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
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.
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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.
Postcolonial Language Ideology and Learner Identity Formation in English Medium Classrooms: A Critical Analysis of Contemporary Indian Educational Contexts
This paper critically examines how postcolonial language ideologies shape learner identity formation in English-medium classrooms across India. While policy documents assert that English's "colonial origins are now forgotten or irrelevant," ethnographic and discourse analyses reveal that colonial language ideologies continue to structure classroom encounters, pedagogical practices, and learner subjectivities. Drawing on postcolonial theory, linguistic ideology studies, and critical pedagogy, this paper argues that English language learning in India functions simultaneously as a site of empowerment for marginalized learners and as an instrument of epistemic marginalization. Through analysis of curriculum materials, classroom practices, and learner narratives, this research demonstrates how standard English ideology, monolingual pedagogies, and native speaker hierarchies reproduce colonial power relations while constraining learners' identity possibilities. Particularly noteworthy are the contradictions between official policy rhetoric promoting multilingualism and institutional practices that marginalize code-switching and translanguaging—pedagogical strategies that research shows significantly enhance learner comprehension and agency. The paper concludes by proposing theoretical frameworks for decolonial language pedagogies that recognize learners as agents capable of constructing complex, hybrid identities through strategic engagement with English while maintaining connections to their linguistic and cultural heritage.
From Homeland to Wordscape: Diasporic Testimonio in the Poetry of Mahmoud Darwish
Darwish’s literary output encompasses all shades of these themes, including alienation, marginalisation, despair, nostalgia, readjustment, assimilation, adaptation, and adoption. As a writer of Diasporic Testimonio, his writings are autobiographical. In his poems, he portrays a kind of cultural in-betweenness. The power structures marginalise these people. They are the natives of their own homeland, which is found in every protest literature where cross-fertilisation takes place. Mahmoud Darwish’s poems are often preoccupied with the elements of nostalgia as he seeks to locate himself in a new culture. His poems depict the culture of his homeland, which was once beautiful, and at the same time, he also registers the painful agony of adapting to a new space that had become terrible. The Ghettoisation and discrimination of the displaced communities result in a sense of dismemberment and marginalisation in the host country. In the displacement, discontinuity, and fragmentation, the writers experience various cultural processes and ethnic mixtures within a multicultural setup, to which they are inevitably drawn. Through Mahmoud Darwish’s works, it can be inferred that there is a hectic search for securing and establishing a new home in the country where they lived, and in this new home, they create an identity that is deeply rooted in the past, where power structures had silenced them.
Love, Society, and Identity: Literary Adaptation in Bollywood from Premchand to Chetan Bhagat
Literature is intended to entertain and is published in various forms, including epics, poetry, and drama. Cinema is often referred to as a new genre of drama, with its themes frequently adapted from literature, primarily novels and plays. Drama and literature are two closely intertwined fields. This article examines the relationship between Indian literature and Hindi cinema, particularly through the translations of Bollywood from Premchand to Chetan Bhagat. Love, society, and identity have been staple themes in Indian cinema for a long time. Premchand's work is concerned with rural society and social issues, whereas Chetan Bhagat's work reflects the issues of modern-day urban youth. This research highlights how cinema assigns new interpretations and meanings to literary texts in social and cultural contexts.
Telling from Afar: The Politics of Voice in Diasporic Testimonio
Politics and emerging ideologies are closely related to culture, and they have also influenced both Literature and criticism. Politics, culture, history, and ideology, which are closely intertwined, have formed a distinct area of research and have profoundly influenced critical thought. In Literature, it has had a profound influence on the creation of literature, and correspondingly, has given rise to a new branch of Literary Criticism that considers culture as a source of literary analysis. The new generation of scholars and intellectuals has been influenced by popular music, new research in science and technology, rapid globalisation, and industrial growth. The cultures of the new generation are distinct from those of the past, which were largely shaped by books. Modern artists, writers, and critics owe a great deal to the new "visual and aural culture" for shaping their worldviews and cultural standards. This generation is proud of how well it has absorbed these "cultural influences" from previous generations. The popular new culture has captivated even the Previous Generation's Scholars and Intellectuals. The word "reading" is being applied in its widest meaning. Distinguishing between reading and theory is essential. Theorising and reading, though, go hand in hand. Both reading acts and the theory develop out of one another. Two have never been able to get along.
Reclaiming Identity through Words: Literature as a Catalyst for Social Justice and Equality
The paper analyses literature as a tool for resistance and empowerment for marginalised audiences: Jews, 'Blacks,’ ‘Dalits,’ women, and transgender individuals. It documents the shift in literature from a record of oppression to a tool for reclaiming identity and asserting equal rights. Through the works of representative writers such as Elie Wiesel, Toni Morrison, B.R. Ambedkar, A. Revathi, and Laxmi Narayan Tripathi, the study demonstrates how personal stories are transformed into collective struggles for dignity and justice. Each section illustrates the particular historical and social conditions of marginalisation, and how these writers transformed silence into speech and oppression into self-articulation. The paper claims that ‘class’ literature does more than chronicle marginalisation. However, it redefines the ethical and humanitarian paradigm of civilisation, encouraging readers to interrogate entrenched ways of thinking and propose more ‘acceptable’ alternatives. It assigns ‘class’ writing as a core element of human rights and social change advocacy.
Resilience, Self-Definition, and the Aesthetics of Silence in the Select Novels of Anita Nair
Anita Nair's body of work presents an intense examination of the inner self of the present-day Indian woman, tracing a landscape of resilience intricately connected to the aesthetics of silence and self-definition. Nair's novels, Ladies Coupe, Mistress, Lessons in Forgetting, and Eating Wasps, portray silence not just as a sign of submission but as a space for self-analysis, healing, and the character finds solace in it. This paper puts forth the argument that Nair's women protagonists put forth silence as a psychological tool to overcome trauma and rebuild an authentic selfhood. Through close readings of the major protagonists Akhila, Radha, Meera, and Rajalakshmi, this paper argues that resilience in fiction is a process articulated through silent endurance, thereby redefining women's empowerment in contemporary Indian English Literature.
Dattani’s Women’s Take on the New Woman: A Comparison with Ibsen’s Nora
This research paper aims to compare Mahesh Dattani’s female characters to Nora, the brave and revolutionary female character in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. The researcher examines how Dattani’s female characters respond to the concept of the “New Woman” and how their growing consciousness empowers them to resist the strict norms of patriarchal society. With their resistance, struggle, and assertion of personal identity, these women challenge established boundaries and the standards imposed by the phallocentric society. On the other hand, Ibsen’s problem play demonstrates how an apparently modest housewife, like Nora, develops into a strong symbol of autonomy and self–realisation. Both writers highlight the limits put on women in a phallocentric culture and call for reform. The so–called “Second Sex” eventually learns to break free from epistemic violence, recover autonomy, and find the strength to struggle for dignity, equality, and identity. This comparative research highlights the growth of female agency in modern play.
Myth and Modernity in the Select Works of R.K. Narayan
The current research work is based on the combination of two terms, namely myth and modernity, as used by R.K. Narayan in his literary work. He is one of the most prominent figures in Indian English fiction. His work bridges the world of mythology with the realities of modern Indian life in a distinctly and uniquely distinct manner. Most of his work takes place in his imaginary, fictional town, known as Malgudi. His literary work captures the tension between two important aspects: ancient cultural traditions and the influences of modernisation on the contemporary era, through his characters, themes, and narrative style. Furthermore, the work examined R.K. Narayan’s focus on the theme of how Indian consciousness navigates between faith, morality, and progress. Thus, this research paper investigated Narayan’s work with the harmonisation of myth and modernity. The novels selected for this work are The Vendor of Sweets, The Man-Eater of Malgudi, and The Guide, which have examined the coexistence and conflict between India’s spiritual heritage and its modern aspirations.