18th
INTERNATIONAL MELOW CONFERENCE REPORT
Compiled by Kalyanee
Rajan, Mirza Sadaf Fatima and Asra Mamnoon. The report was read by Asra Mamnoon.
15-17 March 2019
Inaugural session: The 18th
International MELOW (The Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literatures of
the World) Conference was held at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. The main
thrust of the society lies on world literature and literature across borders of
time and space. The theme for the 18th conference was “Sunny
Pleasure Domes and Caves of Ice: Utopias and Dystopias in World Literature”.
The inaugural session began with a formal welcome by Professor Simi Malhotra,
acting head, Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia. Professor Anil Raina,
President, MELOW, Professor Manju Jaidka, secretary, Joint Secretary, Professor
Manpreet Kaur Kang, Professor Simi Malhotra and Dr. Shimi Moni Doley,
co-ordinator for the conference formed the panel. The session was also graced
by Professor Shahid Ashraf, Vice-Chancellor, Jamia Millia Islamia.
A brief introduction on MELOW was given by Professor Manju
Jaidka who shed light on how the society was formed and developed in India. A
pertinent issue, on which the society emphasises, was brought forth by
Professor Jaidka, which is that of the academia’s excessive preoccupation with
theory and an evident side-lining of literature. The Vice-Chancellor also
addressed the audience, emphasising on the importance of literature in every
field.
The presidential address by Professor Anil Raina began with
an introduction and critical understanding of the conception of Utopia and
Dystopia and how they merge into one another, especially in Coleridge’s
imagination. Professor Raina emphasised on the search for Utopia as an extension
of an inherent contradiction within the human self. Professor Raina drew on
Greek texts and other instances to bring to the fore the ideas of Utopias and
Dystopias as well as their inherent contradictions, accentuating on the fact
that literary classics are mostly dystopian. The session came to a close with a
vote of thanks by Dr. Shimi Moni Doley. It was attended by dignitaries from
across the world, faculty members, graduation and post-graduation students and
research scholars.
Plenary 1:
The session was chaired by Professor Sachidananda Mohanty.
Prof. M.L. Raina delivered the keynote address, entitled “Longings Redeemed but
only Just: Utopian Imagination Then and Now”. Prof. Raina’s sweeping
presentation covered the myriad manifestations of Utopias both in literature
and art. His comprehensive presentation established a genealogy of Utopian
imagination, which he noted, was as old as human desire. He also highlighted
the infinite scope of variety in the conceptualization of the human imagination
which ranges from the Biblical Utopia of the Garden of Eden or heaven, feminist
Utopias, communist and even scientific Utopias. However, according to Prof.
Raina, Utopias rely on a structured and hierarchical order which bordered on
the tyrannical. He concluded therefore by asserting that we can only strive to
make society better but not perfect.
Parallel session 1A was
chaired by Prof Baran Farooqi where the panel consisted of Daniel Kalinowski
who presented a paper titled “The Castle by
Franz Kafka as a Prefiguration of Dystopia”. Harpreet Kaur Vohra presented a
paper titled “Redefining Fertility and Reproduction in a Dystopia: Margaret
Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale”. Joydeep
Bhattacharya presented the paper “Girish Karnad’s Boiled Beans on Toast : Mapping the Urban Potpourri of Utopia and Dystopia”.
Session 1B was chaired by
Prof. Anisur Rahman. In this panel Nahid Kaiser explored the possibility of a
Feminist Utopia in Tagore’s The Land of
Cards. Ritushree Sengupta presented a paper titled “Redefining the Utopia:
An Ecological reading of Charles Kingsley’s The
Water-Babies”.
Session IC was chaired by
Prof. T. Ravichandran. Here, Anita Sharma’s paper investigated into an
exclusively black Utopia imagined in Amiri Baraka’s poetry. Sunil Kamal delved
into Danish Rana’s Red Maize. Vanda
Sukheja analysed Sandeep Sahota’s’ The
Year of the Runaways.
Parallel Session ID was
chaired by Prof. Malati Mathur. Prof. Mary Mohanty presented a paper entitled
“Utopia of the American Dream: Revisiting Scott Fitzgeralds’s The Great Gatsby”. Ranjita Barik
presented a paper on “Utopian Vision in Master Poems: Tagore and Sri Aurobindo.
Sayan Bhowmik presented on “Memory as a Bell: Violence and Forgetting in the
Construction of Utopia in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The
Buried Giant”. Satyajit Das presented a paper on “Puncturing Canadian
Utopia: A Postcolonial Study of George Ryga’s ‘Indian’, ‘An Ecstasy of Rita
Joe’’ and ‘Nothing But a Man’”.
Parallel Session II A was chaired by Dr.
Vandana Sharma where the first speaker, Neela Sarkar spoke on “Reclaiming the
Self: A Reading of The Handmaid’s Tale,
Never Let Me Go and Only Ever Yours”. The second speaker, Bipasha Som Gune
spoke on “Indian Aesthetics and Individual Utopia: A Case Study of Bharat
Muni’s Natyashastra”.
Parallel session II B was chaired by Prof.
Ameena Kazi Ansari. Sayan Mukherjee presented a paper on “The People Never Have
the Power, Only the Illusion of it: Opposing Utopias in Assassin’s Creed”.
Umara Butt spoke about narcissism, necrophilia and Oedipus Complex in the
novel, Child of God. Shraddha
Adityavir Singh presented on Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy.
Parallel session IIC was chaired by Prof.
Kadloor Savitri wherein Dr. Radha Gautam presented a paper on “Understanding
Conflicting Utopias in India: Gandhi and Savarkar”. Navdeep Kahol spoke on
“Pushing the Boundaries: The Dystopian World of ‘The Queene’. Kalyani Rajan presented a paper entitled
“Teaching Her a Lesson: Dynamics of State(ly) Rape in Ambai’s ‘Black Horse
Square’ and Sowmya Rajendran’s ‘The Lesson’”.
Parallel Session II D was
chaired by Prof Manpreet Kaur. Hem Raj Bansal presented a paper titled,
“Subdued Voices, Stifled Dreams: Hope to Hopelessness in a Dystopian World in
Bandi’s Accusation: Forbidden stories
from inside North Korea”. Kalikinkar Pattanayak presented “Utopia and
Indian Imagination: Revisiting The
Ramayana of Valmiki”. The last speaker T. Ravichandran presented a paper
titled, “Between Utopian Impulse and Dystopian Distress: Locating the Ecotopian
in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Wind Up Girl”.
On the second day of the
conference, Parallel Session IIIA was chaired by Prof. Dipankar Purukayastha.
Nilak Dutta presented a paper on a case study of Daniel Boone. The second
presenter Parminder Singh spoke on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. The third speaker, Sunaina Jain spoke on Soul City in the
light of John Rawl’s Theory of Justice.
Parallel Session III B
was chaired by Prof. Sushila Singh. Adela Kalinowski presented a paper titled,
“Polish and Romantic: Representation of London and New York by Cyprian Norwid”.
Ishrat Fatma spoke on, “Home and Away in Anita Desai’s Bye Bye Blackbird”. Nilakshi Roy presented a paper titled, ‘
“Sacred Games”- A Modern Day Dystopia’. Payal A.P. presented “The Housewives’ Tarot: Marketing
Domestic Utopia in Post- 9/11 American Popular Culture”.
Parallel Session III C
was chaired by Prof. Neela Sarkar. There were four speakers in this session.
Mousumi Chowdhury presented a paper on, “Post-Brexit Dystopian Britian: A Study
of Ali Smith’s Autumn(2016) and
Micheal Paraskos’s Rabbitman(2017)”.
Srijani Chowdhury presented her paper titled, “ Brave New Aya: A Study of
Kristen Simmon’s Dystopian Fiction The
Glass Arrow (2015)”. Sumbul Nasim spoke about feminist utopias in her paper
titled “Towards a Feminist Utopia: Manto and his Women”. Amit Narula presented
a paper titled, “Search for a Women’s Utopia in The Prisons We Broke”.
Parallel Session III D
had three paper presenters with Prof. Roshan Sharma chairing this session. Anil
Kumar whose paper titled “Exploring Dystopian Dimensions towards the Post-human
Future in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and
Crake” raised the trajectory of humanist thought from Plato to Heidegger
and further relied on Katherine Hayless’ understanding of post-humanism, Leena
Sarkar’s paper “Romanticism and Mid -Nineteenth Century Despair: Poetics
Utopias and Anti-Utopia focused on William Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ and
Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ and Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’. Rohitashav Yadav’s
paper titled “Post -human Dystopia: A Case Study of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale attempted to explain
post-humanism in The Handmaid’s Tale
via the loss of fertility of women’s bodies due to environmental degradation
and the control and surveillance in Gilead.
Parallel Session IV A was
chaired by Prof. Roshan Sharma. Four speakers presented in this session. Arka
Pramanick presented a paper on, “Towards a Female Utopos: Critiquing Futuristic
Dystopia in Manish Jha’s Matrubhoomi”.
Abin Chakroborty presented a paper titled, “From Buried Pterodactyl to Soaring
Jwala Kumar: An Assessment of Utopian Potentalities in HansdaSowvendra
Shekhar’s Jwala Kumar and the Gift of
Fire”. Debjani Dutta spoke on, “a Re-thinking Rebellion: Unrest and its
ramifications in the coerced collective of We”.
The last presentation by Vandana Sharma was titled, “Paradox of Utopian Thought
and Dystopian reality in Manjula Padmanabhan’s
Escape and the Island of Lost
Girls”.
Parallel Session IV B was
chaired by Prof. Baran Farooqi. Nidhi Sharma presented a paper entitled
“Thinking In and Out of Utopia: A Postmodernist Reading of Cat’s Cradle”. Sartaj Ahmed and Shahila Zafar presented a paper on
“Dystopian Society and Dehumanisation: A Critical Analysis of Lois Lowry’s The Giver. Sujoy Chakravarthi’s paper
was on “Self-Fulfilling Prophesies: Locating our World Amongst Utopias in
Selected Works”.
Parallel Session IV C was
chaired by Prof. Manpreet Kang. Kamalpreet
Kaur’s paper was titled, “Uncovering the (Dys-)utopian reality of The Good Place”. Arundhati Ashangbam
presented a paper titled, “Deconstructing Utopia: A Reflection in Primo Levi’s
Works”. Manpreet Kaur Kang and Gabriella Vargas-Cetina presented a joint paper
titled, “Trans-Species Dystopia: Margaret Atwood and our Biologically
Engineered Futures”. Prerna Priyam Doley’s paper titled, “Negotiating
Human/Non-Human Boundaries: A study of posthuman figures in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep”.
Parallel session IV D was
chaired by Prof. Vijay Sharma. Prof. Kalpana Purohit presented a paper entitled
“A Probe into the Dystopian World of Modern Drama” Mridu Sharma spoke on “Ashen
and Dark Despair: A Study of Dystopian Elements in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
Bipasha Bharti spoke on “Dystopian Discontent through the Lens of V for
Vendetta”. Subham Amin spoke on “A Tale of a Ruptured Frame: A Study of the
Quest for a Utopian Happy Family and its Dystopic Subversion in Kapoor and
Sons”.
Following this, Prof.
Sachidananda Mohanty delivered the prestigious Isaac Sequeira Memorial Special Lecture. A scholar of eminence and
former Vice-Chancellor of Orissa University, Prof. Mohanty was introduced
eloquently by session chairperson, Prof. Manju Jaidka. Prof. Mohanty’s lecture
was titled “Beyond the Colonialist Imagination: Travel, Utopias and the Making
of a New World”. He spoke at length about how every utopia needs a bit of
idealism in order for it to be imagined. His lecture was directed towards
reading India in the sense of a vibrant yet undiscovered pluralism, a condensed
composite whose roots needed to be excavated and studied carefully in order to
take utopianism forward. Using Leela Gandhi’s position explicated in her
significant work, “Affective Communities, Prof. Mohanty set out to interrogate
how utopias become an essential part of Indian heritage. His explication of
Tagore’s Vishwabharati as a world in a nest, of Vishwa Sahitya, of simultaneous
existence of tradition and modernity was remarkable. He concluded by quoting
several extracts from his landmark volume on archival research, talking about
how utopias thus conceived, grow beyond the nation to a global conception of
counter modernity and new beginnings.
The session titled Isaac Sequeira Memorial Award was chaired by Prof. Manju Jaidka,
who delineated the facts about the award and the pre-requisite to get selected
for the final competition. The three competitors for this round were Jasmine
Sharma, who presented a paper entitled “Power, Sexuality and Techno-Scientific
Dynamics in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam
Trilogy”. The second speaker, Nishtha
Pandey spoke on “Utopias and the Pursuit of Knowledge: Reading Jorge Luis
Borges”. The third speaker, Samarth Singhal spoke on “Grotesque Dystopia as
Empty Gesture: The Case of Appupen’s The
Snake and the Lotus”. A panel of
three judges was constituted for this session. After the presentations, Nishtha
Pandey was adjudged the winner of the Isaac Sequeira Memorial Award. The
organisers also gifted a journal to all the three presenters.
On the third day of the
conference, in the Parallel Session VA , two papers were presented in this
panel. Arusharko Banerjee presented a paper titled, “The Men Died, Long Live
the Women: A Comparative Reading of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream and Virgin Bergin’s Who Runs The World.” Bhushan Sharma
spoke on, “Ladyland of Begum Rokeya: A Feminist Utopia”.
Parallel Session V B was
chaired by Prof. Raj Kumar. Sakshi Sundaram spoke on “Of Monsters and Men:
Revisiting Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
as Anti-Utopia”.
Parallel Session VC was
chaired by Prof. Vivek Sachdeva. Santosh Bharti and Preeti Desodiya spoke on
Feminist Utopia in Herland. Shishu
Bala spoke on “Language as an Instrument of Oppression and Liberation of Women
in Select Dystopian Novels.”.
Parallel Session VD was
chaired by Prof. Kalpana Purohit. The first speaker, Mishail Sharma presented a
paper on “Representation of Imposed Identity and Social Order in the
Post-Apocalyptic World of Veronica Roth’s Divergent”.
Shikha Thakur spoke on “Breaking the Feminine Myth: From Invisibly Silent to
Obliviously Omnipotent Genesis of Women in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple”. Zainab
Abrar spoke on “The Dystopian Roots of Post 9/11 Espionage Fiction”.
Parallel Session VI A was
chaired by Prof. Vijay Sharma wherein Shivali Khurana presented a paper on
“Feminist Dystopia in Shashi Deshpande’s Stories”. Mohd. Sheraz Butt analysed Lord of the Flies in the light of
technological Utopia in a Dystopic world. The third presentation by Azhar Uddin
Sahaji and Mirza Sadaf Fatima made a comparative study of Waiting for Godot and Basma Abdul Aziz’s The Gate. Antara Bhatia and Armeen Kaur presented a paper titled “Bana Yeh Mulk Mashaan Kitna: The
Post-partition Dystopian City”
Parallel Session VI B was
chaired by Prof. Vivek Sachdeva. Ambish Malik presented a paper titled,
“Environmental Dystopia in Bacigalupi’s The
People of Sand and Slag”. Aparajita Shukla spoke on, “Cultural Ferment,
Disintegration and Metamorphosis: Studying Dystopian Reality through Comics”.
Rachit Verma presented a paper titled, “The Reworking of Arabic Myth and
Folklore in Patrick Graham’s Ghoul”.
Parallel Session VI C was
chaired by Prof. Sonya Surbhi Gupta. Rimika Singhvi presented a paper titled
“The Religion-Science Divide: A Dystopian Re-telling”. Sourav Kumar Das
presented a paper titled, “Comparison between the European and the Dystopian
society in Ray Brabury’s Fahrenheit 451”.
Tarundeep Singh presented a paper on
animated Japanese movie Spirited Away.
Parallel Session VI D was chaired by Prof.
Dipankar Purukayastha where Faizan Ahmed spoke on “Does Utopia Exist? Analysing
Arun Joshi’s (Un)Brave New Worlds in The
Strange Case of Billy Biswas”. Mohd. Sharief spoke on “Society and
Governance in Dystopian Novels”. Rakhi Vyas spoke on “The Beat Generation and
its Literature: A Bold New Utopia”.
The three-day conference was a fascinating and enriching
experience for the paper presenters and the organisers alike. With more than
ninety presentations in all, invigorating question and answer sessions, a
wonderful cultural evening put together by students of the department of
English, Jamia Millia Islamia but enlivened by Prof. Roshan Sharma’s charming
musical prowess, sumptuous lunches and sometimes ever too sweet tea breaks, the
MELOW-Jamia Millia Islamia conference was a memorable and learning experience
as well as an opportunity for people from across the length and breadth of
academic institutions in India and abroad to interact, learn and form
meaningful friendships. After all, as Prof. Mohanty reminded everyone, the
highlight of a conference is great food, great conversations and great company.
Rapporteurs:
Asra Mamnoon
Kalyanee Rajan
Mirza Sadaf Fatima
Grace Mariam Raju
Anusha Halim
Usama Zakir
Anab Naiyer
Anubhav Pradhan
Zahra Rizvi
Aateka Khan
Arif Nisar
Faizan Moquim
Prisha Gupta
Kanupriya
Ishita
Sumaira Gilani
