The Ṛg-Vedic hymn X. 95, describing the story of Purūravas and Urvaśī is of considerable interest and obscurity. It has attracted the attention of priests and scholars alike from the days of the Brāhmaṇas, with the result that different versions of the story have come down to us with unrestricted freedom. Geldner has recorded eight sources of the story: (i) the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa; (ii) the Kaṭhakam; (iii) Ṣaḍguru-śiṣya's commentary on the Sarvānukramaṇī; (iv) the Harivaṃśa Purāṇa; (v) the Viṣṇu Purāṇa; (vi) the Bṛhaddevatā; (vii) the Kathāsaritsāgara; and (viii) the Mahābhārata. To the above a few more works, such as the Vāyu Purāṇa, the Mātsya Purāṇa, and the Rāmāyaṇa may be added to make the list more comprehensive. However, Kālidāsa made the story more popular through one of his finest plays, Vikramorvaśīyaṃ.
This paper reads two early novels of Shashi Deshpande and maps the ways in which traditional and new alternative masculinities find juxtaposition in the chosen texts. Although Shashi Deshpande is regularly posited as an author of progressive feminist politics, whose fictions present a subjugated femininity under the oppression of a unitary and oppressive masculinity; this reading, however, complicates this position by exploring diverse and contradictory embodiments of manhood in her works. In so doing, this study submits that the presence of supportive or caring masculinities militates against the popular notion of a singular, oppressive and homogenous masculinity and problematizes the notion of pervasive and universal patriarchy. However, these caring or testicular masculinities do not find much textual endorsement. On the contrary, it is the traditional/ patriarchal masculinities that retain their dominance, which allows us to expose the novels' unconscious support of the status quo.
The place is fundamental to our existence; it conforms to the phenomenology of being in the world as we always occupy a place “if not with our minds, then always with our bodies”, to quote Moslund. The role of the senses in knowing the geographies of our existence, form a kind of structuring of space and defining of place. To understand the construction of sensorial-socio-cultural space of Assam at the time of extrajudicial killings that produces a ‘sense of fear’ jeopardizing the everyday negotiations of people inhabit the exceptional zones, this paper takes into account Aruni Kashyap’s debut novel The House with Thousand Stories (2013) that set in Hatimura village of Mayong area and deals with alternate retellings of micro-historical account of Assamese people. The paper dwells upon the artist’s creative response to the Agambenian ‘bare life’ that he associates with ‘bare’ or ‘pure senses’ to cultivate the idea of sensuousness of geography produced through the life stories of people and the interactions between human and non-human beings. Like Manipuri mother’s Naked March in front of Kangla Fort and Irom Sharmila’s sixteen years-long hunger strike that can be looked at as the metaphor for staging the ‘bare life’ against the body polity of the state, the sensual dimension of the geographic experience of Pablo, the narrator of the novel, in the village helps to understand the spaces of difference in the time of conflict.
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