Synergy

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Authors: Nicoleta STANCA

This review introduces the reader to a remarkable study on recent British fiction, which “proposes a new interdisciplinary approach to the representations of London in contemporary British literature by exploring the interplay between reality and fiction in mapping the urban imaginary”.

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Authors: Raluca BOBOC

Part of a larger project interrogating the strategies of different 20th century Scandinavian writers of reaching themselves by exploring anthropologic and geographic alterity during their travels, my article looks into the way that Göran Tunström’s Indian explorations, evoked in his travelogue “India – a winter journey” , function as a catalyst of his personal destiny, reverberating in a singular form of artistic assumption. His inspiring explorations, at the same time geographical and interior, can even invite a phenomenological approach to alterity awareness, in which the portrait of the women from Alapsur plays an interesting role in reversing the functions of exotism and otherness.

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Authors: Mariana NICOLAE

This is a small exploratory attempt at discovering perceptions of Indian women through Romanian eyes. This will be done through the medium of Indian literature written in English and through the personal experience of the author. We all have our collections of cultural stereotypes through which we look at the world: our own as well as others’. One of the starting points in this cultural journey is the sheer difference in size between the two spaces and the incredible variety of people who inhabit India. Our classical lenses or, at the other end, our Bollywood goggles, distort our perceptions of the realities of present-day Indian women. The author will compare her constructed images of modern Indian women as they appear mainly in Anuradha Roy’s The Folded Earth, with her own experience of real women that she had actually met either in Romania or in India. In today’s complex world, in what is called more often and with more valid arguments the Asian century, it is relevant and worthwhile to have such an exercise of cultural and gender exploration in order to better understand ourselves.

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Authors: Cleopatra DAVID

The Indian traditions offer a very specific place in the society to women, and the religious practices give them certain responsibilities. Religion and common life are practically inseparable and the role models offered by the Hindu pantheon and sacred texts are to be reflected in the day to day activity. Shakti is the wife of Lord Sadashiva and the Mother of the Universe, while Lakshmi is the wife of Lord Vishnu, whose main characteristic is to bring prosperity. This article is approaching the role women play from the position of the Hindu tradition, overviewing Puranic and epic texts.

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Authors: Nilufer E. BHARUCHA

Indian women have been writing for millennia but their voices have been lost in a male dominated conservative world. This is being remedied by scholars who wish to provide readers and students of literature with a balanced view of literature as an activity undertaken by both men and women. This provides women readers, students and academics with self-esteem when they realise that women have been writing for ages and literature has not just been written by DWEMs (Dead White European Males). Women’s writing should be moved to the centre of literary discourse from the margins where it has stagnated for centuries. For men it provides a corrective to a male centric world, which can also restrict men with stereotypes of expected masculinities.

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Authors: Sridhar RAJESWARAN

This article focuses only on Deepa Mehta’s importance as a film-maker of Indian diaspora now indwelling in Canada. This paper shall interlock with the films made between 1996 and 2008, i.e., Fire (1996), Earth (1998), Bollywood/Hollywood (2002), Water (2005), Heaven on Earth (2008). Needless to reiterate, that these five films, too, like the others in her oeuvre, have brought her many awards. Though it is imperative to look at the entire oeuvre of an artist, this selection is hoped to prove adequate for the defining purposes of this work, and would ‘throw’ glimpses that could enable others to construct the missing elements.