Global Humanities Review (ISSN 3108-1983) is a peer-reviewed, indexed, and international online journal published bimonthly—January, March, May, July, September, and November—by the Global Humanities Research Forum. The journal serves as a platform for scholars and researchers to share original, insightful, and interdisciplinary work that contributes to the understanding of human culture, thought, and expression in a global context. The journal fosters global dialogue, critical inquiry, and innovative approaches to understanding the diverse human experience in a rapidly transforming world. Editor in Chief: Dr. C. Priya Established: July 2025 Frequency: Bimonthly
Representation of Mental Health in Modern Indian English Fiction: Narratives, Stigma, and Socio-Cultural Contexts
This paper presents an analysis of how mental health has been represented in contemporary Indian English fiction, specifically evaluating the construction around psychological distress, psychiatric illness and emotional suffering that both novelists and short story writers have created out of the diverse milieu of Indian socio-cultural life. Evoking a corpus of texts from the 1980s to the present that includes works by Arundhati Roy, Vikram Seth, Anita Nair, Chetan Bhagat, Shubhangi Swaroop, and others, the study scrutinises how mental illness is depicted in conjunction with caste hierarchies, gender oppression, colonial trauma and familial duty and spiritual belief systems. The paper argues that Indian English fiction holds a critical site as it contributes to challenging the ingrained stigma of mental health while reflecting on and interrogating the socio-cultural architectures producing and maintaining psychological pain. Drawing on frameworks from postcolonial studies, feminist criticism, and disability studies, this research illustrates how literary portrayals of mental health in India are far from monolithic or static, rather class- (and region-, religion-, and broader politics of modernity-) contingent. The paper finally argues that fiction is a potent diagnostic and empathetic tool, one able to humanise the mentally unwell in a society that often allows them to become invisible.
Copyright (c) 2026 Global Humanities Review https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
The Willful Body: Reclaiming Indian Urban Space through “Walk” and “Meet to Sleep”
This paper examines how contemporary feminist performance in India shifts the discourse on gender-based violence from legalistic “protection” to radical “presence.” Centred on the aftermath of the 2012 Nirbhaya case, the research provides a comparative analysis of Maya Krishna Rao’s “Walk” (2012) and Blank Noise’s “Meet to Sleep” (2014). Drawing on Diana Taylor’s distinction between the “archive” and the “repertoire,” this paper argues that these performances resist the closure offered by judicial verdicts by sustaining an affective space of collective mourning and defiance. While Rao’s Walk utilises the minimalist stage to simulate the “zebra crossing” as a failed social contract, Blank Noise’s Meet to Sleep intervenes directly in urban parks, transforming the vulnerable act of napping into a refusal of “slow violence.” By applying the theories of Sara Ahmed (2004; 2014) and Rob Nixon (2011), this research demonstrates how these “willful” bodies disrupt the normalisation of fear. The paper contends that these performative acts do not merely seek safety, but demand a fundamental right to the city, making feminist rights visible through embodied practice long before they are realised in law.
Sons of the Soil: Representation of Ecological Masculinity in Oil on Water: A Novel
The relationship between man and environment has been a topic for critical debate ever since ecocriticism entered the arena of literary discourse. The apocalyptic future of the universe has been seriously dealt with in recent global literature. Masculine hegemony and the toxic effects it unleashed upon nature and environment are well portrayed and exposed by ecocritical readings in general and ecofeminists in particular. Dominance in the name of culture, religion, development, modernisation, etc., must be addressed if we are to save Mother Earth. Hence, it has become imperative that masculine hegemony be replaced by a theoretical praxis that can advance gender equality and environmental justice. Even though the ecofeminist thinkers have thrown light upon the oppressive gender practice of patriarchy, they have ignored the rise of ecological masculinity as a counter force against masculine hegemony. Ecological masculinity is inherently egalitarian, pro-feminist, pro- environmental and progressive in ethos and spirit. This paper reads Oil on Water: A Novel by Helon Habila in the light of ecological masculinity. The destruction of the environment in the Niger Delta is presented in the novel within the backdrop of the large-scale oil extraction and the forced evictions of the native communities when oil companies encroach into their villages for drilling. It illustrates the environmental and human costs of resource extraction in the corrupt, postcolonial Africa in a subtle manner. The paper seeks to analyse the issue from the perspective of ecological masculinity, in relation to the leaders, chiefs, of the village of Ikirefe as presented in the novel, and in line with the first-hand experiences of the two journalist protagonists. Characters like Chief Ibiram and Chief Malabo exhibit conspicuous traits of ecological masculinity. They stand for protecting the environment and the survival of their communities.
Interdisciplinary Teaching Approaches: Enhancing Holistic Learning in Modern Education
Interdisciplinary teaching has emerged as a transformative approach in contemporary education, addressing the limitations of traditional subject-centred pedagogy. By integrating knowledge, methods, and perspectives from multiple disciplines, it promotes holistic learning and equips students with essential 21st-century skills. This paper critically examines the conceptual foundations, significance, models, and pedagogical implications of interdisciplinary teaching. Using a qualitative, analytical methodology based on secondary data, the study explores various approaches, including thematic, inquiry-based, and project-based learning. The findings indicate that interdisciplinary teaching enhances learners' critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, and real-world problem-solving abilities. However, challenges such as rigid curriculum structures, lack of teacher preparedness, and assessment difficulties hinder its effective implementation. The paper concludes by emphasising the need for curriculum flexibility, professional development, and institutional support to successfully integrate interdisciplinary practices into modern education systems.
A Sense of Lassitude and Unease in the Speaker of Sonnet LXVI
This paper examines the sense of lassitude and divestment of joy in Sonnet LXVI. It represents the fallen world of Shakespeare across his dramatic and lyrical form. The speaker has disaffection towards the hellish world. The speaker feels a kind of alienation and distortion which overstate him as unchosen. The sonnet functions as a critique of society and the loss of values. Like his other plays, this sonnet overemphasises Christian values like humility and endurance. The captain of greed and profit governs the world. The speaker remains ethical and allows his feelings to be verbalised. He is too pure to die and too innocent to rebel. The tone of the poem is observational and judgmental. Love is the only source of redemption and protection in the fallen world. The sonnet starts with a cry for death, a pathway to escape the pain, but ends with a tussle of questions on death.
From Desire to Selfhood: Mapping Queer Fluidity in Rituparno Ghosh’s Cinematic Journey
Rituparno Ghosh’s late cinematic oeuvre marks a radical departure from conventional Bengali cinema by foregrounding queer subjectivities and gender fluidity within deeply personal and socio-cultural contexts. This paper examines three of his seminal works—Arekti Premer Golpo (2010), Memories in March (2010), and Chitrangada: The Crowning Wish (2012)—as a continuum that maps the trajectory of desire, loss, and selfhood in queer lives. In Arekti Premer Golpo, Ghosh inhabits a queer filmmaker who draws parallels between his own identity and the historical figure of Chapal Bhaduri, a female impersonator in Bengali theatre, thereby situating queerness within a performative archive. Memories in March shifts the narrative from public to private spaces, depicting a mother’s journey of reconciling with her deceased son’s homosexuality through his surviving partner. The film interrogates heteronormative familial structures and foregrounds queer grief and love as equally legitimate. Chitrangada, arguably Ghosh’s most autobiographical film, fuses Tagore’s play with his own exploration of gender transition, embodying the fluidity of selfhood while negotiating the politics of body, desire, and social legitimacy. Read together, these films create a cinematic map of queer becoming in postcolonial India: from representation to recognition, and finally to transformation. They dismantle binaries of male/female, normal/other, and tradition/modernity, situating queerness as both lived experience and aesthetic resistance. Ghosh’s cinema thus becomes a site where postmodern fluidity, body politics, and the queer gaze converge, challenging the hegemonic constructs of gender and sexuality in Indian cinema.
Cripting the Classics: Disabled Women Reclaim The Ugly Duckling and Rapunzel
Disability Studies questions cultural ideas that treat disability as a problem or defect that needs to be fixed. Crip theory builds on this approach by challenging able-bodied norms and understanding disability as an identity and a source of agency rather than limitation. This paper explores how disabled women retell The Ugly Duckling and Rapunzel in And They Lived… Ever After: Disabled Women Retell Fairy Tales, and how these retellings reshape familiar fairy tales into stories of empowerment. The Ugly Duckling becomes a story about resilience and belonging instead of shame. In contrast, Rapunzel is reimagined as an active character who turns confinement into a path toward self-discovery and connection with others. Drawing on Alison Kafer’s ideas about the politics of disability, the paper argues that these retellings challenge ableist and gendered assumptions and create new ways of imagining agency, community, and transformation.
Contested History and Struggling Lives: Reading A Bend in the River as a Narrative of Change and Disorder
History is constructed by those in power and is shaped by memory, perspectives, and subjective truth. It can be fragmented, contested, and chaotic, marked by the transition from colonial rule to post-independence, from traditional to modern living, and by the struggle for survival and the relentless escape from the void. Naipaul has depicted postcolonial societies and their struggles in his novels. The present novel, Bend in the River, is set in an African society marred by chaos and disorder after the withdrawal of colonial forces and depicts the problems associated with the new order and militant forces. It showcases the struggles and difficult lives of migrants and diasporic people who want to achieve something but are caught in the chaos of changing circumstances in a foreign land. This paper, therefore, attempts to bring out the negotiation of colonial history, subjective history and postcolonial history- thereby revealing their intersections. While doing so, the narrative reflects the universal human predicament, migration, and the search for meaning amid navigating phases of change and disorder.
The Female Bildungsroman: The Study of Krupabai Satthianadhan
This article proposes that the autobiographical novels Krupabai Satthianadhan wrote can be considered bildungsroman novels, in which the protagonists evolve into mature personalities by the end of the novel. A bildungsroman is a story of the growing up of a sensitive person, who finds answers to his/her questions through maturity. Generally, such a novel begins with a loss or tragedy that emotionally disturbs the main character. The protagonist gains maturity through a series of life experiences. Saguna’s account of her relationship with her mother and her experiences of the loss of her child is the basis of this analysis.
Gendered Silences and Narrative Resistances in Sally Morgan’s My Place and Shashi Deshpande’s That Long Silence
My Place attempts a close reading of Sally Morgan’s representation of Aborigines in Australia, in the early life of Sally. It also sketches out the problematic life of Sally and her family members, which unlocks the issues of the Aboriginal people, the marginalised communities in Australia, during the history of colonisation. It determines the quest for her lost identity, besides the inhuman treatment that demonstrates the projection of Aboriginals’ past discrimination and injustices. It also foregrounds how Sally attempts various ways to highlight the problems in her mundane family life in Australia. It reveals the defamiliarising nature of Sally’s lost identity, transforming her from a state of ignorance to comprehension, with a sense of pride and self-esteem. That Long Silence offers a detailed analysis of the Indian writer Shashi Deshpande’s portrayal of Jaya’s intricacies and day-to-day life in patriarchal Indian society. It also foregrounds how Shashi Deshpande, in various instances, attempts to highlight Jaya’s plights in the enigmatic, mundane existence, ranging from domestic suffering, betrayal, alienation, subjugation, acculturation and displacement. This paper concisely explores the protagonists’ empathy for society and their search for identity amid the complex mix of repressive circumstances.
From Ecofeminism to Green Theory: Understanding Transnational Intersections within Nature and the Self
This paper examines the work of Autumn Peltier and Parineeta Dandekar, environmentalists working within transnational spaces of Canada and India, on the question of water. In this context, the paper attempts a reading of the Marathi novel Nadisht, by Manoj Borgavkar and Surfacing by Margaret Atwood, bringing together issues of marginalised communities, gender, ecology and the relationship with nature. Dandekar unearths stories, lore, songs and poetry that depict a connection with the river; Peltier evokes the archetypal connection within the womb. Borgavkar’s novel revolves around the constructs of the mother and the river, while Atwood’s protagonist grapples with separation and the rebirth of the self. These transnational intersections are examined from an ecocritical and green studies perspective, including ecofeminism and green theory. The study finds that the relationship between nature and the self, the power, inequity and domination is symbolized in the abuse of nature and questions it to bring about change.
The Unforgettable Women of History in India: Untold Narratives of Courage and Resilience
This article examines the contributions of women in India’s struggle for freedom. India has witnessed the rise of numerous valiant women who have shattered gender norms and stepped onto the battlefield to protect their people, culture and kingdoms. These warrior women, whose tales of bravery echo through the annals of time, remain an inspiration for generations to come. The present paper delves into the narratives of some of the iconic figures, in order to explore the lives of some of the unforgettable women, who defied societal expectations to defend their realms namely: Rani Durgavati, Rani Mangammal, Ahilya Bai Holkar, Kittur Rani Chennamma and Rani Lakshmi Bai These women faced many challenges in their quest to defend their kingdoms and were known for their exceptional administrative acumen and military prowess. Overcoming the prejudices of their own societies and overcoming adversity yielded remarkable outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to examine these extraordinary women, their indomitable spirit and resilience, who have become our beacons of inspiration, motivating the women kind to rise for their own rights and liberties. Their unwavering commitment undoubtedly played a role in shaping the very course of history. Their narratives resonating across the globe continue to ignite the flames of courage and determination in the hearts of people everywhere.
Contours of Communal Idealism in Mahesh Dattani’s Final Solutions
Dattani’s play Final Solutions is the true representative play of his observations, dealing with one of the burning issues: communal riot. The play showed how the seed of riot is sown, and some vested groups reap its fruit. Even in the twenty-first century, the concept of idealism makes everyone disgusted with one thing. Because of idealism, many people are suffering in the name of religion. In contemporary society, not only in India but everywhere, a group of people is forced or tortured in the name of terrorism. It is common for everyone to want a good solution to the issue. Idealism is one thing that makes others suffer physically and psychologically. Dattani discusses the roles of politicians, police and the public during a communal riot. The common people who live together for years, at the moment of riot, suddenly cease to recognise one another and become enemies on the grounds of religion. This paper analyses how people's ideology dismantles humanity from their hearts during difficult times and suggests answers to the agony faced by innocents.
Beauty as Violation: Female Desire, Disposition and Destiny in the Select Short Stories of Ismat Chughtai
At a time when India was still not ready to accept sexuality as a natural phenomenon or women’s desire as a need, Ismat Chughtai wrote about these non-traditional themes without being overtly didactic in its undertones. She lays bare the true human nature in the most raw and unashamed manner through her narrations. The female desire, patriarchal control and marriage as a means of regulating how power is exercised form a large part of her oeuvre. This paper aims to show that female beauty and body become a site of surveillance, dominance, as well as a tool that threatens to destabilise the male ego. Drawing on her three short stories, ‘Eternal Vine’ (Amar Bel), ‘The Rock’ (Chatan) and ‘The Wife’ (Ghar Waali), which rely on the theatrics of marriage, it shows how women negotiate between the pain and pleasures of beauty, their own desire and presupposed disposition within the conjugal relationship.
Posthuman Care and Liquid Dystopia in Klara and the Sun
Science fiction today often moves away from distant futures and instead focuses on everyday systems that shape human life. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun is one such text that explores technology, care, and social inequality in a near-future setting. Drawing on Lars Schmeink’s ideas of dystopia, posthumanism, and liquid modernity, this paper examines how the novel presents a world in which systems of control, genetic enhancement, and technological dependence gradually shape human relationships. The novel introduces Artificial Friends as companions for children, but it also reflects deeper social problems such as isolation and inequality. At the same time, the idea of “lifting” creates a divide between individuals, showing how biology itself becomes a site of control. As Schmeink suggests, contemporary science fiction often shifts from digital control to biological and social regulation, where life itself becomes structured and managed (Schmeink). This paper argues that Klara and the Sun presents a form of quiet dystopia, where control is not forceful but normalised, and where care itself becomes something designed and distributed. The novel does not give clear answers, but it raises uncomfortable questions about identity, replacement, and what it really means to be human.
Water Politics and Environmental Injustice in The Water Knife
The novel The Water Knife (2015), by Paolo Bacigalupi, presents a post-apocalyptic vision of a water-scarce American Southwest where social stratification deepens amid the region's ecological collapse. This paper explores the book through the perspectives of Postcolonial Ecocriticism, Environmental Justice, and Political Ecology. This novel highlights how internal colonial powers use water as a commodity amid a resource crisis, leading to human displacement and exploitation. While focusing on the plight of people living on the margins of society, the author shows how climate change results in socio-economic and political inequalities and forces individuals to leave their homes and fight to obtain essential resources. Overall, the work provides a thought-provoking perspective on socio-environmental issues associated with climate change.
Digital Flesh: Posthuman Embodiment, Surveillance, and the Ethics of Datafied Selves
The rapid expansion of digital technologies has transformed the human body into a site of continuous data production, circulation, and control. This study examines the emergence of “digital flesh” within the framework of posthuman embodiment, where wearable devices, biometric systems, artificial intelligence, and networked platforms increasingly mediate biological existence. Drawing on the theoretical insights of Michel Foucault, Donna Haraway, Shoshana Zuboff, and N. Katherine Hayles, the paper conceptualises the body as an informational construct subject to pervasive surveillance and algorithmic governance. It argues that datafication reconfigures subjectivity by rendering individuals into measurable and predictive entities, thereby dissolving the boundaries between the physical and the digital. The study further foregrounds the bioethical implications of this transformation, particularly regarding autonomy, consent, privacy, and identity. It contends that contemporary regimes of data extraction operate through forms of implicit or coerced consent, undermining individual agency while intensifying structural inequalities. By engaging with select literary and cultural texts, the study demonstrates how these concerns are critically imagined and contested. Ultimately, it calls for a rearticulation of bioethical frameworks to address the complexities of technologically mediated embodiment.
Trauma, Resistance and Resilience in Murakami’s ‘Kafka on the Shore’
This paper explores the conflicts among trauma, resistance, resilience, and acceptance in Kafka on the Shore through thematic and qualitative analyses of Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore (2002; tr. 2005). The novel depicts both individual and collective traumas, contrasted through two protagonists. The parallel stories of the protagonists, Kafka Tamura and Nakata Satoru, highlight the themes of trauma, resistance, resilience, and acceptance through gradual intertwining. The paper presents how Kafka is affected by his personal psychological traumatic childhood experiences with lasting effects, and how he attempts to resist them and becomes resilient. The paper analyses the other strand of narrative in which Nakata faces trauma, resists it, and finds a resolution. His trauma appears more socio-political and collective, referring to Japanese human conditions after the World Wars in the mid-twentieth century. The other characters, Miss Saeki, Oshima, and Hoshino, play a key role in reflecting trauma and in the quests undertaken by Kafka and Nakata. They support Kafka and Nakata in finding ways to overcome traumatic experiences, internal conflicts, and quotidian dilemmas. The characters strive to resist trauma, to escape suffering through it, and, ultimately, to accept their circumstances and move forward. Through these interwoven narratives, Murakami illustrates a universal movement: from the paralysis of trauma, through deliberate resistance, to resilient acceptance of the past as an inseparable part of the self. The novel thus offers a nuanced meditation on how individuals and societies can navigate historical and personal wounds without being defined by them.
Narrating Justice: Queer Identity, Legal Recognition, and the Politics of Representation in Contemporary English Literature
The tension between queer self-identification and legal recognition appears to be at the heart of justice, visibility, and representation in literature of today's English. The novel then provides a critical reflection on how literary texts re-plot the challenges, sorrows and successes of queer bodies/media, as they remain ensnared by their compulsion to endure and thrive in a world governed by a legal order that has ceaselessly and helplessly closeted those non-normative displays of sexuality or gender. Close readings of selected novels, short stories and plays from the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries demonstrate how narrative elements operate to articulate relationships between legality, citizenship and ethical legitimacy, informing the tangle involving self-assertion versus structural constraint. The analysis situates queer literature within wider socio-legal constellations, arguing that the work of state homage is more than an impersonal bureaucratic process; it also structures the (re)-production of identity and community. Our study builds on the concept of narrative justice by illuminating how storying may disrupt heteronormative configurations and be crucial to the recuperation of marginalised experiences of acting. Engaging in close reading and critical discourse analysis, the study reveals contradictions in legal systems and attends to aesthetic decisions - voice and temporality chief among them - that mediate ethical and political demands. Finally, the article concludes that it is both a contemporary work of literature, a reflection on the realities of law, and a transformer of possibilities regarding discourse rights and recognition.
Micro-Traumas of Modern Professional Life: Narrative Strategies in When Love Finds You
Modern professional life often creates small but repeated emotional pressures that do not appear as major trauma but slowly affect a person’s mental balance. These small disturbances, which may be called micro-traumas, include stress from deadlines, fear of judgement, workplace competition, and constant self-doubt. Such experiences are common in urban corporate culture, yet they are rarely studied in popular Indian fiction. This paper examines how When Love Finds You presents these subtle emotional strains through its narrative techniques. The study shows that the novel does not depend on dramatic crisis but instead portrays gradual psychological tension through internal thoughts, hesitation, and silent emotional conflict. By analysing selected passages from the text, the paper uses close reading as its primary method and connects the story to broader discussions in trauma and narrative studies. This approach helps in understanding how everyday office life can shape emotional responses and create invisible mental pressure. The paper argues that reading the novel through the lens of micro-trauma offers a new way to interpret contemporary Indian Chick Lit and highlights how popular fiction reflects the hidden emotional costs of modern professional environments.
Diaspora, Displacement, and Psychological Disintegration: A Critical Analysis of Female Identity Crisis in Bharati Mukherjee's Wife
This paper examines the psychological trauma and identity crisis experienced by the female protagonist, Dimple Dasgupta, in Bharati Mukherjee's novel Wife (1975). Through the lens of diaspora studies and feminist literary criticism, the study explores how migration from Kolkata to New York precipitates Dimple's mental disintegration. The paper analyses the intersecting factors of cultural displacement, patriarchal marriage structures, social isolation, and linguistic alienation that culminate in her psychological breakdown and ultimate act of violence. Drawing on theoretical frameworks from Edward Said, Salman Rushdie, and feminist critics, this analysis reveals how Mukherjee portrays the gendered experience of immigration and the devastating consequences of failed assimilation for immigrant women trapped between traditional expectations and modern American life. The research demonstrates that Dimple's tragedy represents not merely individual pathology but a systemic failure of both patriarchal structures and the assimilation paradigm to accommodate women's needs and agency.
Prologue to Annihilation of Caste: A Tale of Two Cities
Dr. B. R. Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste remains one of the most radical and timeless critiques of caste-based discrimination in India. Originally conceived as a speech for the Jat-Pat-Todak Mandal's annual conference in Lahore in 1936, the text was never delivered due to its uncompromising content. This article examines the prologue to Annihilation of Caste, which comprises a compelling exchange of letters between Ambedkar and the conference organisers. The correspondence provides not only a narrative of the cancelled event but also insight into the ideological clash between a reformist intellectual and a conservative social organisation. This article seeks to highlight the themes, controversies, and implications surrounding the prologue, framing it as a tale of two conflicting Indias.
Challenging the Normal through Thappad and The Liberation of Sita
Women have been taught to hold on, to turn a deaf ear and to dismiss the acts of injustice perpetrated against them. Whether in epics, social norms or behavioural expectations, women have been constructed as the silenced ones, frequently as the ones who have always been oppressed by the dominant or the powerful. However, with the ascension of popular culture, film media and literature, these social expectations have been challenged. This paper examines how the film Thappad by Anubhav Sinha and the book The Liberation of Sita by Volga have questioned the current understanding of resilience, attributing new meanings to it. Although set in different times, both works question the long-standing idea that a woman must be sacrificed and endure. In Thappad, a single slap from the husband was enough to call into question a whole culture’s propensity to accept small acts of violence. In The Liberation of Sita, Sita takes back her voice, gaining strength and wisdom through interactions with other women who have experienced their own injustices. Utilising feminist revisionist mythology, this paper delves into how ancient stories can be re-told to empower women to the extent that they were previously denied. The essay seeks to analyse why stories in film and literature leave a broader influence on the audience through media convergence theory. Through trauma theory, the paper considers the individual cost of injury, but reinforces the healing through solidarity and self-determination. Finally, both Thappad and The Liberation of Sita are not only artistic works or retellings but also exercises in cultural rewriting. They ask readers and spectators to dream of a world in which women are not determined by their pain, but by their decisions, their dignity.
The Politics of Presence: Loitering, Affect, and Reclaiming Urban Public Space in Post-Nirbhaya India
This paper examines how women’s engagement with Indian urban spaces shifted following the 2012 Nirbhaya case, moving from a discourse of state-mandated “safety” to an elective “politics of presence”. By analysing Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan and Shilpa Ranade’s Why Loiter?, Maya Krishna Rao’s " Performance Walk, and Blank Noise’s “Meet to Sleep” campaign, this study explores how the simple acts of walking, sitting, and sleeping in public become potent forms of resistance. While the Nirbhaya case intensified a culture of fear and restrictive “safety” narratives, these selected texts and performances champion the right to loiter without purpose. Utilising Sara Ahmed’s affect theory and Lauren Berlant’s “crisis ordinariness,” the methodology employs close reading and performance analysis to argue that reclaiming the city is not merely a legal or infrastructural issue but an affective one. The findings suggest that by embracing pleasure and risk over survivalist caution, these acts of “ordinary freedom” challenge the systemic gendered boundaries of the Indian metropole.
The Architecture of Disbelief: Surveillance, ‘Correction,’ and the Social Construction of Truth in BBC TV series ‘The Capture’
The premise of this research article is based on a view beyond the average ‘spy thriller’ genre to view the show as a study of epistemological collapse, where the fundamental ways we "know" things are dismantled. In this series, ‘The Capture’, the state transition from observing reality to authoring it represents the ultimate evolution of the Panopticon. The article's theoretical framework focuses on the concept of the ‘Digital Panopticon’. Furthering the study, the focus shifts to Foucault and Surveillance, discussing how the ‘Correction’ program goes a step further than Foucault’s Panopticon. It’s not just that the subject is being watched; it’s that the subject’s actions can be digitally rewritten to fit a predetermined narrative. The Baudrillard’s Hyperreality section in the paper analyses how the "fake" video becomes ‘more real’ than the actual event because it carries the weight of legal evidence and institutional backing. An exploration into the State-Sourced Gaslighting affecting the sociological impression of ‘Correction’ on the individual (Shaun Emery/Isaac Turner). There is also a brief examination of the concept of ‘anomie’ – the breakdown of social bonds between the citizen and the state. The author also examines the functionalist perspective on digital distortion. Is the subversion of truth a necessary "function" to maintain social order and prevent terrorism, or does it lead to total institutional decay? The Algorithmic Governance sub-theme discusses how the series portrays the shift of power from human judgment to black-box technologies. In a sociological sense, the visual was once a tool for accountability (e.g., body cams and TV interviews). ‘The Capture’ illustrates how technology has been reclaimed by the powerful to disenfranchise the observer. The audience is exposed to a "Post-Truth Social Contract" in which institutional trust is replaced by a manufactured "safety"—one in which the individual must accept the state’s digital narrative as the ultimate truth to remain a functioning member of society.
Eco-Nostalgia and Environmental Consciousness in Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide and Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss
This study investigates the intersection of ecological displacement and diasporic consciousness in contemporary Indian English fiction, specifically examining how environmental nostalgia functions as a crucial yet underexplored dimension of identity formation in diaspora literature. Through comparative ecocritical analysis of Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide (2004) and Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss (2006), this research employs close textual reading, thematic analysis, and postcolonial ecocritical approaches to examine representations of nature, landscape, and environmental knowledge as markers of diasporic identity. The analysis reveals that both novels portray environmental displacement as equally significant to cultural displacement in shaping diasporic consciousness. Ghosh's Sundarbans and Desai's Kalimpong function not merely as geographical settings but as active agents in constructing and deconstructing notions of home, belonging, and identity. The study identifies three primary manifestations of eco-nostalgia: (1) landscape as repository of collective memory, (2) traditional ecological knowledge as cultural inheritance, and (3) environmental degradation as catalyst for displacement. This research pioneers the integration of ecocriticism with diaspora studies, proposing the theoretical framework of "eco-diasporic consciousness" to address gaps in current scholarship. It contributes to contemporary discussions of climate migration and environmental justice while expanding the analytical tools available for the study of twenty-first-century diasporic literature.
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Breaking Free from Materialism: Money, Ethics, and The Search for Purpose in The Razor’s Edge
W. Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge (1944) examines the enduring conflict between material affluence and spiritual integrity in the morally disoriented landscape that followed World War I. Through the opposing lives of its principal characters, the novel interrogates how the pursuit of wealth can obstruct moral clarity and hinder the search for authentic meaning. This paper explores how Maugham employs his protagonist, Larry Darrell, as an emblem of spiritual rebirth in a society enthralled by greed, ambition, and appearance. In contrast, figures like Isabel Bradley and Elliott Templeton reveal the ethical compromises and emotional emptiness of a generation enthralled by status and consumption. By contextualizing The Razor’s Edge within the postwar crisis of faith and drawing connections to modernist critiques of consumerism, this study argues that Maugham presents his work as both a reflection of interwar disillusionment and a timeless moral allegory. The novel challenges the illusion that happiness lies in prosperity, proposing that enlightenment and ethical awareness are the only paths toward genuine fulfillment. This idea continues to resonate in today’s consumer-driven world.
Echoes from the Margins: Women’s Voices and Feminist Resistance in Kavery Nambisan’s A Town Like Ours
Kavery Nambisan’s A Town Like Ours (2014) offers a powerful feminist vision grounded in the moral, emotional, and social realities of Indian womanhood. The novel departs from conventional representations of female liberation by centering its narrative on the marginalized voice of Rajakumari, a woman stigmatized for her past as a sex worker, who becomes both the storyteller and moral conscience of the community. Through her perspective and through the lives of women such as Kripa and Saroja, Nambisan constructs a layered critique of patriarchy, class inequality, and modernization. The novel reframes feminist resistance not as political defiance but as ethical resilience and compassion. Simultaneously, the narrative links the oppression of women with ecological degradation, marking the text as a subtle work of ecofeminism. This paper examines how Nambisan’s feminist aesthetic combines voice, morality, and care to challenge dominant hierarchies, positioning A Town Like Ours as an essential contribution to Indian feminist fiction.
Influence of Space in Life-writing for Archiving History, Tradition, and Culture in Rohinton Mistry’s Select Novels
Rohinton Mistry’s novels explore how space, both real and imagined, helps to preserve history, tradition, and culture through storytelling. In novels such as Such a Long Journey (1991) and Family Matters (2002), Mistry presents the lives of Parsi and Indian communities in spaces that hold deep meaning. The city of Bombay, now Mumbai, is more than a setting in his stories. It becomes a living place that shows how people struggle to find identity, face social problems, and deal with changes in their country. Homes, crowded buildings, and city streets reflect both the warmth of belonging and the pain of loss. They also show the effects of significant events such as Partition, the Emergency, and religious conflict. Mistry uses space to record and remember daily life. He shows how simple places, such as homes and markets, keep the stories of ordinary people alive. His imagination turns these spaces into memory maps where the past and present come together. Through his detailed descriptions of living spaces, he shows how people express their identity and protect their traditions even in times of hardship. These spaces also help readers understand how individuals connect their private lives to the nation's broader history. The role of space in Mistry’s writing is not limited to describing settings. It becomes a form of life-writing that records emotions, memories, and experiences. In this way, Mistry’s novels act as cultural records that keep alive the stories of the Parsi community and Indian society. They remind readers that memory and culture live not only in time but also in the places where people live, love, and struggle.
Narrative Voice and Domestic Violence in Manju Kapur's Home and Meena Kandasamy's When I Hit You
Domestic violence in Indian English women's fiction has received critical attention as a recurring thematic concern. However, existing scholarship remains largely author-centric and thematically descriptive rather than formally attentive to how narrative structure shapes the representation of abuse, agency, and resistance. This article argues that analyzing Manju Kapur's Home (2006) and Meena Kandasamy's When I Hit You (2017) comparatively reveals a significant generational and narrative shift in how domestic violence is mediated in contemporary Indian English women's writing. While Kapur's third-person heterodiegetic narration embeds female characters within patriarchal family structures, constraining their articulation of violence, Kandasamy's first-person, confessional narrative voice performs a radical reclamation of narrative authority through metafictional intervention and literary self-fashioning. Drawing on feminist narratology, trauma theory, and postcolonial literary analysis, this study demonstrates that narrative voice is not merely a stylistic choice but a fundamentally political dimension of how abused women stake claims to agency, interpretation, and truth-telling. The formal differences between these novels reflect broader transformations in how domestic violence is narrativized, conceptualized, and resisted across two decades of Indian English women's fiction, suggesting that contemporary writing increasingly stages intimate trauma as a narrative—and thus interpretable, contestable, and transformable—phenomenon rather than as inevitable private suffering.