Journal articles on the topic 'Kashmiri Poets'

The study of the influence of literary figures on the poetry of Azad Kashmir shows that there are influences of Sanskrit, Kashmiri, Persian, Arabic, Urdu and other regional languages ​​as well as classical and modern poetry on the literature of Azad Kashmir. There are intellectual and artistic influences on the poetry of Azad Kashmir from to the present period. Some thought is prominent, some artistic imitation is visible. There is similar style; there is also the use of similar tone. However, all these influences despite this, the poetry of Azad Kashmir have its own individuality and its own style. Azad Kashmir's poetic capital, while being a part of the poetic tradition of Urdu language, has interesting, unique experiences and individual characteristics in terms of theme, theme, style innovation, new symbols, techniques, untouched and unique creative experiences and many other aspects. Azad Kashmir's own regional symbols and some unique experiences give its distinctive color to the poets of Azad Kashmir. Happily, the influence of movements, ideologies and personalities in the footsteps is less visible in the new generation. The poets of the new generation are actively and diligently engaged in creating their own special point of view, their own tone, their own style, and their own color. In spite of the influence of literary movements, critical schools, literary theories, poetic styles and poet personalities in the poetry of Azad Kashmir, its own color and harmony exist with all the beauty, rather, the colors and styles of the poets of Azad Kashmir are different from those of many other regions.

Abstract This essay shows how the Islamic Persianate poetic tradition is a critical conceptual resource for imagining futures in which poetry is a technology of congregation through which futures are postulated, negotiated, and lived. The essay engages the multilingual poetic milieu of Kashmir (Urdu, Persian, and Kashmiri) in the first half of the twentieth century, offering an inaugural analysis of the itinerant nature of Persian, Urdu, and Kashmiri poetry in relation to the form of ghazal and its consequences for future making. Kashmiri poets and critics, in poetry as well as prose, made prominent contributions to the literary and political debates about the purposes and potentialities of poetry as a socially aware public form in an anti-imperial context, a theme that animated multiple Urdu and Persian literary circles from the 1930s.

The lay of a people is often tethered to the lay of the land that they live in or leave behind; for the land holds all the associations of ancestry, heritage, and environment that constitute what Emile Durkheim would call “the collective conscious.” Landscapes may assume near mythical dimensions in forming and framing the creative impulse of writers who draw their images and symbols, themes and motifs, and aspirations and apprehensions from their terrestrial roots and routes. In the present paper, I seek to reread a few poems of the famous Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali with a view to highlighting his poetics of place that remains true to the kindred points of haven (America, the adopted land) and home (Kashmir, the homeland). Attempts will be made to shed light on the re-creative dynamics of his poetry that helps him to mythicize these two landscapes with the aid of “memory” and “imagination.” My objective here is to foreground the process through which the poet’s re-creation of place combines with the reader’s focus on spatiality to situate Ali’s poems such as “Postcard from Kashmir,” “Snowmen,” “A Wrong Turn,” “Snow on the Desert,” “Farewell,” etc. In the poem, “Postcard from Kashmir” for example, the speaker holds the postcard that represents to him the land of his birth – “Kashmir shrinks into my mailbox,/ my home a neat four by six inches.” The persistent pains of “exile” lead him to proximate the half-inch Himalayas to this “home,” because he realizes “This is home. And this the closest I’ll ever be to home.” Similarly, in the poem “Snow on the Desert,” the poet brings to bear all his imaginative elasticity to re-create the Papago’s way of living in the Sonoran desert in the South Western part of the United States. His poetic narrative brings to the surface the native history of the Papagos people whose long lost lives are imaginatively re-created by a diasporic poet, keenly aware of the ancient glory of his own homeland as contrasted with its recent abjection.

The paper undertakes examination of selected poems of Naseem Shifaee’s translated in English by Neerja Mattoo by focusing on female identity . Literature looks at humanity with a questioning as well as affirmative gaze, disapproving and approving at the same time, reaffirming stereotypes as well as breaking them. Throughout ages narratives in Kashmir have revealed the inbuilt discrimination and biases against women. Cultural space for women is highly restricted in Kashmir. In spite of their marginalized position Kashmiri women made themselves heard ,undeterred by established womanly restraints interrogated the patriarchal practices and refused to live in a culture of silence . Naseem Shifaee is a powerful women voice acclaimed internationally with the publication of her first poetry collection Darichi Matsrith (windows thrown open) highlighted the existing reality of women in contemporary Kashmir. The paper will explore the incongruity between the societal image of female poetic persona and her own instincts about her true nature .It will be argued how poetic persona is trapped in male allotted and confined space, persuaded to look at herself continually in terms of social conventions according to which women are denigrated by patriarchal supremacy .The bewildered state of mind leads her to undertake the obsessive search for her authentic self identity. She questions what if roles were reversed? In other two poems Naseem questions patriarchal traditions Naseem Shifaee assume the role of the medium in establishing female non being into self-realized person.

The widely renowned and exhaustively researched Kashmiri-American diasporic poet, Agha Shahid Ali, has received acclaim for his portrayal of themes such as loss, longing for the homeland, nostalgia, hyphenated identity, hybridity, and dislocation, among others. However, within the purview of new historicism, this paper intends to examine the interplay of literature, culture, and history. Using Clifford Geertz's framework of "thick description," the paper analyzes Agha's poetry as a cultural artifact with ethnographic value. Through a semiotic analysis of select poems based on Bakhtin's notion of chronotopes, the paper aims to unravel themes of fragmented identity, cultural memorialization, and the preservation of imaginary homelands. The paper also attempts to explore that Agha Shahid Ali, actively engaged with the socio-political turmoil in his homeland. He sought to reconcile the tensions between different traditions and religious communities, envisioning a personal utopia rooted in his privileged position. His poetry reflects his historical context, facilitating a symbolic exchange between the fragments of Kashmiri culture. Through intertextual references, religious symbols, and social emblems, Ali constructs a significant and experimental narrative about Kashmir.

This paper aims at analyzing Shadad Zeest Hashmi’s poem ‘You are chained’ with a special focus on the foreground. The tools of foregrounding i.e. parallelism and deviation are surfaced that attract the attention of the reader for hidden messages related to the socio-political scenario of Pakistan, Kashmir, and India. Thus the miserable plight of the Kashmiris is encompassed through stylistic devices which are peculiar to Hashmi’s poetry. Foregrounding is the tool through which one can analyze a piece of literature having so many deviations and code-switching. The main aim of the study is to bring to the fore the local poets writing in English. The research is based on this intention to strike the attention of new researchers to criticize as well as to appreciate our local poets for their encouragement. On the other hand, research on Pakistani literature in English is an emerging area of investigation that is why, it is hoped, that this paper will prove to be an encouraging step ahead for future scholars.

In the Persian poetry of the postclassical period one can fi nd a signifi cant number of relatively little studied works, which are dedicated to Kashmir, a region located in the north-west of the Indian subcontinent. At present, there is no consensus in Iranian studies regarding the genre defi nition of “Kashmir poems”, which led to consider this problem in detail. The author of the article made an attempt to identify the genre of “the Kashmir poems”, written by Qudsi Mashhadi, whose works have never drawn interest of Russian scholars. Upon analyzing the main motifs and topics of Qudsi’s poems, the author come to the conclusion that they refer to descriptive poetry, and the descriptive motifs are placed either in the context of praise or complaints. The genetic basis of such poems is mainly formed by descriptive, panegyric and calendar poetry. It should be pointed out, that Qudsi’s “Kashmir poems” don’t go back to the shahrashub genre. The presence of similar motifs in “the Kashmir poems” of Qudsi and poems, belonging to the shahrashub genre, indicates that the motifs were transferred from genre to genre - from the shahrashub genre to the genre of description ( vasf ) or from object to object (from the description of cities to the description of regions and vice versa), which refl ects the very essence of the transformation of motifs within the framework of the canonical type of artistic creativity. The analysis has also shown that the term “ bucolic ” doesn’t correspond to the genre nature of Qudsi’s “Kashmir poems”. The study of the genesis and evolution of such poems is intended to contribute to the reconstruction of formation of Persian landscape lyrics of the XIXth century.

Abstract This essay examines a multicolored woolen shawl owned by the poet Emily Dickinson. Contemporary writings from the period referred to such textiles as “India shawls,” although the provenance of Dickinson’s shawl is unknown. India shawls frequently appear in sources ranging from advertisements to fashion columns to fiction, but as often as not, the modifier India is emptied of its meaning and extrapolated, by association, to shawls made in Europe and elsewhere. The shawl’s true site of origin in Kashmir is thus obscured by the process through which India comes to bear the weight of Orientalist commodification for a market of female consumers. This essay traces the literary, historical, cultural, social, and economic significance of both Kashmiri and European shawls, reading them alongside the production of cotton textiles and in the larger context of transnational and transoceanic networks of imperial commodity culture. Drawing on the poet’s references to shawls and fabrics as well as on the qualities of the textile itself, this essay takes Dickinson’s shawl as a starting point from which to begin unraveling the tangled threads that make up the production and consumption of one particularly fashionable nineteenth-century garment.

Agha Shahid Ali is one of the most celebrated modern poets of Indian diaspora whose poetry echoes the sense of trauma, loss of ‘home’ and identity and deals with major concerns of dislocation, fragmentation from ancestry, nostalgia, and rootlessness. The sense of alienation is more evident in the works of diaspora writers who are constantly caught up between the cultural spaces of the ‘host’ land and creating a hyphenated identity. The diasporic self finds comfort only in memory rather than the existing contemporary realities hurtful to the ‘exiled’ individual and find themselves possessing a fueling desire to go back to their homeland. Trauma is a response of a distressing event that affects an individual’s ability to cope with life situations and triggers certain traumatic markers. The ‘trauma’ of exile is a psychological phenomenon while the geographical dislocation is more of a physical one. The paper is an attempt to observe the trauma question and exilic state of the diasporic subject in Ali’s poetry and their attempt to live in the ‘host’ land through disintegration from the familiarity of the ‘native’ homeland. The paper seeks to observe how Ali’s poetry is charged with his multicultural hyphenated identity- rendering him a nameless entity. His separation from nativity and ancestral roots showcases the anguish, dilemma triggered in the immigrant in varying degrees and progression of trauma in three select poems- “Postcard from Kashmir”, “Snowmen” and “Cracked Portraits”.

Aagha Hashar Kashmiri is a renowned poet and dramatist. He is considered one of the pioneers of Modern Urdu theater and his work is known for his poetic language in his dramas. He also wrote many poems i.e. "Shukariya Europe", Moj-e-Zam Zam, Eid Mubarak, Sultan tipu and so on. His poetry has Romanism, socialism, alcoholism, sarcasm, humour and vulgarity. Romanticism was inherent in his poetry and beauty was part of his nature. That is why his poetry is full of romanticism. The essence of speech is prominent in his poems and songs. Imagination, figure carving, subtle elegance, informality, creativity, similes and metaphors are the distinguish characteristics of his Ghazals. He also uses vulgar and immortal words in his poetry but his poetry contains hope and philosophy of life. Aagha Hashar had a lasting impact on Urdu.

Sufism has put great impact on human nature. By educating the masses and deepening the spiritual concerns of the Muslims, Sufism has played an important role in the formation of Muslim society. Sufism shares some important spirit and has a great impact of its internal spirit on human. Peer Naik Alam Shah is one of the greatest Sufi poets of Azad Jammu and Kashmir. He lived a life of saint and served humanity through his teachings and poetry. In his poetry, Peer Naik Alam Shah discussed different qualities of Sufism. He discussed different terms related to love of Allah, love of Holy Prophet, Devotion, Respect and other similar terms. He discussed all these in light of Sharia. His book “Si Harfi” ( in light of 30 letters of alphabets of Arabic Language) is replete with sufi related terms.

Diasporic writings occupy a place of great significance between countries and cultures, mostly as a response to their lost homes. Addressing the predominant issues of dislocation, nostalgia, discrimination, survival, cultural change and identity-crisis, dislocation is one of the stern feelings that rip apart the diaspora community. When people find themselves dislocated from their native strain, their mental trauma haunts them incessantly, and they strive to re-locate themselves by remembering their nostalgic past. The earnest quest for self identity remains the central praxis for an individual’s social existence. But how to reach to its end –either by retreating from the world into one’s shelled cocoon or by adopting moderate adherence to Westernization remains much a debatable concern to be answered by nations as well as by the individuals at large. Diasporic literature deals with these experiences of migration and exile, cultural or geographical displacement and the diasporic writers often remain preoccupied with the elements of nostalgia seeking to re-locate themselves in new cultures. Agha Shahid Ali is a Kashmiri poet, who despite being a migrant to USA transcends all geographical, national, and cultural boundaries by the dint of his sheer poetic brilliance. He articulates vehemently his diaspora experiences of “loss and exile” in his poetry and as a visionary integrates the global and the local. In this paper my aim is to represent how literature and culture inter-relates to form the basis of an independent original expression and in turn reflect the problems and aspirations of an individual’s existence in the society. Ali the eminent Indian poet represents his earnest urge to relocate his Self amidst “cultural hybridization” asserting his transnational identity to transform ‘violent cartographies’ to ‘The Ghat of the Only World’.

IntroductionIndian Literature with its multiplicity of languages and the plurality of cultures dates back to 3000 years ago, comprising Vedas, Upanishads, Puranas and Epics like Ramayana and Mahabharata. India has a strong literary tradition in various Indian regional languages like Sanskrit, Prakrit, Pali, Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Oriya, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam and so on. Indian writers share oral tradition, indigenous experiences and reflect on the history, culture and society in regional languages as well as in English. The first Indian novel in English is Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s Rajmohan’s Wife (1864). Indian Writing in English can be viewed in three phases - Imitative, First and Second poets’ phases. The 20th century marks the matrix of indigenous novels. The novels such as Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable (1935), Anita Nair’s Ladies Coupé (2001), and Khuswant Singh’s Memories of Madness: Stories of 1947 (2002) depict social issues, vices and crises (discrimination, injustice, violence against women) in India. Indian writers, and their contribution to world literature, are popular in India and abroad.Researchers are keen on analysing the works of Indian writers from historical, cultural, social perspectives and on literary theories (Post-Colonialism, Postmodernity, Cultural Studies). The enormity of the cultural diversity in India is reflected in Indian novels, plays, dramas, short stories and poems. This collection of articles attempts to capture the diversity of the Indian land/culture/landscape. It focuses on the history of India, partition, women’s voices, culture and society, and science and technology in Indian narratives, documentaries and movies.Special Issue: An Overview“Whatever has happened, has happened for goodWhatever is happening, is also for goodWhatever will happen, shall also be good.”- The Bhagavad-Gita.In the Mahabharata’s Kurukshetra battlefield, Lord Krishna counsels Arjuna on how everything that happens, regardless of whether it is good or bad, happens for a reason.Indian Literature: Past, Present and Future portrays the glorious/not-so-glorious times in history, the ever-changing crisis/peace of contemporary and hope for an unpredictable future through India’s literary and visual narratives. It focuses on comparison across cultures, technological advancements and diverse perspectives or approaches through the work of art produced in/on India. It projects India’s flora, fauna, historical monuments and rich cultural heritage. It illustrates how certain beliefs and practices come into existence – origin, evolution and present structure from a historical perspective. Indian Literature: Past, Present and Future gives a moment to recall, rectify and raise to make a promising future. This collection attempts to interpret various literary and visual narratives which are relevant at present.The Epics Reinterpreted: Highlighting Feminist Issues While Sustaining Deep Motif, examines the Women characters in the Epics – Ramayana and Mahabharata. It links the present setting to the violence against women described in the Epics Carl Jung’s archetypes are highlighted in a few chosen characters (Sita, Amba, Draupati). On one note, it emphasises the need for women to rise and fight for their rights.Fictive Testimony and Genre Tension: A Study of ‘Functionality’ of Genre in Manto’s Toba Tek Singh, analyses the story as a testimony and Manto as a witness. It discusses the ‘Testimony and Fictive Testimony’ in Literature. It explains how the works are segregated into a particular genre. The authors conclude that the testimony is to be used to understand or identify with the terror.Tangible Heritage and Intangible Memory: (Coping) Precarity in the select Partition writings by Muslim Women, explores the predicament of women during the Partition of India through Mumtaz Shah Nawaz’s The Heart Divided (1990) and Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column (2009). It addresses ‘Feminist Geography’ to escape precarity. It depicts a woman who is cut off from her own ethnic or religious group and tries to conjure up her memories as a means of coping with loneliness and insecurity.Nation Building Media Narratives and its Anti-Ecological Roots: An Eco-Aesthetic Analysis of Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan, analyses the post-Partition trauma in the fictional village, Mano Majra. It illustrates the cultural and spiritual bond between Mano Majrans — the inhabitants of Mano Majra — and nature (the land and river). It demonstrates how the media constructs broad myths about culture, religion, and nation. According to the authors, Mano Majrans place a high value on the environment, whilst the other boundaries are more concerned with nationalism and religion.Pain and Hopelessness among Indian Farmers: An Analysis of Deepa Bhatia’s Nero’s Guests documents the farmers’ suicides in India as a result of debt and decreased crop yield. The travels of Sainath and his encounters with the relatives of missing farmers have been chronicled in the documentary Nero’s Guests. It uses the Three Step Theory developed by David Klonsky and Alexis May and discusses suicide as a significant social issue. The authors conclude that farmers are the foundation of the Indian economy and that without them, India’s economy would collapse. It is therefore everyone’s responsibility—the people and the government—to give farmers hope so that they can overcome suicidal thoughts.The link between animals and children in various cultures is discussed in The New Sociology of Childhood: Animal Representations in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Garden in the Dunes, Amazon’s Oh My Dog, and Netflix’s Mughizh: A Cross-Cultural Analysis. It examines the chosen works from the perspectives of cross-cultural psychology and the New Sociology of Childhood. It emphasises kids as self-sufficient, engaged, and future members of society. It emphasises universal traits that apply to all people, regardless of culture. It acknowledges anthropomorphized cartoons create a bond between kids and animals.Life in Hiding: Censorship Challenges faced by Salman Rushdie and Perumal Murugan, explores the issues sparked by their writings. It draws attention to the aggression and concerns that were forced on them by the particular sect of society. It explains the writers’ experiences with the fatwa, court case, exile, and trauma.Female Body as the ‘Other’: Rituals and Biotechnical Approach using Perumal Murugan’s One Part Woman and Matrubhoomi: A Nation Without Women, questions the society that limits female bodies for procreation and objectification. It talks about how men and women are regarded differently, as well as the cultural ideals that apply to women. It explains infertility, which is attributed to women, as well as people’s ignorance and refusal to seek medical help in favour of adhering to traditional customs and engaging in numerous rituals for procreation.Life and (non) Living: Technological and Human Conglomeration in Android Kunjappan Version 5.25, explores how cyborgs and people will inevitably interact in the Malayalam film Android Kunjappan Version 5.25. It demonstrates the advantages, adaptability, and drawbacks of cyborgs in daily life. It emphasises how the cyborg absorbs cultural and religious notions. The authors argue that cyborgs are an inevitable development in the world and that until the flaws are fixed, humans must approach cyborgs with caution. The Challenges of Using Machine Translation While Translating Polysemous Words, discusses the difficulty of using machine translation to translate polysemous words from French to English (Google Translate). It serves as an example of how the machine chooses the formal or often-used meaning rather than the pragmatic meaning and applies it in every situation. It demonstrates how Machine Translation is unable to understand the pragmatic meaning of Polysemous terms because it is ignorant of the cultures of the source and target languages. It implies that Machine Translation will become extremely beneficial and user-friendly if the flaws are fixed.This collection of articles progresses through the literary and visual narratives of India that range from historical events to contemporary situations. It aims to record the stories that are silenced and untold through writing, film, and other forms of art. India’s artistic output was influenced by factors such as independence, partition, the Kashmir crisis, the Northeast Insurgency, marginalisation, religious disputes, environmental awareness, technical breakthroughs, Bollywood, and the Indian film industry. India now reflects a multitude of cultures and customs as a result of these occurrences. As we examine the Indian narratives produced to date, we can draw the conclusion that India has a vast array of tales to share with the rest of the world.Guest Editorial BoardGuest Editor-in-ChiefDr. Bhuvaneswari R, Associate Professor, School of Social Sciences and Languages, Vellore Institute of Technology, Chennai. She has pursued her master’s at the University of Madras, Chennai and doctoral research at HNB Central University, Srinagar. Her research areas of interest are ELT, Children/Young Adult Literature, Canadian writings, Indian literature, and Contemporary Fiction. She is passionate about environmental humanities. She has authored and co-authored articles in National and International Journals.Guest EditorsCynthiya Rose J S, Assistant Professor (Jr.), School of Social Sciences and Languages, Vellore Institute of Technology, Chennai. Her research interests are Children’s Literature, Indian Literature and Graphic Novels.Maria Baptist S, Assistant Professor (Jr.), School of Social Sciences and Languages, Vellore Institute of Technology, Chennai. His research interests include Crime/Detective fiction and Indian Literature.MembersDr. Sufina K, School of Science and Humanities, Sathyabama Institute of Science and Technology, Chennai, IndiaDr. Narendiran S, Department of Science and Humanities, St. Joseph’s Institute of Technology, Chennai, India

The reputation of Agha Shahid Ali, the Kashmiri-American poet, as a poet of exile is well established. Much of his poetry deals with themes of loss, lamentation, and longing where he speaks in a powerful voice about the plight of people of Kashmir. Shahid’s personal memories are not only of Kashmir but also of Delhi, the city where he was born, studied, taught, and published his first collection of poems. In his poems about Delhi he revisits both old Delhi and New Delhi: he roams around the city, listens to Qawwali at Saint Nizamuddin’s mausoleum, meets Muslim butchers, remembers his parents, remembers Shahjahan, and recites Bahadur Shah Zafar’s poem. This article investigates the representations and recollections of Delhi in Agha Shahid Ali’s poems and explores the city’s centrality in understanding socio-cultural history, the importance of particular individuals, and spatial specificity. It studies how the poet explores the city in relation to its languages, histories (the Rebellion of 1857, Partition, post-Partition), and cultures (Mughal and modern). I further investigate how Ali’s literary cartography of Delhi is influenced both by indigenous genres such as Shehr Ashob and the modern English poetic tradition, and how certain Indo-Islamic tropes become central to the poet’s literary memorialization of India’s capital city.

Urdu poetry is a beautiful picturesque of the cultures of the sub-continent. It consists of norms, symbols, ideas, dresses, eatables, crockery, romantic heroes, dialects and folk stories of the multicultural society of Indo-Pak. Urdu poets portrayed the culture of Bengal, Bihar, Hyderabad, Lucknow, Bombay, Gujrat, Delhi, Kashmir, Afghan, Tribal, Sindh, Balochistan, and Punjab. This Article is about the portrayal of Punjabi culture in Akhtar Sherani's poetry. He sketched the Punjabi culture in his poems beautifully. His poetic verses and style describe the cultural elements of the civilization of Punjab. His loud voice is full of colourful aspects of his soil. He is warmly attached to his culture. His poetry is a beautiful metaphor for Punjab's culture, which inspires the reader regarding nature's aspects. He elaborates on the rural and urban life of Punjab.

The relationship of “Sarapa nigari”in Naat has been associated with Muhammad SAW. This topic has been beautifully maintained from the period of “Sahaba –Karam “to the period of present poets.The heart and eyes of the poets of Azad Jammu and Kashmir have been sparkled by the “Sarapa nigari”of Hazrat Muhammad SAW. Prominent one out of these poets is Dr .Abdul Rahman abd. Abdul Rahman abd described the complete “Sarapa of Hazrat Mohammad SAW in his Naatia poetry, and he described it in such a beautiful way that his affection and deep association with “Naatia poetry” clearly Reveal.

Abstract The historian Jonarāja (Kashmir, fifteenth century) is known mainly for his chronicle of the kings of Kashmir, the Dvitīyā Rājataraṅginī, a continuation of Kalhaṇa’s chronicle up to the Muslim Sultanate of Zayin al-’Ābidīn (r. 1419/20–1470). However, Jonarāja also authored the commentaries of three court poems (mahākāvyas), namely Bhāravi’s Kirātārjunīya, Maṅkha’s Śrīkaṇṭhacarita, and Janaka’s Pṛthvīrājavijaya. The present article aims at providing a closer look at Jonarāja’s commentarial strategies, focusing on four cantos (4, 5, 6, and 17) of the Śrīkaṇṭhacarita. First, some examples of how Jonarāja employed specialized literature are presented, particularly quotations from grammar (vyākaraṇa) and Sanskrit dictionaries (kośas). Second, Jonarāja’s philological attempt at restoring Maṅkha’s root text (mūla) is addressed and subsequently analyzed based on the available manuscripts. Lastly, some common concepts contained in Maṅkha’s Śrīkaṇṭhacarita and Bhāravi’s Kirātārjunīya are explored to evaluate how Jonarāja comments on similar verses, and to draw some preliminary conclusions on the style and personal interpretation of the commentator.

Throughout the political history of human society, the Rulers organized a set of system or an institution lobbying their religious or ideological thoughts. This has been documented by poets and historians and even in modern times, the trend remains unaltered. In the nineteenth century, Dharmarth Trust was established by Dogra rulers on socio-religious theme to apprise the religious aspirations among the Hindu community and to protect and propagate the Hindu culture in Jammu and Kashmir State. The paper is an effort to bring into limelight the financial accounting and management of the Dharmarth Trust (1846-1947 A.D.). The Trust was initially established by the donations from the rulers and their families only. The Trust evolved manifold and heaps up the income sources from land grants, jagirs, offerings in the temple, and rent from shops and buildings. It later became an autonomous department of Government of Jammu and Kashmir. The Trust became economically so strong that it started constructing railway lines, bridges and other buildings for the State at a minimum nominal interest rates. Dharmarth Trust even lent loans to the State departments and its subjects for different purposes. The temples and buildings owned by the Trust costs millions of rupees at that time and the Trust emerged as one of the leading player contributing to the economic development of the state.

Introduction Automated or semi-automated software agents, better known as bots, have become an integral part of social media platforms. Reportedly, bots now generate twenty-four per cent of all posts on Twitter (Orlean “Man”), yet we know very little about who these bots are, what they do, or how to attend to these bots. This article examines one particular prominent exemplar: @Horse_ebooks, a much beloved Twitter bot that turned out not to be a “proper” bot after all. By examining how people responded to the revelations that the @Horse_ebooks account was in fact a human and not an automated software program, the intention here is not only to nuance some of the more common discourses around Twitter bots as spam, but more directly and significantly, to use the concept of persona as a useful analytical framework for understanding the relationships people forge with bots. Twitter bots tend to be portrayed as annoying parasites that generate “fake traffic” and “steal identities” (Hill; Love; Perlroth; Slotkin). According to such news media presentations, bots are part of an “ethically-questionable industry,” where they operate to provide an (false) impression of popularity (Hill). In a similar vein, much of the existing academic research on bots, especially from a computer science standpoint, tends to focus on the destructive nature of bots in an attempt to design better spam detection systems (Laboreiro et.al; Weiss and Tscheligi; Zangerle and Specht). While some notable exceptions exist (Gehl; Hwang et al; Mowbray), there is still an obvious lack of research on Twitter bots within Media Studies. By examining a case of “bot fakeness”—albeit in a somewhat different manner—this article contributes an understanding of Twitter bots as medium-specific personas. The case of @Horse_ebooks does show how people treat it as having a distinct personality. More importantly, this case study shows how the relationship people forge with an alleged bot differs from how they would relate to a human. To understand the ambiguity of the concept of persona as it applies to bots, this article relies on para-social interaction theory as developed by Horton and Wohl. In their seminal article first published in 1956, Horton and Wohl understood para-social interaction as a “simulacrum of conversational give and take” that takes place particularly between mass media users and performers (215). The relationship was termed para-social because, despite of the nonreciprocal exposure situation, the viewer would feel as if the relationship was real and intimate. Like theater, an illusory relationship would be created between what they called the persona—an “indigenous figure” presented and created by the mass media—and the viewer (Horton and Wohl 216). Like the “new types of performers” created by the mass media—”the quizmasters, announcers or ‘interviewers’” —bots too, seem to represent a “special category of ‘personalities’ whose existence is a function of the media themselves” (Horton and Wohl 216). In what follows, I revisit the concept of para-social interaction using the case of @Horse_ebooks, to show that there is potential to expand an understanding of persona to include non-human actors as well. Everything Happens So Much: The Case of @Horse_ebooks The case of the now debunked Twitter account @Horse_ebooks is interesting for a number of reasons, not least because it highlights the presence of what we might call botness, the belief that bots possess distinct personalities or personas that are specific to algorithms. In the context of Twitter, bots are pieces of software or scripts that are designed to automatically or semi-automatically publish tweets or make and accept friend requests (Mowbray). Typically, bots are programmed and designed to be as humanlike as possible, a goal that has been pursued ever since Alan Turing proposed what has now become known as the Turing test (Gehl; Weiss and Tschengeli). The Turing test provides the classic challenge for artificial intelligence, namely, whether a machine can impersonate a human so convincingly that it becomes indistinguishable from an actual human. This challenge is particularly pertinent to spambots as they need to dodge the radar of increasingly complex spam filters and detection algorithms. To avoid detection, bots masquerade as “real” accounts, trying to seem as human as possible (Orlean “Man”). Not all bots, however, pretend to be humans. Bots are created for all kinds of purposes. As Mowbray points out, “many bots are designed to be informative or otherwise useful” (184). For example, bots are designed to tweet news headlines, stock market quotes, traffic information, weather forecasts, or even the hourly bell chimes from Big Ben. Others are made for more artistic purposes or simply for fun by hackers and other Internet pundits. These bots tell jokes, automatically respond to certain keywords typed by other users, or write poems (i.e. @pentametron, @ProfJocular). Amidst the growing bot population on Twitter, @Horse_ebooks is perhaps one of the best known and most prominent. The account was originally created by Russian web developer Alexey Kouznetsov and launched on 5 August 2010. In the beginning, @Horse_ebooks periodically tweeted links to an online store selling e-books, some of which were themed around horses. What most people did not know, until it was revealed to the public on 24 September 2013 (Orlean “Horse”), was that the @Horse_ebooks account had been taken over by artist and Buzzfeed employee Jacob Bakkila in September 2011. Only a year after its inception, @Horse_ebooks went from being a bot to being a human impersonating a bot impersonating a human. After making a deal with Kouznetsov, Bakkila disabled the spambot and started generating tweets on behalf of @Horse_ebooks, using found material and text strings from various obscure Internet sites. The first tweet in Bakkila’s disguise was published on 14 September 2011, saying: “You will undoubtedly look on this moment with shock and”. For the next two years, streams of similar, “strangely poetic” (Chen) tweets were published, slowly giving rise to a devoted and growing fan base. Over the years, @Horse_ebooks became somewhat of a cultural phenomenon—an Internet celebrity of sorts. By 2012, @Horse_ebooks had risen to Internet fame; becoming one of the most mentioned “spambots” in news reports and blogs (Chen). Responses to the @Horse_ebooks “Revelation” On 24 September 2013, journalist Susan Orlean published a piece in The New Yorker revealing that @Horse_ebooks was in fact “human after all” (Orlean “@Horse_ebooks”). The revelation rapidly spurred a plethora of different reactions by its followers and fans, ranging from indifference, admiration and disappointment. Some of the sadness and disappointment felt can be seen clearly in the many of media reports, blog posts and tweets that emerged after the New Yorker story was published. Meyer of The Atlantic expressed his disbelief as follows: @Horse_ebooks, reporters told us, was powered by an algorithm. [...] We loved the horse because it was the network talking to itself about us, while trying to speak to us. Our inventions, speaking—somehow sublimely—of ourselves. Our joy was even a little voyeuristic. An algorithm does not need an audience. To me, though, that disappointment is only a mark of the horse’s success. We loved @Horse_ebooks because it was seerlike, childlike. But no: There were people behind it all along. We thought we were obliging a program, a thing which needs no obliging, whereas in fact we were falling for a plan. (Original italics) People felt betrayed, indeed fooled by @Horse_ebooks. As Watson sees it, “The internet got up in arms about the revelation, mostly because it disrupted our desire to believe that there was beauty in algorithms and randomness.” Several prominent Internet pundits, developers and otherwise computationally skilled people, quickly shared their disappointment and even anger on Twitter. As Jacob Harris, a self-proclaimed @Horse_ebooks fan and news hacker at the New York Times expressed it: Harris’ comparisons to the winning chess-playing computer Deep Blue speaks to the kind of disappointment felt. It speaks to the deep fascination that people feel towards the mysteries of the machine. It speaks to the fundamental belief in the potentials of machine intelligence and to the kind of techno-optimism felt amongst many hackers and “webbies.” As technologist and academic Dan Sinker said, “If I can’t rely on a Twitter bot to actually be a bot, what can I rely on?” (Sinker “If”). Perhaps most poignantly, Sinker noted his obvious disbelief in a blog post tellingly titled “Eulogy for a horse”: It’s been said that, given enough time, a million monkeys at typewriters would eventually, randomly, type the works of Shakespeare. It’s just a way of saying that mathematically, given infinite possibilities, eventually everything will happen. But I’ve always wanted it literally to be true. I’ve wanted those little monkeys to produce something beautiful, something meaningful, and yet something wholly unexpected.@Horse_ebooks was my monkey Shakespeare. I think it was a lot of people’s…[I]t really feels hard, like a punch through everything I thought I knew. (Sinker “Eulogy”) It is one thing is to be fooled by a human and quite another to be fooled by a “Buzzfeed employee.” More than anything perhaps, the question of authenticity and trustworthiness seems to be at stake. In this sense, “It wasn’t the identities of the feed’s writers that shocked everyone (though one of the two writers works for BuzzFeed, which really pissed people off). Rather, it was the fact that they were human in the first place” (Farago). As Sinker put it at the end of the “Eulogy”: I want to believe this wasn’t just yet another internet buzz-marketing prank.I want to believe that @Horse was as beautiful and wonderful today as it was yesterday.I want to believe that beauty can be assembled from the randomness of life all around us.I want to believe that a million monkeys can make something amazingGod.I really, really do want to believe.But I don’t think I do.And that feels even worse. Bots as Personae: Revisiting Horton and Wohl’s Concept of Para-Social Relations How then are we to understand and interpret @Horse_ebooks and peoples’ responses to the revelations? Existing research on human-robot relations suggest that machines are routinely treated as having personalities (Turkle “Life”). There is even evidence to suggest that people often imagine relationships with (sufficiently responsive) robots as being better than relationships with humans. As Turkle explains, this is because relationships with machines, unlike humans, do not demand any ethical commitments (Turkle “Alone”). In other words, bots are oftentimes read and perceived as personas, with which people forge affective relationships. The term “persona” can be understood as a performance of personhood. In a Goffmanian sense, this performance describes how human beings enact roles and present themselves in public (Goffman). As Moore puts it, “the persona is a projection, a puppet show, usually constructed by an author and enlivened by the performance, interpretation, or adaptation”. From Marcel Mauss’ classic analysis of gifts as objects thoroughly personified (Scott), through to the study of drag queens (Stru¨bel-Scheiner), the concept of persona signifies a masquerade, a performance. As a useful concept to theorise the performance and doing of personhood, persona has been used to study everything from celebrity culture (Marshall), fiction, and social networking sites (Zhao et al.). The concept also figures prominently in Human Computer Interaction and Usability Studies where the creation of personas constitutes an important design methodology (Dong et al.). Furthermore, as Marshall points out, persona figures prominently in Jungian psychoanalysis where it exemplifies the idea of “what a man should appear to be” (166). While all of these perspectives allow for interesting analysis of personas, here I want to draw on an understanding of persona as a medium specific condition. Specifically, I want to revisit Horton and Wohl’s classic text about para-social interaction. Despite the fact that it was written almost 60 years ago and in the context of the then emerging mass media – radio, television and movies – their observations are still relevant and useful to theorise the kinds of relations people forge with bots today. According to Horton and Wohl, the “persona offers, above all, a continuing relationship. His appearance is a regular and dependable event, to be counted on, planned for, and integrated into the routines of daily life” (216). The para-social relations between audiences and TV personas are developed over time and become more meaningful to the audience as it acquires a history. Not only are devoted TV audiences characterized by a strong belief in the character of the persona, they are also expected to “assume a sense of personal obligation to the performer” (Horton and Wohl 220). As Horton and Wohl note, “the “fan” - comes to believe that he “knows” the persona more intimately and profoundly than others do; that he “understands” his character and appreciates his values and motives (216). In a similar vein, fans of @Horse_ebooks expressed their emotional attachments in blog posts and tweets. For Sinker, @Horse_ebooks seemed to represent the kind of dependable and regular event that Horton and Wohl described: “Even today, I love @Horse_ebooks. A lot. Every day it was a gift. There were some days—thankfully not all that many—where it was the only thing I looked forward to. I know that that was true for others as well” (Sinker “Eulogy”). Judging from searching Twitter retroactively for @Horse_ebooks, the bot meant something, if not much, to other people as well. Still, almost a year after the revelations, people regularly tweet that they miss @Horse_ebooks. For example, Harris tweets messages saying things like: “I’m still bitter about @Horse_ebooks” (12 November 2013) or “Many of us are still angry and hurt about @Horse_ebooks” (27 December 2013). Twitter user @third_dystopia says he feels something is missing from his life, realizing “horse eBooks hasn’t tweeted since September.” Another of the many messages posted in retrospect similarly says: “I want @Horse_ebooks back. Ever since he went silent, Twitter hasn’t been the same for me” (Lockwood). Indeed, Marshall suggests that affect is at “the heart of a wider persona culture” (162). In a Deleuzian understanding of the term, affect refers to the “capacity to affect and be affected” (Steward 2). Borrowing from Marshall, what the @Horse_ebooks case shows is “that there are connections in our culture that are not necessarily coordinated with purposive and rational alignments. They are organised around clusters of sentiment that help situate people on various spectra of activity and engagement” (162). The concept of persona helps to understand how the performance of @Horse_ebooks depends on the audience to “contribute to the illusion by believing in it” (Horton and Wohl 220). “@Horse_ebooks was my monkey” as Sinker says, suggests a fundamental loss. In this case the para-social relation could no longer be sustained, as the illusion of being engaged in a relation with a machine was taken away. The concept of para-social relations helps not only to illuminate the similarities between how people reacted to @Horse_ebooks and the way in which Horton and Wohl described peoples’ reactions to TV personas. It also allows us to see some crucial differences between the ways in which people relate to bots compared to how they relate to a human. For example, rather than an expression of grief at the loss of a social relationship, it could be argued that the responses triggered by the @Horse_ebooks revelations was of a more general loss of belief in the promises of artificial intelligence. To a certain extent, the appeal of @Horse_ebooks was precisely the fact that it was widely believed not to be a person. Whereas TV personas demand an ethical and social commitment on the part of the audience to keep the masquerade of the performer alive, a bot “needs no obliging” (Meyer). Unlike TV personas that depend on an illusory sense of intimacy, bots do “not need an audience” (Meyer). Whether or not people treat bots in the same way as they treat TV personas, Horton and Wohl’s concept of para-social relations ultimately points towards an understanding of the bot persona as “a function of the media themselves” (Horton and Wohl 216). If quizmasters were seen as the “typical and indigenous figures” of mass media in 1956 (Horton and Wohl 216), the bot, I would suggest, constitutes such an “indigenous figure” today. The bot, if not exactly a “new type of performer” (Horton and Wohl 216), is certainly a pervasive “performer”—indeed a persona—on Twitter today. While @Horse_ebooks was somewhat paradoxically revealed as a “performance art” piece (Orlean “Man”), the concept of persona allows us to see the “real” performance of @Horse_ebooks as constituted in the doing of botness. As the responses to @Horse_ebooks show, the concept of persona is not merely tied to beliefs about “what man should appear to be” (Jung 158), but also to ideas about what a bot should appear to be. Moreover, what the curious case of @Horse_ebooks shows, is how bots are not necessarily interpreted and judged by the standards of the original Turing test, that is, how humanlike they are, but according to how well they perform as bots. 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