NUML journal of critical inquiry

Decoloniality, Indigenous Resistance, and Environmental Justice in Mother Forest: The Unfinished Story of C.K Janu

2024-12-02T04:48:31+05:00

This study explores the connection between indigenous resistance, decoloniality and environmental justice through Mother Forest: An Unfinished Story of C.K. Janu. The fight for land rights issues by the Adivasi community started in India right after Independence. This controversial and sensitive realm, worsened initially by the British and sustained by successive governments through Forest Policies, requires critical examination. Resistance voices were always raised against such inhumane deeds of expropriation. The inseparability of land from their existence reinforced their struggle to be rooted in indigenous ontologies. Resistance battles were against the governmental bodies that stripped them of their autonomy, sovereignty, and self-determination. They were able to question bigger structures with colonial origins, highlighting the colonial nature of contemporary forest policies. Indigenous Adivasi resistance struggles, thereby, turn out to be decolonial in nature, as they contest colonial ideas that persist today. Mother Forest: An Unfinished Story of C.K. Janu, is one such tale of indigenous insurgence against unjust land expropriation. Examining the text from a decolonial perspective unveils the potential of indigenous uprisings to question bigger structures of injustice.

‘Heavy Waters’ of Punjab: A Hydro-critical Analysis of Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy Man

2025-01-11T13:05:52+05:00

This research argues that the seminal Partition novel Ice-Candy Man, written by Bapsi Sidhwa, presents a vision of fluvial Punjab in a manner that fits the idea of “Heavy Waters” presented by Elizabeth DeLoughrey. The latter’s idea of water carrying both physical and metaphysical waste seems to materialize in Sidhwa’s novel, who places her story in the context of the partitioned Punjab of 1947, when a desire for ‘territorialism’ over water resulted in countless human beings turning into ‘national refuse’, or people killed in the name of nationality, whose dead bodies floating in the rivers of the Punjab turned the rivers into both a haunting site and a site foreboding an environmental crisis sooner or later. Hydro-criticism emerges as an apt theory to carry out this research, considering the tools it provides to look at literary texts from a watery perspective, while the research methodology involves a close textual analysis, with specific focus on events pertaining to water in the novel. The study concludes that a) If Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s hydro-critical lens can aid in understanding the pain of Middle Passage victims and the defiling of the Atlantic Ocean, the same theory may help read indigenous texts to pay tribute to Pakistan’s water bodies, and b) If Atlantic modernity is metallic due to the residue it carries of British naval weaponry, then overt sexual activity taking place in Pakistan and India can be linked to the ample flesh that lies in the waters of the Subcontinent.

Go Back!: Reclaiming Indigenous Visibility in Literary, Cultural, and Environmental Spaces of Pakistan

2024-12-23T05:01:07+05:00

This paper examines the nexus of visibility and violence in the context of indigenous communities of Pakistan, with a focus on the literary works of Mustansar Hussein Tarar. Through a critical analysis of Tarar’s texts, this study reveals how his narratives subvert the dominant autochthonous discourses (surrounding the sociocultural and geophysical spaces of the Indus Valley), reclaim visibility for the indigenous communities, and thus enable their survival. The intersection of literature, culture, and environment has already been explored by many scholars (De Loughery 2015; Mukherjee 2010; Nixon 2011; Huggan 2004), with some discussions also incorporating the perspectives of indigenous peoples (Dove 2006). By drawing upon the nexus of visibility and violence in the context of environmental spaces discussed by Rob Nixon (2011), this research demonstrates how Tarar’s works challenge representational bias against the visibility of indigenous communities and shows slow violence inflicted upon them, thereby mitigating the detrimental effects of centuries of marginalization. To illustrate this argument, I have chosen two novels by Mustansar Hussain Tarar, Sorrows of Sarasvati originally published as Bahao, and Love in the Shade of Death originally published as Qurbat e Marg Mein Muhabbat. Through these works, Tarar traverses both temporally (from the Indus Valley civilization to the present time) and spatially (from Sarasvati to Sindhu), thereby reprobating the current debates of belonging, reimagining the past and present of the Indus Valley through an indigenous lens, and reclaiming visibility for indigenous people within literary, cultural, and environmental spaces in Pakistan. This study contributes to the ongoing eco-critical debates by highlighting the significance of indigenous literary narratives in imagining alternative spatialities.

Indigeneity and Resistance in Zubair Ahmad’s Grieving for Pigeons

2024-12-14T02:06:32+05:00

This article explores how short stories in Zubair Ahmad’s collection Grieving for Pigeons (2022) manipulate the narrative of cultural memory to project the intricate realities of the postcolonial Pakistani Punjab. These stories set in Lahore foreground the rich memories of pure culture and the partition of Punjab, contribute to the empowerment of Punjabi language, and depiction of cultural and historical heritage of Lahore. Moreover, significantly, these short stories also showcase a postcolonial resistance. Drawing upon concepts of Mieke Bal on cultural memory and Aleida Assman’s “remembering forward”, this research highlights how Ahmad’s stories (2023) succeed in excavating the transformation and reformation of cultures by reinterpreting understanding of the past and, thus, put forward a “remembering forward”. These stories, originally written in Punjabi and translated into English by Anne Murphy, situate culture of the past in the future to come, by influencing people to embrace their culture, enabling it to adapt to new circumstances and achieve an elevated position where it becomes resistant against colonial exercise. I argue that cultural memory, impacting the identities of individuals, grows to a point of resistance which I term as postcolonial resistive memory. This postcolonial resistive memory produces the Affect to emphasize the authenticity of the shared past and ideological resistance in the masses. This memory also has the potential to maintain indigeneity, reinscribe the cultural past, and revolutionize futuristic ideals.

Native American Voices: Decolonial Perspectives on Selected Texts of Alexie and Momaday

2024-07-12T13:25:27+05:00

This paper explores the Native American voices through a decolonial reading of a range of selected texts of Sherman Alexie and Navarre S. Momaday. The aim is to understand indigenous culture as a prototype for retrieving the lost identity of American Indians. The decolonization of mind is realized through cultural resistance and counter-discourse that articulates the liminal experiences of the marginalized and the ostracized. Therefore, the literary representation of peripheral voices not only defies the dominant voice but also creates new avenues for cross-cultural communication with the mainstream discourse. This study employs the dialogic approach of Greg Sarris and Louis Owens as theoretical support for analysing the selected texts. The slippery frontier position of American Indians is not separatist but conversational that subverts stereotypes and, simultaneously, acknowledges difference. This essay principally explores how cross-reading Native American subversive texts can serve as a tool for cross-cultural communication. The indigenous writers with their lost identity (due to their living on reservations) write passionately about their past, traditions, and customs to make their voice heard in the mainstream discourse for their survival. This paper, therefore, proposes that the gap between Natives and Euro-Americans may be bridged through literary resistance for reconciliation instead of creating antagonism between them.