Indian Narratives Research Articles

The psychological and social contexts of complaints of abnormal vaginal discharge: A study of illness narratives in India

Objective Epidemiological studies have reported strong associations between psychosocial adversity and complaints of abnormal vaginal discharge (AVD) in South Asia. We aimed to explore the mechanism of these associations through qualitative research. Method We carried out serial in-depth interviews with 42 married women with the complaint of AVD who were purposively selected from a sample of 2494 women recruited into a population-based cohort study in Goa, India. The interviews elicited illness narratives of their complaint, focusing on causal attributions and help-seeking behaviors. Results Women explicitly link their personal experiences of social adversity and stress (such as marital problems and heavy workloads) with their complaints of AVD. The complaint of tiredness, a core feature of depressive and somatoform disorders, and complaint of “tension” were commonly associated with AVD through bidirectional causal interpretations. Reproductive events, particularly related to the menstrual cycle and contraception, comprise another set of causal attributions. Many women hold multiple causal attributions. Most women sought health care, both biomedical and traditional, and their narratives indicate reinforcement of their causal attributions by health care providers. However, treatments were often discontinued or changed due to lack of symptomatic relief, side effects, or costs. Conclusions Reproductive health policy and practice must explicitly acknowledge and integrate research findings on psychosocial associations of AVD to promote a holistic and evidence-based approach for this common complaint in women in South Asia.

Some Begram Ivories and the South Indian Narrative Tradition: New Evidence

Some Begram Ivories and the South Indian Narrative Tradition: New Evidence

Historicizing Hybridity and the Politics of Location: Three Early Colonial Indian Narratives

From White Mughals to Vikram Seth, novels, historical blockbusters and more nuanced anthropological and postcolonial critiques have exposed the fiction of fixed notions of “race” through sensitive understandings of the liminal space of the “inter-racial” relationship and the “mixed-race” experience. In an era where the textual and cultural production of hybridity has become a new form of cultural capital, articulations of racial “inbetween-ness” have also become somewhat universalised and romanticised. While acknowledging the radical potential of these new paradigms of transnational slippage and métissage as an affront to the old narratives of racial certainty, this article challenges the universalization of the term “mixed-race” in the context of colonial India, both ontologically and historically. By historicising cultural difference according to the social syntax that gives it meaning, it asks whether the term “mixed race” has political relevance in all colonial spaces and across time and culture or whether it needs to be interrogated as an historical product in itself. Finallly, this article turns to the politics of location in a global context to illustrate the limits of Homi Bhabha's notion of the “third space” by moving beyond celebratory and static notions of the “mixed-race” experience.

Unsettling partition: literature, gender, memory

Acknowledgments Introduction: Unsettling Partition 'Making Men for the India of Tomorrow'? Gender and Nationalist Discourse in South Asia Fragments of Imagination: Rethinking the Literary in Historiography through Narratives of India's Partition Cracking the Nation: Memory, Minorities, and the Ends of Narrative in Bapsi Sidhwa's Cracking India A Heart Divided: Education, Romance, and the Domestic Sphere in Attia Hosain's Sunlight on a Broken Column At a Loss for Words: Reading the Silence in South Asian Women's Partition Narratives Conclusion: Recovering the Nation? Appendix A Notes Bibliography Index

Building the temples of postmodern India: economic constructions of national identity

This article surveys the place of the economy in constructions of Indian national identity. The theme of physical construction in the literal and metaphorical building of the Indian national economy is explored. New iterations of this longstanding theme are located in an account of a new narrative of India's ‘imagined economy’. The ‘India Shining’ political advertising campaign of 2004 is understood as an encapsulation of the new economic imaginary. The ongoing relevance of the substance of the India Shining campaign is demonstrated and linked to concerns to establish an India as an international brand. Changes in the Indian economy are linked to an account of the postmodern condition.

Views and Visions: layered landscapes in West Indian migrant narratives

This panel focuses on the crucial importance of migration and remigration to/from the Caribbean and its diaspora centres. My paper is an exploration of how visual and written narratives can be read within this context. Specifically, I want to survey a sample of nineteenth and early twentieth century constructions of the colonial West Indies by women (travelogues, journals, fictions) and if possible, compare these accounts with contemporary visual representations, particularly of landscape, in order to demonstrate how enduring is the strategy of overlaying features of the familiar, memories of (European) home, onto the topography of the (tropical) new. Often, the tropical ‘home’ resists this ‘translation’ and points to the postcolonial space as one which is best read via a peculiar kind of double vision which yokes together disparate cultures; a vision still apparent in West Indian writing today from Naipaul to Kincaid.

Shahrazad is One of Us: Practical Narrative, Theoretical Discussion, and Feminist Discourse

Setting out to investigate the frame-story the Nights and its impact on Eastern and Western literature, I was unaware the wealth studies that have been published. They range from strictly philological research to postmodern literary studies. The former often include considerable reservations about the latter and their seemingly inflated interpretations details. For this reason, I have largely restricted myself to reconsidering previous theses and theories and will regroup different approaches as to content, form, or both while focusing on Shahrazâds different roles as heroine, narrator, and woman. Introduction Your name's really Sherazade? Yes. Really? It's it's so How can I put it? know who Sheherazade was? Yes. And that doesn't mean anything to you? No. You think you can be called Sherazade, just like No idea. He looked at her, standing the other side the high, round counter at the fast-food, unable to believe his eyes. And why not Aziyade? Who's that? A beautiful Turkish woman from Istanbul who Loti was in love with, a hundred years ago. Pierre Loti I've heard of. Not Aziyade. . Aziyade belonged to the harem an old Turk. was a young Circassian slave, converted to Islam. Why you telling me about this woman? She's got nothing to do with me. She had green eyes, like you. That's no reason. Sherazade was drinking her Coke out the can. wasn't listening any more. Julien Desrosiers went back to reading the small ads in Liberation. (Sebbar 1-2) Shahrazâd seems to be common property for Arabs and Europeans, natives and migrants, the educated and the uneducated alike. Beyond the diffusion Shahrazâd's own story and the repertoire her stories into many cultures, there is also evidence for their origins in many cultures. The collection known as Thousand and One Nights is the result a and ethnic meltingprocess (Walther 12), in which Indian and Persian elements blend (not to mention Greek, Egyptian, and Turkish). Against this multinational backdrop, the principle intertwined stories corresponds to Arab concepts adab by underlining the power the word and brilliant speech. Shahrazâd herself is a cultural amalgamate, for she speaks the Arabic language, bears a Persian name (meaning of noble appearance and/or origin), and employs an Indian narrative mode, the frame-story device. Moreover, it has repeatedly been pointed out that, long before Galland's French translation the Nights started its triumphant march through the Western world, its forerunners had already stimulated European and Judeo-Christian culture. The Sindbâd-cycle has been compared to Homer's Odyssey, and Shahrazâd has been considered-and refuted-to be a sister the biblical Esther (De Goeje; Cosquin), while the opening story the two kings Shariyâr and Shâhzamân has been believed a variation paradise lost and regained (Ghazoul 18). Whatever common grounds the Nights and the foundation myths Judeo-Christian culture may have, there is no doubt that before they were even translated into French, English, and German, the Nights made their mark on European literature, in particular on the literature Renaissance Italy (Walther 17; Littmann 359). In Europe and America as well as in the Near East, writers in the twentieth century (in fact more so than ever) still used the characters Shahrazâd's tales and her narrative mode as models for their own writings. With this in mind, Fedwa Malti-Douglas states: Were the Arabic Shahrazad to awaken, like some fairy tale princess, centuries after she first wove the stories in The Thousand and One Nights, she would undoubtedly be surprised by her numerous literary transformations (Shahrazad Feminist 40). Robert Irwin states that it is probably easier to specify the few Western or non-Arab authors who were not affected by the Nights (Irwin 358; Pinault 65-66) than to present a comprehensive list those who were-this list ranging from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Sir Walter Scott, and William Thackeray through Gustave Flaubert, Stendhal, and Gerard de Nerval to H. …

Multivalent narratives: Extending the narrative paradigm with insights from ancient Indian philosophical texts

This study discusses the ways in which ancient Indian narratives use ambiguity and contradiction to enshrine new values and stories for potential acceptance by cross‐cultural audiences. By examining two representative Indian didactic texts (gitas), the Avadhoota Gita and the Devi Gita, this inquiry explores how auditors are forced to reconstruct what these texts mean before they can evaluate them, thus exposing the auditors to powerful sources of novelty. The narrative paradigm espoused by Walter Fisher has been criticized as not allowing new possibilities into the lifeworld of the audience in the form of narratives espousing foreign values and beliefs. This study explicates how these multivalent narratives differ from polyvalent and polysemic narratives in their use of multiple value structures that force the audience to reconcile and reconstruct the various meanings within the text. This study culminates by revising the concepts of narrative probability and fidelity to allow for multivalent narratives that facilitate audience acceptance of new values and beliefs.

An Axis Jump: British Colonialism in the Oral Folk Narratives of Nineteenth-Century India

How did colonialism add on to the repertoire of Indian oral folk narratives? In its everyday life colonial society had to deal with inter-culturality at every level - from personal to social. The colonisers' narratives about this experience have been known in the vast variety of discourse termed ''orientalism''. What has remained obscured is the narrative expression of this experience by the colonised, specifically as oral narrative expression. This discourse of the colonised is contemporary with that of the European orientalist, but from the opposite point of view. It thus creates, as it were, an axis jump in our perception of colonial relations. In this paper are discussed some oral narratives of Indian folk about their British colonisers in the nineteenth century.

Discourses in Early Buddhist Art: Visual Narratives of India

Discourses in Early Buddhist Art: Visual Narratives of India

How some Indian baby makers are made: Media narratives and assisted conception in India

In the closing decades of the 20th century, media and media narratives in India have become powerful rhetorical devices. The journalistic narratives on science in India through the 1980s and the 1990s have tended to oscillate between the 'awe and mistrust' and 'marvel of science' frame, resulting in the creation of genre of popular science journalism that has assumed the form of an 'institutional advertisement'. This 'institutional advertisement' approach to scientific knowledge has played a central role in normalising assisted conception in India. Drawing on extensive media narratives on infertile patients and assisted conception practitioners, this paper attempts to show how the stories told in these accounts have resulted in the 'narrativisation of infertility' as a big problem. Undertaking a narrative analysis, the paper tries to show how the media narratives are publicity driven 'institutional advertisements' and have succeeded in creating a credible image of the medical expertise/experts in an iniquitous disregard for code of good medical practice in India.

American Indian Narrative:Traditions of the Arapaho.;Traditions of the Caddo.

Traditions of the Arapaho. George Dorsey and Alfred Kroeber. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, Bison Books, 1997. xxx + 487 pp. Traditions of the Caddo. George Dorsey. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, Bison Books, 1997. xxiv + 133 pp.

The Captive and Her Editor: The Ciphering of Olive Oatman and Royal B. Stratton

From 1993 to 1996, the first book-length monographs devoted to the Indian captivity narrative systematically began to define and explore the form's complexities, partly by expanding the very limited number of texts previously analyzed and anthologized. But paralleling the production of these book-length overviews, several studies recognized the need to elucidate individual captivities and texts by using the cultural dynamics of revelation, in particular, John Demos's book on Eunice Williams, taken in the attack on Deerfield, Massachusetts, in 1704, and Susan Walsh's article on Mary Jemison, taken near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in 1758. Both analyses concern the difficulties but also the possibilities of contextualizing and thereby individualizing two hitherto shadowy captives who permanently crossed from Anglo to Native American culture.

Lakota noon: the Indian narrative of Custer's defeat

Lakota noon: the Indian narrative of Custer's defeat

"I Lied All the Time": Trickster Discourse and Ethnographic Authority in "Crashing Thunder"

Crashing Thunder: The Autobiography of an American Indian is based on a life story written by the Winnebago Indian Sam Blowsnake that was solicited, translated, and edited by the anthropologist Paul Radin. Like so many Indian autobiographies that are produced out of such cross-cultural exchanges and collaborations, Crashing Thunder includes a preface and introduction written by the anthropologist-editor in which he works to establish of the narrative's authenticity.' Radin insists in the preface, for example, that Blowsnake's manuscript has been translated literally and that changes of any kind have been introduced. After acknowledging that he did enlarge the narrative by incorporating more elaborate versions of events merely alluded to in Blowsnake's original account, Radin goes on to again assert, in a sentence whose very repetitiousness makes it suspect, that the Indian narrator is the sole source for the narrative's contents: It is needless for me to insist that I in no way influenced him either directly or indirectly in any way.2 Through such statements as these, Paul Radin not only declares that the book is authentic, but establishes, through that authenticity, its conformity to the demands of both autobiography and ethnography.

De l’enfermement solitaire au lien social retrouvé : Winter in the Blood de James Welch

Estranged no More : The Journey Out of the Cold in James Welch's Winter in the Blood This article traces the thawing of the unnamed Indian narrator in Winter in the Blood, from emotional isolation haunted by memories of death back into touch with his own past, the life around him and tribal belonging. The reconciliation is shown to be articulated chiefly through Welch ’s treatment of the opening and closing scenes, and through a series of key episodes in which animals are charged with intense mediating power.

Zur Gestalt der Erde im Weltbild des frühen Buddhismus

In the gāthās of the Migālopa-Jātaka and the Gijjha-Jātaka an old Indian narrative is handed down in two basically identical versions which, however, differ from each other, in that the first and older one ascribes a square shape to the earth while the second one conceives it in the form of a wheel. Searching for an explanation for the coexistence of these seemingly contradictory cosmographic pictures in a canonical collection of Buddhist texts, the author of this article discusses in general the archaic cosmological concept of the flat circular disk of the earth, compares relevant sources from vedic and brahmanic literature, and points to some non-Indian tales which are of special interest particularly in regard to the Jātaka versions.

Zur Gestalt der Erde im Weltbild des frühen Buddhismus

AbstractIn the gāthās of the Migālopa-Jātaka and the Gijjha-Jātaka an old Indian narrative is handed down in two basically identical versions which, however, differ from each other, in that the first and older one ascribes a square shape to the earth while the second one conceives it in the form of a wheel. Searching for an explanation for the coexistence of these seemingly contradictory cosmographic pictures in a canonical collection of Buddhist texts, the author of this article discusses in general the archaic cosmological concept of the flat circular disk of the earth, compares relevant sources from vedic and brahmanic literature, and points to some non-Indian tales which are of special interest particularly in regard to the Jātaka versions.

American Indian Intellectualism and the New Indian Story

The role of Indians, themselves, in storytelling of Indian America is as much a matter of jurisdiction as is anything else in Indian Country: economics, law, control of resources, property rights. It goes without saying that it reflects our struggle with colonial experience of our concomitant histories. If that sounds benign, it is anything but that. On contrary, how Indian narrative is told, how it is nourished, who tells it, who nourishes it, and consequences of its telling are among most fascinating-and, at same time, chilling-stories of our time. It is true that the American Indian is to many people a bizarre phrase, falling quaintly on unaccustomed ears of those in American mainstream. While there are images of Jewish intellectuals, European intellectuals, British scholars, African novelists there is no image of an American Indian intellectual. There is only that primitive figure who crouches near fire smoking a sacred pipe or, arms outstretched, calls for gods to look down upon his pitiful being. Worse, drunk, demoralized Chingachgook sitting alongside road, a medallion with George Washington's face imprinted on it hanging about his neck. Or Red Power militant of 1960s. It is as though American Indian has no intellectual voice with which to enter into America's important dialogues. The American Indian is not asked what he thinks we should do about Bosnia or Iraq. He is not asked to participate in Charlie Rose's interview program about books or politics or history. It is as though American Indian does not exist except in faux history or corrupt myth. Yet, American Indian population is one of fastest growing minority populations in America and American Indians own and occupy hundreds of thousands of acres of land throughout country, have earned doctorates and other scholarly credentials, and they run their own homelands-based universities and corporations.

The Indian Narrative: Perspectives and Patterns

The Indian Narrative: Perspectives and Patterns