In recent years the scholastic emphasis on the refugee narratives, which conventionally focused on the loss of lives, homes and resources, is now reimagined as stories of survival and resurrection of people deprived of their homes. Nostalgia for a lost homeland often takes centre stage in refugee narratives. To be physically severed from a space internalised as the safest eternal abode and start afresh is a daunting task. Anchita Ghatak’s translation of Sunanda Sikdar’s Dayamoyeer Katha, A Life Long Ago narrates the life events of Dayamoyee, who chooses to revisit her past, deciding to write about the first ten years of her life in the East Pakistan village of Dighpait following the death of Majamda, a Muslim brotherly figure who sells his cows to come and meet her in India. The return to her childhood’s blissful land unearthed several hidden memories that brought the politics of religion, caste, class, and gender to the forefront. Without paying attention to her aunt’s continuous warnings not to mingle with the Muslim neighbours, Daya found it possible to eat, touch, and have fun with them in her childlike innocence. As the refugees arrive at Dighpait, her aunt remains unwilling to equate them with the native Muslim folk, the ‘bhoomiputra, the “sons of the soil”. Besides the narrator, we also have Snehalata, Daya’s aunt, her foster mother and a child widow. As she narrates how she grieved over the withdrawal of fish and other materialistic pleasures from her daily life rather than her young husband’s demise, we are reminded of the unfair austerity imposed on them in contrast to the elderly widowers who had no restrictions and even remarried occasionally. Characters like Modi bhabi, the woman who lost her mind as her childhood companion Suresh Lahiri left for Hindustan; Mejobhabi, wife of Khalek, who had to be ‘modernised’ to join her husband, now a senior army officer in Pakistan; Sudhirdada, the effeminate male whose murder portrays a show of power in the village, and Gouri, an instance of widow-remarriage needs scholarly attention. The novel further mentions Daya’s mother, the headmistress of a school in Hindustan, and Anita, a leading actress opposite Kishore Kumar, thus representing the educated, empowered women. The very moment of Daya deciding to write about her past is auspicious; it is the moment of finding one’s voice, of illuminating the horrors of the past, and the moment of triumph and healing. Dipesh Chakraborty mentions two aspects of memory: “the sentiment of nostalgia” and the “sense of trauma”, which pervades Dayamoyee’s narrative, but for her, it is equally therapeutic. The proposed paper looks forward to understanding Daya’s notion of her lost motherland and childhood and how the marginalised gender conceptualises home and rootedness. It proposes to analyse the politics of remembering, forgetting and retelling the stories from the point of the female subaltern who consciously buried her past and later chose to speak up, and in the process, portrayed a realistic picture of women during partition.

Claude Levi Strauss coined the term 'floating signifier' by which he means “to represent an undetermined quantity of signification, in itself void of meaning and thus opt to receive any meaning” (Levi Strauss p. 56). Fundamentally, the term refers to the disorientation of the connection between the signifier and the signified in the Saussurian sense. Its reception as a non-linguistic sign is quite popular nowadays. This paper seeks to investigate the portrayal of Ralph Singh, the protagonist of V. S Naipaul’s novel; The Mimic Men (1967), and interpret all the possible factors that justify him as a non-linguistic floating signifier. Ralph Ranjit Kripal Singh or Ralph Singh is a Hindu born, lives in a fictitious Caribbean Island, Isabella. He later goes to England for his education, where he marries an English woman named Sandra. He comes back to Isabella and then travels back to England again. Ralph feels displaced from his real root to be a part of the country which he could not relate himself to and eventually metamorphoses into a ‘sign’. In the novel, wherever he travels, Ralph strives to make his life meaningful and significant. But every time his effort ends up in an insignificant way. So, throughout the novel, Ralph Singh behaves as a floating signifier but wishes to be signified. This paper also explores the relationship between displacement and diaspora, and its correlation to the floating signifier. The final purpose of this article is to ignite the discourse of the diaspora from an entirely different perspective.

For the children of families that have experienced partition, relating to roots and a place of belonging is never without complications. They tend to relocate themselves multiple times in physical places as well as mental spaces. Unfortunately, the final settling never takes place for them, neither in the new place, where the family relocates to, nor in the mind that is a storehouse of experiences of migration. They remain ‘in-between’ and continue negotiating between the past and the present through fragmented as well as tormented memories. This paper attempts to study the complexity of belongingness for those who have lived the experiences of the Partition and how this complexity continues across generations. This will be done through a methodology of writing personal narrative and reviewing testimonies of those who experienced the Partition, along with the members of their families. The primary sources for this paper are personal testimonies of the family members, community magazine Pothohar, the short story ‘Bhenji Parmeshri’ based on the oral tales narrated by the researcher’s grandmother, films Sardar Mohammad (2017) and Eh Janam Tumahare Lekhe (2015) and a testimony of Mohinder Kaur in the newspaper. The paper will evaluate the experience of those who suffered owing to Partition by connecting the contact points, like experience of migration, displacement of families, killing of daughters by their fathers etc. as depicted in the texts and testimonies taken for the study. Personally, the researcher’s grandfather, Harbans Singh lived for 102 years witnessing and participating in events around the Freedom Movement, the Partition of India, the 1971 war with Pakistan, the Emergency, the 1984 anti-Sikh massacres, and finally the recent pandemic (COVI-19). At all major incidences he suffered personal losses. While throughout his life, he kept narrating his experiences of the Partition and the eventual victims’ migration to India, but towards the end of his life, he refused to talk about it anymore. He became very selective in his choice of subject for a conversation. Nevertheless, his village and place of birth, never skipped him. Even in his dementia, any reference to his birthplace would attract his attention. The paper is an attempt to study how physical places become permanent fixatures and sites of memory that surface at a slightest trigger. These incidences are the deepest traumatic sites that never recover.

Edward Said, in his seminal work Orientalism, opined that the colonialist thought process (the notion that the West is superior to the East) did not come to an end when the colonial rule ended, but continued in varied forms. The vision of the Northeast within the borderlines of India reiterates this idea when one envisions the area through the lenses of mainstream ‘Indo-Aryan' and ‘Dravidian' cultural practices. Often termed as a ‘conflict zone', the Northeast has always had a tense relationship with ‘mainland' India, due to the differences in opinion regarding societal and cultural practices, food habits, territorial squabbles, and religion. When it came to the representation part of the Northeast in various art forms, it almost always got moulded by the mainstream imagination, which had nothing to do with real life practices related to the Northeast, and Bollywood movies act as the perfect canvas for this. This paper would attempt to contextualize the (mis)representation of identity, challenges, contestation in the portrayal of Northeast, the evolution of the process ‘othering’ of the characters belonging to the region in the mainstream Bollywood films, like Tango Charlie (2005), Chak de India (2007), Mary Kom (2014), Pink (2016), and the recent web series Axone (2019). Incisively speaking, the paper would also gyrate around some major concerns like the problematic position of Northeastern consciousness amid the ideology of one-nation-one-language that has been perpetrated in certain ways since the Nehruvian times, typecasting characters while portraying them in popular Bollywood movies, casting actors belonging to the Northeast into stereotypical roles, bereft of variety, and ultimately how off-beat cinematic presentations in OTT platforms have poised thought-provoking questions as counter-narratives to mainstream Bollywood movies of the past.

Literature reflects society in various ways. Displacement implies crisis of identity. The history of colonialism has occupied a large space in portraying the displacement of individuals across cultures. It has left a wound in everybody’s heart since driving an individual away from his/her native land is synonymous to deprive him/her of the right to breathe. Partition narratives form the part and parcel of displacement as a separate branch of studies. When a nation is fractured the trauma of losing one’s land creates a wound in the psyche and it has been contextualized by various writers during the pre and post phases of partition. They have focused on the physical, mental, social and above all the psychological wounds of individuals who have lost their native land. The documentation of partition narratives is of various layers and gender discourse is a significant component of this. Partition has revealed the hidden wounds of women’s bodies which have always been the site of oppression. They were abducted, raped, mutilated and they have been left as mere living beings. The present paper attempts to explore the effect of partition on women through the analysis of short stories written by Shobha Rao. Urvashi Butalia, Nivedita Menon, Kamla Bhasin have been extensively exploring the displacement of women in the context of partition and their narratives focus on the traumatic experiences of displacement and how that reduce their identities since they are merely considered as ‘bodies’. Shobha Rao, known as an American novelist immigrating from India has extensively focused on women’s oppression in various contexts. In the collection of short stories called An Unrestored Woman Rao is concentrating on the abducted women being returned to their own lands in the context of the Abducted Persons (Recovery and Restoration) Act in 1949. The proposed paper is going to examine Rao’s texts in the context of partition to trace the nature of displacement, trauma and quest to find their own identity.

Displacement for survival, perhaps since the inception of life on the earth, has been a marked feature of the animal kingdom—be it birds, mammals, reptiles, or human beings. However, these are only human beings who migrate not just for survival but also for a better life. In this very context, the present paper deliberates on the migration of Punjabis to England, America, and Canada through some of the short stories in Punjabi produced by the migrants settled in these countries. The stories have been taken from an anthology titled Punjabi Parvasian Dian Kahanian (The Stories from Migrant Punjabis), edited by Jinder and Baldev Singh Baddan. The selected stories bring forth the diasporic people’s desires, sometimes lust also, to enjoy the riches and the glamorous life of the western countries and their struggles for success in foreign lands. This literary response is a collection of mixed experiences. On the one hand, it exhibits bewilderment at the incompatibility with the new culture, a sense of alienation, and the sacrifices of health and ethics to reach prosperity; on the other, it brings forth how the migrants learn to explore themselves, gain independence (especially women) and shed their weaknesses and narrow attitudes in the new liberal environments. This study also includes the problem of illegal migration, the vice of greed behind it, the resultant fear and frustration, and how it results in turning humans into not-less-than-beasts.

Gender violence is one of the major social issues which needs proper attention. It is one of the worst crimes of human society. ‘Gender Violence’ is an umbrella term that includes a large number of crimes directly or indirectly posed against a person’s sexuality. Several crimes like domestic violence, marital rape, human trafficking, honor killing, and other such abuses are heinous realities of the contemporary Indian society. To a large extent, the trauma of gender violence is not only physical but also psychological. Sadly, it has remained neglected for a very long period. However, by the twentieth century, voices fighting against such issues have gained wide recognition. The literary representation of sexual violence in Indian English literature is a way of giving voice to silent unheard victims and is worth critical attention. Jaishree Misra is a contemporary Indian English novelist delineating various socio-cultural issues of the contemporary Indian society through her large gamut of literary works. Her novel Afterwards (2004) deals with the life of a woman named Maya, trapped in a loveless and suffocating marriage. This research paper attempts to study the textual representation of sexual violence in the contemporary Indian English fictions with special attention to the selected literary work.

Tragically, human history has always been determined by the experience of being exiled. This has been discussed in historical documents and especially in literary texts throughout time. The present essay first reflects on the wide range of examples for this topic, and then illustrates it through a critical reading of the Old High German heroic poem, “Hildebrandslied,” and the Middle High German heroic epic, Nibelungenlied. Each time, the experience of exile is described in moving, horrific terms and utilized as a metaphor of the tragedy of the human existence. Insofar as these two medieval examples strike us as so timeless and universal, we can recognize here, once again, the great significance of medieval literature for the exploration of fundamental aspects in our lives, particularly in extreme cases.

Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea both have been influenced by anarchism, Discordianism and conspiracy theories. They both use conspiracy theories about Illuminati, knights Templars, Freemasons and New World Order, anti-semitism, end time prophecies of the Bible and world domination plans etc. Their main genre of writing is conspiracy fiction. Conspiracy fiction is a sub-genre of thriller fiction. Both the authors have filled their works with various types of conspiracy theories and thrilling feel. The focus of the present research paper is on the use of conspiracy theories in The Illuminatus! Trilogy. Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea made this trilogy one of the best works in the field of conspiracy fiction. Although the writers have used several of them, in the present paper only use of the New World Order conspiracy theories and secret societies, especially the Illuminati conspiracy theories will be analyzed. The study of conspiracy theories is an emerging field and little work has been done on this topic. So, the present paper will enrich the information about conspiracy theories and conspiracy fiction.

Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, the Nobel Laureate, is a celebrated name in the world of literature. He is known for his precise and remarkable prose writings. He won numerous accolades for his precision in fiction and non-fiction. His works are replete with insight and acute observation of master craftsmanship. He was an Indian-origin Trinidadian-born British Citizen. During his upbringing, he got the Indian atmosphere at his home but he could never connect himself the way his ancestors did with the land and the people. He, himself, admits that he only knew his mother and father beyond that his ancestry is “blurred”. From his childhood, he heard so many stories about India that there developed a sort of fascination for the land. He decided to visit India and finally, he paid his first visit in the 60s. India has been a land of wonders for people around the world. Those, who never had been here read about the land and the people through the travelogues. He wrote three books on India which are known as The Indian Trilogy. Though they are controversial in nature, the minute observation of the author is laudable. Apart from the trilogy he wrote six essays between (1962 and 2006) namely – In the middle of the journey (1962), Jamshed into Jimmy (1963), A Second Visit (1967), The election in Ajmer (1971), Looking and not Seeing: the Indian way (2005-2006), India Again: the Mahatma and After (2005-2006). The paper is an endeavor to highlight his prejudices, his biased nature, and his malignity towards India and her people.

The soul and spirit of morality have been transmitted to children from generation to generation through stories. Stories play a significant role in the mental growth and character-building of children. Storybooks are a wonderful source of inspiration and lay a strong foundation for their future life. Reading storybooks helps children to increase their confidence, handle emotions, and cope up with problems. It also develops their imagination power, language skills, and learning. The multi-faceted prolific children’s author Sudha Murthy’s contribution to the field of children’s literature is a hallmark in Indian English literature. Her children’s stories dealt with the importance of family bonds and concern towards society and fellow beings. The characters in her stories help the children to understand our culture and tradition. The paper tries to analyze three such books of children's stories by Sudha Murthy in the light of the theories of ‘tabula rasa’ and ‘Kohlberg's Theory of moral judgment’. The paper focuses on How I Taught My Grandmother to Read and Other Stories, Grandma’s Bag of Stories, and The Magic Drum and Other Favourite Stories’ and the moral values inculcated in them.

This paper aims to analyse the lessons about truth and relevance that may be gained from literature by reading George Orwell's dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four in the context of philosopher Stanley Cavell's idea of “living scepticism”. According to the idea, we can view the novel as a representation of life under a totalitarian system. The protagonists in the totalitarian society of the novel experience this experienced scepticism, which is a state of confusion and doubt brought on by indoctrination as well as physical and psychological punishment. The three main types of authoritarian experiences that are imagined in the book are scepticism of the outside world, scepticism of language, and scepticism of other people's brains. The focus of the article is on the scepticism of other minds and totalitarian lived meaning among these three. It explicitly inquires as to who may be the “perfect case” in order for the main character to appreciate the viewpoints of others. Intimacy, privacy, love, brutality, and knowledge are all related in some way in the novel's imagined world. The article contends that through exposing us to The Party's peculiar unlearning pedagogy, Orwell's writing offers us a nightmare image of the elimination of the possibilities for love. What does it mean at the book's conclusion for the main character to “love” Big Brother? In the dystopian society of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the reader might utilise these crucial questions to assess her own moral and intellectual limits. Can you imagine being so obsessed with Big Brother? Or does the use of the term "love" in this situation simply aim to provide the reader the ability to distinguish between speech that makes sense and speech that doesn't?

Postcolonial Indian society appears to have achieved political freedom but has yet to get social freedom. The modern, democratic Indian society is not yet free as for as the caste system, the unequal distribution of wealth, the safety and security of women, minorities and children, and so on are concerned. The term social exclusion or social marginalisation means ostracization or alienation of an individual or a community as a whole on the base of wealth, social status, caste, class, religion, gender etc. This paper offers a critique of Arundhati Roy’s second published novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness in 2017 to understand the integration of the theme of social exclusion and subalternation in the novel. The novel is fundamentally a painful story of everyone and everything oppressed and suppressed and drifting to the margins of society by the powerful class. The narrative is dedicated to ‘The Unconsoled’ such as the Hijras, the outcasts, women, the Kashmiris, the disappeared, the displaced so on and so forth. The novel transports us on a journey that spans many years, from the claustrophobic Old Delhi neighbourhoods to the escalating new metropolis and beyond, to the Kashmir Valley and the forests of central India, where war is concord and concord is war, and where, occasionally, normality is avowed.

Feminine sensibilities and gender issues are based on different cultures and diasporic essence. The desire and aspirations of women of different countries are not similar. Their demands are influenced by a number of variables, including familial, societal/racial, marital, economic, cultural, and personal ones. It is considered incorrect to compare Indian feminism to western feminism, which is characterised by radical rules, in such a varied culture. In its early stages, Indian feminism was wholly liberal and addressed every facet of mankind. There hasn't been a significant political or social uprising in India against the male-dominated culture. In beginning, they seek to address the inequality and dissimilarity that existed between males and females. They desired to bridge the gaps between men and women through their social revolt and provide the psychological reason for the male violence against women. Some feminist intellectuals extended the gender issues focusing the intention on rape and other forms of sexual violence. To them, such gender issues of exploitation are because of the male dominant society. They agree with Liberal feminists that material change and patriarchy is the sole reason for women's discrimination. They argue against the existing tradition of love, marriage, and gender inequality and demand equal social rights. The women writers like Shashi Deshpande have used fiction to explore and share their experiences. The myriad conflicts, which they face in everyday lives, are woven into the fictional world of their creation. To Shashi Deshpande, traditional beliefs also play a major role in female discrimination.

The metro cities of India are under the influence of the real estate business. Mumbai, the center of India's commerce, is not exempt from the gentrification process. Mumbai is a city of new money and rising real estate in the twenty-first century. The novel Last Man in Tower raises the issues of globalization and redevelopment in Mumbai in the last few years. Further, Globalization has widely affected the morals of the social and cultural arena too. The novel also examines how English literature is affected by the ever-evolving current trends in the postcolonial age by globalisation, which is a sort of neo-colonialism. Like his debut novel The White Tiger, this novel also, Adiga has become the voice of the marginalized section by exposing the pitfall of urban development. This propulsive, explosive, insightful story coming out of the signature wit and magic of Adiga presents several interlinked issues of the teeming city of Mumbai. With great courage, Aravind Adiga explores the theme of lawlessness as the protagonist, Master Yogesh Murthy fails to receive justice and support from law, order, and even from the media. The crux of the novel revolves around the duality of human existence in the modern world and raises the question of whose rights should be preserved in case of a conflict between an individual and society. There are grave consequences of the redevelopment of societies which include not the only issue of compensation but also the larger issue of the acquisition of land, resettlement, rehabilitation, and participation in negotiation which can mitigate the darker side of redevelopment. The novel may be acclaimed as an example of post-modernist ethos seeking to explore the modern way of life. The present paper attempts to throw light on redevelopment and its social, economic, and political impact on society.

Patriarchy is systematically a set of rules in which a male dominates over a female in every aspect of life. Even children also suffer in this patriarchal system. The literal meaning of ‘Patriarchy’ is “the rule of the father.” The word 'Patriarchy' originated from a Greek word which is a combination of two words; ‘patria’ means ‘lineage, descent, family, fatherland’ and the other is ‘arkhe’ means ‘domination, authority, sovereignty’. It is a system which subordinates women in both private and public life. For the ages, men relish the supreme position and women have been subservient to them. Society assumes men as superior to women. They are considered as inferior and less intellectual and are made to follow male authorities and ideologies. The patriarchal ideologies consider women only as a housewife and men as a leader of social, political and economic authorities. They experience domination, discrimination, oppression, control, insult and violence within family as well as in society. Although in contemporary society, a number of women try to resist and revolt against dominating authorities to get equal rights yet many of them relinquish their lives silently at the hand of heinous offenses of patriarchy. This system is very common in India and across the world. Females encounter physical or verbal abuses in their family and sometimes at public place too.

Patriarchal domination and female submissiveness are common phenomena in almost all societies and cultures. Shashi Deshpande, an Indian female novelist, describes all kinds of visible and invisible physical, psychological, and ideological oppression caused by patriarchy in microscopic details in her novels The Dark Holds No Terrors and Roots and Shadows. Deshpande celebrates the freedom of women by creating two strong female characters, Sarita and Indu, who pay attention to their inner consciences, celebrating female emancipation and feminine identity. The patriarchy controls a notable proportion of female characters in English literature who remain silent, passive, and inactive. William Shakespeare's Desdemona, Ophelia, Thomas Hardy's Tess, Emily Bronte's Catherine, Isabella, Charlotte Bronte's Bertha Mason, and D. H. Lawrence's Miriam are all depicted as being helpless, frail, and feeble at the hands of patriarchy. Deshpande, on the other hand, is successful in showing how her female protagonists transform and become more aware of their place in society. Through these two selected novels, she depicts patriarchal dominance and the frustration that women encounter in marital relationships. Therefore, the general objective of this paper is to portray the lifelong struggle of women to find their genuine identities and a position for themselves in families, societies, and cultures. This study attempts to unravel the true nature of patriarchy, which persists in society in different shapes and forms to confine women by despising their inner strength and individuality.

Poetry has played pivot in healthcare system of the world as an alternative to medicine to heal the mental anguish of the readers.as well as the writers. It has immense impact on healing of the hurts of the readers. The power and potential of the poetry in palliative and hospice care is well proven. It has proven a panacea to both the patient and physicians in an ebullient way. The poetic therapy has been used by the experts in psychiatry to heal the angst, anguish, hurts of the minds of the people. Through poetry, mental health and peace of mind can be maintained with pace immeasurable. The waves of passion that runs through poet’s sensibility, soothes the senses of the readers. Poetry reading, writing and listening casts good therapeutic effects. Poetry provides peace, calmness, and tranquilly to the minds of the readers by elevating mood in distress and duress. Studies show that poetry therapy has proven a boon to patients suffering from serious ailments and to augment their emotional resilience and brings joy in their life. Our brains are electrified with rhyme and rhythm of the poetry to give emotional reaction to joy and sadness both. Like sweet melody of music, poetry heals our emotional hurts. The metaphors embellish the poetic lines with magical brilliance, and they glitter with astute meaning and message. Diction plays a very emphatic role in discerning poet’s leanings. Reflection, perception and attachment are interwoven in diction so inextricably that they turn poet’s mouthpiece, and roar and rave with perfect resonance to poetic experiences. The paper, however, pinpoints poetry’s indefinable role to heal mental stress, trauma, and agony and to maintain good mental health well. We will examine some poetic utterances of great romantic poet and physician John Keats and its therapeutic effects. We will also observe how the John Keats’ poetry radiates beams of healing and can play multifaceted role in healthcare.

With the advent of technology and globalization, the level of interaction is very high, and people are close to each other, due to this the social communication and exchange of values, opinions, and cultures are at their peak. This certainly plays a very important role in the society to understand new culturism and allows people to interact and mix with people from other parts of the world, accept other cultures, and express them in a variety of ways in order to promote economic development and accelerate social and indigenous progress. Media globalization and social change accelerate the flow of information and mutual intrusions of all kinds of cultures, which results in the assimilation of culture and its values and beliefs. The majority of people in society accept mass culture under the banner of pop culture. Cultural identity is a concept that exists in today’s globalized world but may have drastic change in recent decades. Considering all these facts, youth and cultural identity are inextricably linked. In the present era, the youth represent the main idea of cultural identity as they are frequently accepting new values and cultural patterns. Modern culture is a component of social development, and the impact of globalization and the development of the information society have given social capital a new direction. The effect of changing faces of people, especially the youth, is well marked in their expression as a popular culture. Popular culture is a kind of popularized culture among the masses, which is an outcome of media and social interactions. The representation of high culture and mass culture gives a new style to the traditional concept and is represented as a popular culture in the present scenario. The youth are very prone to change and symbolize popular culture. This is largely accepted by the majority of society’s members. The current study looked at the impact of traditional and modern factors on the emergence of cultural identity in the younger generation. The current study examines the growth and development of a new culture in society based on experience and perception that strengthens the youth group’s identity. The methodology used in the study was primary.  

Ethnic dehumanization occurs when an ethnic group thinks that the other ethnic group is not equal to it and can be treated as less than human. The debut novel of Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner manifests intangible situation between the Pashtuns and Hazaras who are two different ethnic groups in Afghanistan. The purpose of my paper is to deal with the concept of dehumanization, the reason for dehumanizing ethnicity and to analyses the effect of dehumanization depicted in Hosseini’s The Kite Runner. Theories of sociological and psychological approaches are used in this paper. Apart from Shia and Sunni sects, few Hindu, Sikh and Jew communities inhabit Afghanistan, but in this fragmented nation major issues of the conflict between Hazaras and Pashtuns have resulted in dehumanizing ethnicity. Hazaras are dehumanized by Pashtuns as they consider them as the poorest and weakest ethnic group in Afghan. Pashtuns consider themself superior than Hazaras because of physical appearance, religious’ beliefs and cultural practices. Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, highlights the issues of dehumanization and dehumanizing ethnicity which is the main reason of the bad effect on psychological health of oppressed ethnic people in Afghanistan. In this novel, Hosseini not only highlights the psychological and social health of Hassan but through Hassan he tries to give the glimpse of all Hazara’s psychological and social status. Dehumanization of ethnicity creates hate in one group of people by their fellow group of people and it divides the people into two groups in which one tries to repress others and sometimes it results in genocide, slavery and molestation. That’s why dehumanizing ethnicity is curse for the society because it creates discrimination at every level of humanity.

From time immemorial, India has been an important place for travel. The reasons for travel to India were many, ranging from pilgrimage, trade, and conquest to exploration and diplomacy, etc. The British traveled to India basically for trade. Invigorated by the improvements in travel and expanding British influence, there was a spurt in travel by not only British men but British women as well. These women travelers traveled for many personal and political reasons. Many travel writers came to India from different parts of the world and depicted it in their own ways. The British women also depicted India in their own peculiar ways. This paper seeks to study the travel account of Marianne Postans and Maria Graham to understand the ways in which they represent India.

This paper dubbed “A Sociolinguistic Assessment of language shift among Hyam speakers” examines the sociolinguistic concepts of language shift and its resultant effect of language death or extinction. This is against the backdrop that like many other minority languages, the Hyam language is still in competition with other more sophisticated and standard linguistic codes. To achieve this aim, a total of two hundred (200) structured questionnaires are administered to both the home and the Diaspora populations respectively. findings reveal that even though people speak the language with their children and still have native-like competence, a greater number of them still speak or prefer other language varieties. They equally do not use the language with their friends or non-native speakers because it is not mutually intelligible. Nevertheless, the degree of solidarity and loyalty for the Hyam language are still very high regardless. It is however disturbing to say that the language is not standardized, literatures are very much lacking in the language, making teaching and learning in it somewhat challenging; and it is still incapable of performing modern functions typical of a metropolitan variety. It is on this light that this research is quick to state, and also by way of recommendation, that if something is not done soon and fast particularly in the area of instruction, documentation and standardization, the shift though gradual for now, may become irreversible and language death may therefore become inevitable.

John Galsworthy, a contemporary playwright of G. B. Shaw, established realism in drama in the early 20^th century England. Through his plays, he exposed the socio-economic, socio-political, socio-cultural, and socio-legal problems in a realistic, sincere and impartial way, providing implied solutions to those problems as an objective observer of the contemporary English life. With objective impartiality, he exposed the wrong-headedness of some traditional beliefs and advocated social reform. The objective of the present paper is to expose the metaphors of tragic vision on account of class consciousness in John Galsworthy’s Strife followed by some implied solutions. The reasons of tragic vision are pride, lack of human insight, extreme and fanatical approach, rigidity, class consciousness, uncompromising stands, warring faction, obstinacy, and desire to win and dominate, etc. Through this play the playwright wishes to establish the notion that human beings should be ruled by logic and reason and his testimony lies in portraying the futility and stupidity of quarrelling over conceptual differences, which might have been settled by compromise or arbitration.

Marginality is not only a state of tangible/physical suffering but also a condition of mind. However, the nature of both is complementary to each other as the troubled psychic state results only from material reality. The adjective ‘celestial’ in the title seems to negate any material claims to one’s deprived state as emanating from structural inequities. The marginal state of major female characters in Jokha Alharthi’s (b. 1978) the Man Booker International Prize-Winning novel Celestial Bodies (2019) has its basis in the patriarchal functioning of society. Marilyn Booth writes, “The impact of a strong patriarchal system on both women and subordinate men is unsparing but it shapes different generations, and individuals, distinctly as it leads to both suffering and confrontation” (x). All three sisters Mayya, Khawla and Asma in the Celestial Bodies have their own trajectories of hidden pain. Apart from it, marginality as observed in the case of Zarifa, the female slave who unconsciously submits herself to a better life, results from ignorance as she does not find anything appalling even in being a concubine to Merchant Sulayman, the slave owner. Another note of marginality stems in the portrayal of Habib and his son Sanjar who view slavery as an “involuntary human servitude” (Wright n.pag.) and hence break themselves free from the shackles of bondage by leaving the house of Sulayman. While the former realizes that despite being his wife, Zarifa is also his master’s keep which is a blow to his masculinity; his son also identifies selfish motives in Sulayman’s doing a few things for his betterment. Another victim of a husbandly suspicion is Fatima, the wife of Sulayman whose death remains a mystery until it is learnt that it was her husband who hastens her to a poisonous death as her affair with a slave is suspected. Mayya’s daughter London’s marginal state cements the vulnerable status of women as despite from a rich family she is treated in terms of her supposed weak gender as her voluntary marriage to a peasant’s ends in a fiasco. The present paper seeks to provide answer to different types of marginalities found in the Celestial Bodies along with charting out a course of passive to active resistance as adopted by different characters.

This paper examines nature as a device in Tanure Ojaide’s The Tale of the Harmattan and Flora Nwapa’s Cassava Song and Rice Song. It proceeds on the assumption that there is a relationship between nature and literature beyond the interest of the Romantics and Ecocriticism and that this relationship is often demonstrated aesthetically and thematically to express the human condition. With emphasis on the metaphorization of the components that make up nature, this paper deploys Peter Steiner’s Machine model of Formalism which sees literary criticism as a sort of mechanics and the text as a heap of devices. In this regard, Formalism is here deployed as a means of exploring the extent to which nature functions as a device in The Tale of the Harmattan and Cassava Song and Rice Song. It emphasizes the figurative use of nature to estrange the ordinary. This paper finds that the figurative use of nature helps to establish the aesthetic grounds that justifies the literariness of the poem. The paper also finds that the presence of nature in the poems heighten the aesthetic quality of the poems because nature readily finds expression in patterns or attributes common to all its components. Thus, the metaphorization of nature components as a means of portraying the human condition.

Over the years, there has been a proliferation of writing by women authors in Northern Nigeria, central to their concern, is negotiating between what culture is and is not, especially as it relates to the women folks. With literature’s overwhelming role, in its stance as the mirror of the society, is the forceps with which one can gather the customs, believes, thoughts and value systems of a people, thus; learning about how their culture(s), could make or mar them. This explains why the Northern Nigerian woman as a prototype of the African woman has her role(s) defined by history, religion and cultural practices. In light of the foregoing, this paper finds that, this phenomenon called culture (in all its social forms, material traits of a racial, religious or social group) with its cancerous fangs on the livelihood of the average African woman, has today been reconfigured by the Womanist strand of feminism to the extent its impact are both felt and visible. Thus; this paper unknots the nitty-gritties of Africans perception of womanhood by the males and how the woman also sees herself and/or expects to be seen with particular focus on Phoebe Jatau’s The Hound. By this, it shows that contemporary female writers in Northern Nigeria and Africa at large have both re-evaluated themselves and are akin to the significance of their place, thus; crushing the patriarchal hold of their individual societies on them, and in the long run, assuaging their worth as less than humans.

The present article tries to highlight the connections between Dalit women's rights, human rights, and the forms of domination and fight practiced on them. It closely examines the suffering and literary works that have been created about Dalit women’s bodies and existence. Due to their gender, economic circumstance, and ethnicity, Dalit women's bodies, experiences, and rights continue to be seen with bias. The importance of this article lies in its attempt to highlight the trauma experienced by Dalit women, caste divide in Indian culture, and resistance to numerous power discourses that must also be addressed as a component of human rights. The goal of this article is to investigate how Dalit women are subjected to emotional manipulation by men who pretend to take care of them. The reason for this is that people utilise this tactic to objectify and possess their physique. It also tries to investigate Dalit women’s self-perceptions and rights, which are governed by men. It is significant because Dalit males need to be aware of the negative consequences that men have on Dalit women's lives. The current essay also aims to illustrate the issue with Dalit women’s rights in both public and private life.

The term Indian diaspora refers to the overseas Indians officially known as Non- Resident Indians (NRIs) or the Persons of Indian Origin (PIOs) or the people of India by birth or descendants from Indian subcontinents, living outside of Indian Republic. Overseas Indians are concerned as the people of India or the ethnic groups of people associated with Indian sensibility, ethnicity, nationality, citizenship or having other co-relation of Indian life style abroad overseas. The conceptual analyses on migration have explained the social criteria of Indian diasporic sensibility just as assimilation and integration, the organized associations, cultural crisis, emergence of identity crisis, ethnicity and the globalization etc.

The essence of history, on the most part, is to provide discursive knots that either hold a people together or provide tissues of asymmetrical relations that separate them permanently. Hence, through the Postcolonial lens, this paper argues that Edwidge Danticat and Grace Nichols have used their historical novels: The Farming of Bones and Whole of a Morning Sky– the novels that not only take their setting and some events and characters from history, but make the historical events and issues crucial for the course of the narrative to (re)inscribed historical codes that harbour a constant shift in individuation among the colonized people. Their aim is to unearth certain salient relational frontiers – ones that have created a “...radically asymmetrical relations of power” in modern Caribbean nations. The reason for this, on the one hand, is to show “...the marks of a shifting boundaries that alienates the frontiers of the modern (Caribbean) nation”, and on the other, to show how these shifting boundaries have not only created what Bhabha calls the “Third Space” – the process of ‘splitting’ of national subject – but how this space has hindered the realization of Caribbean-nests. By using the Caribbean example, the paper concludes that history provides a lasting memory to the Third world nations and through it the slippage of categories, such as sexuality, class affiliation, territorial paranoia, or cultural difference can be understood and bridged for the advancement of the people.

One of the major challenges faced by the translators is finding equivalence in the target language. The translators of Shakespeare plays have used Assamese words as appropriate equivalence of English words used by Shakespeare. However, it is not possible for the translators to claim that a particular kind of translation is the most faithful to the source text or the original text. The critics of translation studies are divided on deciding the parameters to assess whether a particular translation is faithful or not. The translators face various challenges in the process of translation such as finding equivalence, truthfully representing the linguistic and cultural nuances etc. In this process, the Assamese translators of Shakespeare’s plays have used adaptation, domestication, foreignization etc. Although the methods are different, they serve a common purpose, i.e., to bring a culturally and linguistically different text close to Assamese readers. The Comedy of Errors was the first Shakespeare play to be translated into Assamese by Ratnadhar Barua, Ramakanta Barkakoti, Gunjanan Barua and Ghanashyam Barua as Bhramaranga in 1888. Since then, a good number of Shakespeare plays have been either adapted or translated into Assamese. As You Like It, Cymbeline, Macbeth, Troilus and Cressida, Taming of the Shrew, King Lear, A Midsummer Night’s Dream etc. were adapted into Assamese. Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Twelfth Night etc. were translated using domestication as an effective strategy. Othello, Macbeth, Measure for Measure were also translated by other translators using foreignization as an effective strategy. The paper examines the multiple methods that have been used for translation of Shakespeare’s plays into Assamese across time with special emphasis on adaptation, domestication and foreignization. As multiple translations of the same Shakespeare plays are available in Assamese, the paper also highlights the features of those translations and critically comments on their effectiveness in terms of strategies used by the translators. It also underlines the challenges faced by the translators while translating Shakespeare’s plays into Assamese. Specific examples from both the source texts and target texts are given to assess the process of translation. A few translators have retained the original names in the translations. A few others have change the names completely giving some indigenous flavor to the target texts. The choices of the translators and the factors responsible for such choices have also been discussed in this paper. The paper also documents most of the Shakespeare plays translated into Assamese since 1888. However, the assessment of the strategies used to translate the plays is not chronological. The paper is divided into three main parts: ‘Adaptation of Shakespeare’s Plays into Assamese’, ‘Domestication in Translation of Shakespeare’s Plays into Assamese’ and ‘Foreignization in Translation of Shakespeare’s Plays into Assamese’.

The present research article examines the myriad ways that the Dikan ritual performance among the Bajju people of Kaduna State, Northern West, Nigeria, is celebrated. The Dikan ritual performance in its current enactment can be gleamed as a cultural space for the remembrance of the essence and cultural identity of the Bajju tribe, in a world under the threat of rapid globalization, socio-cultural, and historical changes; which is made more prevalent by the exerting force of technology, popular culture, and postmodern elements demonstrated through various social media platforms and news outlets. The study begins by highlighting the background of Dikan ritual performance in Kajju from the precolonial to postcolonial Northern Nigeria. It espouses on the nature and structure of this ritual and its relevance to the Bajju people. It then makes recommendations on ways of sustaining this practice, to save it from extinction.

Hamlet has always been remembered as Shakespeare’s masterpiece creation. The play has enjoyed unmatched popularity among the audience of all ages. Since its first public performance, till date, the play has always remained relevant to the audience, in some way or the other. The history of Hamlet in India dates back to the colonial era. The play was first introduced by the troupes which performed it for the English traders. Later on, as a consequence of the colonial education, it became the part of the formal English education and travelled to the other groups of the society. Shakespeare was a big name even then, and the ever-praised elements of the play greatly influenced the local audience. With the development, translation and movie-adaptation also greatly helped in the wider circulation of the play, and it never went totally out of discussion. The present research paper focuses on some of the major elements which helped in this larger popularity of the play in a non-English-speaking country like India. It will try to analyse the relevance and significance of Hamlet to the audience in the Indian context. The focus will also be on the translation and the different kinds of adaptations of the play which have greatly helped in a wider circulation of Shakespeare’s creative genius. The paper begins with a general discussion of the play, mostly taking accounts from the English literary critics, and moves on to the analysis of the play in the Indian context.

In the criticism of the novel Titas Ekti Nadir Naam (1956), Mallabarman’s widely read Bengali novel, the life-narratives of the Malos, a Bengali low-caste fisherfolk community, their unique culture, their indomitable fight to survive economically, their fight to save the Malo culture in the face of all kinds of adversary forces have been discussed to a considerable extent. In the criticism of the Ritwik Ghatak’s eponymous 1973 film adaptation of the novel, the major importance has been given to Ghatak’s treatment of the struggling life of the Malo community in a rural set up and Ghatak’s mastery as a director. Less attention has been given to the caste question which determines the social position of the Malos in various ways. In examining both novel and the film text, this paper shows that whereas how caste operates in the Malo life-world and how the system of caste determines the low-caste Malos’ social position vis-à-vis the Brahmins and the Kayasthas, their high-caste counterparts are substantively dealt with in Mallabarman’s novel, Ghatak puts more focus on the human catastrophe faced by the Malos both as individual and as a community in his film, and has attempted to document the Malo life-world, as the acclaimed filmmaker Mani Kaul argues, as a civilization. This paper is concerned with this factor of caste, the catastrophe of the Malo community, and the Malo life-world as a civilization.

Gender and sexuality are now too much talked about terms in our society and academics but they still have a labyrinth of complications and matrix of misunderstandings that confuse the identities of the concerned individuals— both from the individual side and from the public side. Gender and sexual identities, as critics of feminism and sexuality studies argue, are culturally constructed and are more fluid and cultures specific. Gender identities seem to remain universal as almost every society, in all over the world, with few exceptions, is patriarchal. In such typically patriarchal societies gender norms are more rigid in terms of their performativity among the common members of the set society and are more part of the public sphere, sexual identities are more tabooed and are part of more personal and protected spheres. Speaking of the formation of such identities and naturalization of the self through the processes in which an individual goes through it has been observed that all these identities are spatial and temporal and, in many cases, they are more based on the occasions in which a child unfortunately grows up—for example sexual abuse and exploitation. The article tries to explore the ways in which these gender and sexual identities are formed not only in terms of man and woman but also of transgenders.

The Indian partition experience has generally been seen as being extraordinarily complex and violent kind of appearance in literary works. There are manifestations of oppression and violence that are the most recognized themes in the context of postcolonialism. The “decolonization” of writing, which aims to transcend this colonial history, will bring about and illuminate a wide range of subjects through its interpretation. Numerous books have been published about post-colonialism in India, but writers like Khushwant Singh have seen this magnificent historical period as a matter terrifying phenomenon. His novel, Train to Pakistan (1956) was written on the backdrop of Indian partition. The unavoidable reason of partition has been examined in this novel which was a sprout of radicalism and fundamentalism sparked by bolstering community attitudes. They effectively and precisely express the fear and exposure of human existence brought on by the pangs and enigmas of the consequences of the Partition. In addition to offering a wealth of information, Train to Pakistan is also unconventional in the matter of themes, style and narrativity. Khushwant Singh has provided human qualities that would interpret any sense of authenticity, dismay, and credibility rather than presenting the events in political terms. Thus, the story not only describes the existence of man and his struggle to survive, but it also demonstrates that despite social exclusion, people may still be a source of inspiration for others who are unhappy, upset disappointed and misinformed.

David Herbert Lawrence’sSons and Lovers (1913) tells the story of the Morels— a working-class family. Lawrence has referred to Sons and Lovers as his ‘colliery novel’. The present paper attempts to decode the class politics of the novel by closely focussing on Walter Morel, the chief working-class figure in the novel. The novel’s narrative pivots around the domestic concerns of the Morel family, very often in which, Walter Morel, emerges as a villain and an oppressor of his wife and children. The text poignantly portrays domestic discord and the hardships that Gertrude Morel and her children face. However, it fails to delve into or elucidate upon the underlying reasons for the emergence of these hardships in the first place. At the obvious level, Walter Morel seems to be demonised as a brute who causes his family continuous pain. However, it is imperative that the text is read within the larger social, economic, and political structures of its time, which significantly shaped and influenced the lives and action of Walter Morel and his family. This paper attempts to recuperate dispersed evidence from the margins of the novel to gainsay a superficial interpretation of Walter Morel as a mindless violent brute who is solely responsible for the trials and tribulations of the Morel family. It attempts to connect the dots between the representation of Walter Morel with the narrative’s inclination towards the middle-class value system aspired to by the other members of his family, in order to, gain a more nuanced insight into the class politics of the novel.

In That Long Silence, Deshpande portrays the life of Jaya, an educated, married writer. As a writer, she should be able to use her thinking and analytical skills to show the problems and contradictions in society in her writing. However, this does not happen for several reasons. She has to surrender to family and societal pressures. Not being able to say or write what she feels like saying or writing, she is forced to write what patriarchal society wants to read or hear. Even though she is educated, she remains silent against the injustices that have befallen her. Not only Jaya but also the other women characters portrayed in the novel— Jaya’s mother, grandmother, cousin Kusum, her widowed neighbor Mukta, and the women in general— have also maintained silence for centuries. Deshpande goes on to show how the social environment, as well as family preaching and practices, play a significant role in this. When Jaya gets time to reflect on the happenings of her life, she finds herself in a dilemma about what to do and what not to do. This paper aims at analyzing the factors, taking into consideration the comments and observations by other critics and theorists as well, responsible for Jaya's crisis in particular and the misery of women in general, as well as showing how, through introspection, Jaya, the representative of modern women, comes out of her victimization and crisis and breaks her long silence.

Diasporic experiences of Indian characters have drawn a considerable attention of social thinkers, political leaders, literary scholars and critics. The experiences of immigrants have been explored by postmodern researchers and writers in an effort to understand the reasons behind their hopelessness, the breakdown of their families, and how they ultimately internalise the ideals of the host culture at the urging of the native culture. Greek word for dispersal is where the word “diaspora” originates. It speaks of the scattering and displacing of individuals from their place of origin. The authors of diaspora have tried to underpin the hidden underlying reasons of leaving one’s country and compensating for their periferal status in the adopted culture. While juxtaposing the past and present experiences, the diaspora writers critically analyise the nature of exile, homelessness, nostalgia, memory of native land, hybridity, liminality, marginality, culture shock and identity crisis. In this research article, Jhumpa Lahiri's representation of immigrants’ struggles with identity, self-formation, and cultural differences in her book The Lowland will be critically assessed. It attempts to throw light on the social and political insecurities, human rights and cultural challenges brought forth by their liminal status. Facing liminality the characters are hovering in a perpetual mental dilemma between Indian lifestyle and American advanced culture. The major themes of the novel are location, relocation, dislocation, displacement and alienation which are solely caused by characters’ personal choices and actions.

This paper provides a critical analysis of Bhimayana: Experiences of Untouchability, a graphic biography on the experiences of caste discrimination and resistance that Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar recorded in his autobiographical illustrations, and CNN hailed this book as being among the top five political comic books. Unlike other biographies, which often address those enthusiastic about Dr Ambedkar and his anti-cast struggle. The Bhimayana Provides critical insight into the negligence and caste-ridden mind of the Indian psyche towards the architect of the Indian constitution. This graphic biography also provides a dint to educate non-Dalit who seems to ignore the contributions and drudgeries of Dr Ambedkar.

Theme defines a major subject, idea or underlying meaning that is being discussed or a writer explores in a piece of writing. It is the suggested view taken on the main idea or message of any fictional, dramatic or nonfictional story. For instance, love can be the subject but desire for love might be the theme. The setting, characters, plot, dialogue are combined together to convey the theme of any piece of writing. Theme is not only the storyline or description but also something more than it. It is the center of any narrative that runs throughout a plot. Betrayal, love, life and death, courage, good vs. evil, revenge, beauty, family etc. are some of the common themes in literature. Important concepts and messages encountered by the characters and the setting of a tale are communicated through themes. A story without a theme is just a collection of random characters and events. It serves as the component that gives a tale or poem its meaning. This article discusses different kinds of themes used within the works of V.S. Naipaul. The main themes in his writings are escapism and disillusionment, Exile and alienation, displacement or migration, the search of a stable sense of personal identity, rootlessness and many more.

The following paper is an attempt to analyze the wonderful tale Salman Rushdie has penned about the Indian nation. Rushdie’s sheer brilliance could be seen in Midnight’s Children, where he has piled the Indian history in a sublime way. Britishers, who sucked the soul out of India, are the ones directly responsible for the situation the Indian nationhood is in today. The mere pleasure of monarchs and elites brought catastrophes and havoc to the whole nation. The Indian freedom struggle was one of its kind in the world- for the country was divided on the night of its independence. It suffered one its worst time on the day it was liberated, millions left their home for ever and a line of hatred was drawn. This paper tries to lighten the history which tells us about those dreams which caused the partition of India. It talks about the working of the elites, who causes the manipulation of masses. It explains the political megalomania and how religion acts as the main ingredient for it, in India. The paper is not only a reference to a particular incident in history, but explains the working of government, authority and oligarchy and their dominion over the soul and body of the common people of the country.

Writing is a mirror that reflects social recorded, financial and political occasions refracted through nonexistent or anecdotal domains of public sayings. Strangely, in such accounts, writing additionally mirrors the irregular characteristics or complexities that exist in social as well as individual connections. Like many other European writers, Indians also have launched a war against such political, social and economic exploitations of the oppressors. As people know that women are more kind enough by heart, that’s why they have explored the various social evils and maladies that are continuously ruining the lives of the marginalized people in the form of caste, creed and religion. Apart from writing about feminism and gender discrimination, they have also dealt with the other grave issues that destroy the lives of these marginalized outcastes. Their works reveal the true picture of the contemporary society where innocence is exploited through the corrupted ideas of human beings in this man-made society. The present research paper has tried to explore the plight of Dalits and Tribals in the works of Mahasweta Devi, one of the great marginal voices in Indian English Literature.

This research article makes an attempt to thematically study the philosophical musings of Shiv K Kumar over death in his selected poems of Where Have the Dead Gone? And Other Poems. Kumar’s first love is poetry and, therefore, he is called an intuitive and philosophical poet. In his scholarly collection of poems, he seriously cogitates on the occurrence of death and questions where man goes after he dies. He is quite certain that intellect and reason cannot explain the mystery of life while intuitions can make us comprehend what life is. Through his poems, the poet makes his readers understand that life is balanced between the two absolutely opposite points of birth and death. It is a universally known fact that where there is birth, there is death. Birth is glorified and death is treated as something dreadful and is, hence, mourned. Intertwined in the philosophical riddle of birth and death, man has been trying for ages to delve into the mysteries of life, death, and rebirth. The poet wants to remain calm and composed and takes the life as it comes to him. In his collected poems, it is clearly understood that he treats the death of human beings and animals equally.

This paper analyses the narrative techniques of two Dalit texts; an autobiography called Joothan by Omprakash Valmiki and a novel called Koogai: The Owl by Cho. Dharman. Through this analysis, the paper presents an account of the changing socio-political conditions of the Dalits in India after independence. Using the theoretical framework of narratology, the paper argues that the two very different narrative styles present in these two texts are reflective of the respective conditions within which their writers found themselves in and the larger socio-political questions that the Dalit emancipation movement was dealing with during those periods. Another aspect that the paper covers is how these two texts present the inherent conflicts and contradictions within the Dalit identity. It then asks the question whether these contradictions should be flattened to present a more homogeneous conceptualisation of what it means to be a Dalit or whether the identity should be imagined alongside these contradictions.

The slaves, especially women, are more vulnerable than the men to the oppressive system of slavery. It does not only seize the idea of self from a slave (which constitutes a human being, and slavery seeks support from and utilizes the existing laws by which all the legal rights of the slaves are hijacked) but also it puts them (women) into a constant struggle to negotiate, not just for the construction of their ‘selves’ but for their motherhoods and the right of being called wives of their husbands and so forth. The masters, the white, adopt numerous evil strategies which sabotage the slaves forming strong bondage between husband and wife; and parents and children. The masters and slaveholders separate the slaves to run slavery smoothly; for if they are kept together, there will grow a strong relationship among the slaves as they will share feelings, emotions, and sentiments, which may result in gathering a possible resistance against the entire slavery. In such a heavy check on the formation of family bondage, Jackobs’s spoke persona, Brent adopts several strategies, which not only help but also construct her identity and liberate herself as well as her children from the claws of slavery. Thus, this paper examines how the emergence of motherhood becomes the prime factor for negotiating and constructing self-identity, not for herself– Brent but also for her children, out of nothing– inheritance. Moreover, it has created awareness among the communities that despise slavery against slavery, afterward uprooting slavery forever.

The research paper attempts to probe into the concept/idea of ‘self’ by analyzing the ‘self’ of the characters in Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice its Indian cinematic adaptation Bride and Prejudice. It will explore the hybrid or diasporic identities as against the British national identities of Austen’s characters. One of the texts explored is an adaptation of the other thereby resulting in the similarity as far as the plot and characters are concerned. However, society and culture have changed during the process of adaptation. The adapted version has a global approach. It is not only a different culture and society but also a larger world weaved in one thread. The native setting of the original novel is but a part of the larger setting of the adapted movie. The globe has taken place of Britain. Not only that but the source text belongs to the imperial nation whereas the adaptation belongs to the third world. The central setting of the adaptation is a country which was once a colony to the imperial nation of the source text. In spite of this major difference of settings, not only the plot but even the characters remain unchanged. Their position in the plot, their role and the experiences they go through remain the same. Hence, they should be the same too. What is worth exploring here is the impact of the changed society, culture and setting upon these characters. The given paper attempts to explore this aspect.

This present research aims to determine the growing needs and challenges faced by Data Science and Cyber Security students at Al Istiqlal University's Faculty of Information Technology when learning the English language. It also tries to ascertain whether gender and level of competence affected their requirements and difficulties in mastering the English language. 35 cadets who are specializing in Data Science and Cyber Security make up the sample. The researcher gave out 39 questionnaire items divided into eight domains. The results show that cadets in Data Science and Cyber Security did not undergo any guidance regarding how to utilize English in the discipline while engaging in the analysis of data or cyber security keywords. Additionally, the study demonstrates that cadets majoring in data science and cyber security did not receive any guidance on how to learn to communicate in English, and the teaching activities in the English programs they had taken did not match their notions of the standards for expert English. Moreover, English proficiency requirements for cadets enrolling in Data Science and Cyber Security courses should be taken into consideration. Additionally, no statically meaningful differences in the demands for key competencies and barriers faced by Data Science and Cyber Security cadets are found when gender and competency traits are taken into consideration.

The school curriculum maintains the quality learning through various innovative methods of language teaching; it comprises the practices usually followed for the betterment of students who are expected to understand the basic knowledge of their mother tongue. To ensures the quality of such valuable practices the students are made to learn how to write and speak making use of these practices in an acquisition rich atmosphere. The school education department of Tamilnadu has made it mandatory that every student at primary level must have the fluency in reading and writing, and the expected capability of using their mother tongue before they enter the middle school. It is a highly challenging task for the teachers teaching mother tongue to make the students master their language skills, particularly that of reading and writing. The role of pattern practice is mainly to focus on teaching mother tongue with creative method and make the students learn the mother tongue easily adhering to the precepts of school curriculum. In this way, designing syllabus requires a huge change in ensuring the effective teaching of mother tongue at primary level. When we follow the simple pattern practices in teaching mother tongue at school level, the constructive and promising results are quite discernible. Pattern practice teaching comprises the basic language and grammatical structures through which the students manifest substantial capability in reading and writing skills.

Mulk Raj Anand was a revolutionary writer of the twentieth century India who changed the mode of writing and thinking in the field of Indian fiction writing. The novelists before him, who had written fiction, wrote the fictional side of life which were ideal and romantic in nature. There were a smaller number of issues of the society. Mulk Raj Anand’s writing brought revolutionary change in the field of fiction writing. He wrote the novels for the sake of untouchables and the poor. He raised the issues of casteism, capitalism, feudalism, colonialism and imperialism through his novels. In Untouchable, he has attacked one of the worst social evils of the Indian society which was ignored by the previous writers and that is blot on Indian society, culture and tradition that has colonized eighty five percent people of Indian society. This sensibility has ruined creativity of Indian people. Casteism and untouchability are the blots on the face of humanity. Anand seems fighting for the liberty, equality and justice of the untouchables and the poor. He appealed for the basic human rights and needs in the newly emerging civil structure of colonial and post-independence India. He had the opinion among all the fundamental rights that human dignity is the highest. Bakha, the leading character, had the resistance in the mind but he could not express it due to the fear of his caste. Bakha is a metaphor for all the untouchables of India.

In human culture there are certain numbers of special importance. They are mostly used in old and modern writings as “sacred numbers” of religious and literary significance. They are present in the Greek myths, in Egyptian Pharaonic culture, in ancient Persian, in the Indian culture, and in Arab traditions; then (Islamic) culture as well as in the Biblical Western culture. These numbers are of two kinds: even and uneven or odd. The odd numbers 1, 3, 5, 7and 9 play a far more important part than the even numbers. One is Deity, three the Trinity, five the chief division, seven is the sacred number, and nine is three times three. These numbers have good function and been looked at as ‘Sacred’ or ‘Perfect’ numbers either of good omen or evil. There is another forth number, which is “10”, it comes mainly in Jewish and Islamic education in very few cases having similar religious suggestion. Shakespeare has used the number Ten in Sonnet 6 Then let not winter's ragged hand deface. “Sacred Numbers” have become a part of religion and even of modern belief, and mostly represented in the popular rituals. Shakespeare has used the “Sacred Numbers” in his works either prose or poetry, and this article is restricted to deal only with three Shakespearean sonnets where I imagine Shakespeare reciting his Latin Rosary in a poetic religious tone and drawing the cross sign on his chest and on the forehead of his sonnets in order to invoke divine protection. It seems that Shakespeare’s date of birth and death (1564 -1616) carries a certain secret of his fondness for sacred numbers; thus: The sum of the date of his birth (1564=16) is doubled in the date of his death (1616).