Anjali Gera Roy
Biographic Data
| ID | 643862 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Anjali Gera Roy |
| GIVEN NAMES | Anjali Gera |
| FAMILY NAME | Roy |
| SIGNATURE | ROY A G |
| AFFILIATIONS | Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7436-7575 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 50 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 26 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 49 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Partition’s purusharthis
The unequal power hierarchy implicit in the Indian state and local response to the refugee crisis post-Partition is reflected in the creation of docile subjectivity of the refugee that is enshrined in the terminology “sharanarthi”. The Nehruvian ideology of self-rehabilitation, coupled with the Punjabi ethnocultural stereotype of stoicism, enterprise, etc., and religious practices enjoined in Sikh scriptures, however, privileged Punjabi refugees’…
The 'undefined' in Malabar
During the Indian partition of 1947, a group of Mappila labourers from Malabar (Kerala) who had travelled to Karachi for employment opportunities were denied entry to their homeland upon return. What ensued was a decades-long legal and political battle to regain their lost citizenship. This study examines their lived histories and strives to understand the numerous contestations of citizenship that were engendered in Malabar. It investigates the …
Unhoming home
Healing the Bloody Line
The asymmetry of political with social, linguistic and cultural borders and the contradiction between national citizenship and cultural belonging is now an established trope in the discussion of borders in Partition Studies. Less examined is the dissolution of political boundaries through non state actors’ using informal or formal tactics like kinship and friendship relations, family visits and pilgrimage tours, cultural exchanges and collaborati…
Multani Shikarpuri Migration to Malabar
Since time immemorial, Malabar, the fabled port region on the western seaboard of India, has witnessed several waves of migration owing to its expansive trade networks across the Arabian Sea. This paper traces the continuous migration of the Multani Shikarpuri from Multan to Kozhikode (formerly Calicut and part of Malabar). The study, in its entirety, attempts to document the lived narratives and experiences of the Multani Shikarpuri community in…
Micro Partitions
This special section on micro partitions follows 'the reduction in scale' from macro in national to meso in regional and micro in micro-regional histories in the field of Partition studies through focusing on micro-narratives of Partition from Punjab, a region divided between India and Pakistan after the Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947. The focus of the essays is on affective memories of Partition in testimonies and cultural represen…
Remembering partition in diaspora films
Although traumatic memories of the subcontinental Partition left indelible scars on South Asian diasporas dispersed worldwide, Partition has been examined from a nation-centric lens. Lately, Partition scholars have emphasised the need to investigate its traumatising effects beyond the nation states of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Arguing that when it comes to geographically and temporally displaced diasporic subjects, memory becomes the prima…
Toxic Rhythms
Bhangra music has generically functioned as the site for the articulation of a particular form of Jat masculinity that may be described as hypermasculine. In its glorification of Jat machismo and reification of the female as an object of the Jat’s adoration, it has perpetuated gendered stereotypes originating in feudal Punjabi cultures of honour. Several Punjabi folksongs or those attributed to legendary Punjabi folk singers map strength, courage…
Speech Unites, Script Divides
The debate on the existence of syncretic, composite, overlapping boundaries of Panjab has divided scholars into two groups. As opposed to Harjot Oberoi, Nonica Dutta and others who have traced the construction of religious boundaries through the consolidation of formal religious identities highlighting the role of the Singh Sabhas and Arya Samaj, another group of scholars such as Farina Mir, Yogesh Snehi and others confirm the continuity of share…
Descendants of a Difficult Past
Severed from the immediate physical realities of the Indian partition, Bangalore, a city in South India, witnessed a large influx of Sindhi refugees during the partition years. However, the lived narratives of these refugees haven't been examined in the Indian partition historiography. Identifying this discernible research gap, the paper examines the diverse resettlement strategies and practices adopted by the Sindhi refugees in Bangalore. Throug…
Regional Perspectives on Indias Partition
The Somatechnics of Cognition, Memory and Desire in Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte and Fury
The accelerated use of technical prostheses as assistive devices has resulted in an externalisation of the site of cognition outside the sensory-motor neural apparatus. This has in turn problematised the notion of embodied cognition and corporeal integrity. Bernard Stiegler in For a New Critique of Political Economy (2010a) states that human beings not only evolve and mature genetically but ‘extragenetically’ and ‘epiphylogenetically’, that is th…
Ideological positioning in the representation of borders
Ideology and cinematic representation are crucially linked even though a film’s positioning of itself with respect to dominant state ideology may differ thus contesting the idea that films always serve as ideological state apparatus. In this context, the paper reflects on the complex ways in which the ideological positioning – advertently or inadvertently – of cinematic representations of Partition in Hindi films of the 2000s interacts with domin…
Yeh Hai Bombay Meri Jaan
Critical toponymies, instead of viewing place names as transparent signifiers that designate places as ‘objects’ or ‘artifacts’, have foregrounded the necessity for understanding place naming as ‘a contested spatial practice’ and attempted ‘a critical interrogation of the politics of place naming’. In view of the frequency of colonial erasures and appropriations of the spaces of the colonised, post-colonial reclamations of place resort to technol…
Philosophy, education and visceral politics of the now
The essay looks into the pedagogical role of philosophy in shaping the practice of dissent. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s radical understandings of philosophy as a machinic assemblage, it redeploys philosophy as a pedagogical tool which gathers traction from social events and remains invested in a dissensual politics. As a machinic assemblage committed to a dissensual politics philosophy works alongside collective modalities of e…
Facing the Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic has intensely impacted art production and the art market all around the world. This is dramatically visible inside the Patua or Patachitra communities in Medinipur, West Bengal, where Patachitras’ scrolls characterise the economy of folk-art communities in the so-called villages of painters. Patachitras’ singing pictures belong to an ancestral tradition of storytelling and performing art. For centuries, new themes have been …
Distress, Duress and Dichotomy
The sociology of everyday life is a paradigm of theoretical orientation. The complexities of the everyday life of the social actors exhibit more than what is there in the framework of the apparent reality and help in constructing a fulfilling and applicable idea about the social actors. This essay aims to examine such complexities in the fabric of the everyday lives of the scroll painters of Naya, a village in West Midnapore district of West Beng…
Gendering Dance
Originating as a Punjabi male dance, bhangra, reinvented as a genre of music in the 1980s, reiterated religious, gender, and caste hierarchies at the discursive as well as the performative level. Although the strong feminine presence of trailblazing female DJs like Rani Kaur alias Radical Sista in bhangra parties in the 1990s challenged the gender division in Punjabi cultural production, it was the appearance of Taran Kaur Dhillon alias Hard Kaur…
Narratives of Secular Nationalism in Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children” and “The Moor’s Last Sigh”
Nationalism as a theoretical category is a widely disputed and elusive concept. This is due to the fact that the formulation of the nation-space across widely scattered geographies has now to take into account an altered dynamics of interaction and exchange. The relevance of literary language as an aesthetic register to corroborate the nation as “a powerful historical idea” and the need to formulate suitable analogies reveal the inadequacy of map…
Desiring Production a Cross-Cultural Pathology of Desire in Salman Rushdie’s “Fury” and “The Ground Beneath her Feet”
The present essay through a close investigation of Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) and Fury (2002) looks into the challenges posed by global capitalism at the turn of the 21st century. The resilience of civilizations, in particular their cultural vocabulary and ethnic compositions, is explored in the face of the homogenizing drive of capitalist enterprise. The encounters between various ethnicities and cultures create liminal …
The precarious diasporas of Sikh and Ahmadiyya generations
Precarity and precariousness have largely been theorized within the discourse of neoliberal capitalism as it impacts individuals in nations of the Global North. Michael Nijhawan’s new book The Prec
Deconstructing the Non-West
Yin, Jing’s essay ‘Beyond Postmodernism: A Non-Western Perspective on Identity’ is an extremely ambitious and timely project that aims to explore the possibility of theorizing selfhood from a non-W
Bhangra Moves
Bhangra is commonly understood as the hybrid music produced in Britain by British Asian music producers through mixing Panjabi folk melodies with western pop and black dance rhythms. This is derived from a Punjabi harvest dance of the same name. This book looks at Bhangra's global flows from one of its originary sites, the Indian subcontinent, to contribute to the understanding of emerging South Asian cultural practices such as Bhangra or Bollywo…
The Production of Alternative Global Spaces
de Certeau explicitly posits walking as a mode of resistance, which has been updated in theories of affect and posthumanism that advocate a return to the concept of the body and the human, respectively. These new theories propose a modified walker who blurs the subject–object/human–nonhuman distinction, reinforcing both a contested embodiment and an inclusive approach to the “other” in self-fashioning. Salman Rushdie, too, uses the trope of walki…
Dream of a World Without Borders
This essay revisits the ‘Komagata Maru’ incident of 1914 to investigate the legalities that have complicated migration from some parts of the world to others since the era of apparently porous colonial borders to the highly bordered contemporary world that is differentially porous. It shows that the promise of free movement in the global village is undercut by the reality of legislation and juridical issues that continue to regulate the movements…
Making and Unmaking of Strangers – The Komagata Maru Episode and the Alienation of Sikhs as Undesirable Persons
The Komagata Maru episode, which became a test case for White Canada and Asian Exclusion polices, epitomizes the process of ‘the making and unmaking of strangers’ under British imperialism (Bauman 1997 Bauman, Zygmunt. 1997. Postmodernity and Its Discontents. Cambridge, MA: Polity. [Google Scholar]). While the passengers on board the ship chartered by Gurdit Singh, a descendant of one of the Sikhs who had arrived in the British Malaya as part of …
Representation of Sikhs in Bollywood Cinema
Like other ethnic minorities, Sikhs have been conventionally represented in popular Hindi cinema either as brave warriors or as uncouth rustics. In the nationalist text in which the imagined subject was an urban North Indian, Hindu male, Sikh characters were displaced and made to provide comic relief. Since the mid-1990s, Hindi filmmakers have genuflected to the rising economic and political power of the Sikh diaspora through token inclusions of …
Aja'ib, Ghar'aib, Tilismi Qisse, and Salman Rushdie's Tilismi Realism
Salman Rushdie's writing has been appropriated in both postmodernism and postcolonialism and largely viewed as being influenced by the magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Márquez. Despite Rushdie's self-acknowledged debt to “oriental” storytelling traditions of Dastan-e-Amir Hamza, Dastan-e-Hatim Tai, Panchatantra, Kathasaritsagar, and Arabian Nights, his “Eastern literary ancestors”1 have not been examined in depth. Strongly opposing the perception …
Haroun and Luka
Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) and Luka and the Fire of Life (2010) are telling instances of his hybridization of Eastern and Western narrative and aesthetic traditions. Particularly, the Islamic storytelling tradition of the dastan has been completely overlooked. While acknowledging that many narrative traditions of the West and the East, such as fairy tales, fantasies, boys’ adventure stories, as well as One Thousand and …
Black beats with a Punjabi twist
The bonding between black and brown immigrants in Britain has resulted in the emergence of a new musical genre called Bhangra, which hybridises Punjabi dhol rhythms with those of reggae, rap and hip hop. Bhangra's appropriation of Black sounds that are considered 'Kool' in the West has not only given Asian youth a new, distinctive voice in the form of 'Asian dance music' but has also led to the reinvention of Punjabi folk tradition in consonance …
Asian Kool or Punjabi Kool? Bhangra's global invasion
The common understanding of Bhangra as a hybrid British music makes one overlook the fact that it is derived from a Punjabi harvest dance of the same name. Echoing ethnomusicologists' interest in the discovery of the musics of ‘others’, the British media hailed it as ‘Asian Kool’ and ‘the voice of the Asian youth’ marking the British Asian presence on the British pop cultural scene. British culture studies examined Bhangra developments in Britain…
Microstoria
Remembering partition in diaspora films
Although traumatic memories of the subcontinental Partition left indelible scars on South Asian diasporas dispersed worldwide, Partition has been examined from a nation-centric lens. Lately, Partition scholars have emphasised the need to investigate its traumatising effects beyond the nation states of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Arguing that when it comes to geographically and temporally displaced diasporic subjects, memory becomes the prima…
Ideological positioning in the representation of borders
Ideology and cinematic representation are crucially linked even though a film’s positioning of itself with respect to dominant state ideology may differ thus contesting the idea that films always serve as ideological state apparatus. In this context, the paper reflects on the complex ways in which the ideological positioning – advertently or inadvertently – of cinematic representations of Partition in Hindi films of the 2000s interacts with domin…
Narratives of Secular Nationalism in Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children” and “The Moor’s Last Sigh”
Nationalism as a theoretical category is a widely disputed and elusive concept. This is due to the fact that the formulation of the nation-space across widely scattered geographies has now to take into account an altered dynamics of interaction and exchange. The relevance of literary language as an aesthetic register to corroborate the nation as “a powerful historical idea” and the need to formulate suitable analogies reveal the inadequacy of map…
Desiring Production a Cross-Cultural Pathology of Desire in Salman Rushdie’s “Fury” and “The Ground Beneath her Feet”
The present essay through a close investigation of Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) and Fury (2002) looks into the challenges posed by global capitalism at the turn of the 21st century. The resilience of civilizations, in particular their cultural vocabulary and ethnic compositions, is explored in the face of the homogenizing drive of capitalist enterprise. The encounters between various ethnicities and cultures create liminal …
The Production of Alternative Global Spaces
de Certeau explicitly posits walking as a mode of resistance, which has been updated in theories of affect and posthumanism that advocate a return to the concept of the body and the human, respectively. These new theories propose a modified walker who blurs the subject–object/human–nonhuman distinction, reinforcing both a contested embodiment and an inclusive approach to the “other” in self-fashioning. Salman Rushdie, too, uses the trope of walki…
Bombay in Salman Rushdie’s novels
Bombay, the city where Salman Rushdie spent his childhood, features prominently in four of his novels, namely Midnight’s Children (1981), The Satanic Verses (1988), The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995) and The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999). However, in traditional literary approaches, the built environment and the materiality of Bombay evident in Rushdie’s fiction are largely lost disallowing Rushdie’s portrayal of the city to be explained as the real-im…
BhangraNation
Punjabi Delights in Forbidden City Singapore
SOJOURN is an interdisciplinary journal devoted to the study of social and cultural issues in Southeast Asia. It publishes empirical and theoretical research articles with a view to promoting and disseminating scholarship in and on the region. Areas of special concern include ethnicity, religion, tourism, urbanization, migration, popular culture, social and cultural change, and development. Fields most often represented in the journal are anthrop…
Microstoria
Teri Chunni De Sitare
BhangraNation
House on Shoulder
Punjabi Delights in Forbidden City Singapore
SOJOURN is an interdisciplinary journal devoted to the study of social and cultural issues in Southeast Asia. It publishes empirical and theoretical research articles with a view to promoting and disseminating scholarship in and on the region. Areas of special concern include ethnicity, religion, tourism, urbanization, migration, popular culture, social and cultural change, and development. Fields most often represented in the journal are anthrop…
Pakistani Diasporas
edited by Virinder S. Kalra, Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2009, 379 pp., Rs. 495.00 (hardback), ISBN 978‐0‐19‐547625‐5 Banda bhi badkīsmati se Mechanical Engineer Hai (Yours truly is also unfo
Celebrating ‘the sons of Jats’
While critics of globalization had apprehended that its homogenizing wave would erase ethnic, cultural and sectarian difference to produce cosmpolitanized identities, the counter movement towards fragmentation in the present global process has paradoxically led to the thickening and intensification of boundaries and the return of ‘the tribes’, which converge on primordial essences such as language, culture, region, religion, ethnicity and caste. …
Asian Kool or Punjabi Kool? Bhangra's global invasion
The common understanding of Bhangra as a hybrid British music makes one overlook the fact that it is derived from a Punjabi harvest dance of the same name. Echoing ethnomusicologists' interest in the discovery of the musics of ‘others’, the British media hailed it as ‘Asian Kool’ and ‘the voice of the Asian youth’ marking the British Asian presence on the British pop cultural scene. British culture studies examined Bhangra developments in Britain…
Sikh Diaspora Philanthropy in Punjab
Travels of Bollywood Cinema
Faith outside the Lab
The four hundred and fifty strong academic community in the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, one of the premier institutions of science and technology in the country, include some of India's leading scientists and technologists, who have won reputed national and international awards for excellence in their respective fields of specialization. In an institution that prides itself on its 'pursuit of excellence', and where almost every fac…
The remembered railway town of Anglo-Indian memory
Unlike those who grew up in railway towns, the majority of Indians would have a hard time locating towns with quaint names on the Indian map that signified adventure, romance and the Raj. Kharagpur is one such colonial railway town whose history has been overwritten by one of the ‘temples’ of the postcolonial nation state, the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology. But Kharagpur, about 110 km away from Kolkata, is remembered as home in Anglo…
Soldiers, Artisans, Cultivators and Revolutionaries
The geography of Punjab, a land-locked region divided between India and Pakistan, makes it an unlikely player in oceanic sojourns. But imperial interventions in Punjab in the middle of the 19th century triggered movements from Punjab that inserted this region in the littoral narrative of the Indian Ocean. Unlike the movements of lascars and traders, who have been central to the revisionist histories of the Indian Ocean, those from Punjab have not…
Distribution and circulation of Indian films in Singapore
Despite the long history of the export and exhibition of Indian films in Southeast Asia, a systematic documentation of how Hindi and Tamil films from India found their way into the region has yet to be undertaken. Theatrical exhibition of Indian films is reported to have sharply declined or ended since the late 1970s in their traditional markets in Malaya, Ceylon, British East Africa, Burma, Persian Gulf Ports, Thailand and South Vietnam. Yet fil…
Black beats with a Punjabi twist
The bonding between black and brown immigrants in Britain has resulted in the emergence of a new musical genre called Bhangra, which hybridises Punjabi dhol rhythms with those of reggae, rap and hip hop. Bhangra's appropriation of Black sounds that are considered 'Kool' in the West has not only given Asian youth a new, distinctive voice in the form of 'Asian dance music' but has also led to the reinvention of Punjabi folk tradition in consonance …
Imagining Punjab and the Punjabi diaspora
Bombay in Salman Rushdie’s novels
Bombay, the city where Salman Rushdie spent his childhood, features prominently in four of his novels, namely Midnight’s Children (1981), The Satanic Verses (1988), The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995) and The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999). However, in traditional literary approaches, the built environment and the materiality of Bombay evident in Rushdie’s fiction are largely lost disallowing Rushdie’s portrayal of the city to be explained as the real-im…
Representation of Sikhs in Bollywood Cinema
Like other ethnic minorities, Sikhs have been conventionally represented in popular Hindi cinema either as brave warriors or as uncouth rustics. In the nationalist text in which the imagined subject was an urban North Indian, Hindu male, Sikh characters were displaced and made to provide comic relief. Since the mid-1990s, Hindi filmmakers have genuflected to the rising economic and political power of the Sikh diaspora through token inclusions of …
Haroun and Luka
Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) and Luka and the Fire of Life (2010) are telling instances of his hybridization of Eastern and Western narrative and aesthetic traditions. Particularly, the Islamic storytelling tradition of the dastan has been completely overlooked. While acknowledging that many narrative traditions of the West and the East, such as fairy tales, fantasies, boys’ adventure stories, as well as One Thousand and …
Immobile mobilities and free-flowing Sikh movements from Punjab
This essay borrows Bryan Turner’s theory of the ‘enclave society’ to throw light on imperial tactics and strategies deployed to immobilize the transnational movements of Sikhs under imperialism focusing on the Komagata Maru episode [2007. “The Enclave Society: Towards a Sociology of Immobility.” European Journal of Social Theory 10 (2): 287–304]. It proposes the notion of immobile mobilities to argue that while regulated movements from Punjab wer…
The journey of the Komagata Maru
More than a hundred years ago, a Japanese ship called Komagata Maru chartered by Gurdit Singh, a prosperous entrepreneur based in Singapore, carrying 376 Punjabi passengers - largely Sikhs but also some Hindus and Muslims - from Hong Kong was not permitted to land in Vancouver on grounds of a stipulation about a continuous journey from the port of departure and forced to return to Budge Budge near Kolkata where the passengers were fired at, detai…
The Punjabis in British Columbia
Literature on South Asian Migrations and Diasporas in Canada has largely been silent on the experience of rural migrants from Punjab even after more than a century of Punjabi migration. Kamala Naya
Making and Unmaking of Strangers – The Komagata Maru Episode and the Alienation of Sikhs as Undesirable Persons
The Komagata Maru episode, which became a test case for White Canada and Asian Exclusion polices, epitomizes the process of ‘the making and unmaking of strangers’ under British imperialism (Bauman 1997 Bauman, Zygmunt. 1997. Postmodernity and Its Discontents. Cambridge, MA: Polity. [Google Scholar]). While the passengers on board the ship chartered by Gurdit Singh, a descendant of one of the Sikhs who had arrived in the British Malaya as part of …
Aja'ib, Ghar'aib, Tilismi Qisse, and Salman Rushdie's Tilismi Realism
Salman Rushdie's writing has been appropriated in both postmodernism and postcolonialism and largely viewed as being influenced by the magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Márquez. Despite Rushdie's self-acknowledged debt to “oriental” storytelling traditions of Dastan-e-Amir Hamza, Dastan-e-Hatim Tai, Panchatantra, Kathasaritsagar, and Arabian Nights, his “Eastern literary ancestors”1 have not been examined in depth. Strongly opposing the perception …
Bhangra Moves
Bhangra is commonly understood as the hybrid music produced in Britain by British Asian music producers through mixing Panjabi folk melodies with western pop and black dance rhythms. This is derived from a Punjabi harvest dance of the same name. This book looks at Bhangra's global flows from one of its originary sites, the Indian subcontinent, to contribute to the understanding of emerging South Asian cultural practices such as Bhangra or Bollywo…
Sociology (34 works) · History (27 works) · Art (24 works) · Gender Studies (24 works) · Political science (24 works) · Philosophy (20 works) · History (19 works) · Law (19 works) · South Asian Studies and Conflicts (18 works) · Literature (17 works)