About the Book
Culture, Transformation and Identity captures the excitement of the nineteen creative and exploratory essays concerning journeys, physical and psychological, in search of knowledge and spiritual peace, escape from oneself or one’s past, a new beginning or a search for roots and identity, adventure and conquest, business or trade. Opening out multidimensional movement of imagination and through cross-cultural dialogue some eminent writers here deal with constructs of identity and nation, community and belonging and open up confined spaces.
The relationship of travel to history and knowledge constructs in the Vedic texts, the transformation brought about by the spread of Buddhism, the precolonial and postcolonial points of view of representation of China, the intellectual shifts in life of Gandhi, Iqbal’s and Naipaul’s dilemma of belonging and non-belonging, Hemingway’s love for Spain and bullfighting, Lessing’s view’s about home, memory and identity, Imtiaz Dharkar’s multicultural experiences of Pakistan, India and England, Gilbert’s imbibing of life’s precepts from India and Indonesia and many more cultural transformations and identity crisis are dealt with by renowned creative writers and critics.
Traversing a wide range from religion to politics, from personal to the national, from the different markers of culture as cuisine to the different markers of power as trade and empathy these essays express the immense possibilities of human mind as well as interpersonal strategies at work.
Contents
1 Transformations / Eunice de Souza
2 Passing on Travel Lessons / Karen Swenson
3 Time and Space Travel in Ancient Vedic Texts / Divya Joshi
4 The Pilgrimage of Buddhist Epistemology in the Asian Space / Ranjana Jaitly
5 The Memsahibs / Bandana Chakrabarty
6 Gandhi’s Journey / S. Asha
7 Dynamics of Evolutionary Reflections / Samina Khan
8 Northrop Frye / Pooja Joshi
9 The Essence of Spain in Hemingway’s Work / Shahla Ghauri
10 Microcosms in R.K. Narayan’s My Days and My Dateless Diary / Prerna Vanjani
11 Geoscapes of the Mind / Jasbir Jain
12 From Behind the Veil and Beyond / Rimika Singhvi
13 Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing in Vassanji’s A Place Within / Sangeeta Handa
14 Journeys to her Homeland / Preeti Bhatt and Manju Nemad
15 Travelling Subjectivities and Bridging Discourses in Ghosh’s The Glass Palace / Urmil Talwar
16 Reviewing the Orient / Santosh Gupta
17 Sojourns in the Geoscapes of the Mind / Rama Hirawat
18 The Self in Transit / Namita Singh
19 Travel and Transformation of the Self / Akansha Kaushik
About the Author / Editor
Urmil Talwar has been teaching English at various government colleges in Rajasthan since 1982. Presently posted at B.G.D. Government Girls College, Shahpura, she is working on her postdoctoral thesis on Border Poetics in the Fiction of Amitav Ghosh. Her translated stories from Hindi to English were published in Journal of Literature and Aesthetics and in 23 Stories. She has authored and co-edited books and has also presented papers in national and international seminars and conferences in India, France and Spain.
Bandana Chakrabarty, presently working as Principal, Rajasthan School of Art, Jaipur, has taught English at various government colleges of Rajasthan since 1980. Author of Fictions of the Self: Alice Munro and co-editor of Contemporary Indian Drama and Embracing Glocal English, she has presented papers in national and international conferences. Her areas of interest include Canadian Literature, Indian English Fiction and Comparative Literature.
