Mahuldiha Days

Set in the forests of northern Odisha, Mahuldia Days is the moving story of a young civil servant caught between her commitment to the tribal communities she knows are the original inhabitants of the forest, and the monolithic state, oblivious to the diverse realities of life on the ground. The moonlit Brahmani river snakes through the story with a life of its own while the city of the narrator’s childhood returns to her in dreams. Agnihotri creates a poignant, intense narrative layered with an awareness of the pressures of motherhood and personal love. Praise for Anita Agnihotri: “Agnihotri draws you in with her well fleshed out characters. Their dreams, idiosyncrasies and disappointments are all too real; as are their failures.” — Aparna Singh, Women’s Web “Urgently told and precise in their direction... Each story crackles with intensity and purpose.” — Mike McClelland, Spectrum Culture “[Anita Agnihotri] sensitively and beautifully chronicles the plight of a major chunk of the country’s population.” — Abdullah Khan, The Hindu

Ecocriticism has emerged as one of the most fascinating and rapidly growing fields of recent literary and cultural studies. From its regional origins in late-twentieth-century Anglo-American academia, it has become a worldwide phenomenon, which involves a decidedly transdisciplinary and transnational paradigm that promises to return a new sense of relevance to research and teaching in the humanities. A distinctive feature of the present handbook in comparison with other survey volumes is the combination of ecocriticism with cultural ecology, reflecting an emphasis on the cultural transformation of ecological processes and on the crucial role of literature, art, and other forms of cultural creativity for the evolution of societies towards sustainable futures. In state-of-the-art contributions by leading international scholars in the field, this handbook maps some of the most important developments in contemporary ecocritical thought. It introduces key theoretical concepts, issues, and directions of ecocriticism and cultural ecology and demonstrates their relevance for the analysis of texts and other cultural phenomena.

In an effort to counter the marginalization of indirect translation in systematic research, this book establishes innovative theoretical and methodological grounds and mitigates terminological instability in the field. In so doing, it unsettles the binary paradigms still predominant in translation research, such as original versus translation and source versus target culture/language/text. The contributors focus on the indirect translation of literature and cover a variety of European and Asian cultures and languages, such as Assamese, Bengali, Catalan, Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil and Urdu. This book will be of interest to all researchers studying intercultural relations, the probabilistic genealogies of texts, the circulation of texts and ideas among dominant and dominated cultures and groups, and the implications of English as a main pivot language in today’s world. This book was originally published as a special issue of Translation Studies.

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Chandrabati, the first woman poet in Bangla, lived in the sixteenth century in Mymensingh district in present day Bangladesh. She was also the first poet in the Bangla language to present a retelling of the Ram story from the point of view of Sita. Idolised as a model of marital obedience and chastity in Valmiki’s Ramayan, Chandrabati’s lyrical retelling of Sita’s story offers us a fresh perspective. Written in order to be sung before a non-courtly audience, mainly of womenfolk of rural Bengal, Chandrabati’s Ramayan adds new characters and situations to the story to provide new interpretations of already known events drawing richly on elements of existing genres. Its location in the tales of everyday life has ensured that Chandrabati’s Ramayan lives on in the hearts of village women of modern-day India.

Lal Ded, Habba Khatun, Rupa Bhavani, Arnimal: these four women poets, dating from different periods in the history of Kashmir, are household names in the valley and are claimed by all, no matter what religious, ethnic or other group they belong to. In this beautiful volume, Neerja Mattoo brings their work together for the first time, placing it in two traditions, the mystic and the lyric. Fine and nuanced translations of their poems are accompanied by brief introductions to their work that place the women in a historical context and deal with both the facts and the beliefs about their work.