Literature At Home

By the titular ‘cycle’ Preetinicha Barman in her poem “Cycle” metaphorically refers to the menstrual cycle signifying fertility, birth, flow of life etc which every girl has to undergo enduring all the pain and bane in order to become a ‘woman’. The image of the beads of sweat in the speaker’s body is quintessential of a woman’s menstrual blood— “Pungent, slimy, the quasi-liquid drips” — which flows from the uterus through cervix and out of the body through vagina which is symbolized by the ‘naked hill’, thus implying the spatio-temporal action the backdrop of the poem is supposed to have set against. The use of the adjective ‘naked’ is compatible enough with the vagina in that it sheds or empties all the menstrual blood— which is partly blood and partly tissue from the inside of the uterus symbolized by the ‘red soil’— from it during menstruation. The speaker seems to have been worn out after her ritualistic participation in the monthly period. The burden, pain, sufferings infli...

A shrine of a Hindu folk deity named “Buri Maa”, Burir Pat is located in Dinhata near Bypass Highway. The temple enjoys popularity in the town with its rich history. As per the little knowledge gathered while chit-chatting with a fellow resident of this area, this temple was built during the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War by a Muslim who fled to India from the then East Pakistan (present-day Bangladesh) and erected this temple at Buri Maa’s behest in his dream. Ever since then Buri Maa has been worshipped both by the Hindus and the Muslims of this locality. This is truly an inspiring story which talks to us about the importance of cultural syncretism and cosmopolitanism. Buri Maa is a special form of goddess Durga. But unlike goddess Durga, she is not accompanied by her children here. She is a symbol of good luck and prosperity. People worship Buri Maa in their houses before arranging any auspicious occasions like marriage, rice ceremony etc with a view to expecting propitious result ...

                   “Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies— for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text— as into the world and into history—by her own movement.” — Helen Cixous. If perceived from a cursory glance, unlike materialist feminist thinkers like Virginia Woolf, Mary Wollstonecraft and Simone de Beauvoir who all recited a litany of complaints on the basis of how women were socially and economically oppressed by the patriarchal society, French Feminist Psychoanalytic theory is interested in the latter’s influence on women’s psychological experience and creativity. This theory focuses largely on the individual psyche, and not on group existence. And for many French psychoanalytic feminists like Helen Cixous, the possibilities for ...

Responsive reception is a unique, essential and special faculty or quality or characteristic of the Indian culture, its traditions as well as its people. As is easily sensed from a cursory glance at the titular terminology, there is an immediate or simultaneous process of at least two functions the conjoining of which makes Indian culture and traditions look exotically different from western culture by leaving a legacy that India will cherish and celebrate perennially. Unlike the western culture and traditions which are primarily deemed uniform or homogeneous, Indian culture and traditions are largely diverse in form and nature. But despite this inborn, innate, complex, indivisible and undistinguished diversities, there is a conspicuous presence of unity in Indian culture and traditions. Hence, the famous saying of Jawaharlal Nehru “Unity in diversity” . The reason behind this wide diversity lies in the fact that India is supposed to be the most active, enthusiastic and potent receiver...

  Abstract The objective of this paper is to unbiasedly and unabashedly locate among the large corpus of any genre of literature, which is historically, culturally and commercially not a very reliable medium for resistant discourses and alternative life-practices of the queer people because of the suspect bourgeois, capitalist, patriarchal, phallic-ideological, hegemonic, heteronormative, scopophilic, voyeuristic and “mass cultural” motor of the literary forms and practices, the representation of the queer in the poems of Adrienne Rich, a pioneering feminist who is credited with bringing the idea of lesbianism in the poetry world. In Gender Studies, the term “gender” is used to refer and limit only to the social and cultural constructions of masculinity and femininity. Gender is prescribed just like a script and everyone has to perform certain roles following the script. Any avoidance of or deviation from particular gender norms is immediately considered an anomaly and the suppos...

“Standing before Time, we must bear witness/ To what we have done and what we have thought.” —Jibanananda Das. Trying to figure out the nature of Time, Saint Augustine in his The Confessions wonders “What then is time?” before going on to confirm time’s enigmatic entity by himself responding “If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to one who asks, I do not know.” Jibanananda Das does not pose any conceptual question in his poems about time as such; not because he was never a spiritual person, but perhaps questions about time have lost their fascination for twentieth century man. Unlike poems from his collection Rupashi Bangla (Beautiful Bengal) in which Jibanananda Das is seen to transubstantiate and universalise Bengal into an ideal of the homeland that is acultural, ahistoric and atemporal much like a utopian fiction, in the poem “Horse” (Ghora), published in his 1948 collection The Darkness of Seven Stars , his idyllic setting of Bengal like other parts of...

  Do you know that the females have a penis too? Yes, they do have one. It is their clitoris. Clitoris and penis are in many ways very similar to each other. The outer part of the clitoris almost looks like a penis. Clitoris and penis are both made of the same tissues. They both have a shaft and a head. Both get erected during the time of arousal. They both play an important role in sexual pleasure. It is not the vagina that is the most sensitive and stimulating sex organ but the clitoris since this tiny external portion has more nerve endings than any other human body, be it male or female. We all know about vaginal orgasm but we hardly know about clitoral orgasm. The difference between these two types of orgasm is just the means by which nerves are stimulated. For clitoral orgasm, it is the external part of the clitoris that is being stimulated and for vaginal orgasm it is nerves inside the vagina that are being stimulated. Most women reach climax sooner from clitoral stimulation...