kriticulture

  Editor’s Note A lot of good South Asian writing is taking place outside the dominant circuits of recognition. It was our assumption when we started SAE . Five years down the road, it is a conclusion. Leafing through pages from the past, we see many installed stereotypes crumbling. Yet much survives that seems to identify us.             What is still awaited is a radical mobilization of the elements of the ensemble that is us and our experience, a mobilization that dislocates, disassembles and creates afresh beyond merely reproducing. This would require infusion of energies from outside the ensemble’s boundaries. But haven’t cultures always outsourced? Isn’t imagination the great outsourcing machine? Isn’t literature always in another place, always already elsewhere?             South Asia is a horizon that must be transcended. Only when it begins to...

Summer and Fall 2013 Vol 5 No. 3 & 4 Editorial The unprofitable work of literature Rajesh Sharma     The oldest memories with me include a balding and bespectacled old head reading a book held up by a hairy hand with cracked brown skin. A reflective grin spreads or shrinks, prompted by mysterious proceedings in the magic mirror in front. Memory’s selection tool functions strangely.             Sood Uncle. He ran a shop that never had more than… ten books? A banyan had grown in the shop’s forehead, hanging down like hair from aging eyebrows. Seven steps into the shop you faced darkness that tasted damp with the odor of rats’ droppings. I bought my first books, on credit to be paid by my mother’s brother, from Sood Uncle. My mother’s mother once confided to me that this Sood Uncle was a legendary kanjoos . Unlimitedly kanjoos , she said.        ...

An extract from Sasenarine Persaud's review of South Asian Ensemble : "Stories, excerpts, poems, essays, photography, paintings, reviews and interviews all go into making this eclectic publication. The contributions are not only by, or about, South Asians. The great strength of South Asian Ensemble is the translations from Indian languages." - Sasenarine Persaud's Complete review here: http://poets-and-co.blogspot.in/

By Rajesh Sharma Gachcoo must have died. He had to. The henna on his white head, the gold rings on his great flappy ears, the paint brush moustache, the crow's feet nesting like a river's delta beside eyes old as the seas – nothing would have stood between him and the hand of death. His back had curved like an autumn leaf so that when he walked he looked like a curled dry leaf carried by an unsuspecting beetle stuck underneath. But that was years later – when, away from my eyes, the old man had aged after a long spell of agelessness that had lasted almost as long as my childhood.             Gachcoo. How did he get that crisp-hard-crinkling nuts-and-jaggery name though he never sold gachak? No one will perhaps ever find out. He, his world, his memories all have disintegrated. What remains is like fiction, a figure drawn by a flight of birds in the late spring sky, a sheer contingency against the void. Yes, he did ...

- Son’s tribute to Taseer Aatish Taseer, the Delhi-based son of slain Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer, mourns his father’s death I have recently flown home from North America. In airport after international airport, the world’s papers carried front-page images of my father’s assassin. A 26-year-old boy, with a beard, a forehead calloused from prayer, and the serene expression of a man assured of some higher reward. Last Tuesday, this boy, hardly older than my youngest brother whose 25th birthday it was that day, shot to death my father, the governor of Punjab, in a market in Islamabad. My father had always taken pleasure in eluding his security, sometimes appearing without any at all in open-air restaurants with his family, but in this last instance it would not have mattered, for the boy who killed him was a member of his security detail. It appears now that the plan to kill my father had been in his assassin’s mind, even revealed to a few confidants, for many days bef...

By JÜRGEN HABERMAS That we are experiencing a relapse into this ethnic understanding of our liberal constitution is bad enough. It doesn’t make things any better that today leitkultur is defined not by “German culture” but by religion. With an arrogant appropriation of Judaism — and an incredible disregard for the fate the Jews suffered in Germany — the apologists of the leitkultur now appeal to the “Judeo-Christian tradition,” which distinguishes “us” from the foreigners. Nevertheless I do not have the impression that the appeals to the leitkultur signal anything more than a rearguard action or that the lapse of an author into the snares of the controversy over nature versus nurture has given enduring and widespread impetus to the more noxious mixture of xenophobia, racist feelings of superiority and social Darwinism. The problems of today have set off the reactions of yesterday — but not those of the day before. Link: Leadership and Leitkultur - NYTimes.com

Here is an urgent message from Amritjit Singh, Langston Hughes Professor of English, Ohio University, USA Dear Colleagues, Much is happening around the country right now to inflame hatred toward Muslims and Arabs. As one dear colleague noted today with understandable alarm, “I am deeply worried about the poisonous environment swirling around the Park51 initiative. Glen Beck and his ilk have given public permission to revile and attack Muslims and their institutions. Mosques are being burned, there is a threat to torch Qur'ans on 9/11, and individuals are being physically assaulted.” Further, those of us with origins in South Asia or the Middle East (Muslim or not) – that is, those of us who are perceived as Muslim or Arab based on our phenotype or our dress – are also beginning to catch the fire. As educators or as individuals otherwise concerned about civil rights and civil liberties, we need to be on the alert and be prepared to do whatever we can to speak up and to educate. At...

From The New York Times “Where literature exists, translation exists. Joined at the hip, they are absolutely inseparable, and, in the long run, what happens to one happens to the other. Despite all the difficulties the two have faced, sometimes separately, usually together, they need and nurture each other, and their long-term relationship, often problematic but always illuminating, will surely continue for as long as they both shall live.” Book Review - Why Translation Matters - By Edith Grossman - Review - NYTimes.com

South Asian Ensemble An Interface of Arts, Literature and Culture for South Asian Diaspora South Asian Ensemble is a Canadian quarterly devoted to the arts, literature and culture of the South Asian diaspora. The inaugural issue is now available online: http://www.southasianensemble.com/

From Manzur Ejaz of wichaar.com The gypsies or the Roma people, presently settled in Europe, are of Punjabi origin. In this movie if you follow the dailogues you will recognize Punjabi words like pee (drink) kha (eat) main (me) tu (you) etc . This is very intresting film about seperated Punjabis. http://www.wichaar.com/videos/gadjo-dilo/gadjo-dilo-part-1-video_3a6c85ee4.html Some artiles about Roma people. On the road to Roma people Tarot of the Romas Roma People

A Day In New York Remembered By M L Raina My New York is not the city Thomas Pynchon’s V explored through its sewers, nor the city that Garcia Lorca thought diabolic as well as inviting. My New York is a city on whose symmetrical streets and avenues I have walked miles and capped milestones of memory and remembrance. One such memory is of a day more than ten years ago, a memory that is evoked as I rediscover those streets on a day’s walk. I arrive in New York a few days after India blasted its way into the nuclear club. Suitably puffed up with patriotic fervour I recall the words of the actor George Scott, playing World War II’s prima donnish general Patton in the Hollywood movie of that name: “No poor bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other bastard die for his country”. So, on arrival, my first impulse is to see how the other bastards, Pakistanis, were coping with our new-found pride and self-respect. What right, I ask, has the American Preside...

Re-Markings is a biannual journal of English Letters. The journal aims at providing a healthy forum for scholarly and authoritative views on broad cultural issues of human import as evidenced in literature, art, television, cinema and journalism. Special Numbers/Sections devoted to events, issues and personalities are a regular feature of Re-Markings . Launched in March 2002 Re-Markings is in its seventh year of publication in 2008. In this short span the journal has made its presence felt emphatically in literary and academic circles with appreciative comments coming from senior academicians, statesmen and writers in India and abroad. Charles Johnson, the most persuasive voice in Afro-American writing today, responded to Re-Markings thus: “I've now read (twice) this issue's (March 2004) introduction, and looked over the material included on poet David Ray. All in all, with its impressive global range and vision, and especially the international writers included, this iss...

Reading Anita Rau Badami’s Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? “‘The thing is to give them what they want. . . . I am simply using it to make a living.’” (Badami 126) “As for the authentic ingredients to create the authentic taste? Well, Bibi-ji knew where everything could be found.” (136) “By the simple act of writing to her, Nimmo realized, she had gathered up those shards of memory and looked straight at them for the first time.” (161) The first impression that Anita Rau Badami leaves on a reader with her novel Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? is that she is an impressive storyteller. She knows the ways of the word, can spin the yarn back and forth with a seductive elegance, and seems to command an accurate measure of her reader’s sensibilities. She tantalizes, but stops short of inflicting strain. In short, she is a clever and safe player who takes only calculated risk. But great writing demands more than this modest set of writerly virtues. On the farther end,...