![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
Abstract
This paper is a gendered analysis of structures and cultures of violence that characterize both public political and private domestic spaces in Northeast India, one of the most sustained conflict zones in South Asia. It links the violence at home with the political violence generated by the idea of ethnic homelands. While illustrating how domestic and political violences intersect, the paper questions the very idea of home as safe haven, or refuge from the outside world. It also parallelly raises reservations about the ethno-nationalist demand for territorial homelands as the solution to political conflicts between communities. The paper does this by juxtaposing the specters of fear and manifestations of violence in both the public and private domains as depicted in the fiction of Anglophone writer Jahnavi Barua. It analyzes Barua’s characters who are at the center of this violence to understand her depiction of home and homeland. It then relates text to context by drawing on media reports, policy documents, domestic violence handbooks and manuals, field reports and reports of fact-finding missions among other primary sources. The sociology of conflict literature and an attempt to illustrate the value of the witness fiction writers bear to violent conflicts underpins the analysis.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Balzacq (Citation2005, 172–3) argues that securitization is “a strategic (pragmatic) practice” that is ensconced “in the social context, a field of power struggles in which securitizing actors align on a security issue to swing the audience’s support toward a policy or course of action.”
2 The brutalization of the armed forces in India has often been remarked upon. “Brutalised armies,” former Indian Army Chief General Shankar Roychoudhuri has been quoted as saying, “are no good as fighting machines” (Bhaumik Citation2007, 35).
3 Often, the media is also complicit in upholding this myth. People from the Northeast have increasingly faced racial profiling and extreme, often violent, prejudice on the Indian mainland. Numerous incidents of violence against Northeastern people, especially women, continue to be reported (The Hindustan Times Citation2015; The Times of India Citation2015; NDTV Citation2014). In recording their protest against these incidents, the Northeast media invariably projects the status of women here as far superior to that of their counterparts in the rest of India (The Meghalaya Times Citation2016; The Northeast Today Citation2016). Within the region, though, women continue to be routinely portrayed unfavorably and with extreme prejudice in the local media (Dowerah Citation2012; India Today Citation2015).
4 “Glocalization” originated as a “capitalistic business term” and is considered to have a Japanese origin. Sociologist Roland Robertson adopted it in order to “transcend the tendency to cast the idea of globalization as inevitably in tension with the idea of localization.” In suggesting that the term “globalization” be replaced “for certain purposes with the concept of glocalization” he maintains that “globalization – in the broadest sense, the compression of the world – has involved and increasingly involves the creation and the incorporation of locality, processes which themselves largely shape, in turn, the compression of the world as a whole” (Robertson Citation1995, 40).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Uddipana Goswami
Uddipana Goswami is a sociologist and feminist peace researcher who teaches critical writing and liberal arts courses.