Indian Scene Research Articles

“A Literature of Frustration and Failure”: The Anxiety of Indianness in the Making of Sindhi Literature as an Indian Literature

Abstract Studies of Partition frequently turn to literature to understand how displacement processes, among other things, impact aesthetics and representation. This article takes a broader view of aesthetics as representation: it demonstrates how turning to the literary archive of a moment and a community gives rise to questions about the politics of individual texts and literary historiography. Centered on Sindhi literature produced in India after Partition, it shows that examining the literary productivity of the community needs to involve questions of literature as political survival. It focuses on the earliest essays from the Sindhi literary scene in India (published in the Sahitya Akademi journal Indian Literature). The article argues that these essays register anxiety about the survival of a language trying to come into being in an already existing and complicated language-nation relationship. It unpacks three registers of anxiety visible in the literary archive to broaden the scope of the conversations around the Sindhi language and its literature.

IDENTIFYING BARRIERS TO WALKABILITY WITHIN THE HERITAGE CITY OF MYSORE, KARNATAKA, INDIA

Historically, streets have served a range of functions, primarily those associated with shopping and social interactions. However, in the 20th century, the street design became centred on traffic movement. It enhanced the space for automobiles, while public lives were marginalized to sidewalks, not to forget the problems faced by the street hawkers, quintessential to the Street scene in India. The historic core of Mysore, a metropolitan city in the Southern state of Karnataka in India, has had various attempts to enhance its mobility but has not had much success. The paper summarises a pilot study carried out on Asoka Road in the city of Mysore to investigate its walkability. A descriptive quantitative technique was adopted, in which a random sample of respondents who happened to walk down Asoka Street were given questionnaires and surveys to complete to collect data. The results revealed that the level of comfort of the street amounted to 51.8% and that the pedestrian path was quite uncomfortable.

A Descriptive Study on- Scope of Space Research for Start-up With Reference to Indian Space Research Opportunities

The space research scene in India is on the rise, and this study takes a closer look at what's happening. We explore how big the space research market is, what's making it grow, and who the key players are. In India, space research is booming thanks to cool projects and better technology. We check out the main players, from new start-ups to the big research centres, and see how they're making their mark in this busy space. The city is home to lots of space research spots, each doing different things like making satellites and exploring outer space. We look at the city's tech strengths and skilled pros, predicting that India is all set for more growth and cool stuff in space research. This study gives you a peek into what's happening now and what's in store for India as it becomes a major player in India's space exploration dreams.

Abhilash Pillai's Midnight's Children: Performing Politics through Optics

Abhilash Pillai's stage adaptation of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (2005–6) introduced a new visual language to Indian theatre, conceiving performance between theatre and cinema. Pillai's work presents history as memory, amnesia and re-remembering within the framework of a multisensorial scenography that largely uses the vocabularies of the Bollywood film industry. The politics of the performance lies less in the thematic than in its optical dynamics, different as they are from both scene painting and the aestheticization of the public sphere. The production shows how theatre experience in a media society may primarily build on the perceptual, but without dismissing text or suspending the cognitive altogether. The visual media are used more as an intervention in politico-aesthetic discourse than as mere technology. As I explain the reasons for the long absence of any scholarly study of the production, I also consider its relevance to the current political scene in India.

Folk Dance and Music of Rajasthan: A Study of their Role in Fairs and Festivals

Rajasthan, a state with a thriving cultural scene in India, is home to a diverse range of traditional folk dance performances and folk music that have greatly influenced the growth of the local culture. Through thoroughly examining various folk dance and music, their historical roots, and their contemporary relevance, this study sheds light on how these folk dances and music contribute to preserving Rajasthan's legacy and their significance in fairs and festivals. The main goal of this study is to examine the mutually beneficial interaction between Rajasthan's traditional performances—such as folk dances and music, and the fairs and festivals that shape the state's calendar. The paper is exploratory, providing an overview of the folk dance and music of Rajasthan and their relevance to the state-wide fairs and festivals.

‘Azadi’s political until you’re pressing play’: Capitalist realism, hip-hop, and platform affordances

The article delves into the hip-hop scene in India, by locating its particular relationship with digital platforms, Instagram, YouTube and music streaming services such as Spotify, SoundCloud and Bandcamp. Because of hip-hop’s self-referentiality and its peculiar form of realism, discourses around platform capitalism have inadvertently entered the culture at large. Cultural artefacts produced by the scene reflect on the condition of music’s interaction with platforms and in turn, lay bare the evaluative tendencies vis-à-vis platforms. The article argues that digital platforms are productive in giving form to culture wherein the audio track is accompanied by a range of other trans-textual and trans-medial linkages of texts, audio, images and videos, that is, discourses which circulate outside of the audio form creating a crisscross of lines which come to form the cypher of hip-hop culture. It isn’t merely the offline cyphers then which are crucial in giving form to the community but also the digital platforms and their affordances.

Dalit Histories, Pandemic Histories

Dalit Histories, Pandemic Histories

Overview of the Organ Transplant Scene in India and an Attempt to Flag Issues

Overview of the Organ Transplant Scene in India and an Attempt to Flag Issues

Revisiting the Origins of Muslim Cultural Exclusivism in British India

Notwithstanding the fundamental socio-cultural cum religious divergences existing between the Muslims and Hindus, the two religious groups managed to forge bonds of fraternity based on mutual understanding and respect thanks to their centuries-long overall peaceful co-existence in the Indian environment. This virtually harmonious relationship soon gave birth to a composite culture whereby many of the Muslim-Hindu differences were blunted and replaced by shared socio-cultural – and sometimes even religious – aspects of life. Yet, the second half of the nineteenth century witnessed a reversal of this trend. In fact, the post-Revolt context in British India was marked by the emergence of consciousness among the Muslims whereby they developed a sense of belonging to a cultural entity that was different from that of the Hindus. In other words, these “Muhammadans” became actively conscious of their cultural differences vis-à-vis the Hindus, and therefore, saw themselves as a separate group with distinct cultural traits. This shift towards cultural exclusivism, which eventually gave rise to a separatist tendency among them, has been a moot point that drew a great deal of interest among scholars who provided different interpretations. In this article, the main task is to look into whether the British had any involvement in this new development in the Indian scene. [Indian Muslims, Hindus, Urdu, Hindi, divide et impera, language controversy]

Review: Balkrishna Doshi: Writings on Architecture and Identity and One Continuous Line: Art, Architecture and Urbanism of Aditya Prakash

Review: <i>Balkrishna Doshi: Writings on Architecture and Identity</i> and <i>One Continuous Line: Art, Architecture and Urbanism of Aditya Prakash</i>

Innovative Entrepreneurship: An Indian Scene of Drivers and Obstacles

Global entrepreneurship monitor (GEM) in its report in 2013 revealed that India is a nation whose economy is factor driven and not innovation driven. But still entrepreneurs here are continuously coming up with ideas, leading to the creation of such products/services which carry a great competitive advantage for them and thereby helping them to survive in this highly competitive business world. At the same time, this business world is becoming increasingly more complex. We see rapid advances in technology and most critically markets face rising churn and this causes an unprecedented rise in business failures today. Among many reasons to avoid this failure we recommend the Innovative Entrepreneurship to be the most important factor with which Indian companies can achieve competitive advantage and avoid the likely failures in future. Still Indian economy is factor driven and not innovation driven. So there are great obstacles in its way, due to which India is not able to unleash its innovative entrepreneurial potential to the fullest. The purpose of this paper is to identify the factors that act as positive forces of the innovative entrepreneurship in Indian scenario. We also focus on identifying the obstacles in the path of the said field and also attempt to identify the ways in which this innovative potential can be realised to the fullest.

Dematerialization of Art: Concepts and Its Traces in Contemporary Indian Art

This paper explores the concept of “dematerialization” which was introduced by Lucy Lippard and John Chandler in their work on conceptual art that emerged in the 1960s. Dematerialization stands for the dominance of ideas linked with intelligence on materiality linked with sensory perception. So, dematerialization is a kind of process in which ideas take the lead and become primary, and materiality loses its traditional status and becomes secondary. The notion of dematerialization can be reconsidered on these grounds. First of all, the core of the work is the idea or concept, no material form. Secondly, the core of the artwork is not confined to what the viewer “looks at” as an art object as a final product. Thus, the idea permits the process. The concept of dematerialization gave a new vision to Indian artists to explore their feelings and thoughts through concepts and ideas with readymade objects. By interpreting conceptual art and dematerialization, the author concludes that these tendencies share significant similarities, and that is a beneficial and innovative sight in the contemporary art scene in India.

Improving Scene Text Recognition for Indian Languages with Transfer Learning and Font Diversity.

Reading Indian scene texts is complex due to the use of regional vocabulary, multiple fonts/scripts, and text size. This work investigates the significant differences in Indian and Latin Scene Text Recognition (STR) systems. Recent STR works rely on synthetic generators that involve diverse fonts to ensure robust reading solutions. We present utilizing additional non-Unicode fonts with generally employed Unicode fonts to cover font diversity in such synthesizers for Indian languages. We also perform experiments on transfer learning among six different Indian languages. Our transfer learning experiments on synthetic images with common backgrounds provide an exciting insight that Indian scripts can benefit from each other than from the extensive English datasets. Our evaluations for the real settings help us achieve significant improvements over previous methods on four Indian languages from standard datasets like IIIT-ILST, MLT-17, and the new dataset (we release) containing 440 scene images with 500 Gujarati and 2535 Tamil words. Further enriching the synthetic dataset with non-Unicode fonts and multiple augmentations helps us achieve a remarkable Word Recognition Rate gain of over on the IIIT-ILST Hindi dataset. We also present the results of lexicon-based transcription approaches for all six languages.

From a Lingua Franca to a Communal Language: The Islamicization of Urdu in British India

The Urdu language, alternatively known as Hindustani, enjoyed the status of a lingua franca in the Indian subcontinent due to the fact that it was a common medium of expression used by Indians regardless of their faith. However, around the mid-nineteenth century, mutations on the Indian scene were to pose a challenge to this status which rendered this language an exclusively Islamic one. Therefore, this paper seeks to highlight the process of this transition—that is, from a common language used by all to a communal one—as well as the motivating forces behind such a change which, ultimately, led to the fragmentation of the country by the mid-twentieth century

Technology-Enabled Learning and Post-Pandemic Academic Scene in India: Some Reflections

The onslaught of the Covid pandemic has changed the landscape of human interactions and life drastically; after the apparent changes in the health sector, the field of education has been radically changed. This study makes an effort to deliberate upon some aspects of the National Education Policy, 2020(NEP) and Right to Education (RTE) in relation to the post-pandemic changes that have been seen in the present Indian educational scene especially in the context of the technology-enabled learning.

Post-Millennial Indian Dystopian Fiction: A Developing Canon of Precarity, (Im)purity and Ideas of India(nness)

This paper is interested in an emerging canon of post-millennial Indian dystopian fiction in English and the related themes of precarity and (im)purity. After introducing some recent novels and texts from the domestic Indian literary scene, the paper looks to demonstrate how precarity, (im)purity and changing ideas of India(nness) are manifested in Prayaag Akbar’s Leila, a 2017 Indian post-millennial dystopian novel in English. To focus on these particular themes, I consider the novel’s urban geography in terms of its modes of segregation, specifically how the walled sectors of the dystopian, near-future metropolis divide a city ruled over by the Repeaters and pervasive surveillance systems, whilst the Slums and the Outroads lie beyond the city limits. This focus on (im)pure involves an examination of representations of class, privilege, freedom of movement and religious affiliation. Overall, this paper is especially interested in how the dystopian as a narrative mode is harnessed in order to recount ‘precarious’ urban existence, a theme that runs through the wider body of post-millennial Indian dystopian fiction. Through discussion of the (im)purity trope and particularly through the narrative mode of the dystopian, I argue that Leila, like other recent Indian works of this genre, tangentially engages with certain socio-political themes of the second decade of the millennium such as segregation and develops ideas of India(nness) in relation to the Indian post-millennial contemporary.

‘Walking the Indian Streets’: Analysing Ved Mehta’s Memoirs of Return

ABSTRACT This essay attempts to explore the autobiographical narratives by Ved Mehta that can be categorised as memoirs of return. Born before the partition (in 1947) of the Indian subcontinent, Mehta travelled to the West at fifteen and returned to India after a decade. This return remained significant since around it we find a cluster of memoirs (Face to Face, Walking the Indian Streets, Ledge between the Streams), which document some of the most complex narratives of an Indian return migrant’s attempt to negotiate between his notional homeland and his experience of being physically located within his country of origin. The central issue that I discuss here is ‘proprioceptive crisis’, when the body cannot comfortably fit within the surrounding space. For Mehta, his first experience of return was marked by an acute proprioceptive crisis, which was exacerbated by a sense of disillusionment about the Indian political and socio-economic scene. The essay will attempt to study the interplay between his early memories, which he used to construct his version of an Indian homeland while abroad, with the problematic experiences that marked his return and complicated his relationship with the physical space of India, which he once claimed to be his home.

Multilingualism and Subversion: Articulating Plural Identities in Stand-up Comedy in India

Laughter has become a serious business in India now. Over the last decade, the growth of stand-up comedy has been phenomenal in India. From having late-night comedy shows on televisions that employed the same stream of jokes repetitively, the comedy scene in India has evolved into an entire industry of stand-up comedians performing in pubs, clubs, auditoriums, and digital platforms like YouTube channels and other streaming platforms. The huge popularity of stand-up comedy hints at the license given to the stand-up comedians by the audience to discuss the current socio-political issues of the country. The audience’s laughter in response to the comedian’s joke might suggest a collective agreement to the stand-up comedian’s opinionated jokes. Therefore, an understanding of the relevance of stand-up comedy in contemporary culture becomes pertinent. Since stand-up comedians use the medium of language to connect with the audience to convey their jokes, it becomes important to take into cognizance the role language plays in the performance especially in a multilingual country, like India. This research paper is thus an aim to analyze the role of multilingualism in stand-up comedy in articulating issues pertinent to India to locate the contemporary pluralistic culture of India.

ICT IN TEACHING AND LEARNING: AN INDIAN SCENE

The use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has been admired worldwide for decades. The impact of ICT in teaching and learning is an interesting point which must be known to find the output. With the aim, the present study was focused on exhaustive literature review on the use of ICT in teaching and learning in Indian scene. The search was made using ICT tool itself e.g. internet and institutional library. Google and Google scholar were used as primary search engines. Results retrieved from the search were filtered and confined to India (2010-2020) only to make this review focused in the Indian scenario only. The finding of the work revealed the positive effect of the use of ICT in teaching and learning. Further, it has also been observed that use of ICT in developing countries like India is at lesser side as compare to developed countries. As such reviews (study) are scare, this would be a pathfinder to others to carry out more and more studies to know the worldwide impact of ICT.

Conceptual Artwork: in terms of new media and technology

Abstract This paper presents a discussion of conceptual art in terms of new media and technology. The author aims to highlight the interplay of technology and new media with conceptual art. In conceptual art, the idea or concept behind the work is as important as the work itself. In these ways, new media is a blend of various media juxtaposed with enticing thoughts and ideas. Taking an essential step in that direction, technology has been a significant player in the global impact of 21st-century artists from India. Interestingly, artists used electronic technology to broadened their ways and expressed their ideas conceptually based. Technological development giving rise as well as generate creative visual forms. “In conceptual art, the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work…the idea becomes a machine that makes the art”. In this way, both conceptual Art and Technology are much more closely related. The author further exemplifies the contemporary artists work in India at the intersection of conceptual Art, Technology, and new media art. Therefore, using secondary data and descriptive research methodology, this paper re-examines conceptual Art, new media, and Technology to promote dialogue and creative expression and address social change. By interpreting conceptual art in terms of media and technology, the author concludes that these tendencies share significant similarities, and that is a beneficial and innovative sight in the contemporary art scene in India. Technology is shown to have a significant influence on conceptual art but often based on historical, social and cybernetic narratives. Keywords: Conceptual Art, Technology, New Media Art, Idea and Concept