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A close connection exists between literature and history, especially in times of major upheavals in the political and cultural climate of a nation. While history posits itself as fact, literature represents those facts by connecting disperse events and telling an overarching story of the historical record. When understood in this context, historical memory becomes the cornerstone of individual and collective identities. The shared experiences enable a community to pull an array of distinct memories together into a coherent whole. The paper discusses how Zahir delineates a diverse range of characters and incorporates multiple arcs and trajectories; thereby expanding the novella to form a collective history and national identity of the people of East Pakistan. From the vantage point of the third-person, Zahir analyses the retrospective memory of 1971 that not only shapes the present of the victims but also reclaims their past and rewrites their history. Since memory plays a significant role in shaping the national identity. One notion of national identity mainstreams one group of citizens and relegates the other to a marginal existence. Hence significant moments in a nation’s history are often interpreted in the light of conflicting metanarratives for pollical expediency. The paper explores Zahir’s novella ‘Life and political reality’ and depicts the clash of metanarratives in Bangladesh during the war of liberation and after the 1975 military coup.

This paper aims at exploring the texts of Haruki Murakami, namely his novels Norwegian Wood (1987) and Kafka on the Shore (2002), and an anthology of short stories Men Without Women (2014), to observe with a close eye the phallocentric tongue, literary devices, characters, and plot; the depiction of a man’s world through a quintessential male gaze. Studying his art of characterization and the recurrent motifs he employs towards that very realization are a key reference point to understand the covert stance of Murakami, which appears to be misogynistic in its stead. Murakami creates his fictional women with certain key characteristics omnipresent in almost all of them, their exhibition of ludicrously unnatural and overt sexuality as if deliberately strengthening a stereotype of the seemingly new “modern woman” who has no qualms in expressing her sexuality even to near-strangers. While his protagonists, in most cases heterosexual men, in every literary creation of his are blueprints of the same man, most probably either Murakami himself or someone he aspired to be like but failed and compensated for it by creating numerous men in that lonely ideal nihilistic image, one around whom women lose all sense of autonomy and give themselves up entirely, to what Murakami literarily depicted as a mysterious muscular charm. In Murakami’s literary world, the men are there to fulfill their destinies whereas the women are there for the men.

Emily Dickinson, now a celebrated poet, is still studied more from the subjective angles which belittle her stature than the objective ones which may contribute in highlighting her genuine poetic worth. This perspective is a modest attempt to decipher Dickinson’s poetry in the light of the Bhagavad-gita, the flashes of which are flashed in her concept of soul, self, non-attachment, renunciation, equanimity, happiness within, removal of false ego for peace and rejection of sense objects for a higher taste. A few relevant excerpts from the Bhagavad-gita and Dickinson’s poems have been analysed to trace out the spiritual light that reveals the path leading to her invisible connection with India. In her poems, she exhorts like Krishna of the Bhagavad-gita and reveals the truth of the material existence while making her journey from outside to inside. The application of the objective approach helps in bringing out the real worth of Emily Dickinson and contributes in connecting the threads of her poetry to the other parts of the world claiming for a universal appeal of her poetry.

It is said in the Norton Introduction to Literature that "poetry gives a vocabulary for emotion." Peter Howarth argues in his book British Poetry in the Age of Modernism that the social progress that has taken place in modern times has left obvious imprints upon the poetic form. This author is of the opinion that, as a result of advances in scientific knowledge, poetry has advanced, both in terms of its form and its meaning. In his book "The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism," Thomas Stern Eliot provides evidence in favour of this viewpoint by confirming that political and socio-historical existence may be analyzed via poetry. In doing so, Eliot anticipates Howarth's interpretation of this concept. When Philip Arthur Larkin says that he works as diligently as possible not just to analyze the social climate throughout his poems but also to discover measures to soothe the traumas endured in the second half of the twentieth century, one can really agree with him. This British poet places the social unrest that occurred during the World Wars in the forefront by adopting such a position, and from this point on, his attention is kept on the existential quest that was manifested in the post-war period when many British citizens were intrigued about their material renovation. This is because the poet believes that the conflicts between the sexes were the root cause of the social unrest.

Apart from wars, the Partition of India and Pakistan was one of the most horrific events in human history. Massacres, rapes, and sexual torture were used to promote racial hate, and women suffered a great deal more than males. Many people lost their lives, their homes, and even their identities. Therefore, this essay explores how the horrific Partition era affected the lives of women by turning them into silent victims of phallocentric or male supremacy through the Partition novels from which Shauna Singh Baldwin's What the Body Remembers and Bapsi Sidhwa's Ice Candy Man have been taken. Women were kidnapped, raped, forced into prostitution, and died during Partition. In the Rawalpindi area, where Muslim mobs preyed on women, systematic violence against women first appeared in March 1947. Before further attacks, many Sikh women committed suicide by jumping into water wells to save honour and avoid conversion. Due to phallocentric society's rules, the time of Partition was a traumatic experience for women on physical, emotional, political, social, and sexual levels. These female writers wrote about these experiences through a female perspective, which demonstrated resistance and retaliation against phallocentrism or the male point of view. Because of this, the present dissertation will add new aspects to the established canon of women, trauma, and phallocentrism.

Salman Rashid is Pakistan's most prominent travel writer. He has written nine travel novels. His debut memoir is titled A Time of Ma dness. The pa rtition of India in 1947 into two sepa ra te na tions, Pa kista n a nd India , wa s considered a ma noeuvre by the Colonia l British to use Divide a nd Rule ta ctics. The end consequence wa s dea dly ma yhem. People lost their identity while a ttempting to esta blish themselves in a new na tion a nd their na tive country. In the ensuing ma ss migra tion, they were sca rred a nd exiled. Millions of innocent individua ls were trea ted inhuma nely. The turmoil a nd disorder of life da nced on them. This book depicts the a uthor's persona l a dventure aga inst this ba ckground. To the rea ders, his own experiences a re a sta rk rea lity. "Consequently, when the memory of Pa rtition is irrevoca bly oblitera ted with the rise of my genera tion, we sha ll be left with no hope," he finishes the Memoir. The grea test tragedy will not be the loss of lives a nd property during the 1947 turmoil. Those efforts would ha ve been in va in since they never inspired us."

Sunil Sharma is in the vanguard of the contemporary fiction written in Indian English today. He has an enormous output of short fiction and poetry as well. Basically, a Marxist-text, but multi-layered, scholars are finding his novel highly relevant to assess the power -and wealth-driven modern societies. His debut novel, The Minotaur, is a master narrative that depicts the struggling humankind, groping for intellectual answers to old existential problems of the inequity of wealth and power, justice and good governance, and, oppression of the liberals. In short, the enduring human desires for a more humane, better, fair and liveable world for everybody. The novel is divided into an epilogue, eight chapters and an afterword. The most astonishing fact is the vision of the writer towards nature and its treatment at his hands. He has found nature to be a source of profound meaning, tranquillity and knowledge. Today, when there is a revived interest and lot of discussion over the reclamation of nature from mindless exploitation by man, it can be discerned that the writer in the very first decade of the twentieth century has posited wilderness with serenity, beauty, mysticism and spirituality. Nature has been delineated as life-giving and as a timeless marvel. The current paper deals with the transcendental and eco critical reading of this seminal text. It is an attempt to analyse and trace the writer’s oblique but remarkable portrayal of the virtues manifested in nature.

The colonization of India had awful consequences on the lives of people as the nation was severely affected by problems like poverty, illiteracy, unhygienic and callous living producing, in addition to the already prevailing sociological and economic problems, environmental and conservational crisis, the root cause of which was to be found in the incessant exploitation of natural resources by the ruling European colonial powers in India. Resultantly, the Gandhian struggle for independence could not restrict itself merely to the primary objective of acquiring a politically independent statehood for India, but it had to keep on its agenda also problems of ecology, hygiene and conservation. The novel Tamas describes analogous labors made by the congress working committee volunteers in the Muslim area despite antagonism by the Muslim League workers. This ecology of nationalism, however, could not sustain long as the ecological purity of a mosque and a temple, in retaliatory action, was polluted by the perpetrators. The novel regularly, throughout the narrative, establishes a connection between the ideas of pureness and dirtiness and the consequential communal clashes in the city by showing how harmony and mutual veneration for each other’s community, the so-called ecology of nationalism and political unity, was thwarted by an error of Nathu, a member of the lower caste community. In a broad sense, the character of Nathu is presented representatively in a way to demonstrate how the act of a socially impure community was accountable for the fall of the ecology of Indian nationalism rather than the political desires and mistakes of leadership.

Rajkumari de Silva is a poet from Colombo who has been at the Prashanti Nilayam Ashram in Andhra Pradesh since 1981. Only just few poets in India have composed spiritual prose poems in post-independence Indian English poetry. Rajkumari's works are mostly published by Writers' Workshop under the names 'Ananya: One Alone,' 'Ferryman! The Paddler,' 'The Bowl Baggar,' 'Lord I Forgot,' 'Template Bagger,' and 'Ravindra and O My Fakir!' She also has three books of writing named 'Rama Jaya Jaya,' 'The Supreme Sound,' and 'Gan Diva and Anu.' Rajkumari De silva's poetry is love poetry in which she expresses her heavenly love for her god, for whom her heart lingers and her soul longs. The poet in Rajkumari has received spiritual ambrosia from Sri Sathya Sai Baba's ghats. Rajkumari is a poet who knows the language of love via quiet rather than words. She goes through more than she communicates. She has experienced the Lord's everlasting love in unfathomable ways. This paper aims at highlighting the spiritual note of the poet’s love and devotion to the common man as well as God. The paper will also throw light on the mystic self of the secluded poet.

To place Lucknow in today's context, I have attempted to analyse the city's literature and culture in this paper. The paper is divided into three sections: the first gives a brief history of Lucknow up to the end of the nawabi era, focusing on events relevant to this paper; the second discusses music, drama, and poetry, especially the Lucknow School of Urdu poetry, masnavi, and marsia; and the third examines Lucknow's culture from a modern perspective. In his well-known work Guzishta Lakhnau (Purana Lakhnau in Hindi), Abdul Halim Sharar dates the beginning of Lucknow to the period when Lord Ram returned from his banvas (exile in the forest) and assumed the throne of Ayodhya. He granted his brother Lakshman this land as a jagir (estate), and Lakshman erected his home on a rise next to the river that had a deep tunnel that was rumoured to go to Sheshnag (located on the track of Amarnath cave in Kashmir). Around this raised area, a tiny settlement called Lakshman Teela—the word "teela" refers to an elevated area—was established. The unique culture of Lucknow, its secularism, refined manners, etiquette and extreme politeness in conversation lingers on albeit in a diluted form, and it is easy to recognize a person from Lucknow by the way he/she speaks, the use of a blend of Hindi, Urdu and the local dialect Awadhi, often called Hindustani language, the use of ‘aap’ even when addressing children, and the plural ‘hum’ in place of the singular ‘mai’.