theme of gender equality through the lens of patriarchal literature, focusing on the works of Vijay Tendulkar, Mahasweta Devi, and Kamala Das. Each work reveals how patriarchy has shaped differences among gendered lives, silencing voices and restricting freedoms not only for women but also for society as a whole. In Tendulkar’s Silence! The Court is in Session, the play exposes the cruelty and rigid mindsets of societal institutions, particularly the courtroom, which shows gender differences and suppress women’s situation and voices. Mahasweta Devi’s Mother of 1084 highlights the intertwined oppressions of political and patriarchal forces, where a mother’s grief becomes inseparable from the larger struggle for justice. Kamala Das’s poems, especially An Introduction and The Old Playhouse, portray the tensions of self-expression and identity under marital and societal expectations. Her husband’s disapproval of her writing in English and his possessiveness underscore the emotional suffocation imposed on women. Through these analyses, the paper demonstrates how patriarchal systems perpetuate inequality through mechanisms of silence, control, and suppression. At the same time, it shows how literature functions as a space of resistance, offering voices of dissent and reimagining the dynamics of power, equality, and justice.
Childhood Grief and Trauma in The Discomfort of Evening and Western Lane
Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s The Discomfort of Evening (2018) and Chetna Maroo’s Western Lane (2023) are fictional narratives that examine the pervasive effects of childhood grief and trauma following the death of a central family member. Rijneveld’s novel, set within a reformed Christian family in rural Netherlands, portrays ten-year-old Jas’s trauma through grotesque imagery, bodily obsession, and fragmented consciousness, illustrating how grief embeds itself in both mind and body. Maroo’s work, situated in a British-Gujarati household, follows eleven-year-old Gopi, who channels her father’s unspoken sorrow through the disciplined repetition of squash, demonstrating how trauma can manifest through controlled physicality and heightened sensory perception. Both narratives foreground the relational, psychological, and socio-cultural dimensions of bereavement, highlighting how silence, memory, and domestic spaces shape emotional development and identity formation. This paper analyses these texts through the lens of Trauma Theory, drawing on Cathy Caruth, Judith Herman, and Bessel van der Kolk, to explore the embodied, relational, and cognitive consequences of unresolved loss. The study argues that grief is neither uniform nor predictable but is mediated by familial dynamics, cultural context, and interpersonal modelling, offering nuanced insights into literature’s representation of childhood trauma and the enduring imprint of bereavement.
An Ecocritical and Intersectional Exploration of Human and Non-Human Vulnerability
Climate change is not merely a scientific or environmental phenomenon but also a cultural, ethical, and narrative crisis explored profoundly in contemporary literature. This study investigates how environmental degradation becomes embedded in human lives through literary texts, adopting an ecocritical and intersectional framework. Moving beyond empirical climate data, it examines how literature captures subtle, cumulative harms—what Rob Nixon describes as “slow violence”—particularly on marginalized communities. Through novels, climate fiction, indigenous storytelling, and postcolonial narratives, the research analyzes how environmental trauma reshapes human experience, ethical consciousness, and social awareness. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s concept of “sympoiesis,” the study emphasizes the portrayal of multispecies interdependence, planetary interconnectedness, and relational responsibility toward non-human life. It also explores how literature engages with readers, cultivating ecological imagination, empathy, and ethical reflection. Finally, the research highlights literature’s role in pedagogy, activism, and cultural discourse, showing how narrative forms translate scientific and sociopolitical crises into ethical, emotional, and cultural knowledge. By bridging ecological awareness, justice the study calls for a reimagining of literary studies as a space where human and non-human futures are critically engaged, ethically navigated, and creatively envisioned in the Anthropocene.
Exploring the Role of Literature in Social Sustainability
This is a research article that explores this complicated aspect of literature in improving social sustainability. It will look at how literary work can help in the development of empathy, cognition, inclusion and positive social transformation in various communities. The paper has shown how literature impacted such values in the society, the struggle against bias and the encouragement to engage in common action through a critical analysis of the genre of literature as well as bridging the time gaps. The findings underline the extent to which the application of the literature can be deep as the tool of the social sustainability promotion and the establishment of the more equal and peaceful society. The literature has a significant role to play in social integration, strength, and overall wellbeing in terms of empathy, adequate discourse, and empowering individuals. Literature is also one of the best educators that help in strengthening the critical thinking and citizenship. It is through literature that future generations have the ability to be informed, empathetic, and socially aware citizens of the world through practicing the multivocality and multi-storifying within the academic curriculum. This study highlights the significance of literature in creating empathy, disrupting the prevailing paradigms, and causing positive social change and may eventually result in the creation of a more stable and just world.
An Ecocritical and Cultural Approach to Dhruv Bhatt’s Select Novels
The scientific advancements and developments of the 21st century have been achieved at the expense of nature, and humans have lost harmony with it, putting themselves under threat to their own survival. Literature also explores these concerns and studies them through the theory of Ecocriticism that developed in the 1990s. The concept of Ecocritism is a global discourse. In literature, the authors like Margaret Atwood, the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem, British-Turkish Elif Shafak, Indian Amitav Ghosh have meticulously raised the issue of the destruction of nature and the preservation of the same in their works. The human desire for controlling nature, gaining herculean powers, eternal strength and beauty etc. have created havoc, and therefore advocated nature and viewing the discourse of Ecocriticism from the non-Euro-Centric perspective is extremely needed. Writers like Ghosh and Bhatt have been talking about nature and Ecocriticism from the standpoint of the Global South. Ecocriticism focuses on the analysis of the man-nature relationship and also studies its reflection in literature. Thus, the study pinpoints the novels of Dhruv Bhatt by centralizing the Ecocritical theory and establishing the connection between the modern-day society and nature, or nature and human relation.
Narrating Identity: Literature, Inclusion, and the Pluralistic Experience
In an increasingly interconnected and multicultural world, literature serves as a vital platform for exploring the complexities of diversity, inclusion, identity and representation. This paper examines how literary expression amplifies marginalized voices, challenges deeply rooted social hierarchies, and reshapes cultural consciousness. By analyzing postcolonial, diasporic, queer, gendered and multilingual narratives, the study highlights the ways in which literature negotiates identity and belonging across temporal and spatial boundaries. The research further investigates contemporary literary landscapes, including digital and global platforms, which expand the accessibility and visibility of diverse voices. Through theoretical engagement with intersectionality, hybridity, and performativity, the paper demonstrates the transformative power of inclusive narratives in cultivating empathy, cultural understanding, and social equity. Ultimately, this study argues that literature is not merely a reflection of society but an active agent in redefining identity, promoting inclusion and constructing a shared yet pluralistic human experience.
Queering Dharma: Gender Fluidity and the Politics of Desire in Devdutt Pattanaik’s The Pregnant King
Devdutt Pattanaik’s The Pregnant King (2008) reimagines an obscure episode from the Mahabharata to interrogate the intersections of gender, dharma, and desire in Indian cultural consciousness. Through the story of King Yuvanashva, who accidentally becomes pregnant, Pattanaik reconfigures myth as a dynamic site for negotiating questions of identity, power, and moral order. Drawing on queer theory and feminist thought; particularly Judith Butler’s notion of gender performativity, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s understanding of queer subjectivity, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s idea of the subaltern and this paper argues that The Pregnant King queers both kingship and dharma. It exposes how patriarchal epistemologies shape the limits of recognition, while myth itself becomes a space of resistance and fluidity. By queering cultural memory, Pattanaik recovers suppressed voices and destabilizes binary constructions of masculinity and femininity. Ultimately, the novel reveals the radical potential of mythic retelling to question normative moral frameworks and to contribute to contemporary discourses of gender justice and inclusivity.
Hanwell to Hell: A Study of Zadie Smith's Perspectives on Postmodernism
This paper undertakes a comprehensive study of Zadie Smith’s Hanwell in Hell within the broader context of her literary work, situating it against the backdrop of postmodernist literary traditions. The study aims to investigate Smith’s negotiation with postmodern strategies such as fragmentation, metafiction and irony, while highlighting how she adapts these devices to address diasporic identity, cultural hybridity and existential concerns. The paper seeks to analyze the textual and thematic implications of postmodernism in her works and assess how her narratives move beyond relativism to articulate ethical, cultural and diasporic dimensions of identity. Through qualitative close reading, discourse analysis and intertextual mapping, the research interprets the paradigmatic shift in her fiction. The novel portrays Hanwell as he confronts memory, mortality and alienation, dramatizing postmodern fragmentation while retaining a deeply human center. The implied theory includes Hutcheon’s historiographic metafiction and Baudrillard’s simulacra, supplemented by postcolonial and metamodern readings. The research findings suggest that her fiction reflects a hybridized postmodernism and employs postmodern strategies as tools to interrogate diaspora, memory and cultural displacement.
Salaam Venky: The Demands of Care and the Dilemma of Consent
Chronic illness derails the life of both the patient and the caregiver. It puts people in situations for which one may never be prepared. It brings up morally challenging situations forcing people to act against ones wishes or forces the law of the land to look ahead of the times, beyond the established norm of the day. This paper is an attempt to understand the struggles of caregivers and patients in the face of a debilitating illness, the demands of caring and the question of consent. The paper analyses the movie Salaam Venky, which is about a person with degenerative disease who wishes to donate organs but fails to do so as there is no provision for harvesting vital organs from a living donor. Consent and care are vital aspects of treating chronic illness. One can only imagine the plight of caregivers who have to wage war against the established norms of the society while hope is too distant and the situation is too grim.
Motherhood, Motherland, and the Gendered Refugee Experience in Contemporary Slam Poetry
The gendered conception of a ‘mother’ nation is a recurring trope in nationalist literature that constructs the woman's body as a bearer of nationalist cultural values and its idealised citizen, while nationalism itself becomes a masculine ideal. The paper examines how slam poets like Rafeef Ziadah, Emitithal Mahmoud, and Muna Abdulahi vocalise their diasporic experience and reinvigorate memories of a diminishing motherland. Through a few select works of these writers, this paper intends to trace the contemporary re-formulations of the ‘mother-ised’ land amidst intergenerational and transnational refugee women forced to flee from their homes due to genocidal violence. The paper hopes to show how the conflation of the body of the nation with the body of the woman goes beyond implications of patriarchal control to draw out a matrilineal heritage of blood and bonds to a homeland quickly disappearing under genocidal threats. In such cases, the woman's body also bears witness to the violence imposed on the land/body. Moreover, the paper also analyses the diasporic experience and identity formulation of the daughters of refugees, and how it is often built on links to the motherland, formulated almost entirely on nostalgic cultural impressions and traditions relayed through maternal bonds.
Memory, Translation, and Mobility: Hybrid Identity Practices in Amy Tan’s Postcolonial Narratives
Amy Tan theorises, dramatises, and complicates hybridity and cultural negotiation as lived practices of identity formation across generations, languages, geographies, and political regimes in her six major novels: The Joy Luck Club (1989), The Kitchen God's Wife (1991), The Hundred Secret Senses (1995), The Bonesetter's Daughter (2001), Saving Fish from Drowning (2005), and The Valley of Amazement (2013). This paper makes the case, drawing on postcolonial and transnational frameworks, that Amy Tan's work positions diasporic subjects in intersubjective spaces mother/daughter, sister/sister, tourist/local, where translation, superstition, trauma, and storytelling serve as mediating technologies of hybrid identity. Amy Tan's work stages "being" and "becoming" as dynamic negotiations between ancestral memory and modern adaptation. The reading generates three claims: first, that Amy Tan's distinctive mother-daughter architecture exemplifies an ethics of hybridity based on intergenerational discourse; second, that Amy Tan's subsequent transnational turn expands hybrid negotiation from domestic ethnic relations to cross-border, geopolitical encounters; and third, that Amy Tan's narrative poetics frame tales, spectral narration, and polyphonic structure perform hybridity both thematically and formally. In addition to providing careful readings of significant passages in each book, the study synthesises critical knowledge on Chinese American literature, diaspora, hybridity, and transnationalism. Amy Tan is reframed in the end as a cultural negotiation theorist and novelist whose works shed light on the ways in which memory, mediation, and movement are used to re-author identities.
Immigrant Narratives in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's The Vine of Desire: A Critical Analysis
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Vine of Desire intricately explores the emotional and psychological complexities of cross-cultural encounters through the lives of two Indian women navigating immigration, identity, and adaptation in a foreign land. This paper critically examines the novel’s portrayal of immigrant dilemmas, including cultural dislocation, emotional fragmentation, and the conflict between tradition and modernity. Divakaruni deftly weaves personal narratives with broader socio-cultural commentary, particularly emphasising Sudha’s struggle to reconcile her Indian values with the demands of American society. The novel illuminates how immigrant identities are neither fixed nor singular but constantly evolving under pressure from memory, exile, and new affiliations. Through her characters' experiences of loneliness, loss, and longing, Divakaruni foregrounds the gendered Aspect of migration, highlighting how women often bear the double burden of cultural preservation and personal reinvention. This paper draws on postcolonial and diasporic theoretical frameworks to interrogate themes of hybridity, nostalgia, and self-redefinition. The Vine of Desire presents a poignant meditation on the immigrant experience, highlighting the costs of cultural displacement and the potential for transformation through empathy and resilience.
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