Debali Mookerjea-Leonard
Biographic Data
| ID | 618983 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Debali Mookerjea-Leonard |
| GIVEN NAMES | Debali |
| FAMILY NAME | Mookerjea-Leonard |
| SIGNATURE | MOOKERJEA-LEONARD D |
| AFFILIATIONS | James Madison University |
| ORCID | 0009-0007-1111-8687 |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 11 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 3 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 11 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
The modern nomad
Through a reading of Bani Basu’s Janmabhoomi Matribhoomi ( The Continents Between ) ([1988] 2024) and Manoj Bhowmik’s Ei Dweep, Ei Nirbasan (‘This island, this exile’) (1988), this article examines literary representations of Indian/Bengali middle-class migrants in the United States. Beginning with a discussion of the migrant as a modern nomad, the article examines the migrants’ experience of leaving the homeland and the rupture of ties to family…
The Many Voices of Woman
Disputing critic Pramatha Chaudhuri's claim that Bengali women authors simply imitated the style of their male counterparts and lacked a genuinely feminine voice, writer Radharani Devi embarked on a literary experiment. Adopting the nom de plume "Aparajita Devi," she proceeded to supply the "feminine" voice the critic called for by writing poetry in a very different and markedly feminine style about women's experience of everyday domestic life. I…
The Partition at 75
Woman-Speak
Challenging critic Pramatha Chaudhuri’s claim that Bengali women authors lacked a genuinely feminine voice, the writer Radharani Devi embarked on a literary experiment – adopting a nom de plume, “Aparajita Devi,” she started writing poetry in a markedly “feminine” style about women’s experience of everyday domestic life. Aparajita’s language, buoyancy, and humor introduced a new esthetic into Bengali poetry. And her poems were wildly popular. Thi…
Futuristic Technologies and Purdah in the Feminist Utopia
Masculinity in Crisis
Using exiled Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen's novel Lajja ( Shame ), this essay addresses questions of the articulation of a vulnerable masculinity in the political arena. It contends that in South Asia the field of sectarian politics has become the site for asserting masculinity and also the site for the making and unmaking of citizenship. Tracking the production of minority citizenship and national belonging, this essay examines how Nasreen…
The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia
To be Pure or not to Be
This article examines Gandhi's writings, speeches, and correspondence, produced mainly from 1946 to the end of his life, on the subject of violence against women during the riots surrounding the Partition of the Indian subcontinent. Gandhi, the article demonstrates, persistently fails to address the gender pathology revealed at the heart of South Asian society by these violations, a pathology to which men were subject, but of which women were the…
Jyotirmoyee Devi
This paper offers a feminist reading of a novel and short story by Jyotirmoyee Devi on the predicament of Hindu and Sikh women who were abducted and/or raped in the riots surrounding the Partition of India in 1947, repatriated subsequently on state initiative, but rejected by their families and communities. I contend that the rejections were motivated, and even ideologically rationalised, by a long and complicated history of the patriarchal fetis…
Divided Homelands, Hostile Homes
Quarantined
Carrying forward the preliminary feminist research on Partition by Butalia Das Menon and Bhasin my paper suggests that it is possible to link the rejections of abducted and raped women with the social production of a discourse of honor and especially of womens sexual purity. Imbricated in a program of Hindu cultural nationalism beginning in the nineteenth century the discourse of womens chastity was deployed to counter issues of foreign dominatio…
Woman-Speak
Challenging critic Pramatha Chaudhuri’s claim that Bengali women authors lacked a genuinely feminine voice, the writer Radharani Devi embarked on a literary experiment – adopting a nom de plume, “Aparajita Devi,” she started writing poetry in a markedly “feminine” style about women’s experience of everyday domestic life. Aparajita’s language, buoyancy, and humor introduced a new esthetic into Bengali poetry. And her poems were wildly popular. Thi…
Divided Homelands, Hostile Homes
Quarantined
Carrying forward the preliminary feminist research on Partition by Butalia Das Menon and Bhasin my paper suggests that it is possible to link the rejections of abducted and raped women with the social production of a discourse of honor and especially of womens sexual purity. Imbricated in a program of Hindu cultural nationalism beginning in the nineteenth century the discourse of womens chastity was deployed to counter issues of foreign dominatio…
Quarantined
Carrying forward the preliminary feminist research on Partition by Butalia Das Menon and Bhasin my paper suggests that it is possible to link the rejections of abducted and raped women with the social production of a discourse of honor and especially of womens sexual purity. Imbricated in a program of Hindu cultural nationalism beginning in the nineteenth century the discourse of womens chastity was deployed to counter issues of foreign dominatio…
Jyotirmoyee Devi
This paper offers a feminist reading of a novel and short story by Jyotirmoyee Devi on the predicament of Hindu and Sikh women who were abducted and/or raped in the riots surrounding the Partition of India in 1947, repatriated subsequently on state initiative, but rejected by their families and communities. I contend that the rejections were motivated, and even ideologically rationalised, by a long and complicated history of the patriarchal fetis…
Divided Homelands, Hostile Homes
The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia
To be Pure or not to Be
This article examines Gandhi's writings, speeches, and correspondence, produced mainly from 1946 to the end of his life, on the subject of violence against women during the riots surrounding the Partition of the Indian subcontinent. Gandhi, the article demonstrates, persistently fails to address the gender pathology revealed at the heart of South Asian society by these violations, a pathology to which men were subject, but of which women were the…
Masculinity in Crisis
Using exiled Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen's novel Lajja ( Shame ), this essay addresses questions of the articulation of a vulnerable masculinity in the political arena. It contends that in South Asia the field of sectarian politics has become the site for asserting masculinity and also the site for the making and unmaking of citizenship. Tracking the production of minority citizenship and national belonging, this essay examines how Nasreen…
Futuristic Technologies and Purdah in the Feminist Utopia
Woman-Speak
Challenging critic Pramatha Chaudhuri’s claim that Bengali women authors lacked a genuinely feminine voice, the writer Radharani Devi embarked on a literary experiment – adopting a nom de plume, “Aparajita Devi,” she started writing poetry in a markedly “feminine” style about women’s experience of everyday domestic life. Aparajita’s language, buoyancy, and humor introduced a new esthetic into Bengali poetry. And her poems were wildly popular. Thi…
The Partition at 75
The Many Voices of Woman
Disputing critic Pramatha Chaudhuri's claim that Bengali women authors simply imitated the style of their male counterparts and lacked a genuinely feminine voice, writer Radharani Devi embarked on a literary experiment. Adopting the nom de plume "Aparajita Devi," she proceeded to supply the "feminine" voice the critic called for by writing poetry in a very different and markedly feminine style about women's experience of everyday domestic life. I…
The modern nomad
Through a reading of Bani Basu’s Janmabhoomi Matribhoomi ( The Continents Between ) ([1988] 2024) and Manoj Bhowmik’s Ei Dweep, Ei Nirbasan (‘This island, this exile’) (1988), this article examines literary representations of Indian/Bengali middle-class migrants in the United States. Beginning with a discussion of the migrant as a modern nomad, the article examines the migrants’ experience of leaving the homeland and the rupture of ties to family…
South Asian Studies and Diaspora (7 works) · Gender Studies (6 works) · Sociology (6 works) · South Asian Studies and Conflicts (6 works) · Partition (number theory (5 works) · South Asian Cinema and Culture (5 works) · Political science (4 works) · Anthropology (3 works) · Combinatorics (3 works) · Gender Studies (3 works)