Journal articles on the topic 'Childhood, India, Raj, Colonialism'

Many colonial regimes appropriate traditional symbols of power to enhance authority. In many cases this appropriation results in the hardening of more transitory political divisions among subject people into ethnic, national, or tribal ones. Colonialism often, in essence, creates different identities for subject peoples. For example, the East India Company (E.I.C.) and royal colonial government in India manipulated caste and religion to carry out a policy of divide and rule. Moreover, the E.I.C. and later the Raj attempted to create a European-style landed elite that could promote development of agriculture, maintain social control in the countryside and, perhaps most important, collect taxes owed to the government. The Raj attempted to place the structures of power that evolved within the framework of the symbols of Moghul legitimacy, going so far as to create a hybrid traditional style of architecture used in many public buildings that mixed elements from both Hindu and Muslim buildings. In South Africa, colonial legislation, as seen in the process begun by the Glen Gray Act of 1894, resulted in the proletarianization of the African population by creating tribal reservations without enough resources to support all the people often arbitrarily defined as members of a particular tribe. And, as seen in studies of mine labor, coloniallegislation also defined a distinctive legal status for workers.

Dalit conversion to Christianity has a long history, predating Dr Ambedkar’s call for conversion in 1935. The contexts of conversion are many; however, the strong urge among Dalits to escape the oppressive, dehumanizing socio-spiritual condition remains the chief motive. The colonial administration, and even before that, the missionaries, were the first to make interventions in the lives of the Dalits, providing access to education, employment, healthcare, and mobility. Consequently many Dalits converted to Christianity en masse. However, post conversion, they became “doubly marginalized” (Omvedt, 2009) both in terms of caste and religion. Several attacks on Dalit Christians in colonial as well as post-independence India illustrate these two bases of victimization. A few writers, such as Bama, Imayam, and Raj Gouthaman, have attempted to explore the lived experience of Dalit Christians with a focus on caste within the Catholic Church. Kalyan Rao’s Telugu novel Antarani vasantham ( Untouchable Spring) is the first novel that seriously engages with the complex of Dalit conversions and in an epic fashion explores the lived experience and struggle of Telugu Dalits and Dalit Christians in history from the colonial times to the present. The primary focus of this article is to explore Kalyan Rao’s representation of Dalit experience using the optics of mission history and liberation and Dalit theologies, which I argue, enable us to contextualize the novel’s representation of Dalit habitus.

This paper will examine literary representations of children as earning members of society against the history of child labour in India, as a means of understanding the relationship between class, labour, nationalism and childhood. It is part of my ongoing attempt to examine formulations of childhood in the Global South as a way of engaging with the concept of ‘multiple childhoods’ and examining their position vis-à-vis global, universal (and, according to scholars like Emer O' Sullivan, Western) paradigms of childhood. In the wake of The Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Amendment Bill, 2016, the historical and constitutional journey India embarks on is examined, beginning with the Indian Factory Act, 1881, along the path of its nascent nationhood, to The Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act of 1986 and the subsequent Amendment. The focus is on Mulk Raj Anand's Coolie and Anita Desai's The Village by the Sea as texts which portray two different modes of thinking about labouring children. Applying Viviana Zelizer's definitions of the ‘uselessness’ and ‘usefulness’ of children, my paper studies these two literary representations of useful childhood in India, published at different points in India's journey as a nation, in a political and historical continuum within which the futurity of a young country is embodied by the willing labour of youth.

Given their sheer numbers, it is hardly surprising that the fate of peasants during British Rule in India should have become a principal index for evaluating its successes and failures. Since the Raj was much more than another effete political superimposition on supposedly timeless villages, the question of agrarian growth or stagnation during its currency is intertwined with more general issues. In so far as colonialism meant a sizable expansion of trade to and from the rural areas, its impact on village social structure in India bears comparison with that of a modern market on peasantries in other parts of the world. Perhaps, the classic case of a peasantry coming face to face with a growing market happened in Russia between 1860 and 1930. The history of that period has generated conceptual discussion about the dynamics of peasant society. The possibility of some of those ideas shedding light on the situation in India has prompted Indo-Russian contrasts and comparisons in agrarian history on more than one occasion (Charlesworth: 1979; Stein: 1984). As a sequel to these writings the Russian debate is considered here briefly in order to suggest some ways in which it might be useful in the Indian context.

AbstractWithin a year of Indian independence, the Communist Party of India declared independence to be a false dawn and the whole Socialist bloc within the ruling Indian National Congress cut its ties with the national government. The speed with which the left disengaged from what had been a patriotic alliance under colonialism surprised many at the time and has perplexed historians ever since. Some have looked to the wider context of the Cold War to explain the onset of dissent within the Indian left. This paper points instead to the neglected domestic context, examining the lines of inclusion and exclusion that were drawn up in the process of the making of the new Indian constitution. Once in power, Congress leaders recalibrated their relationship with their former friends at the radical end of the political spectrum. Despite some of the well-known differences among leading Congress personalities, they spoke as one on industrial labour and the illegitimacy of strikes as a political weapon in the first year of national rule and declared advocates of class politics to be enemies of the Indian state. Congress thus attempted to sideline the Socialists and Communists and brand them as unacceptable in the new regime. This paper focuses on this first year of independence, emphasizing how rapidly the limits of Indian democracy were set in place.

Measles is one of the disease which is amenable to eradication, but in India measles isstill a major cause of morbidity and significant contributor to childhood mortality. Inthe present study. Infectious disease hospital records for a period of five & half yearswere analysed. It was found that 253 measles cases were diagnosed & underwenttreatment. Out of 253, 179 ( 70.7%) were males and 74 ( 29.2%) were females. Fourtyeight (18.9%) were between 7-12 months of age. Maximum cases i.e. 166 ( 65.6%)were registered during months of March, April, May, & June. A significant proportionof cases i.e. 54 (21%) developed measles, inspite of immunization.measles still remain endemic with most casesoccuring in young children & infants.3In India,measles vaccine was first made available in 1978and has been reccommended for children aged 9-15 months. Vaccination against measlesPoliomyelitis, Diphtheria , Tetanus, Pertussis andtuberculosis is provided free to all infants in India,through the National Health Services and thecoverage rate is >85%.41. S.M.S. Medical College, Jaipur, India.2. Directorate of Medical & Health Services, Govt. of Rajasthan, Jaipur, India.Address for correspondence : Dr. Monika Rathore46, Shiv Raj Niketen ColonyVaishali Nagar, Jaipur, (Rajasthan),IndiaEmail: rathoremonika@rediffmail.comKey Words: Measles, Immunised Children, India.

The authors begin the book with „Who “we” are‟….which puts them in the context of their childhood and young age which was influenced by the Nationalist Movement, Charisma od Gandhiji, Alexander Dumas, Maxim Gorky, Mulk Raj Anand, and many other worlds and national phenomena. They also talk about their detachment for the first-hand experiences of the troubled and tortured as they were coming from the upper middle class Hindu savarna families. In the process of narrowing down the whole idea of movements related to women‟s issues, the authors have selected four major areas namely sexual violence, health, work, and legal campaigns. They also excluded the collection of case studies form their preview. By 1984, they came up with their first office with the name” the Women‟s Decade Research Collective- WDRC. In 1985, they got a grant from the ISS Holland. By 1986 their struggle started in the various parts of India to collect the stories/ data/ cases and documents. Their train journey from Assam to Benaras to Madhya Pradesh taught them to be a part of the daily struggle put up by the women across India. The action program got strengthened by the little surveys they took and the information and advice they picked up during the journey. The women‟s movement has no beginning or “origin”. It exists as an emotion, anger deep within us. The women‟s movement history also is like notes in a cycle of rhythm; each is a eparate piece, yet a part of the whole.

The article is devoted to the study of the process of I. Gandhi personally development as a politician, characteristics and features of her worldview formation. Indira Nehru’s entourage had a decisive role in becoming her as a politician and a leader of the nation continuing her father’s “Nehru course”. The cornerstone of I. Gandhi foreign policy concept and activity was the doctrine of “Great India” which took shape in the conditions of the 20th century world shocks which radically changed the political map of the world. Colonialism contributed to the emergence of a heightened sense of national dignity among many Indian politicians and intellectuals including I. Gandhi. J. Nehru views played an important educational role in I. Gandhi worldview formation. His scientific, philosophical and political views became the foundation that would subsequently develop and strengthen in her mind and form the future politician with certain beliefs and ideas about “Great India.” For her people she was not just a female politician, but a symbol, because even after the resignation from the post of prime minister, I. Gandhi presence in the government was seen as maintaining fidelity to the commandments of the largest national leader by the people. The spiritual appearance formed in her childhood helped her overcome all the difficulties that she would encounter on her political path. She would endure all the ups and downs with dignity and even the awareness of the impending assassination attempt did not make her hide but meet her opponents.

This article utilizes a three-pronged analytical model to examine the mechanics of British colonialism and its socioeconomic and political consequences in India. Those three elements are divide and rule, colonial education, and British laws. The British took some reformative initiatives that ostensibly deserve appreciation such as the development of a predictable legal system, investment in infrastructure development, and education in the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. However, most colonial policies and reforms were against the will and welfare of the people of India. The British took away India’s resources and introduced the English educational system to create an educated and elite buffer class for its own interests. It also introduced positivistic and predictable laws and repressive and discriminatory measures, including force, to control the natives and prevent anti-British agitation, protests, and armed uprisings in India. Although the consequences of British colonialism in India has been explored from various disciplines, the legacy of British colonialism to present day Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan has not been examined from the Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS) lens. Johan Galtung’s (1990) violence triangle framework helps us to understand the different forms of colonial violence, and the need for positive peacebuilding in the post-colonial context. This paper argues that the current educational policy, the legal framework, and the ethno-religious-cultural diversity of today, exhibiting the structural, cultural, and direct violence, are a continuation of the legacy of the British Raj.

Professor Girindrasekhar Bose, D. Sc., M.B., F.N.L., was born on 30th January, 1887 in Darbhanga district of Bihar. The Bose family had the reputation of rich cultural excellence. Girindrasekhar’s father Sri Chandrasekhar Bose was the then Dewan of the Darbhanga Raj Estate. One of his brothers, Sri Rajsekhar Bose, was a famous writer of Bengali literature. Girindrasekhar was the youngest of the four sons and five daughters. Since childhood, amiable in his behaviour and inquisitive by nature, he was very much liked by his teachers and peer group.

The aim of this paper is to highlight that Post-Colonial writers in English novels pay more attention on common themes such as emigration, independence struggles, allegiance, national identity, and childhood. This paper speaks about the heart of the darkness by joseph Conrad and a passage to India by E.M Forster and how the themes of these two novels deal with post- colonialism and the relationship between both colonizer and the colonized. It explains the world of colony and how it describes a group of people leaving their native country to settle in a new geographical location subject to, and how post-colonial theory is built in large part around the concept of otherness with its associated problems including doublings of identity, values and meaning of the colonising culture and resistance. The study tries to show how the apparent holy mission of the colonisers led to their own loss. It also gives how the coloniser’s characters are caught between inner moral pressure conflicts and social demands. Man, in a colonised country is also torn between the uncertain world and his dissatisfying home. The study proclaims how a personal dilemma is a true reflection of the moral hypocrisy. The study concludes by depicting how hypocrisy and moral duality lead the colonizer to lose their identity as well as explaining one of the problems associated with colonizer theory, the attempt to maintain a national identity.

The release in 2004 of Gurinder Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice marked yet another contribution to celluloid’s Austen mania that began in the 1990s and is still going strong. Released almost simultaneously on three different continents (in the UK, US, and India), and in two different languages (English and Hindi), Bride and Prejudice, however, is definitely not another Anglo-American period costume drama. Described by one reviewer as “East meets West”, Chadha’s film “marries a characteristically English saga [Austen’s Pride and Prejudice] with classic Bollywood format “transforming corsets to saris, … the Bennetts to the Bakshis and … pianos to bhangra beats” (Adarsh). Bride and Prejudice, thus, clearly belongs to the upcoming genre of South Asian cross-over cinema in its diasporic incarnation. Such cross-over cinema self-consciously acts as a bridge between at least two distinct cinematic traditions—Hollywood and Bollywood (Indian Hindi cinema). By taking Austen’s Pride and Prejudice as her source text, Chadha has added another dimension to the intertextuality of such cross-over cinema, creating a complex hybrid that does not fit neatly into binary hyphenated categories such as “Asian-American cinema” that film critics such as Mandal invoke to characterise diaspora productions. An embodiment of contemporary globalised (post?)coloniality in its narrative scope, embracing not just Amritsar and LA, but also Goa and London, Bride and Prejudice refuses to fit into a neat East versus West cross-cultural model. How, then, are we to classify this film? Is this problem of identity indicative of postmodern indeterminacy of meaning or can the film be seen to occupy a “third” space, to act as a postcolonial hybrid that successfully undermines (neo)colonial hegemony (Sangari, 1-2)? To answer this question, I will examine Bride and Prejudice as a mimic text, focusing specifically on its complex relationship with Bollywood conventions. According to Gurinder Chadha, Bride and Prejudice is a “complete Hindi movie” in which she has paid “homage to Hindi cinema” through “deliberate references to the cinema of Manoj Kumar, Raj Kapoor, Yash Chopra and Karan Johar” (Jha). This list of film makers is associated with a specific Bollywood sub-genre: the patriotic family romance. Combining aspects of two popular Bollywood genres, the “social” (Prasad, 83) and the “romance” (Virdi, 178), this sub-genre enacts the story of young lovers caught within complex familial politics against the backdrop of a nationalist celebration of Indian identity. Using a cinematic language that is characterised by the spectacular in both its aural and visual aspects, the patriotic family romance follows a typical “masala” narrative pattern that brings together “a little action and some romance with a touch of comedy, drama, tragedy, music, and dance” (Jaikumar). Bride and Prejudice’s successful mimicry of this language and narrative pattern is evident in film reviews consistently pointing to its being very “Bollywoodish”: “the songs and some sequences look straight out of a Hindi film” says one reviewer (Adarsh), while another wonders “why this talented director has reduced Jane Austen’s creation to a Bollywood masala film” (Bhaskaran). Setting aside, for the moment, these reviewers’ condemnation of such Bollywood associations, it is worthwhile to explore the implications of yoking together a canonical British text with Indian popular culture. According to Chadha, this combination is made possible since “the themes of Jane Austen’s novels are a ‘perfect fit’ for a Bollywood style film” (Wray). Ostensibly, such a comment may be seen to reinforce the authority of the colonial canonical text by affirming its transnational/transhistorical relevance. From this perspective, the Bollywood adaptation not only becomes a “native” tribute to the colonial “master” text, but also, implicitly, marks the necessary belatedness of Bollywood as a “native” cultural formation that can only mimic the “English book”. Again, Chadha herself seems to subscribe to this view: “I chose Pride and Prejudice because I feel 200 years ago, England was no different than Amritsar today” (Jha). The ease with which the basic plot premise of Pride and Prejudice—a mother with grown-up daughters obsessed with their marriage—transfers to a contemporary Indian setting does seem to substantiate this idea of belatedness. The spatio-temporal contours of the narrative require changes to accommodate the transference from eighteenth-century English countryside to twenty-first-century India, but in terms of themes, character types, and even plot elements, Bride and Prejudice is able to “mimic” its master text faithfully. While the Bennets, Bingleys and Darcy negotiate the relationship between marriage, money and social status in an England transformed by the rise of industrial capitalism, the Bakshis, Balraj and, yes, Will Darcy, undertake the same tasks in an India transformed by corporate globalisation. Differences in class are here overlaid with those in culture as a middle-class Indian family interacts with wealthy non-resident British Indians and American owners of multinational enterprises, mingling the problems created by pride in social status with prejudices rooted in cultural insularity. However, the underlying conflicts between social and individual identity, between relationships based on material expediency and romantic love, remain the same, clearly indicating India’s belated transition from tradition to modernity. It is not surprising, then, that Chadha can claim that “the transposition [of Austen to India] did not offend the purists in England at all” (Jha). But if the purity of the “master” text is not contaminated by such native mimicry, then how does one explain the Indian anglophile rejection of Bride and Prejudice? The problem, according to the Indian reviewers, lies not in the idea of an Indian adaptation, but in the choice of genre, in the devaluation of the “master” text’s cultural currency by associating it with the populist “masala” formula of Bollywood. The patriotic family romance, characterised by spectacular melodrama with little heed paid to psychological complexity, is certainly a far cry from the restrained Austenian narrative that achieves its dramatic effect exclusively through verbal sparring and epistolary revelations. When Elizabeth and Darcy’s quiet walk through Pemberley becomes Lalita and Darcy singing and dancing through public fountains, and the private economic transaction that rescues Lydia from infamy is translated into fisticuff between Darcy and Wickham in front of an applauding cinema audience, mimicry does smack too much of mockery to be taken as a tribute. It is no wonder then that “the news that [Chadha] was making Bride and Prejudice was welcomed with broad grins by everyone [in Britain] because it’s such a cheeky thing to do” (Jha). This cheekiness is evident throughout the film, which provides a splendid over-the-top cinematic translation of Pride and Prejudice that deliberately undermines the seriousness accorded to the Austen text, not just by the literary establishment, but also by cinematic counterparts that attempt to preserve its cultural value through carefully constructed period pieces. Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice, on the other hand, marries British high culture to Indian popular culture, creating a mimic text that is, in Homi Bhabha’s terms, “almost the same, but not quite” (86), thus undermining the authority, the primacy, of the so-called “master” text. This postcolonial subversion is enacted in Chadha’s film at the level of both style and content. If the adaptation of fiction into film is seen as an activity of translation, of a semiotic shift from one language to another (Boyum, 21), then Bride and Prejudice can be seen to enact this translation at two levels: the obvious translation of the language of novel into the language of film, and the more complex translation of Western high culture idiom into the idiom of Indian popular culture. The very choice of target language in the latter case clearly indicates that “authenticity” is not the intended goal here. Instead of attempting to render the target language transparent, making it a non-intrusive medium that derives all its meaning from the source text, Bride and Prejudice foregrounds the conventions of Bollywood masala films, forcing its audience to grapple with this “new” language on its own terms. The film thus becomes a classic instance of the colony “talking back” to the metropolis, of Caliban speaking to Prospero, not in the language Prospero has taught him, but in his own native tongue. The burden of responsibility is shifted; it is Prospero/audiences in the West that have the responsibility to understand the language of Bollywood without dismissing it as gibberish or attempting to domesticate it, to reduce it to the familiar. The presence in Bride and Prejudice of song and dance sequences, for example, does not make it a Hollywood musical, just as the focus on couples in love does not make it a Hollywood-style romantic comedy. Neither The Sound of Music (Robert Wise, 1965) nor You’ve Got Mail (Nora Ephron, 1998) corresponds to the Bollywood patriotic family romance that combines various elements from distinct Hollywood genres into one coherent narrative pattern. Instead, it is Bollywood hits like Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (Aditya Chopra, 1995) and Pardes (Subhash Ghai, 1997) that constitute the cinema tradition to which Bride and Prejudice belongs, and against which backdrop it needs to be seen. This is made clear in the film itself where the climactic fight between Darcy and Wickham is shot against a screening of Manoj Kumar’s Purab Aur Paschim (East and West) (1970), establishing Darcy, unequivocally, as the Bollywood hero, the rescuer of the damsel in distress, who deserves, and gets, the audience’s full support, denoted by enthusiastic applause. Through such intertextuality, Bride and Prejudice enacts a postcolonial reversal whereby the usual hierarchy governing the relationship between the colony and the metropolis is inverted. By privileging through style and explicit reference the Indian Bollywood framework in Bride and Prejudice, Chadha implicitly minimises the importance of Austen’s text, reducing it to just one among several intertextual invocations without any claim to primacy. It is, in fact, perfectly possible to view Bride and Prejudice without any knowledge of Austen; its characters and narrative pattern are fully comprehensible within a well-established Bollywood tradition that is certainly more familiar to a larger number of Indians than is Austen. An Indian audience, thus, enjoys a home court advantage with this film, not the least of which is the presence of Aishwarya Rai, the Bollywood superstar who is undoubtedly the central focus of Chadha’s film. But star power apart, the film consolidates the Indian advantage through careful re-visioning of specific plot elements of Austen’s text in ways that clearly reverse the colonial power dynamics between Britain and India. The re-casting of Bingley as the British Indian Balraj re-presents Britain in terms of its immigrant identity. White British identity, on the other hand, is reduced to a single character—Johnny Wickham—which associates it with a callous duplicity and devious exploitation that provide the only instance in this film of Bollywood-style villainy. This re-visioning of British identity is evident even at the level of the film’s visuals where England is identified first by a panning shot that covers everything from Big Ben to a mosque, and later by a snapshot of Buckingham Palace through a window: a combination of its present multicultural reality juxtaposed against its continued self-representation in terms of an imperial tradition embodied by the monarchy. This reductionist re-visioning of white Britain’s imperial identity is foregrounded in the film by the re-casting of Darcy as an American entrepreneur, which effectively shifts the narratorial focus from Britain to the US. Clearly, with respect to India, it is now the US which is the imperial power, with London being nothing more than a stop-over on the way from Amritsar to LA. This shift, however, does not in itself challenge the more fundamental West-East power hierarchy; it merely indicates a shift of the imperial centre without any perceptible change in the contours of colonial discourse. The continuing operation of the latter is evident in the American Darcy’s stereotypical and dismissive attitude towards Indian culture as he makes snide comments about arranged marriages and describes Bhangra as an “easy dance” that looks like “screwing in a light bulb with one hand and patting a dog with the other.” Within the film, this cultural snobbery of the West is effectively challenged by Lalita, the Indian Elizabeth, whose “liveliness of mind” is exhibited here chiefly through her cutting comebacks to such disparaging remarks, making her the film’s chief spokesperson for India. When Darcy’s mother, for example, dismisses the need to go to India since yoga and Deepak Chopra are now available in the US, Lalita asks her if going to Italy has become redundant because Pizza Hut has opened around the corner? Similarly, she undermines Darcy’s stereotyping of India as the backward Other where arranged marriages are still the norm, by pointing out the eerie similarity between so-called arranged marriages in India and the attempts of Darcy’s own mother to find a wife for him. Lalita’s strategy, thus, is not to invert the hierarchy by proving the superiority of the East over the West; instead, she blurs the distinction between the two, while simultaneously introducing the West (as represented by Darcy and his mother) to the “real India”. The latter is achieved not only through direct conversational confrontations with Darcy, but also indirectly through her own behaviour and deportment. Through her easy camaraderie with local Goan kids, whom she joins in an impromptu game of cricket, and her free-spirited guitar-playing with a group of backpacking tourists, Lalita clearly shows Darcy (and the audience in the West) that so-called “Hicksville, India” is no different from the so-called cosmopolitan sophistication of LA. Lalita is definitely not the stereotypical shy retiring Indian woman; this jean-clad, tractor-riding gal is as comfortable dancing the garbha at an Indian wedding as she is sipping marguerites in an LA restaurant. Interestingly, this East-West union in Aishwarya Rai’s portrayal of Lalita as a modern Indian woman de-stabilises the stereotypes generated not only by colonial discourse but also by Bollywood’s brand of conservative nationalism. As Chadha astutely points out, “Bride and Prejudice is not a Hindi film in the true sense. That rikshawallah in the front row in Patna is going to say, ‘Yeh kya hua? Aishwarya ko kya kiya?’ [What did you do to Aishwarya?]” (Jha). This disgruntlement of the average Indian Hindi-film audience, which resulted in the film being a commercial flop in India, is a result of Chadha’s departures from the conventions of her chosen Bollywood genre at both the cinematic and the thematic levels. The perceived problem with Aishwarya Rai, as articulated by the plaintive question of the imagined Indian viewer, is precisely her presentation as a modern (read Westernised) Indian heroine, which is pretty much an oxymoron within Bollywood conventions. In all her mainstream Hindi films, Aishwarya Rai has conformed to these conventions, playing the demure, sari-clad, conventional Indian heroine who is untouched by any “anti-national” western influence in dress, behaviour or ideas (Gangoli,158). Her transformation in Chadha’s film challenges this conventional notion of a “pure” Indian identity that informs the Bollywood “masala” film. Such re-visioning of Bollywood’s thematic conventions is paralleled, in Bride and Prejudice, with a playfully subversive mimicry of its cinematic conventions. This is most obvious in the song-and-dance sequences in the film. While their inclusion places the film within the Bollywood tradition, their actual picturisation creates an audio-visual pastiche that freely mingles Bollywood conventions with those of Hollywood musicals as well as contemporary music videos from both sides of the globe. A song, for example, that begins conventionally enough (in Bollywood terms) with three friends singing about one of them getting married and moving away, soon transforms into a parody of Hollywood musicals as random individuals from the marketplace join in, not just as chorus, but as developers of the main theme, almost reducing the three friends to a chorus. And while the camera alternates between mid and long shots in conventional Bollywood fashion, the frame violates the conventions of stylised choreography by including a chaotic spill-over that self-consciously creates a postmodern montage very different from the controlled spectacle created by conventional Bollywood song sequences. Bride and Prejudice, thus, has an “almost the same, but not quite” relationship not just with Austen’s text but also with Bollywood. Such dual-edged mimicry, which foregrounds Chadha’s “outsider” status with respect to both traditions, eschews all notions of “authenticity” and thus seems to become a perfect embodiment of postcolonial hybridity. Does this mean that postmodern pastiche can fulfill the political agenda of postcolonial resistance to the forces of globalised (neo)imperialism? As discussed above, Bride and Prejudice does provide a postcolonial critique of (neo)colonial discourse through the character of Lalita, while at the same time escaping the trap of Bollywood’s explicitly articulated brand of nationalism by foregrounding Lalita’s (Westernised) modernity. And yet, ironically, the film unselfconsciously remains faithful to contemporary Bollywood’s implicit ideological framework. As most analyses of Bollywood blockbusters in the post-liberalisation (post-1990) era have pointed out, the contemporary patriotic family romance is distinct from its earlier counterparts in its unquestioning embrace of neo-conservative consumerist ideology (Deshpande, 187; Virdi, 203). This enthusiastic celebration of globalisation in its most recent neo-imperial avatar is, interestingly, not seen to conflict with Bollywood’s explicit nationalist agenda; the two are reconciled through a discourse of cultural nationalism that happily co-exists with a globalisation-sponsored rampant consumerism, while studiously ignoring the latter’s neo-colonial implications. Bride and Prejudice, while self-consciously redefining certain elements of this cultural nationalism and, in the process, providing a token recognition of neo-imperial configurations, does not fundamentally question this implicit neo-conservative consumerism of the Bollywood patriotic family romance. This is most obvious in the film’s gender politics where it blindly mimics Bollywood conventions in embodying the nation as a woman (Lalita) who, however independent she may appear, not only requires male protection (Darcy is needed to physically rescue Lakhi from Wickham) but also remains an object of exchange between competing systems of capitalist patriarchy (Uberoi, 207). At the film’s climax, Lalita walks away from her family towards Darcy. But before Darcy embraces the very willing Lalita, his eyes seek out and receive permission from Mr Bakshi. Patriarchal authority is thus granted due recognition, and Lalita’s seemingly bold “independent” decision remains caught within the politics of patriarchal exchange. This particular configuration of gender politics is very much a part of Bollywood’s neo-conservative consumerist ideology wherein the Indian woman/nation is given enough agency to make choices, to act as a “voluntary” consumer, within a globalised marketplace that is, however, controlled by the interests of capitalist patriarchy. The narrative of Bride and Prejudice perfectly aligns this framework with Lalita’s project of cultural nationalism, which functions purely at the personal/familial level, but which is framed at both ends of the film by a visual conjoining of marriage and the marketplace, both of which are ultimately outside Lalita’s control. Chadha’s attempt to appropriate and transform British “Pride” through subversive postcolonial mimicry, thus, ultimately results only in replacing it with an Indian “Bride,” with a “star” product (Aishwarya Rai / Bride and Prejudice / India as Bollywood) in a splendid package, ready for exchange and consumption within the global marketplace. All glittering surface and little substance, Bride and Prejudice proves, once again, that postmodern pastiche cannot automatically double as politically enabling postcolonial hybridity (Sangari, 23-4). References Adarsh, Taran. “Balle Balle! From Amritsar to L.A.” IndiaFM Movie Review 8 Oct. 2004. 19 Feb. 2007 http://indiafm.com/movies/review/7211/index.html>. Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. 1813. New Delhi: Rupa and Co., 1999. Bhabha, Homi. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” The Location of Culture. Routledge: New York, 1994. 85-92. Bhaskaran, Gautam. “Classic Made Trivial.” The Hindu 15 Oct. 2004. 19 Feb. 2007 http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/fr/2004/10/15/stories/ 2004101502220100.htm>. Boyum, Joy Gould. Double Exposure: Fiction into Film. Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1989. Bride and Prejudice. Dir. Gurinder Chadha. Perf. Aishwarya Ray and Martin Henderson. Miramax, 2004. Deshpande, Sudhanva. “The Consumable Hero of Globalized India.” Bollyworld: Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens. Eds. Raminder Kaur and Ajay J. Sinha. New Delhi: Sage, 2005. 186-203. Gangoli, Geetanjali. “Sexuality, Sensuality and Belonging: Representations of the ‘Anglo-Indian’ and the ‘Western’ Woman in Hindi Cinema.” Bollyworld: Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens. Eds. Raminder Kaur and Ajay J. Sinha. New Delhi: Sage, 2005. 143-162. Jaikumar, Priya. “Bollywood Spectaculars.” World Literature Today 77.3/4 (2003): n. pag. Jha, Subhash K. “Bride and Prejudice is not a K3G.” The Rediff Interview 30 Aug. 2004. 19 Feb. 2007 http://in.rediff.com/movies/2004/aug/30finter.htm>. Mandal, Somdatta. Film and Fiction: Word into Image. New Delhi: Rawat Publications, 2005. Prasad, M. Madhava. Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1998. Sangari, Kumkum. Politics of the Possible: Essays on Gender, History, Narratives, Colonial English. New Delhi: Tulika, 1999. Uberoi, Patricia. Freedom and Destiny: Gender, Family, and Popular Culture in India. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 2006. Virdi, Jyotika. The Cinematic Imagination: Indian Popular Films as Social History. Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003. Wray, James. “Gurinder Chadha Talks Bride and Prejudice.” Movie News 7 Feb. 2005. 19 Feb. http://movies.monstersandcritics.com/news/article_4163.php/ Gurinder_Chadha_Talks_Bride_and_Prejudice>. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Mathur, Suchitra. "From British “Pride” to Indian “Bride”: Mapping the Contours of a Globalised (Post?)Colonialism." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/06-mathur.php>. APA Style Mathur, S. (May 2007) "From British “Pride” to Indian “Bride”: Mapping the Contours of a Globalised (Post?)Colonialism," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/06-mathur.php>.

Whilst urban growth is generally accepted as a global phenomenon, this has numerous and ambivalent implications for Australia and its identity-work. Suburbia the site where the majority of Australians live, located somewhere between the privileged spaces of the city and the bush comes into focus as the emblematic topos through which the representational work of nation is articulated. Here, space becomes imbued with much current Australian political import. This article puts the discursive representation of Australian suburbia into juncture with hegemonic formations of nationness, and posits potential critical refigurations of these formations by mobilising a spatialised politics of cultural difference. Suburbia has come to represent a site of egalitarianism, signifying a truly Australian way of life. The masculinist and colonialist Australian myth of egalitarianism is constituted through a practice of carving up the land into equal portions, such that each man could have his stake in the country (Chambers 87). In this schema, the ownership of a detached house on a plot of land ensures proper and viable national subjects, since what is known as the suburban good life is nestled in a conception of house as home, where home is that which is familiar and secure. Consider John Howard's nationalist rhetoric: I believe that the concept of home is a compelling notion in our psyche…The loss of security challenges traditional notions of home and people feel the need to react to alienation…he or she must embrace what is secure, what people see as 'home.' (qtd. in Burke 8) It comes as no surprise, then, that Howard has initiated a scheme that grants $7000 to young couples toward establishing their first home. Home is not only a metaphor for nation; home is constituted in a material way through the house. The secure, housed, nation is most effectively enacted through the house and its ideal subjects: the white model of the heterosexual nuclear family. If European nostalgia is under threat, Howard's response is to maintain attempts to recover a unified national home. Ghassan Hage writes that the homely nation is itself an aspiration that guides the national subject's practices (68-9, my emphasis). Howard's anxiety is displayed in his response to the recent Tampa crisis, and it has become overwhelmingly evident who or what is not figured in his homely imaginary. Textuality becomes an effective means by which to negotiate and contest these dominant discourses of nation-space, and their prescribed modes of subjectivity. Suneeta Peres da Costa's recent novel Homework provides one such exigent re-mapping of nation-informed discourses of suburbia. Peres da Costa's text enacts a strategic invocation of cultural difference. Here, difference is not meant to connote inclusion or assimilation; difference must be seen as a dynamic constitutive mode of oppositionality, a provisional but insurrectionary and necessarily strategic other to dominant formations of nationness. As the novel's title itself suggests, home is work the work of being between spaces. Working from within the interstices of locatedness and worldliness allows the text to challenge embedded hegemonic inscriptions of nation-space. Whilst the novel was written and set in Australia, its packaging and subsequent reception also evokes the current trend of diasporic cosmopolitanism, signaling a world supposedly exempt from national belonging (Brennan qtd. in Kaplan 123). The novel was published simultaneously in the UK, the US, and Australia by Bloomsbury in 1999. The construction of this worldliness is here constituted in the politics of publishing, but this (dis)juncture between national and international, or the local and global, continues in the narrative itself. The narrative traverses both Australian domestic spaces and (imagined) international spaces. The fictive autobiography details Mina Pereira's late-childhood years as she lives with her family in suburban Rain Hill, Sydney. Whilst Mina and her sisters have grown up in Australia, their parents originate from Portuguese Goa, and Bombay, India. The narrative produces a tension between a global dislocation, where both Mr and Mrs Pereira's different and contradictory forms of homesickness are articulated, and the situatedness of Australia, where colonialism continues to construct hegemonic narratives of nationness. It is at this (dis)juncture that the narrative re-writes suburban space. Integrated into the suburban landscape and, in particular, the house itself, is the psychic space of memory. In the Pereira's house involuntary memories of former spaces and incidents in both Australia and India are evoked. A prolonged melancholia infiltrates the psychic and actual suburban spaces of the text, and in particular, the Federation house that the family lives in. If the Federation house signifies national unification, then this text enacts a kind of dis-unification of nation. With, in Gaston Bachelard's words, the past com[ing] to dwell in the new house (5), the seamless coherence of the suburban house is ruptured. As Homi Bhabha writes, [t]he recesses of the domestic space become sites for history's most intricate invasions. In that displacement, borders between home and world become confused; and, uncannily, the private and the public become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it is disorienting. (9) In Homework, memory stretches beyond the limits of the nation such that nostalgia, as a politicised construction of the present, productively challenges the nation's boundaries. As Ien Ang writes, diasporas have the potential to unsettle static, essentialist and totalitarian conceptions of 'national culture' or 'national identity' with origins firmly rooted in fixed geography and common history (7). In this sense, the text interrogates the representational work of nation that attempts to maintain integrity and unity through incessant policing and securing of its borders. In Homework, the suburban house becomes unhomely, or unheimlich, in the haunting of subjects' memories that inhabit it, such that the house becomes not a tool for inculcating Australian nationness, but a zone of intermediacy between home and world. From this border space, that Homi Bhabha calls international (38) for the space of translation, negotiation, and hybridity, Australian space is unbounded and defamiliarised. Homework effectively dislodges the nation's homely imaginary by pointing to the excesses of belonging. Here home, as a mode of security and belonging, becomes detached from house. Aamir Mufti and Ella Shohat write that belonging cannot be housed simply within the material space of walls and roofs, of fenced topographies and well-drawn maps (1). This re-writing of hegemonic spatiality is concomitant with the re-constitution of prescribed modes of subjectivity. A politics of difference becomes a tool of creativity to question multiple forms of repression and dominance (Trinh 73). Cultural difference must be seen as disordering, as opening up new spaces for critical exchange (Soja and Hooper 193), and as positing new ways of critically writing and occupying spaces. By spatialising this politics of difference, the supposedly coherent spatiality of suburbia is ruptured and shown to be vulnerable. Re-narrating suburban spaces according to a politics of difference has the potential to dislodge hegemonic narratives that have become naturalised as they are mapped onto, or materialised in, real spaces. At the conclusion of Homework, the Pereira's house is enflamed. In this spectacular climax, part oneiric and fantastical, the house on fire becomes, in its pyrotechnical wizardry (255), a final recalcitrant figure to Australian suburban space. Merging with, and working against, that other sanctioned element of official multiculturalism, food, the fire sends out a toxic vapour to the hegemonic suburb: The pungent perfume that hung in a thick vapour above us was that of a vast spice warehouse burning to the ground. I could smell vast vats of mango and lime pickle; the bittersweet of cardamom spores that, with the intensity of the heat must have burst from their pods; peppercorns and paprika; turmeric, tamarind, and bay leaf; all these now lingered and mingled in a masala of mixed messages with the certain scents of dried cloves and the singular aroma of coriander. (256-7) The Federation house, with its symbolic encodings of nationness, is not only under de(con)struction here, but this image of a monstrous other further insults the suburban landscape's very senses. At the very heart of Australian suburbia is a stirring of the unhomely that is bound to repeat its disturbance to the mappings of nation. References Ang, Ien. Migrations of Chineseness. SPAN 34 (1993) : 9 pp. <http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/ReadingRoom...> Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. 1958. Boston: Beacon, 1994. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Burke, Anthony. Australia's Asian Crisis. Australian Humanities Review June (2001) : 9 pp. 27 August 2001 <http://www.lib.latrobe.edu/AHR/archive/I...> Chambers, Deborah. A Stake in the Country: Women's Experiences of Suburban Development. Visions of Suburbia. Ed. Roger Silverstone. London: Routledge, 1997. 86-107. Hage, Ghassan. White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. Leichhardt: Pluto Press, 1998. Kaplan, Caren. Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement. Durham: Duke UP, 1996. Peres da Costa, Suneeta. Homework. London: Bloomsbury, 1999. Soja, Edward, and Barbara Hooper. The Spaces that Difference Makes: Some Notes on the Geographical Margins of the New Cultural Politics. Place and the Politics of Identity. Ed. Michael Keith and Steve Pile. London: Routledge, 1993. 183-205. Trinh, T. Minh-ha. Not You/Like You: Post-Colonial Women and the Interlocking Questions of Identity and Difference. Inscriptions 3-4 (1988) : 71-7. Links http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/ReadingRoom/litserv/SPAN/34/Ang.html http://www.lib.latrobe.edu/AHR/archive/Issue-June-2001/burke.html Citation reference for this article MLA Style Bullock, Emily. "Re-Writing Suburbia" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.2 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/suburbia.php>. Chicago Style Bullock, Emily, "Re-Writing Suburbia" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 2 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/suburbia.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Bullock, Emily. (2002) Re-Writing Suburbia. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(2). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/suburbia.php> ([your date of access]).

Introduction The genealogy of Feminist Standpoint Theory in the 1970s prioritised “locationality”, particularly the recognition of social and historical locations as valuable contribution to knowledge production. Pioneering figures such as Sandra Harding, Dorothy Smith, Patricia Hill Collins, Alison Jaggar, and Donna Haraway have argued that the oppressed must have some means (such as language, cultural practices) to enter the world of the oppressor in order to access some understanding of how the world works from the privileged perspective. In the essay “Meeting at the Edge of Fear: Theory on a World Scale”, the Australian social scientist Raewyn Connell explains that the production of feminist theory almost always comes from the global North. Connell critiques the hegemony of mainstream Northern feminism in her pyramidal model (59), showing how theory/knowledge is produced at the apex (global North) of a pyramid structure and “trickles down” (59) to the global South. Connell refers to a second model called mosaic epistemology which shows that multiple feminist ideologies across global North/South are juxtaposed against each other like tiles, with each specific culture making its own claims to validity.However, Nigerian feminist Bibi Bakare-Yusuf’s reflection on the fluidity of culture in her essay “Fabricating Identities” (5) suggests that fixing knowledge as Northern and Southern—disparate, discrete, and rigidly structured tiles—is also problematic. Connell proposes a third model called solidarity-based epistemology which involves mutual learning and critiquing with a focus on solidarity across differences. However, this is impractical in implementation especially given that feminist nomenclature relies on problematic terms such as “international”, “global North/South”, “transnational”, and “planetary” to categorise difference, spatiality, and temporality, often creating more distance than reciprocal exchange. Geographical specificity can be too limiting, but we also need to acknowledge that it is geographical locationality which becomes disadvantageous to overcome racial, cultural, and gender biases — and here are few examples.Nomenclatures: Global-North and Global South ParadigmThe global North/South terminology differentiating the two regions according to means of trade and relative wealth emerged from the Brandt Report’s delineation of the North as wealthy and South as impoverished in 1980s. Initially, these terms were a welcome repudiation of the hierarchical nomenclature of “developed” and “developing” nations. Nevertheless, the categories of North and South are problematic because of increased socio-economic heterogeneity causing erasure of local specificities without reflecting microscopic conflicts among feminists within the global North and the global South. Some feminist terms such as “Third World feminism” (Narayan), “global feminism” (Morgan), or “local feminisms” (Basu) aim to centre women's movements originating outside the West or in the postcolonial context, other labels attempt to making feminism more inclusive or reflective of cross-border linkages. These include “transnational feminism” (Grewal and Kaplan) and “feminism without borders” (Mohanty). In the 1980s, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality garnered attention in the US along with Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), which raised feminists’ awareness of educational, healthcare, and financial disparities among women and the experiences of marginalised people across the globe, leading to an interrogation of the aims and purposes of mainstream feminism. In general, global North feminism refers to white middle class feminist movements further expanded by concerns about civil rights and contemporary queer theory while global South feminism focusses on decolonisation, economic justice, and disarmament. However, the history of colonialism demonstrates that this paradigm is inadequate because the oppression and marginalisation of Black, Indigenous, and Queer activists have been avoided purposely in the homogenous models of women’s oppression depicted by white radical and liberal feminists. A poignant example is from Audre Lorde’s personal account:I wheeled my two-year-old daughter in a shopping cart through a supermarket in Eastchester in 1967, and a little white girl riding past in her mother’s cart calls out excitedly, ‘oh look, Mommy, a baby maid!’ And your mother shushes you, but does not correct you, and so fifteen years later, at a conference on racism, you can still find that story humorous. But I hear your laughter is full of terror and disease. (Lorde)This exemplifies how the terminology global North/South is a problem because there are inequities within the North that are parallel to the division of power and resources between North and South. Additionally, Susan Friedman in Planetary Modernisms observes that although the terms “Global North” and “Global South” are “rhetorically spatial” they are “as geographically imprecise and ideologically weighted as East/West” because “Global North” signifies “modern global hegemony” and “Global South” signifies the “subaltern, … —a binary construction that continues to place the West at the controlling centre of the plot” (Friedman, 123).Focussing on research-activism debate among US feminists, Sondra Hale takes another tack, emphasising that feminism in the global South is more pragmatic than the theory-oriented feminist discourse of the North (Hale). Just as the research-scholarship binary implies myopic assumption that scholarship is a privileged activity, Hale’s observations reveal a reductive assumption in the global North and global South nomenclature that feminism at the margins is theoretically inadequate. In other words, recognising the “North” as the site of theoretical processing is a euphemism for Northern feminists’ intellectual supremacy and the inferiority of Southern feminist praxis. To wit, theories emanating from the South are often overlooked or rejected outright for not aligning with Eurocentric framings of knowledge production, thereby limiting the scope of feminist theories to those that originate in the North. For example, while discussing Indigenous women’s craft-autobiography, the standard feminist approach is to apply Susan Sontag’s theory of gender and photography to these artefacts even though it may not be applicable given the different cultural, social, and class contexts in which they are produced. Consequently, Moroccan feminist Fatima Mernissi’s Islamic methodology (Mernissi), the discourse of land rights, gender equality, kinship, and rituals found in Bina Agarwal’s A Field of One’s Own, Marcia Langton’s “Grandmothers’ Law”, and the reflection on military intervention are missing from Northern feminist theoretical discussions. Moreover, “outsiders within” feminist scholars fit into Western feminist canonical requirements by publishing their works in leading Western journals or seeking higher degrees from Western institutions. In the process, Northern feminists’ intellectual hegemony is normalised and regularised. An example of the wealth of the materials outside of mainstream Western feminist theories may be found in the work of Girindrasekhar Bose, a contemporary of Sigmund Freud, founder of the Indian Psychoanalytic Society and author of the book Concept of Repression (1921). Bose developed the “vagina envy theory” long before the neo-Freudian psychiatrist Karen Horney proposed it, but it is largely unknown in the West. Bose’s article “The Genesis and Adjustment of the Oedipus Wish” discarded Freud’s theory of castration and explained how in the Indian cultural context, men can cherish an unconscious desire to bear a child and to be castrated, implicitly overturning Freud’s correlative theory of “penis envy.” Indeed, the case of India shows that the birth of theory can be traced back to as early as eighth century when study of verbal ornamentation and literary semantics based on the notion of dbvani or suggestion, and the aesthetic theory of rasa or "sentiment" is developed. If theory means systematic reasoning and conceptualising the structure of thought, methods, and epistemology, it exists in all cultures but unfortunately non-Western theory is largely invisible in classroom courses.In the recent book Queer Activism in India, Naisargi Dev shows that the theory is rooted in activism. Similarly, in her essay “Seed and Earth”, Leela Dube reveals how Eastern theories are distorted as they are Westernised. For instance, the “Purusha-Prakriti” concept in Hinduism where Purusha stands for pure consciousness and Prakriti stands for the entire phenomenal world is almost universally misinterpreted in terms of Western binary oppositions as masculine consciousness and feminine creative principle which has led to disastrous consequences including the legitimisation of male control over female sexuality. Dube argues how heteropatriarchy has twisted the Purusha-Prakriti philosophy to frame the reproductive metaphor of the male seed germinating in the female field for the advantage of patrilineal agrarian economies and to influence a homology between reproductive metaphors and cultural and institutional sexism (Dube 22-24). Attempting to reverse such distortions, ecofeminist Vandana Shiva rejects dualistic and exploitative “contemporary Western views of nature” (37) and employs the original Prakriti-Purusha cosmology to construct feminist vision and environmental ethics. Shiva argues that unlike Cartesian binaries where nature or Prakriti is inert and passive, in Hindu Philosophy, Purusha and Prakriti are inseparable and inviolable (Shiva 37-39). She refers to Kalika Purana where it is explained how rivers and mountains have a dual nature. “A river is a form of water, yet is has a distinct body … . We cannot know, when looking at a lifeless shell, that it contains a living being. Similarly, within the apparently inanimate rivers and mountains there dwells a hidden consciousness. Rivers and mountains take the forms they wish” (38).Scholars on the periphery who never migrated to the North find it difficult to achieve international audiences unless they colonise themselves, steeping their work in concepts and methods recognised by Western institutions and mimicking the style and format that western feminist journals follow. The best remedy for this would be to interpret border relations and economic flow between countries and across time through the prism of gender and race, an idea similar to what Sarah Radcliffe, Nina Laurie and Robert Andolina have called the “transnationalization of gender” (160).Migration between Global North and Global SouthReformulation of feminist epistemology might reasonably begin with a focus on migration and gender politics because international and interregional migration have played a crucial role in the production of feminist theories. While some white mainstream feminists acknowledge the long history of feminist imperialism, they need to be more assertive in centralising non-Western theories, scholarship, and institutions in order to resist economic inequalities and racist, patriarchal global hierarchies of military and organisational power. But these possibilities are stymied by migrants’ “de-skilling”, which maintains unequal power dynamics: when migrants move from the global South to global North, many end up in jobs for which they are overqualified because of their cultural, educational, racial, or religious alterity.In the face of a global trend of movement from South to North in search of a “better life”, visual artist Naiza Khan chose to return to Pakistan after spending her childhood in Lebanon before being trained at the University of Oxford. Living in Karachi over twenty years, Khan travels globally, researching, delivering lectures, and holding exhibitions on her art work. Auj Khan’s essay “Peripheries of Thought and Practise in Naiza Khan’s Work” argues: “Khan seems to be going through a perpetual diaspora within an ownership of her hybridity, without having really left any of her abodes. This agitated space of modern hybrid existence is a rich and ripe ground for resolution and understanding. This multiple consciousness is an edge for anyone in that space, which could be effectively made use of to establish new ground”. Naiza Khan’s works embrace loss or nostalgia and a sense of choice and autonomy within the context of unrestricted liminal geographical boundaries.Early work such as “Chastity Belt,” “Heavenly Ornaments”, “Dream”, and “The Skin She Wears” deal with the female body though Khan resists the “feminist artist” category, essentially because of limited Western associations and on account of her paradoxical, diasporic subjectivity: of “the self and the non-self, the doable and the undoable and the anxiety of possibility and choice” (Khan Webpage). Instead, Khan theorises “gender” as “personal sexuality”. The symbolic elements in her work such as corsets, skirts, and slips, though apparently Western, are purposely destabilised as she engages in re-constructing the cartography of the body in search of personal space. In “The Wardrobe”, Khan establishes a path for expressing women’s power that Western feminism barely acknowledges. Responding to the 2007 Islamabad Lal Masjid siege by militants, Khan reveals the power of the burqa to protect Muslim men by disguising their gender and sexuality; women escape the Orientalist gaze. For Khan, home is where her art is—beyond the global North and South dichotomy.In another example of de-centring Western feminist theory, the Indian-British sitar player Anoushka Shankar, who identifies as a radical pro-feminist, in her recent musical album “Land of Gold” produces what Chilla Bulbeck calls “braiding at the borderlands”. As a humanitarian response to the trauma of displacement and the plight of refugees, Shankar focusses on women giving birth during migration and the trauma of being unable to provide stability and security to their children. Grounded in maternal humility, Shankar’s album, composed by artists of diverse background as Akram Khan, singer Alev Lenz, and poet Pavana Reddy, attempts to dissolve boundaries in the midst of chaos—the dislocation, vulnerability and uncertainty experienced by migrants. The album is “a bit of this, and a bit of that” (borrowing Salman Rushdie’s definition of migration in Satanic Verses), both in terms of musical genre and cultural identities, which evokes emotion and subjective fluidity. An encouraging example of truly transnational feminist ethics, Shankar’s album reveals the chasm between global North and global South represented in the tension of a nascent friendship between a white, Western little girl and a migrant refugee child. Unlike mainstream feminism, where migration is often sympathetically feminised and exotified—or, to paraphrase bell hooks, difference is commodified (hooks 373) — Shankar’s album simultaneously exhibits regional, national, and transnational elements. The album inhabits multiple borderlands through musical genres, literature and politics, orality and text, and ethnographic and intercultural encounters. The message is: “the body is a continent / But may your heart always remain the sea" (Shankar). The human rights advocate and lawyer Randa Abdel-Fattah, in her autobiographical novel Does My Head Look Big in This?, depicts herself as “colourful adjectives” (such as “darkies”, “towel-heads”, or the “salami eaters”), painful identities imposed on her for being a Muslim woman of colour. These ultimately empower her to embrace her identity as a Palestinian-Egyptian-Australian Muslim writer (Abdel-Fattah 359). In the process, Abdel-Fattah reveals how mainstream feminism participates in her marginalisation: “You’re constantly made to feel as you’re commenting as a Muslim, and somehow your views are a little bit inferior or you’re somehow a little bit more brainwashed” (Abdel-Fattah, interviewed in 2015).With her parental roots in the global South (Egyptian mother and Palestinian father), Abdel-Fattah was born and brought up in the global North, Australia (although geographically located in global South, Australia is categorised as global North for being above the world average GDP per capita) where she embraced her faith and religious identity apparently because of Islamophobia:I refuse to be an apologist, to minimise this appalling state of affairs… While I'm sick to death, as a Muslim woman, of the hypocrisy and nonsensical fatwas, I confess that I'm also tired of white women who think the answer is flashing a bit of breast so that those "poor," "infantilised" Muslim women can be "rescued" by the "enlightened" West - as if freedom was the sole preserve of secular feminists. (Abdel-Fattah, "Ending Oppression")Abdel-Fattah’s residency in the global North while advocating for justice and equality for Muslim women in both the global North and South is a classic example of the mutual dependency between the feminists in global North and global South, and the need to recognise and resist neoliberal policies applied in by the North to the South. In her novel, sixteen-year-old Amal Mohamed chooses to become a “full-time” hijab wearer in an elite school in Melbourne just after the 9/11 tragedy, the Bali bombings which killed 88 Australians, and the threat by Algerian-born Abdel Nacer Benbrika, who planned to attack popular places in Sydney and Melbourne. In such turmoil, Amal’s decision to wear the hijab amounts to more than resistance to Islamophobia: it is a passionate search for the true meaning of Islam, an attempt to embrace her hybridity as an Australian Muslim girl and above all a step towards seeking spiritual self-fulfilment. As the novel depicts Amal’s challenging journey amidst discouraging and painful, humiliating experiences, the socially constructed “bloody confusing identity hyphens” collapse (5). What remains is the beautiful veil that stands for Amal’s multi-valence subjectivity. The different shades of her hijab reflect different moods and multiple “selves” which are variously tentative, rebellious, romantic, argumentative, spiritual, and ambitious: “I am experiencing a new identity, a new expression of who I am on the inside” (25).In Griffith Review, Randa-Abdel Fattah strongly criticises the book Nine Parts of Desire by Geraldine Brooks, a Wall-Street Journal reporter who travelled from global North to the South to cover Muslim women in the Middle East. Recognising the liberal feminist’s desire to explore the Orient, Randa-Abdel calls the book an example of feminist Orientalism because of the author’s inability to understand the nuanced diversity in the Muslim world, Muslim women’s purposeful downplay of agency, and, most importantly, Brooks’s inevitable veil fetishism in her trip to Gaza and lack of interest in human rights violations of Palestinian women or their lack of access to education and health services. Though Brooks travelled from Australia to the Middle East, she failed to develop partnerships with the women she met and distanced herself from them. This underscores the veracity of Amal’s observation in Abdel Fattah’s novel: “It’s mainly the migrants in my life who have inspired me to understand what it means to be an Aussie” (340). 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