dialog, No. 45 (Spring 2025)
ISSN: 0975-4881
Editor: Prof. Meenu A. Gupta
Editorial Board:
- Akshaya Kumar
- Surbhi Goel
Advisory Board:
- Janell Watson, Virginia Tech, Editor, the minnesota review
- Nishat Zaidi, Jamia Milia Islamia, Delhi
- Sanjukta Dasgupta, Calcutta University, Kolkata
- Joff Bradley, Teikyo University, Japan
- Tej N Dhar, Chitrakoot School of Liberal Arts, Shoolini University, Solan
- Mini Chandran, IIT, Kanpur
- M. Asaduddin, Jamia Milia Islamia, Delhi
- Raj Kumar, Delhi University, Delhi
- Shelley Walia, Panjab University, Chandigarh
- Pushpinder Syal, Panjab University, Chandigarh
Editorial Assistants:
- Kamalpreet Kaur (Assistant Professor, GGSCW-Sector 26, Chandigarh)
- Arunjot Kaur, Chahat Rampal & Sonali Negi (Research Scholars, Department of English and Cultural Studies, P.U. Chd.)
- Arushi Bhandari (Research Scholar, Research Centre, PGGCG -11, Chd.)
Subscription Fee:
Institutions: INR 1200 ($45) yearly or INR 3000 ($120) for three years.
Individuals: INR 1500 ($75) yearly or INR 4000 ($150) for three years.
Cheques/Demand Drafts can be sent to: The Chairperson, Department of English and Cultural Studies, Panjab University, Chandigarh (India) – 160014
All inquiries pertaining to dialog should be addressed to: editordialog@pu.ac.in Website: http://dialog.puchd.ac.in
Cover by Danny Rienecker on Unsplash. It depicts an aerial view of braided glacial rivers flowing through volcanic terrain, creating organic abstract patterns. A unique natural artwork shaped by ice, water, and time.
dialog, No. 45 (Spring, 2025)
CONTENTS
Editorial
Cultural Afterlives and Ethical Reimagining in Contemporary Times
– Meenu A. Gupta
Research Papers
From Indenture to Ecology: Rethinking Girmitiya Literature Through Eco-Translation
– Salma Begum and Sanjib Sahoo
Comic Relief or Social Commentary? Ethical Dimensions of Humour in Disability Discourse
– Smrity Jayara
– Jaidev Bishnoi
Narrating Everyday Violence: Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp and the South Asian Muslim Women’s Question
– Labiba Alam
– Bhaswati Bhattacharjee
– Renuka K and Jenisha T
– Runjun Devi
– Manjeera G
Eastern Shakespeare: Macbeth, Hamlet, and Othello and Their Modern Film Adaptations in the East
– Fardun Ali Middya
Neurodivergent Embodiment in Posthuman Media: Towards A Soft Aesthetics of Cognition
– Martine Mussies
Comic Frames and Conditional Immunity in Indian Stand-Up Comedy
– Tasnim Nazifa Choudhury
Translations
A Street Singer’s Homage to a Father of the Nation (Translated from Tamil to English)
– Denish Raja Durai
Poems
Book Reviews
– Nikita Tewari and Hari Priya Pathak
The Jallianwala Bagh Journals: Political Lives of Memory by Sarmistha Dutta Gupta
– Kainat Siddiqui
dialog, No. 45 (Spring, 2025)
Editorial
Cultural Afterlives and Ethical Reimagining in
Contemporary Times
Issue No. 45 of dialog brings together research papers that mobilise diverse strands of popular culture—literature, cinema, performance, memoir, translation, and humour—as critical sites for reflecting upon contemporary social concerns and imagining ethical deflections from them. In the spirit of Raymond Williams’s reminder that “culture is ordinary, in every society and in every mind,” the issue treats cultural forms not as aesthetic embellishments but as lived practices through which social realities are negotiated, resisted, and reimagined (Williams, 1958/1989). This understanding resonates closely with A. K. Ramanujan’s view of tradition as something that is not static but “a series of discontinuous continuities,” shaped through acts of remembering, translation, and reinterpretation.
A significant strand of the issue engages ecological thought through literary memory, translation, and place-based practices. Papers revisiting ancient literary ecosystems argue that classical texts encode sophisticated ecological ethics that can counter the violence of extractive modernity and environmental collapse. Walter Benjamin’s notion of translation as ensuring a text’s afterlife finds a parallel here: translation becomes not merely a linguistic transfer but an ethical reactivation of ecological knowledge for the present. This ecological concern is further extended through studies of borderland communities whose practices of dwelling resist mainstream exploitation and foreground relational coexistence with land. Trauma—both intimate and collective—forms another critical axis of the issue. Essays examining women’s domestic trauma alongside genocide memoirs reveal the uneven politics of memory, where some forms of suffering are institutionalised and ritualised while others quietly sediment across generations. As Cathy Caruth reminds us, trauma is “an experience that is not fully owned,” returning belatedly and insistently (Caruth 1995: 151).
Cinema and performance culture emerge as vital mediating forms that sustain critique across spatio-temporal and cultural divides. Studies of Shakespearean adaptations in Eastern cinematic traditions demonstrate how classical tragedy survives through transnational and diagonal adaptations, where ambition, morality, and identity are re-inscribed within new sociopolitical contexts. Alongside this, analyses of performance cultures— ranging from stand-up comedy to satire—foreground humour as a precarious yet potent mode of dissent. In Mikhail Bakhtin’s terms, laughter performs a carnivalesque function, while in Indian aesthetic thought it recalls the dual movement of hāsya rasa, which both exposes social contradiction and offers momentary relief from it.
Extending and reframing these concerns, the paper on neurodivergence and soft aesthetics provides a crucial posthuman and affective lens through which the issue coheres. By foregrounding the receiver’s sensory and cognitive experience, it resonates with Gilles Deleuze’s insistence that affect is “the capacity to affect and be affected,” while also echoing Abhinavagupta’s emphasis on sahr̥ daya—the attuned, responsive reader or spectator who completes the aesthetic experience. Literature, cinema, performance, and humour are thus re-read not merely as representational forms but as affective encounters that reshape perception and ethical response.
As has often been the case in literary and cultural history, the ancient is re-looked and re-visited here not as nostalgia but as a reservoir of hope. Translation, adaptation, and performance emerge as critical tools for reaching new shores, while comic devices—humour, satire, irony, and laughter—simultaneously accentuate pain and emolliate it for the voiceless. In reaffirming literature’s enduring influence as a mode of ethical connection, dialog Issue No. 45 positions cultural practice itself as a site of responsibility, resilience, and imaginative renewal.
Engaging with the ecological turn in Translation Studies, Salma Begum and Sanjib Sahoo rethink Girmitiya literature beyond its dominant human-centred narrative. Their article mobilizes Eco-translation and Ecolinguistics to interrogate the erasure of environmental agency in translations of Abhimanyu Unnuth’s Lal Pasina, proposing re-translation as an ethical and activist practice responsive to extractivist colonial histories and contemporary climate crises.
Smrity Jayara’s contribution interrogates the fraught relationship between humour and disability, asking whether laughter serves as comic relief or social commentary. Drawing on Disability Studies and cultural theory, the article charts the evolution of disability humour from stigmatizing caricature to an ethically grounded, self-authored mode of expression. The study compellingly demonstrates how stand-up comedy and contemporary literary representations enable persons with disabilities to subvert stereotypes and challenge normative assumptions.
This issue includes Jaidev Bishnoi’s essay on Chandrika Balan’s short fiction, which examines female subjectivity and everyday life in Malayalam literature through feminist aesthetics and the lens of everyday resistance. By critically engaging with the discourse of pennezhuthu, the paper foregrounds subaltern agency articulated through negotiation, ambivalence, and lived experience rather than overt radicalism. The essay contributes to ongoing discussions on gender, agency, and narrative strategies in Indian women’s writing; its insistence on reading women’s agency within context, vulnerability, and contradiction—an approach that enriches current feminist literary scholarship. The paper engaging Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp as a testimonial archive of everyday suffering is particularly significant for its refusal of trauma as a spectacle. It examines forms of gendered violence that unfold not in moments of catastrophe but through the slow erosion of women’s bodies and subjectivities, thereby extending feminist trauma studies beyond Eurocentric paradigms. Conceptualising trauma as vernacular and insidious rather than spatially or temporally discrete, the essay traces how coercion embedded within marriage vows, reproductive expectations, and religious authority is rendered invisible and legally inaudible. The analysis foregrounds the failure of juridical and religious institutions—often structured by patriarchal bias—to recognise or redress such harm, thereby exposing the ethical limits of law when confronted with intimate, normalised violence.
From Banu Mushtaq’s feminist short stories, which expose everyday domestic violence within intimate and religious spaces, to Consolee Nishimwe’s Rwandan genocide memoir that narrativises the biopolitical regulation of life and death, the contributions in this editorial collectively interrogate how trauma is experienced, remembered, and mediated at the intersection of the individual and the collective.
By engaging multiple registers of marginality, this edition interrogates the silences produced by dominant cultural, political, and environmental narratives. Renuka K and Jenisha T’s essay intervenes in this discourse through a reading of borderland travel writing, foregrounding how precarious environments are not merely endured but meaningfully inhabited through affective bonds and topophilic attachments to place. Drawing on Environmental Humanities and spatial theory, the paper reframes borderlands as sites of ecological belonging and quiet resistance rather than zones of abandonment.
Extending ecological inquiry, this issue also foregrounds ecological thought rooted in classical literary traditions. Manjeera G’s paper reads Illanko Atikal’s Cillapatikaram through the lens of environmental aesthetics, demonstrating how the Akam poetic system—structured through the coded tinais— articulates a non-binary, eco-social imagination where human life and natural landscapes co-emerge. By revisiting Sangam ecologies, the essay argues that ancient Tamil literary frameworks offer vital resources for reviving, reconfiguring, and rebuilding greener imaginaries beyond dominant Western environmental models.
This issue also includes a study that revisits Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Hamlet, and Othello through their modern Eastern film adaptations, foregrounding the enduring relevance of the tragic hero across cultures and media. By analysing Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider and Omkara, the paper demonstrates how diagonal adaptations reconfigure ambition, morality, and identity within distinct sociopolitical and cultural landscapes. The contribution situates Shakespearean tragedy within a transnational cinematic praxis, revealing how cultural transposition sustains the ethical and psychological force of classical drama.
Another article positions neurodivergent cognition as a posthumanist lens through which contemporary media aesthetics can be critically rethought. By foregrounding neurodivergent embodiment as a phenomenologically rich and epistemically productive mode of cognition, it demonstrates how sensory multiplicity and non-linear perception illuminate broader questions of media, technology, and aesthetic experience. The contribution aligns with dialog’s interdisciplinary inquiry by bridging posthuman theory, media studies, and alternative epistemologies.
This issue also engages contemporary performance cultures through a grounded study of Indian stand-up comedy as a spatially and socially mediated form. Drawing on ethnographic