Indian Story Research Articles

Parallel Worlds, Stretched Time, and Illusory Reality: The Tang Tale “Du Zichun”

Focusing on the Tang-dynasty tale “Du Zichun” and comparing it with foreign and Chinese analogues in which the protagonist takes an allegorical inner journey only to return to his own world and time, C arrie R eed explores treatments of the notion of illusory reality. She argues that the treatment of time as stretched in “Du Zichun” closely resembles that in certain Indian tales and may have derived not from written translations of Buddhist texts but from Indian stories that circulated orally in China. She further shows that “Du Zichun” differs significantly from most Chinese stories yet also reflects ontological concerns of the Tang dynasty: its multifaced and ambivalent message—which simultaneously underscores the themes of illusory reality and attachment—exemplifies the variety of ways that foreign stories were assimilated by Chinese writers into a new literary environment.

Spent fuel management in India

The Indian nuclear story is different from the rest of the nuclear power producing countries largely due to the unique nuclear energy path the country has chosen. The issues regarding the resultant spent nuclear fuel are also accordingly different. Based on the ideology of self‐dependence, India adopted a three‐stage nuclear energy program which envisages reprocessing spent fuel aimed at the final utilization of the vast amount of thorium reserves in the country. The nuclear test of 1974 and the country’s subsequent nuclear isolation furthered this technology innovation. At present, nuclear energy contributes a mere 3% (approximately) of the total energy produced in the country. Since the program is very small, high level waste (HLW) after reprocessing is very minimal and its management at present does not pose any major concerns. But with India’s rapid economic growth, access to electricity is becoming crucial and nuclear energy is viewed as a promising source to meet future demand. The government is envisaging substantial raising of nuclear power production in the next couple of decades. With the objective of expanding nuclear energy production, India in 2008 came out of nuclear isolation through a special agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the USA, and Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) countries that allows members of the nuclear club to undertake nuclear trade with India. While we are not certain what shape India’s nuclear energy program will take, it is certain that the proposed expansion plan will lead to HLW becoming a concern in the future.

Savage Materiality

Page 5 September–October 2009 Savage Materiality Christine Hume Bhanu Kapil’s Humanimal, a Project for Future Children does not yield first impressions.As in most of Kapil’s work, immersion is both technique and kinetic effect. Immediately intimate, the book explores cultural identity formation through mirroring and alterizing several main characters—a wolfgirl, the author’s father, and the Kapil herself—in three narratives magnetized by the force of relation. In the foreground is the story of two human girls found living with wolves—as wolves—in the Bengal region of India in 1920. Based on the diary of Reverend Joseph Singh, the missionary who took them into his orphanage , Kapil’s account roughens up her source text in order to dramatize the book’s ultimate subject: the body. Meanwhile, a companion memoir—responsive to and contextualized within the wolfgirls’ story— fastens on Kapil’s father’s transformation from illiterate goatherd to the firstAsian headmaster in the UK. Readers confront his epistemological shift largely through uncanny physical descriptions.Triangulating with these “retellings,” Kapil also relates the story of her research of the wolfgirls and her travels with a French filmmaking company documenting humanwolf contact. In just sixty-five pages, we also find a ghost manifesto on aesthetics. Narrative internests with theoretical riffs and interbreeds with document, while never surrendering the brutal adumbrations of a shared captivity narrative. Though the hybrid ethos is fashionable in experimental writing—Nortonized and commodified unto near meaninglessness—Humanimal sets new stakes by permeating subject, form, and approach with an empathy that illuminates drastic human configurations and conversions. Though based on true stories, Kapil’s work functions more like myth, with its orchestration of infinitely corruptible parts. For instance, Kapil alters Singh’s representation of the wolfgirls’ lives significantly; this simultaneous reveling in and resistance to historic sources will raise a few eyebrows for those curious and industrious enough to track down the source of Kapil’s quotations. Yet the interval between fact and fiction, between research and intuition, percolates powerful mythologies. Kapil reconstitutes given stories by subjecting their facts to the same kind of intense conversions Kapil’s characters undergo. All of Kapil’s subject-strands form and de/reform in the service of deeply relational aesthetics , each translating the other to maximum advantage in a rapture of complementary passions. Humanimal questions liminal identities and territories of all kinds by indirection more often than by direct address. How is the story of the wolfgirls a female story? How is the story of the wolfgirls a human story? How does our umwelt—our subjective environment—physically shape us? How does it determine what we sense, digest, and understand? Does our umwelt determine our species? In what ways do the jungle and garden act on us, as haven, as machine, as projection? Does domestication inaugurate violence and oppression? How is the story of the wolfgirls an Indian story? How does the story of abandonment lend anyone feral, possessed , or outside another way to be found? What might it be like to occupy a caesura between human and animal? What unprecedented pulse—thought, sensation, politics—might come of it? Though these quandaries are impossible not to fathom while reading Humanimal, Kapil insists, “I don’t want to ask primal questions.” She instead provides an antidote to what Giorgio Agamben calls, in The Open: Man and Animal (2004), the “anthropological machine,” or thinking that creates an absolute divide between animal and “man.” In our efforts to define ourselves, we have deformed ourselves. This chilling capacity for adaptability has led our species, Agamben claims, to “the total management of biological life,” a global economy, and “humanitarian ideology ”—three concentric faces looking toward posthistorical humanity. Kapil’s work unites its hybrid faces against this troubled physiology. The book is not as much concerned with transmission of ideas as it is with the creation of an atmosphere where our automatic naturalization of sentience into sapience slows down or shuts off. She does so by refusing to betray—that is, control—the senses: “We are here to cull an atmosphere; to scrape color and sound and light into jars.” To really enjoy reading Humaninal, best to have a taste for amniotic atmospheres...

Robbins Revisited: The Indian Experience

This research paper was presented at the 75th Anniversary celebration of Lionel Robbins celebrated Essay by the LSE in December 2007. It tries to ‘explode the traditional definition of Robbins’ as a science that studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses. The Indian sub-continent shows that consumption across all income groups is on the rise, especially due to growing consumer loans financed by an expanding banking system; and generally on account of a progressing globalizing economy. Thus, the problem of choice and prioritization seems to become less severe, as people can buy more via loans, as well as work harder and smarter due to increasing job opportunities, particularly in the high growth industries of information technology, medical transcription, tourism, and other services. This is supported by empirical evidence of the earning and expenditure data of a select segment of the Back Processing Office workers, whose incomes have risen the fastest. Also, the income of the common man is rising due to increasing opportunities of livelihood that provide more work as documented by international institutions like the World Bank, and also due to privatization and de-nationalization thereby harnessing under-utilized or unutilized potential resources. This also questions the second important tenet of Robbins contention of the deductive nature of economic analysis, as most of the economic analysis and policies are based on empirical research and methodology. The third premise focusing on the positive aspect of economics is open to criticism, as the normative aspect should also be considered. This becomes essential to balance the existing situation with the ideal one, as it’s important to know and act in the direction of 'what should be'. The model value of this proposition would help to balance realism with idealism, and fine tune excessive materialism. The Indian growth story may seem impressive, but may not be so in terms of distribution of opportunities, income and wealth.

Rethinking Relationality in the Context of Adult Mother–Daughter Caregiving in Indian Fiction

This article seeks to examine how far mainstream moral concepts, such as rights and contracts, which came in for a strong critique from feminist ethicists in the 1980s, may still be relevant to the dynamics of intergenerational relations in old age. Through close readings of three Indian short stories about adult daughters' caregiving to their critically ill or dying mothers in a manner that recalls maternal caregiving to young children, it demonstrates how the maternal paradigm does not engage sufficiently with notions of reciprocity and is therefore unable to capture the dynamic nature of intergenerational exchange between adult children and their aging parents. Finally, it argues that neither the social contract theory of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Rawls with its basis in a notion of a self-interested individual, nor the maternal paradigm theory of feminist scholars such as Carol Gilligan and Sara Ruddick with their emphasis on an other-focused relationality provide an adequate model for capturing th...

The consumers' predisposition towards enrolling for retail loyalty cards: the Indian retail story

Relationship marketing has developed from focusing on retaining customers. The traditional view of marketing focused on 'single, discrete transactions' (McIlroy and Barnett, 2000). The important aspect of relationship marketing is the evolution of strategies that help an organisation create loyal customers. The idea is to develop cost-effective marketing strategies which link the organisation to its customers. By using the experiences of customers, companies can devise programmes which give greater value and thrust to relationship marketing (Morris et al., 1999). Organisations continuously try to improve their product offerings so that they are able to attract customers by providing better quality. 'The key to the successful adoption of relationship marketing lies in the building of client loyalty in dynamic business environments' (Morris et al., 1999). The paper is based upon primary research conducted on the impact of loyalty programmes in retail on consumers' purchase behaviour. It studies the willingness of customers to enrol for loyalty cards and schemes in retail in India. As retail is in the growth stage in the country, the willingness of customers towards loyalty schemes are mixed. As the market matures in loyalty programmes, trends that are similar to those of developed countries would be visible in the Indian retail market.

Dialing in Rural Prosperity Through Universal Cellular Connectivity

The Indian telecommunications success story is the combined result of sound policy, excellent regulation and an innovative and enterprising private sector. The best part about this saga is that it has the potential to transform the lives of millions of poor Indians, especially those in rural areas who are otherwise deprived of the benefits of infrastructure available in urban areas. Mobile connectivity holds tremendous potential to transform rural India. Being connected means access to information, markets and government services apart from financial services and entertainment. This connectivity can thus improve rural productivity, reduce dependence on exploitative intermediaries and can ensure that rural schemes actually deliver their planned benefits. With cities nearing saturation levels, the next wave of the Indian mobile revolution is definitely going to soar in rural India. This development holds the promise of mainstreaming the rural areas and populations; a necessity to bring about inclusive and sustainable growth for India.

Port Politics: Indian Seamen, Australian Unions and Indonesian Independence, 1945-47

In September 1945 a boycott of Dutch shipping in Australian waters was called in support of the Indonesian declaration of independence at the end of World War II. Inspired by the Atlantic Charter, a new decolonised world seemed possible. It was working people of Australia, Indonesia and India who co-operated in the boycott and attempt to win freedom not only in Indonesia but also in India. This article compares the Australian accounts of the boycott with Indian perspectives, found in the records of the Indian Seamen's Union in Australia and in oral histories of Australian activists who supported the Indians in this boycott. This comparison demonstrates that the Indian seamen played a substantial role in the practical implementation of the boycott, as it was they, not Indonesians or Australians, who were the main body of seamen obstructing the departures of the black-banned ships. The article asks why the Indian story has been absent in the Australian accounts to date and locates the sources of that marginalisation in the assumptions and stereotypes developed over a century of hierarchical and competitive colonial labour practices. The boycott which seemed to be about the end of colonialism was nevertheless shaped by and remembered within the constraints of that colonialism.

The Violence of Collection: <i>Indian Killer</i>’s Archives

The Violence of CollectionIndian Killer’s Archives Janet Dean (bio) At the close of Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer, in a final chapter titled “Creation Story,” a killer carries a backpack containing, among other things, “dozens of owl feathers, a scrapbook, and two bloody scalps in a plastic bag” (419). Readers schooled in the psychopathologies of real and fictional serial killers will be familiar with the detail: body parts or other “trophies” (to use this killer’s term) often serve to memorialize a murderer’s acts (149). That the tokens of violence here are scalps and owl feathers reflects the racial entanglements of this particular killing spree and of Alexie’s novel in general. The accompanying scrapbook points to a less spectacular, if no less significant, concern of the text, a concern with the systematized collection and preservation of artifacts of violent racial encounter. As the chapter title indicates, the killer’s collection creates: it produces a narrative of ethnographic trauma and racial identity. The archive is resistant to tribal specification. The killer, wearing a mask of “cedar, or pine, or maple,” brings his archive to “this reservation or that reservation. Any reservation, a particular reservation” (419). Still, the killer’s dance, “over five hundred years old,” draws hundreds of indigenes, “all learning the same song, the exact dance” (420). At the center of a spontaneous, revelatory ceremony, the archive seems to generate an indigenous identity that is both specific and generalized, a touchstone for all Native American experience since European contact. The creation of “Creation Story” enacts a central paradox of collections, which theorists have argued serve to contain objects [End Page 29] in a system of knowledge and simultaneously to solidify the identity of the collector. Collections, it has been argued, reveal more about those who create them than about the objects collected. The scalps and scrapbook in the killer’s backpack may memorialize acts of violence against white men, but they are by no means a contemporary adaptation of the warrior’s counting coup. Rather, the artifacts are at the center of a radical redefinition of indigenous identity produced through the archive of racial encounter. The anonymous Native Americans seemingly drawn by the items in the killer’s pack are poised to learn “the exact dance” of indigenous identity. That identity is predicated here on artifacts of non-Native being, on objects—white scalps—that define the non-Native other as victims of violent interracial encounter. The killer’s collection reflects Alexie’s penchant for ironic reversal: in contrast to the familiar dynamic of western museums and private ethnographic archives, white men are the objects of collection rather than the collectors here, and Native Americans are the ones reveling in the accumulation of artifacts. In fact, the killer’s collection serves as counterbalance to the many collections in the novel that are created by whites to define Native Americans and, consequently, to maintain a racial hierarchy in the modern world. An anthropology professor covetously files away audiotapes of tribal elders performing oral narratives. The white father of an adopted Native American son pores over his atlases of colonized spaces, while his wife conducts research in her collection of books on Native American history and culture. A detective novelist eavesdrops in an indigenous watering hole, accumulating material for his book. A white professor’s syllabus for his course on Native American studies gathers a more conventional set of “Indian stories” in the required readings. Through such collections, white authority figures mark their understanding of and their authority over “authentic” Native American culture by accruing both real and imagined artifacts of indigenous existence. To various degrees, these white acts of collection resemble the anthropological appropriation of tribal objects that has been the subject of intense debate between tribal leaders and administrators [End Page 30] of mainstream cultural institutions in recent years. While that debate centers on material artifacts, on art works, ceremonial items, and human remains, Alexie focuses on the collection of more abstract cultural property taken, sometimes forcibly, off the reservation. Such collections serve as the basis for Alexie’s critique of cultural imperialism. In Indian Killer, collections are part of the mechanism of racial and ethnic...

<i>The Sound the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky: The Writings of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft</i> (review)

Reviewed by: The Sound the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky: The Writings of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft James Cox The Sound the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky: The Writings of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft. Edited by Robert Dale Parker. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. 292 pp. $34.95. The last fifteen years in American Indian literary studies have been an age of recovery. During this time, scholars have found previously unpublished works, such as John Milton Oskison’s novel The Singing Bird; reintroduced works such as Todd Downing’s The Mexican Earth, S. Alice Callahan’s novel Wynema, Dallas Chief Eagle’s novel Winter Count, and Joseph Nicolar’s The Life and Traditions of the Red Man; and edited the collected writings of William Apess, Joseph Johnson, and Samson Occom. We now welcome Robert Dale Parker’s edition of the writings of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, “the first known American Indian literary writer, the first known Indian woman writer, by some measures the first known Indian poet, the first known poet to write poems in a Native American language, and the first known American Indian to write out traditional Indian stories” (2). With this edition, Parker moves Schoolcraft’s writing from the margins of American Indian literary studies to a much more prominent position. During approximately the same period of time, scholars such as Lisa Brooks, Daniel Heath Justice, and Robert Allen Warrior have been recovering and foregrounding Native intellectual traditions and tribal nation contexts in their literary critical practice. Parker’s introduction, which he describes as a “cultural history, a literary and cultural biography, and a literary-critical introduction,” contributes to these efforts by guiding readers through the many complex and overlapping contexts that informed Schoolcraft’s literary production: Ojibwe, Métis, French Canadian, British Canadian, Scotch-Irish, and American. Schoolcraft produced a collection of poems, stories, and songs that in fascinating, often poignant ways speaks of this world of shifting cultural and national allegiances and American colonial aggression. Writing was also a refuge for Schoolcraft. The loneliness, melancholy, and grief so frequently expressed in the poems document a home life made turbulent, for example, by her husband Henry’s long and frequent absences, the death of their son, and her possible addiction to laudanum prescribed by her doctors. The stories focus on relationships within families—between parents [End Page 168] and their children or between siblings—and the devastating consequences of the failure to fulfill kinship obligations, while several of the songs explore the impact on those people at home of the absence of lovers or family members. Precise attribution of stories and songs was a daunting task for Parker, who had to follow, often through many manuscripts in different hands, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s role in the transcription, translation, and revision of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft’s work. Jane Johnston Schoolcraft “may have played a central or a shared role in the transcription and translation of all or some of these songs,” Parker indicates, but with two exceptions “there is no evidence that she did” (211). Many scholars will find particularly exciting the path that Parker traces from Schoolcraft’s writing through Henry Rowe Schoolcraft to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Wilhelm Grimm, one of the famous brothers of German folklore, and perhaps to Mary E. Howard Schoolcraft, to whom Henry was married after Jane died in 1842. Mary Schoolcraft wrote The Black Gauntlet: A Tale of Plantation Life in South Carolina, in which, Parker suggests, there is a character with an opium addiction modeled on Jane (42). The path that Jane Johnston Schoolcraft’s work follows, through multiple appropriations and silencings, places her in a web of national and international literary production. Her work traveled the globe, while her home in Sault Ste. Marie was an influential literary salon in which she hosted visitors such as Anna Brownell Jameson. Parker’s editing and readings of the texts demonstrate an abiding intellectual respect for the writing and the world in which Schoolcraft produced them. His lists of substantive and “less substantive” variants allow for a careful consideration of Schoolcraft’s process of revision (260, 261), and the appendices include two examples of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s readings of Jane...

Unspeakable Acts: The Avant-Garde Theatre of Terayama Shūji and Postwar Japan (review)

Reviewed by: Unspeakable Acts: The Avant-Garde Theatre of Terayama Shūji and Postwar Japan David Jortner Unspeakable Acts: The Avant-Garde Theatre of Terayama Shūji and Postwar Japan. By Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei . Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005; pp. vii + 335. $48.00 cloth. For the past several years, Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei has been tempting conference attendees with excerpts from her forthcoming book, presenting alluring fifteen-to-twenty-minute snippets of the life and work of one of Japan's most enigmatic theatrical figures, Terayama Shūji. Although several scripts and essays about Terayama exist in English (see, for example, "Knock: Street Theatre," in Robert T. Rolf and John K. Gillespie, ed., Alternative Japanese Theatre: TenPlays), this volume is the first major English work about this fascinating and controversial playwright and director. In this text, Sorgenfrei uses theoretical and historical models to provide a comprehensive scholarly analysis of Terayama's life and career, and illustrates both the Japanese and Western cultural influences on his work. The book also contains translations of three Terayama plays as well as selections from his writings on theatre. Sorgenfrei's Unspeakable Acts is a scintillating work of research that greatly adds to current scholarship on modern Japanese theatre and the work of avant-garde theatre artists. For many years Terayama Shūji was one of the leading figures of the Japanese 1960s avant-garde theatre movement known as shōgekijō (little theatre). Terayama and his troupe, Tenjō Sajiki, performed numerous avant-garde plays throughout Japan and internationally. He was so influential on the Japanese avant-garde that several scholars, both in Japan and the West, mark his death in 1983 as the end of the shōgekijō movement. Despite this influence, there has (until now) been no book-length study of Terayama, and only a few of his performance pieces have been translated. Sorgenfrei's work remedies this situation. Her first four chapters present a scholarly overview of Terayama's life and work. The analytical patterns follow a loose biographical chronology, examining the major themes, influences, and styles of Terayama's [End Page 142] theatre. The first chapter presents a broad biographical overview of Terayama's life, which includes historical and cultural influences upon the playwright. The next three chapters examine different periods in the playwright / director's development, as well as provide theoretical tools for a greater understanding of his work. In the second chapter, Sorgenfrei discusses Terayama's theatrical explorations of psychology and family. Here, the author provides an interesting and useful tool for psychoanalytic theorists. In discussing Terayama's maternal relationship, she suggests Kosawa Heisaku's "Ajase complex" as a "culturally appropriate substitute in Japan for the father-centered Oedipus complex" (60). The Indian story of Prince Ajase tells of a child whose mother kills in order to conceive him, and upon birth, attempts to kill the child out of guilt, until she finally accepts her role as a mother. The son, upon reaching adulthood, learns of his history, attempts to kill his mother, and is deserted by all but her, eventually leading to reconciliation and forgiveness. Not only is the Ajase story mirrored in the personal history of Terayama and his mother, but this idea provides scholars with new ways of approaching traditional psychoanalytic theory. As Sorgenfrei deftly shows, the ideas contained within the Ajase complex can be used to analyze familial, gendered, and sexual relationships in literature. In the third chapter, Sorgenfrei explores Terayama's interest in the removal of traditional theatrical boundaries, including his (sometimes) controversial uses of mobile audiences and nontraditional theatre spaces. In this chapter, she also looks at how this nontraditional staging reflected the thematic content of Terayama's work, with its emphasis on shifting identities, trickster figures, and cultural (and familial) dependency. The fourth chapter looks at the cult of Terayama and explores the nostalgic and postmodern effects of his life and work. One of the more interesting aspects of this chapter is Sorgenfrei's comparison of the cultural roles played by Terayama and Mishima Yukio. Although Mishima was the political antithesis of Terayama, the author illustrates how both of them (as well as the singer Misora Hibari) created a cult-like...

Bringing the Indian to the Book (review)

Bringing Indians to the Book. By Albert Furtwangler. (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2005. Pp. xii, 226. Illustrations. Paper, $22.50.)In the past 30 years, few subfields of American history have been as vibrant as Indian-American relations on the frontier. From the ethnohistorical efforts such as James Axtell's innovative The Invasion Within and Anthony F.C. Wallace's Death and Rebirth of the Seneca, a study of Indian revival movements, to Richard White's influential The Middle Ground, to the more recent work of Borderlands historians, scholars of American history have increasingly blurred the cultural divide that once seemed to separate the various frontier communities. Other scholars, focusing on the power of images both to reflect and shape American attitudes toward Indians, have drawn on insights from literary and discourse theory to investigate antebellum racial ideologies, and, in the process, have reshaped the way in which historians think about the frontier. The title of Albert Furtwangler's Bringing Indians to the Book might imply a connection to this important scholarship, yet his work remains only tangentially linked. Bringing Indians to the Book is based on a series of lectures given in the Emil and Kathleen Sick Lecture-Book series in Western History, a fact that may explain why it reads as four distinct essays, only loosely connected by their general focus on exploration and missionary work in Oregon.Chapter 1, On the Authority of William Clark, focuses on a single episode: the arrival in St. Louis in 1831 of a small group of Oregon Indians who requested that teachers be sent to their people. Furtwangler uses this episode to explore a variety of issues: the agency of Indians in seeking religious and educational instruction, the impact of the periodical press in relating the story to readership far from the frontier, the relative accuracy of the various accounts of the visit, and above all, the enduring authority of Clark among Native Americans. Furtwangler's analysis wanders from topic to topic and largely fails to capture the broader significance of this event, particularly the most important question: How did the story of Indians approaching white Americans to request spiritual and educational guidance figure in the context of missionary ideology? Here was an account of Native Americans actually uttering the Macedonian cry-come over and help us-and, placed in the broader context of missionary ideology examined by the late William Hutcheson (who does not even appear in the bibliography), such a call would have resonated powerfully among supporters of frontier missions. Yet despite quoting repeatedly from missionary accounts of the meeting in St. Louis and even castigating mission supporters for exaggeration, Furtwangler stops short of connecting this episode to the broader missionary context, turning instead to explore the far less vital issue of William Clark's significance as an authoritative figure for both Indians and white Americans.Furtwangler's second chapter compares the writing in the journals of Lewis and Clark to missionary writings penned in the same geographic area roughly three decades later. Furtwangler explores the different perceptions of relatively transient and secular-minded explorers on the one hand and somewhat more settled, religiously minded missionaries on the other, a project with interesting possibilities. …

Locating non‐Western enlightenment texts for a global curriculum

The context of this paper is a university‐based teacher education course in Melbourne, Australia. The assumption underpinning the course is that it is crucial for trainee teachers to examine the lenses they typically use in terms of common‐sense understandings of children and adolescents. We point to the 18th century Western enlightenment period as the source of this thinking. I argue that it is important to be aware of other enlightenments that have shaped the traditions of students in our multicultural mix. In this paper, I explore the writings of the Mahabharata and other early Indian texts to see how they have also influenced ways of thinking about childhood and adolescence. Data for this paper have been drawn from course materials, student responses, translations of early Indian texts and popular stories depicting childhood and adolescence.

Seeing the Elephant

As our field evolves, the tools available to us seem to change at a rate faster than the environmental problems we are trying to understand. One of these exciting new tools is a modeling approach based on fuzzy logic: artificial neural networks. Originally devised in the 1970s, programs spawned from this research area have crept into our daily lives and are operating around us continuously. Every time your video camera removes the vibration from a home movie or when you scan text into a word processing program on your computer, a pattern recognition tool based on fuzzy logic is working for you. Yet, the application of these tools to problems we face as environmental engineers seems to be lagging. I often speak to colleagues and students who do not understand what an artificial neural network is or how they could apply this method in their work. I offer the following analogy for those unfamiliar with these modeling tools. Consider the old Indian story of the four blind men describing an elephant. Each man describes what he can touch directly in front of him; a rope tail, a tree-trunk leg, a slab side, or a snake-like trunk. Each man is correct in his view of the elephant, but each assessment is incomplete. The picture of the elephant is only complete after blending all of the perceptions. If you think of each man as a separate model and the elephant as the environment, then you have a sense of how limited conventional models can be in their description. The models often accurately produce results in a limited manner but do not address the larger picture. Artificial neural networks create a matrix of equations that illustrate the whole picture, in essence, blending the multiple perceptions of the blind men into a whole. One of the problems that I sense limiting the quick adoption of fuzzy logic tools into the field with which I am most familiar, public health microbiology and surface water quality control, is our reliance upon strict numbers for action. For example, if water quality in Michigan exceeds 300 E. coli cfu/100 mL on a single day, beaches will be closed. Yet, anyone who has measured bacteria in surface water knows that the numbers produced by the current analytical techniques are not consistent and have great inherent variability. As noted by the American Public Health Association in Standard Methods for the Examination of Water and Wastewater, microbial counts are not absolute numbers. So why do engineers continue to treat them as such and apply models that require these counts to have precision that they do not have?

Moccasin Thunder: American Indian Stories for Today (review)

Reviewed by: Moccasin Thunder: American Indian Stories for Today Deborah Stevenson Carlson, Lori Marie , ed. Moccasin Thunder: American Indian Stories for Today. HarperCollins, 2005156p Library ed. ISBN 0-06-623959-1$16.89 Trade ed. ISBN 0-06-623957-5$15.99 R Gr. 9-12 Noted anthologist Carlson (Red Hot Salsa, BCCB 4/05, etc.) turns here to contemporary short stories, collecting ten pieces, half of them original, about modern life as a Native American. Though reading sophistication levels vary (some entries were initially published for adult audiences), protagonists for the stories are all young, and settings for stories range from a southwestern boarding school (Joy Harjo's "How to Get to the Planet Venus"), to Canada's Northwest Territories (Richard Van Camp's "The Last Snow of the Virgin Mary"), to Chicago (Susan Power's "Drum Kiss"). Many of the stories are imbued with sadness—accounts of lost and deceiving families, straitened circumstances, missed opportunities—yet some of those offer tenderness and insight (the standout of the collection, Sherman Alexie's story of a boy's yearning for his father, shines with humor and resilience as well as loss), and several speak eloquently and directly to the power of storytelling that's accessible even to young tellers of tales. Individual stories could be shared as readalouds with younger audiences or the collection used as a resource rather than a straight-through read, while older readers will simply appreciate the concentration of literary experience. Author biographies are included. Copyright © 2006 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

ROMANCING KINSHIP

ROMANCING KINSHIP

Manufacturing India:Perspectives 2025

The ever-increasing visibility of Indian story on global front is a positive determinant of India's future. The present paper reiterates India's potential to metamorphose itself into an economic powerhouse in the next two decades. Our economy stands in the departure lounge and if surveys of business and consumer confidence are any indication, India in the long term stands to benefit. However the paper emphasizes that the issue is not how to celebrate the present uplift in economy and our spirits. The issue rather is to avoid being trapped in the false consciousness the market has created for us and open ourselves up to learning from it and looking beyond it. There is no doubt that services off shoring do add value and brings in more revenues for our economy. However, India faces a threat from the competitive reality of other countries such as China, Philippines and Vietnam catching up with it. As a consequence, there is a need to acknowledge that what held good in 2005 might not be same in 2025. The paper contributes to the understanding that against the backdrop of services outsourcing, the global opportunity for India's success in 2025 seem to emerge in form of manufacturing outsourcing. It is evident that future would not provide ways to win consistently and in perpetuity. This leads to the discussion on the future trends in the off shoring space and the sectors holding promise for India. The paper focuses its attention on leveraging the opportunity to establish India as a true outsourcing hub, not just in terms of services but in manufacturing too. The factors that would help India in the 2025 would be the favourable 'demographic dividend' of India-the highest proportion of young workforce by the end of year 2025 in tandem with the emergence of India as the new manufacturing hub. The conventional low-cost manufacturing along with improving capabilities of the labour force is acting as a catalyst to pull in more and more global vehicle manufacturers and vendors. The paper elucidates the benefits of embracing a manufacturing-led outward looking economic orientation in India's context with the contention that manufacturing will actually lubricate the services and agricultural sector. The premise is that while certain service sectors will continue to grow impressively, their overall contribution to economic growth, employment and incomes will not be adequate in itself to meet India's economic growth need. Hence the choice of focus on manufacturing off shoring, which is presently at an embryonic stage, would put India into a commanding position. The paper also compares and contrasts the issues and potential problems India faces due to India's relatively late start in economic liberalisation. The paper ends with the suggested measures and implications for government as well as Indian manufacturing sector.

Native American Picture Books of Change: The Art of Historic Children's Editions (review)

Reviewed by: Native American Picture Books of Change: The Art of Historic Children’s Editions Susan Gardner (bio) Native American Picture Books of Change: The Art of Historic Children’s Editions. By Rebecca C. Benes . Foreword by Gloria Emerson . Santa Fe, NM: Museum of New Mexico Press, 2004. No citizen of the United States is immune from the major sources of stereotyping American Indians: the electronic media, advertising, and children's literature. As all of these play powerful roles in the socialization of mainstream (and even Indian) youth, it is hard to outgrow these images and fantasies. However, traditional Native American societies, in their oral storytelling (dating back at least 30,000 years), had little concept of what we call "children's literature," which, interestingly, is defined by its audience: the "protected class" of modern childhood in the Western European-derived world. Traditional Native American conceptions of "the self" locate its origins in ancestral time out of mind; children are the ancestors reborn; the notion of an "individual" attains significance as a function of kinship placement and membership of a prior and over-arching social whole, the People. Moreover, in non-Western, traditional societies, it was assumed that understanding the stories grew with time; endings did not have to be happy, nor were certain subjects taboo; and oral narrative/storytelling was the means by which cultures preserved their memory, history, knowledge, and wisdom. As one elder has said, "We are Indian people because we tell each other Indian stories." During the Treaty-making era, although treaties in international law are conducted between sovereign entities, Federal law had already classified Native Americans as "domestic dependent nations." A predictable rhetoric perceiving them as children or wards under the Great Father's protection ensued, particularly when land cessions became involved (1784–1868). No other American ethnic "minority" is paternally administered by a sub-Cabinet agency, in this case the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the U.S. Dept. of the Interior. In the later nineteenth and well into the twentieth centuries, when assimilation and forced deculturation within government and church-run off-reservation boarding schools were Federal policy after the confinement of Native Americans to reservations, an unforeseen effect of suppressing Native languages and cultural practices was the development of pan-Indian identities and a nascent literature in a new, shared language: English. One way to address a mainstream audience, early Native writers discovered, was via "children's literature." The entrée of American Indian-authored stories into the Euramerican literary [End Page 333] mainstream was thus by dint of their infantilization. (Salishan) Mourning Dove's Coyote Stories sanitized the great Trickster. (Dakota) Charles Eastman and his Euramerican wife Elaine Eastman's Wigwam Evenings domesticated traditional narrative. One of (Mohawk) performing artist E. Pauline Johnson's forums was mass-circulation magazines for children and their parents. During the same time period, English-born artist Ernest Thompson Seton started the Woodcraft Indian societies for Canadian and American white youth. In England, the Boy Scouts (founded in 1908) and the Girl Guides (1910) were negligibly influenced by Seton's model, but in North America The Boy Scout Handbook evolved from Seton's The Birch-bark Roll of the Woodcraft Indians. In 1911, the Camp Fire Girls was established. This imitative trend survives in YMCA summer camps where Euramerican children acquire "Indian" names, clan affiliations, and survival skills. However honorable the values taught, Euramerican children are only playing at being Indians, during "quality" "down" time. In the boarding schools, Native American children were not playing at being white. They had no choice in the matter. A heavily propagandistic literature took aim at graduates of Native American boarding schools to ensure that they would maintain the intended allegiance to white, "clean," and Christian values. Novelist Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo), doyenne of American Indian women writers of the Southwest, recalls Stiya: the Story of an Indian Girl, published by the U.S. War Dept. in 1881 and written by a white woman, Marion Bergess (masquerading as "Tonka," a meaningless name). Bergess had been a teacher and dormitory matron at the notorious Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, PA, whose former military founder Richard Pratt's philosophy was "to...

Hindu Diasporic Consciousness

This article applies theories of diaspora and diasporic consciousness to the study of a film produced in Canada by an independent South Asian film maker, Srinivas Krishna. The film, Masala, a dark comedy filmed in Toronto against a backdrop of South Asian immigrant groups, multi-culturalism and the 1985 Air India bombing and drawing upon the magico-realism of Bollywood productions and Indian devotionals, offers commentaries on questions of identity and life among South Asian diasporic communities in Canada, Canadian social policy, religion and diasporic consciousness. The article examines the way the film is located in diasporic space and how the film maker plays upon the different locations and sensitivities of his audiences to represent, explain and critique diasporic space. The article considers the way caricature and stereotype inform the negotiations of identity among members of diasporic communities, the way objective and subjective spaces are redefined in a diasporic setting and how Hindu beliefs are represented in such settings. The article examines how the film maker draws upon traditional techniques of Indian story telling as well as a mixture of cinematic techniques to tell a diasporic version of a Hindu avatara story. It argues that in simultaneously affirming and challenging the religious beliefs that inform that story, the film maker raises some provocative questions about the vitality of religious and cultural traditions in the diaspora. The article concludes with a brief examination of how the film was received by audiences in India and in Europe and North America.

Ageing Subjects, Agentic Bodies: Appetite, Modernity and the Middle Class in Two Indian Short Stories in English

Ageing Subjects, Agentic Bodies: Appetite, Modernity and the Middle Class in Two Indian Short Stories in English