‘The flower faded but the pain remained’: Reflections on Nature in Literature -- Plenary Talk by Nibir K. Ghosh at International Conference on “Literature, Environment and Climate Change” RGNUL Punjab, 7-8 April 2022

 

International Conference on “Literature, Environment and Climate Change” RGNUL Punjab, 7-8 April 2022

‘The flower faded but the pain remained’: Reflections on Nature in Literature

by

Nibir K. Ghosh

I will begin with a poem The Miller of the Dee attributed to Charles Mackay

 

There dwelt a miller, hale and bold,
Beside the river Dee;
He worked and sang from morn till night -
No lark more blithe than he;
And this the burden of his song
Forever used to be:
"I envy nobody - no, not I -
And nobody envies me!"

"Thou'rt wrong, my friend," said good King Hal,
"As wrong as wrong can be;
For could my heart be light as thine,
I'd gladly change with thee.
And tell me now, what makes thee sing,
With voice so loud and free,
While I am sad, though I am king,
Beside the river Dee?"

The miller smiled and doffed his cap,
"I earn my bread," quoth he;
"I love my wife, I love my friend,
I love my children three;
I owe no penny I can not pay,
I thank the river Dee,
That turns the mill that grinds the corn
That feeds my babes and me."

"Good friend," said Hall, and sighed the while,
"Farewell, and happy be;
But say no more, if thou'dst be true,
That no one envies thee;
Thy mealy cap is worth my crown,
Thy mill my kingdom's fee;
Such men as thou are England's boast,
O miller of the Dee!

From this simple melodious poem celebrating the life of an ordinary Miller, let me take you to a monumental work that amplifies the theme of this conference on “Literature, Environment and Climate Change.”

Way back in 1762 Jean-Jacques Rousseau initiated a serious discourse on the relationship between man and nature in his monumental book titled The Social Contract. In the insightful opening lines of his powerful treatise he stated emphatically, “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” Implying that the freedom which man had originally experienced in the “state of nature” was forsaken by his enslavement to his own increasing material needs, Rousseau acknowledged that people can never be as entirely free in modern society as they are in the state of nature. Consequently, at the end of The Social Contract, Rousseau advocates a “return to nature.” Inspired by Rousseau’s philosophy, William Wordsworth voiced his concern over man’s limitless greed in his popular poem, “The World is Too Much with Us” wherein he laments: “The world is too much with us; late and soon,/ Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;/ Little we see in Nature that is ours;/ We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”

It is perhaps providential that two-and-a-half centuries after the publication of  The Social Contract the city of Paris, from where Rousseau launched his prophetic work, became the nerve centre of the International Summit on Climate Change. As inhabitants of an extremely endangered Earth, heads of nations representing the environmental anxiety and dread of their respective citizens from every corner of the globe assembled in Paris at the end of 2015 to adopt the first-ever universal, legally binding global climate deal. The global ecological crisis that we are now confronting is unprecedented in human history. The terrifying scale of this crisis and our increasing awareness that it has emerged out of deliberate human policies to interfere with Nature itself has virtually compelled us to realize and understand that we can no longer take Nature for granted. John May in The Greenpeace Story rightly says: “When the last tree is cut and the last fish killed, the last river poisoned, then you will see that you can’t eat money.”

To make you aware of the magnitude of the calamitous problem of environmental crisis created by our anthropocentric attitude and behaviour, let me share a recent happening in Canada’s British Columbia. In the emergency department of Kootenay Lake Hospital, Dr. Kyle Merritt, the head, saw a patient enter literally gasping for breath. After carefully examining the patient, Dr. Merritt announced his diagnosis: "climate change." When asked why he chose to make the unusual diagnosis, Dr. Merritt stated: “If we’re not looking at the underlying cause, and we’re just treating the symptoms, we’re just gonna keep falling further and further behind.”

The question now is how do we use literature to confront and control the ever-worsening situation.

                                        Reflections on Nature in Literature:

The following lines from William Wordsworth's poem "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798" reveal among other things what is paramount about the relationship between Nature and Man/woman. 

 

These beauteous forms,

Through a long absence, have not been to me

As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:

But oft, …

I have owed to them,

In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,

Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;

And passing even into my purer mind

With tranquil restoration:—feelings too

Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,

As have no slight or trivial influence

On that best portion of a good man's life,

His little, nameless, unremembered, acts

Of kindness and of love.

Likewise, in a poem, “I Plucked you Flower” (The Gardener, Poem No. LVII),  Rabindranath Tagore shows the impact of human aggression on Nature:

I plucked your flower, O world!

I pressed it to my heart and the thorn pricked.
When the day waned and it darkened, I found that
the flower had faded, but the pain remained. (1-4)

But here I wish to emphasize that merely reading or writing poems and stories of Nature, planting saplings on World Environment Day, or sharing selfies at beautiful natural resorts on Facebook or Instagram, or writing profoundly scholarly papers for Climate Change conferences will not take us closer to comprehending the problem or determining what role we can play to mitigate the crisis. We really need to explore in literature elements that can sensitize us and others to human misery, poverty, malnutrition, debilitating diseases, discrimination and oppression of man by man.

W. H. Auden in “Refugee Blues” says: this city has ten million souls,/ Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes. These lines took me this morning to doing a bit of research on ground reality of the human condition.

In the process, I googled ‘Dharavi Slums.’ I am sharing details: The slum, like many others, lacks provisions for sanitation, drains, safe drinking water, roads or other basic services. The film industry has played a key role in bringing this slum to prominence. It was featured in films like the Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire and the more recent Gully Boy. The sprawling Dharavi became the favourite tourist experience of 2019 in India and even beat the Taj Mahal, says  travel site TripAdvisor’s Travellers.’ I was shocked at the available data: in less than 535 Acres of land, live close to 12 Lakh people which means 17 sq ft per (4x4 sq ft per person) inhabitant. In contrast I was amused to learn that a single family whose affluence and popularity is common knowledge live in a tiny house that is built on 4,00,000 sq. ft. which leaves only 40000 sq ft per person. If by studying and teaching literature we continue to turn our heads away from the continued misery of our own human kind, does it really matter what we talk and write about?

To contribute our share to resolving the dreadful environmental crisis, let me take you back to Rousseau who defined the principles of the Social Contract where  “All citizens should participate - and should be committed to the general good - even if it means acting against their private or personal interests.”

What we need is passionate involvement and dedicated commitment to leave the world better than we found it in. If we can become courageous like Gaura Devi, a woman who became a widow at the age of 22, and who, with just 27 illiterate women, hugged the trees to prevent them from being felled way back on March 26, 1974 to initiate what is now recognised globally as the Chipko movement, there is still hope.

I, therefore, exhort the young participants in this international conference and the students of RGNUL to explore in their own little way how they can substantiate their ideas and resolutions with concrete action to justify their commitment to environment conservation even at the cost of their personal materialistic priorities and pursuits. I strongly affirm that it is incumbent upon us all to join hands together to feel the innate joy of seeing the flower in bloom rather than find ourselves plucking them and living with the “pain” as Tagore had warned.  

Thank You!

 

Review by Nibir K. Ghosh in ASYMPTOTE: Tijan M. Sallah's I Come from a Country

 

I Come from a Country by Tijan M. Sallah, Africa World Press, 2021

A Storehouse of Affection

Nibir K. Ghosh

If The Gambia as a nation figures on the globe as “one of the world’s poorest and least-developed countries,” according to a recent article in The Guardian, there may be much cause for despair. As I leaf through the pages of Tijan M. Sallah’s latest poetry collection I Come from a Country, I can see a great deal of hope emanating from the vigorous pen of The Gambia’s leading poet, writer, and critic. The very first poem “I Come from a Country,” that gives the collection its title, shows how Sallah negotiates the dark terrains of poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, and urban squalor through images and pictures of what he considers essentially human. The opening lines of the poem, “I come from a country where the land is small, / But our hearts are big,” immediately suggest that it is the people who constitute a nation rather than geographical lines or boundaries. This is a land where “every one knows your name / . . . Where poverty gnaws at our heels, / But we have not given up hope / We continue to work.”

The collection’s recurring image of the sun signifies hope eternal. Hope, for Sallah, is not a “thing with feathers” as Emily Dickinson would have us imagine in her poem, “Hope is the thing with Feathers,” but it is a reassurance that “rises daily with the sun.” Life is difficult but with the resilience reminiscent of Hemingway’s Santiago, the common folks of The Gambia believe that “a man can be destroyed but not defeated”:

And if resilience were a person,
She will live in my country.
She will be a calloused-handed woman
In sun-drenched rice-fields,
With a child strapped on her back;
But with a love enormous as the sea.

. . . Where we still believe in such things as
Sweating with your hand,
And still remember God and family.
And still support the indigent,
And carry Hope like oysters,
Sun-peeping from their shells.

Though based in the USA, Sallah’s intimate relationship with The Gambia remains deeply embedded in his sensibility. It is not restricted to a mere poetic expression of “imaginary homelands.” He seems to be carrying The Gambia within his heart and soul. If he is eager to show his love and esteem for the people of his homeland, he is no less vehement in offering his harsh indictment of tyrants like Yahya Jammeh who brought untold misery to the subjects for whom he was elected to be their custodian. Celebrating the overthrow that led to Jammeh’s exile, Sallah warns his fellow Gambians in “Jammeh-Exit”:

The detractors of freedom prey
On the unfulfilled pledges to the poor . . .
We must not be fooled;
That history does not repeat itself.
But, damn well, it does, if
Those who guard the doors of liberty
Sleep like dunderheads at sunrise.

Sallah is equally unsparing of leaders with dictatorial intent as is evident from the poem “Nasty Palaver of Donald Duck,” where his target is Donald Trump. Infuriated by Trump’s reference to natives of Africa as “people from the shit-hole continent,” Sallah castigates the “insolence from a drake, holding the scepter” for creating fissures in the most powerful democracy in the world with his hate-speeches against immigrants and people of colour. Sallah desires to see the earth rid of “such unbridled / Arrogance and greed” that cannot treat fellow human beings with respect and dignity.

This slender collection of thirty-two poems showcases amazing diversity and an encyclopaedic range of topics that cover people and events, cultures and civilizations, society and polity, calamities and pandemics. Poems like “Of India, I have hope for the Sun” evoke the poet’s ability to travel in his mind to distant lands as a cultural ambassador to share the message of freedom, peace, tolerance, and prosperity that comes from recognizing the otherness of the other with empathy and love. He imagines flying to India on the “chariot of his dreams” and, “sitting by the Ganges and the Brahmaputra,” desires to “watch pilgrims sail deep into their atman.” Inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s ideals, he says:

That Mahatma, who taught the world
The enduring lesson of satyagraha.
Who knew that a spindle and a thread
Can defeat the depraved canons of Empire.

He visualizes Rabindranath Tagore sitting by “the date palms of Santiniketan” and “proliferating the wisdom among gurus/ About the enlightened path of Brahmo Samaj.” The India of Sallah’s dreams corresponds with Tagore’s vision of a “Heaven of Freedom”:

Of India, I have hope for the sun.
And of the rays of the sun,
Of the shadows of Dalits merging with the Brahmins
In mutual empathy and regard;
Of the silhouettes of Hindus, Muslims, and Christians
Melding love into an unrecognizable whole.
Of the rich breaking bread with the poor
To form a circle of incestuous kindness.
Of men and women, breaking the miseries
Wrought by fate, to shape a virtuous destiny.

Sallah seems to value the freedom of the individual as well as the collective. He derides the “Mending Wall” syndrome and asks in his poem, “Walls”: “How can a country grow that erects walls?” His rhetorical questions, in the same poem, “What would have happened to Relativity, / If Einstein was put in a cage? / What happens to caged children / When you set them free?” demonstrate his innate concern for issues that we normally turn away from. He castigates the gross materialism that has led humanity astray in the name of modernity. He is disturbed by the yawning gulf between the roaring rich and the utterly poor even in a land of plenty such as America. This is evident from his poem “Washington,” in which he avers “You have seen the world’s perfections and imperfections,” if you have seen the capital of the USA.

What makes this volume noteworthy is the intrinsic humanity of the poet, allowing him to offer exemplary tributes to the people he has loved, admired, adored, and revered. The epigraph by Stephen Spender—“I think continually of those who were truly great”—appended to the poem “Ballad for Mother” shows Sallah as a storehouse of affection blended with gratitude. He concludes the poem with the lines:

Among the many greats I know,
My mother was truly great.
If your mind racks with doubt,
I wish you had met my mother.

No less effusive are his remembrances of Dr. Lenrie Peters: “He loved the country like dolphins loved its river”; Chinua Achebe: “We will remember you for your dreams to make Africa fly”; and the Nobel Laureate for Literature Nadine Gordimer: “You loved truth like your birth.”

In these grim times, when the world continues to come to terms with the hazardous COVID-19 pandemic, Sallah writes in “Season of Vengeance”:

It is the season when death visited us
With a vengeance.
Corona crowned itself the king of the earth.
And we all prayed for the first time
For we were frightful.
We knew we had been careless
About things that really mattered.

The poem begins with the description of the traumatic fear that King Corona created by emerging as the great leveller that reduced to “a scandalous dungheap” all our “accumulated knowledge” of dealing with pandemics. As “Hospitals roiled with the drama of masks and ventilators” and “Mortuaries lay overwhelmed by / The rapid march of death’s spell,” Sallah points out how a complacent world was sent into a spin “by the scourge of the tiny” virus that wrought havoc on all fronts of human territory: social, economic, and political. Citing the warning given by Greta Thunberg, the young Swedish environmental activist, regarding the impending existential crisis from climate change, the poem laments how the world, lost in the funhouse of material greed and comfort, had to pay a heavy price:

We knew we had been careless
About things that really mattered.
Greta warned us, but, hey, did we listen
Earth is one; emissions must sink.
But the world blocked its ears,
And continued with business. Pests jumped,
And found free rein.
Arrogance, if not tempered, is poison for the world.

Sallah’s concern for the environment that we notice in “Season of Vengeance” is not an isolated instance. Many poems in the collection bring to the forefront his essential sensitivity in approaching events and issues as a caring poet. In “Slaying A Banjul Crocodile,” he shows his extreme displeasure when a group of children launch a brutal attack on the helpless crocodile. The crocodile’s attempt to defend itself makes the poet in Sallah remark: “one defenseless soul / Against a mob is / Sinking David against Goliath. / It instilled not fear in the mob. / It only spurred their excitement.” Likewise, a poem like “Moth” brings into bold relief the satisfaction and happiness that come to him from saving the life of the “blackish brown moth” trapped between the glass and wire gauze of a window: “I thought of leaving it alone. / But I noticed that sometimes / Leaving things alone may / End their fate.”

With a perfect rendering of emotions in multiple forms—ballad, haiku, and free verse—I Come from a Country is bound to command attention from both practitioners of poetry and lay readers. The easy conversational tone used by Sallah in his poems should remind one of Robert Frost who took pride in saying: “My poems talk.”

Dr. Nibir K. Ghosh, former Senior Fulbright Fellow 2003–4 at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA, is UGC Emeritus Professor of English at Agra College, Agra, India. He is Chief Editor of Re-Markings (www.re-markings.com), an India-based international journal of English Letters in its twenty-first year of publication. He has authored or edited fifteen books that include Calculus of Power: Modern American Novel, Multicultural America: Conversations with Contemporary Authors, W. H. Auden: Therapeutic Fountain, Rabindranath Tagore: The Living Presence, Gandhi and His Soulforce Mission, and Beyond Boundaries: Reflections of Indian and U.S. Scholars, among others. His most recent work is Mirror from the Indus: Essays, Tributes and Memoirs.

https://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2022/02/03/a-storehouse-of-affection-on-tijan-m-sallahs-i-come-from-a-country/#more-28514

COMMENTS

Dear Prof. Ghosh, I am delighted to see that the review finally came out.  You have done a fantastic job. Thank you for taking the time to write a thought-provoking and comprehensive review.  Certainly, the best review done on the book so far…!    If you don’t mind, I will share it around with friends. I have shared your review around, including with my publisher, who was very happy with your thoughtful piece.  It is the best review so far, and I am grateful to you. Tijan M. Sallah

***

Indeed a rich tribute to the poet!

You've captured the theme of hope and resilience and the likeness to Hemingway's eternally true "man can be destroyed, not defeated" is commendable ...  of anguish and desire for the home that was ... of political tyrants and their loudmouths ...

You have a very lucid style of writing, Sir. It appears to be written so effortlessly ! I marvel at your genius.   So fortunate are the ones who are your students.

More power to you, Sir. Please keep sharing your analytical and perceptive writings more often. Let me learn and grow under your wings --Dr. Ashoo Toor, Department of Agricultural Journalism, Languages & Culture, Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana.

                       ***

It's really an illuminating experience for me to go through the review. you have  done it with moving sympathy for the sufferers of racism. The lines you have quoted are powerful as they're born of struggles the working people wage in their every day life. --Dr. G.L. Gautam, HOD English, Lajpat Rai College, Sahibabad, Ghaziabad

                                                                    

                                                                        ***

I don't know much about this writer Sallah but your Review has kindled a desire in me to read more about him. I will certainly do so whenever I can. Excellent write up Sir. Fabulous 👌👌-- Dr. Gunjan Chaturvedi, HOD English, BDK Girls College, Agra

***

Thank you Sir, for sharing such a wonderful piece of your writing, & for introducing us to the beautiful poems of Mr. Sallah that speak of his patriotism. His faith in love, hope & humanity impresses us. His compassion for the poor helpless crocodile reminds us of the great philosophy of "live, and let live." While he dares to speak about the arrogant world leaders of their vain pride; his love & gratitude towards India, Tagore & Mahatma Gandhi reveals his humbleness. I really wonder what Mr. Sallah would be writing about the present times when the whole world is at the verge of another world war. Thank you Sir for sharing such a beautiful article full of wisdom. No doubt, I feel inspired & motivated. Thank you Sir. 🙏—Dr. Priti Verma is HOD English, P.C. Bagla College, Hathras

                                                                     

                                                                      ***

This article/review served as a window to Gambian literature to me. Tijan Sallah's poetry has been part of World Contemporary... too but this book is actually profound as it covers larger depth of issues faced by the country. I came to know about the "Shithole countries" remark for first time. Congratulations to you for another wonderful publication. -- Saurabh Agarwal, Entrepreneur and Literary enthusiast.

                                                                ***

I read your review and I felt an urge of reading the whole work. The way you've portrayed everything is extremely insightful and at the same time tends to put forth the fact that it is merely our self created boundaries that set us apart... I, as a reader, felt strongly of how much atrocities is the world facing and how people are being fragmented at heart, forgetting that before anything else they are human beings... I haven't read the poetry but I can make out the voice of the people of Gambia and their suffering...

It is written in a quite understandable manner yet brings to light such complex issues and events with ease and serenity...Thank you for giving me the opportunity to read it. -- Ashna Taneja, BA I, DEI, Dayalbagh, Agra

 

Re-Markings Vol. 21 No. 1 March 2022 (marking 21 years of publication)

 Re-Markings 

Vol. 21 No. 1 March 2022

 EDITORIAL

It is true that survivors refuse to draw any lesson from the past or present and love to continue to cherish the illusion of immunity from disaster. They tend to forget that if life is all about hedonistic pleasures, it is also about restraint about how we conduct ourselves as a member of the social community. To make a mockery of protocols like ‘social distancing’ and wearing a ‘mask’ only shows how insensitive we can be to feelings of compassion for others.

Deeply pained and concerned with the way a fairly large part of mankind continues to handle disasters and calamities, I had recorded the above sentiments in my Editorial to the September 2021 issue of Re-Markings. It is strange that a major part of the populace worldwide considers observing COVID-19 protocols a big affront to their freedom to pursue their individual and collective brand of comfort and happiness. It reminds me of an observation that A. G. Gardiner makes in his essay entitled “On the Rule of the Road”: “Liberty is not a personal affair only but a social contract. It is an accommodation of interest.” Wary of restrictions imposed on our limited notion of liberty, we look with disdain at anything and anyone who tries to point out the values of the ‘social contract’ that Gardiner talks about. Consequently, despite the marvels wrought by the vaccines to contain the savage onslaught of the pandemic, the dreaded ‘third wave’ has returned with a vengeance to make us aware that the era of anxiety and fear is far from over. Strangely enough, this time the new mantras are not ‘mask’ or ‘social distancing’ but the ‘survival of the fittest’ amidst ‘community spread’.

Bob Dylan, the Literature Nobel Laureate, succinctly captures the various nuances of apathy, unconcern and indifference of people towards the predicament of fellow-homo sapiens in his popular song “Blowin’ in the Wind”:

How many roads must a man walk down
Before you call him a man?
How many seas must a white dove sail
Before she sleeps in the sand?
Yes, and how many times must the cannonballs fly
Before they’re forever banned? …

Yes, and how many years must a mountain exist
Before it is washed to the sea?

 

And how many years can some people exist
Before they’re allowed to be free?
Yes, and how many times can a man turn his head
And pretend that he just doesn’t see? …

Yes, and how many times must a man look up
Before he can see the sky?
And how many ears must one man have
Before he can hear people cry?
Yes, and how many deaths will it take ’til he knows
That too many people have died?

The answer to Dylan’s series of rhetorical questions appears as a refrain at the end of each stanza of the song: “The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.” Referring to the poem, Dylan had remarked in an interview: “But the only trouble is that no one picks up the answer when it comes down so not too many people get to see and know . . . and then it flies away. I still say that some of the biggest criminals are those that turn their heads away when they see wrong and know it’s wrong. I’m only 21 years old and I know that there’s been too many . . .” Dylan’s song lucidly articulates the imperatives of the need for change in outlook where the preference is for peace over war, love and compassion over inertia and unconcern. Though published in 1963, the relevance of the poem remains timeless and universal.

As Re-Markings enters the 21^st year of its publication with the current issue, I find it considerably significant that our contributors, readers and admirers are constantly aware of the journal’s unfailing commitment to provide a healthy forum for scholarly and authoritative views on broad economic, socio-political, cultural, gender, racial and environmental issues as evidenced in literature, art, cinema, television, social media and journalism.

The kaleidoscopic range and variety of discourses offered in the pages of the current volume, including the Symposium on “Words and Worlds” organized by Rajiv Gandhi National University of Law Punjab in collaboration with Re-Markings, do strengthen our resolve to confront head-on the stark reality of life’s problems and spread the luminous rays of the light of awakening and engaged mindfulness to dispel the deadliest of darkness that besets the world we inhabit.

Nibir K. Ghosh
​Chief Editor

​

CONTENTS

The Hubris of Historical Illiteracy: The Unlearnt Lessons of Partition and 1984 from Prafulla Roy to Shonali Roy –Shanker Ashish Dutt / 7

Jack London, Jack London: Double Trouble – Jonah Raskin / 21

The Dreams of Langston Hughes and Martin Luther King, Jr. W. –  Jason Miller / 28

Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 as Bibliotherapy: De-Toxifying Trauma Through Literary Transformation – Jonathan Little / 39

God: For and Against – Sushil Gupta / 47

The Poetry and the Sacred- John Robert Lee / 53

Evocation and Expansion: Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming  – Shernavaz Buhariwala / 57

The Black and the Unpleasant: Upamanyu Chatterjee’s Weight Loss – Tanutrushna Panigrahi / 65

Representation of Indian Muslim Women in Indian English Fiction and Non-Fiction – Sahar Rahman / 74

The Bengal Partition in Literature – Ajit Kumar Mukherjee & Pranamita Pati / 81

Deeply Entrenched Patriarchy in the film The Great Indian Kitchen: An Analysis – Mrudula Lakkaraju / 86

In Search of the Truly Human: W. H. Auden’s “Law Like Love” – Navleen Multani / 93

The Marabar Caves and Temple in A Passage to India:  A Social Constructivist Paradigm – Achal Sinha / 100

Chugtai, Manto and their Sense of Time – Richa / 109

Historiographical and Cultural Motifs in The Hungry Tide in the Light of Foucault’s Concept of Heterotopia – Prantik Banerjee & Tuhina Bose / 115

Claiming Female Sexuality: A Study of Select Indian Women Autobiographies – Nibedita Das / 123

The Indian Progressive Writing Initiative: Its European (non-Bolshevik) Face  – P. Singh / 132

The Ghazal Tradition and Agha Shahid Ali – Akshada Shrotryia / 140

 Making a Difference: Words and Worlds  – Nibir K. Ghosh / 144

Khushi Kaul / 147, Deepali / 148, Aviral Pathak / 149, Jaiveer Singh / 149, Shreya Jain / 150, & Charvi / 151

Language, Law and Literature: Symposium Highlights – Navleen Multani / 152

Poetry

Sagar Mal Gupta

Goodbye by A Corona Patient /154, Bottle Poems / 155, The Sad Silence of the Monuments of the World / 156

Manas Bakshi

Recycling / 157, Moment of Truth / 158, Fighting it off / 158
Matutinal / 159

 

Comments on the Issue

What a great issue!! I am honored to be included in the pages of Re-Markings. There is so much food for thought, many books and writers I find fascinating and so much diversity. Will start to read right away. Thank you,  Jonah Raskin, California

Re-Markings continues to provide the remarkably diverse forum to think politics, culture, and literature as coexistent entities rather than disparate fields of inquiry.  My deep congratulations to you, Nibir! After twenty years, the impact of issues such as your March 2022 edition will continue to establish the kind of dialogue we all need as emerging and established scholars share ideas side by side.   -

W. Jason Miller, Professor of Literature, NC State University, USA   

Dear Dr. Ghosh,

So impressed I have been by this latest issue of Re-markings (March 2022), which I received earlier today that I cannot stop myself from writing this mail to you.

As I tore open the packet and my hands held the journal, I immediately realized that something new has been done to it: it has become bigger; the paper quality has improved; the presentation and overall impact have upped. I think, now, it has assumed almost the perfect shape and size. Congratulations to you and your editorial, designing and printing team. Great job, indeed.

I have quickly glanced through it and have been impressed by two write-ups in particular: 'God: For and Against' by Sushil Gupta -- I possess and have read most of the books mentioned in his recommended reading list, and 'Poetry and the Sacred' by John Robert Lee. 

Kudos to you for publishing such articles. Congratulations once again for giving an enhanced look to Re-Markings.

Sending good wishes and warm regards, Sanjay Kumar Mishra, R.B.S. College, Agra   

Re-Markings has become a literary diet-supplement that never fails to surprise the reader with the depth and variety of the topics it covers.  March 2022 issue, too, carries the extensively researched papers which deal with varied subjects. Chief Editor Dr. Nibir K. Ghosh strikes the right chord by highlighting our inability to learn from past mistakes in the Covid period, consequently inflicting a larger harm on the society. Invocation of Bob Dylan’s famous song is apt as we realize that there are no ready-made solutions to such problems.

Prof. Jonah Raskin’s ‘Jack London Jack London: Double Trouble’ is high on both intellectual and entertainment quotient. The paper lets us understand the unwarranted benefits that have accrued to the celebrated author, Jack London and how these situations have shaped his writings. Prof Jonathan Little has added a new dimension to the very popular surrealist Japanese author Haruki Murakami when he calls his literature “therapeutic.” This paper would inspire many of the students and teachers alike to take an unorthodox view of the literature as a whole. ‘The Black and the Unpleasant: Upamanu Chatterjee’s Weight Loss’ by Tanutrushna Panigrahi brings to light the use of black humour in literature.  This helped me understand how the emotional inconsistencies and black humour go together in some of the prominent works discussed in the paper.

It is the uniqueness of Re-Markings where the contemporary works along with the timeless classics are explored for their modern-day relevance and where all forms of literature get the representation. For me, each issue of Re-Markings comes as the motivation to read more, explore more. Team Re-Markings, congratulations for another enlightening edition. --Saurabh Agarwal, Entrepreneur and Literature enthusiast

There is no denying that Re-Markings as a distinctive international journal of literary import, sense and significance has carved a special niche in the core of hearts of multilayered readership. It is indeed a landmark in literary discipline. Congratulations on its unbroken journey!!!!! Like previous issues of Re-Markings, the current Issue  provides abundant literary and aesthetic food for the literati.The reference to Bob Dylan's song in the Editorial made me reflect on people's aberration from their humanitarian sensibility and sensitivity only because of their gross self interest. In addition, what a fantastic and fabulous cover design! Always varying and unique in its approach! -- Dr. Rajan Lal, JSH PG College, Amroha