English Language, Literature and Creative Writing Blog

 Ngangom’s “The Strange Affair of Robin S. Ngangom" is one of his longest poems. It describes a visit to his native place, Manipur, which was ravaged in the conflict between Indian armed forces and the insurgents. Though the poem is autobiographical in nature, in him is found the capability of transforming his personal experiences in a conflict ravaged land to the generalised experiences of people belonging to many parts of North-East India. It is a critique on how the powerless has to remain subdued and succumb to the wishes of the powerful even if that dispossesses them from their rights and freedom. The poem is divided into four parts.  The first part of the poem (lines 1-61) is a description of how the ‘pristine’ native land of his boyhood have been turned into ‘murderous’ in the present with pervading hunger, distrust and destruction. The second part of the poem (lines 62-105) gives a description of how the Indian armed forces through their ‘appliances of death and destru...

  The narrative unfolds from the third-person perspective of protagonist Deven, a middle-aged college professor whose love for poetry and the Urdu language leads him into a tragi-comic series of encounters that challenge his faith in humanity and in what he has always believed about himself. The narrative begins with an encounter that sends both the plot and Deven’s process of self-discovery in motion. His wealthy and manipulative friend from long-ago school days, Murad, invites him to participate in the creation of a special issue of the magazine that Murad publishes. That special issue, Murad, says, will focus on poetry written in the Urdu language. That language, narration suggests, is decreasing in both usage and influence in India, its presence in everyday life overwhelmed by the more commonly used Hindi. Deven, who teaches Hindi but loves Urdu poetry, agrees. Murad assigns him the task of getting in touch with Nur, one of the most renowned Urdu poets in India and someone wh...

  Chaucer's Wife of Bath is easily one of the most arresting figures among the pilgrims. As is often the case, Chaucer mingles literary model with social reality: she is only partly an imitation of the description of La Vieille in the Roman de la Rose . Many of her characteristics could be traced back to the fact that she was born when Taurus was in the ascendant and Mars and Venus in conjunction in that sign of the zodiac. This accounts for her sexual appetite and refusal to be dominated by men in marriage. She may thus be a successor to an earlier type of the heroic woman, the Amazon located now in a middle-class milieu where martial qualities were expressed in the domestic world of gender relations. Among her personal traits, which have prompted critics to identify her, are her love of travel, her rather unfashionable dress and equipment, and the fact that she was deaf and her teeth were set wide apart. Chaucer also gives an accurate statement as to the locality of Bath from whi...

 

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Q. Analyse the story "The Intrusion" as a quest for identity. Or  Q. Describe how Shahi Deshpande draws the plight of the modern Indian woman in her short story "The Intrusion". Or  Q. How does Shashi Deshpande illustrate man woman relationship and its implications in the modern day society in her story "The Intrusion".  Answer   Shashi Deshpande is one of the eminent novelists of contemporary Indian literature in English. Deshpande creates characters that take her readers through the social strata of urban society; but her interest comes to centre more and more on women of the middle and upper middle classes. She talks about well-educated women who fight for their own space, for their place in the family and in their social and cultural setting. This setting is the backdrop to almost all her stories. Women, in Deshpande's works, are not simply victims of circumstances, of family, of society, they suffer from a self consciousness till the end of their ...