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In difficult times, people turn to poetry, reading, and writing for solace and peace. In emotionally intense and traumatic times, people use poetry to process and understand the lived eyepieces. The havoc wreaked by the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the emotional and psychological well-being of individuals all across the world. Poetry has emerged as a savior in these difficult times. A phenomenon, "lockdown poems", came into existence as individuals all across the globe processed and shared their lived experiences of isolation, pain, and suffering through poems. In the present paper, students of a management program process and share their experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic, the subsequent lockdowns, and their community work experience. Poetry as a therapeutic and hope-building tool is discussed in the paper along with the original poems written by the students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper offers an extended introduction to the Kavikaṇṭhapāśa (or "Leash for Poets"), an anonymous text on the metaphysical qualities of poetry. By way of an annotated translation of key passages, the essay argues that the Kavikaṇṭhapāśa was likely composed sometime in the twelfth or thirteenth century, and that it is closely connected to the earliest Tamil pāṭṭiyal s. This suggests that it is one of the earliest witnesses to the metaphysical analysis of poetry in the Deccan and southern India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on exploring dhvani as a hermeneutical tool for reading Christian devotional literature. Dhvani is a theory of poetic suggestion proposed by Ānandavardhana in the eighth century and elaborated upon by Abhinavagupta in the eleventh century that posits layers of semantics in poetic language. By focusing on the devotional poetry of the seventeenth-century religious poets of England, this paper argues for Ānandavardhana's proposed poetics of suggestion as an enabling way of reading and cognizing devotion as a psycho emotive process. In the context of Indian Christianity, dhvani has been suggested by certain scholars as also enriching the possibilities of interfaith dialogue. This paper argues for incorporating poetic frameworks like dhvani as modes of interfaith dialogue, especially when reading Christian texts in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the manifestation of Dalit consciousness in the poems of Malayalam Dalit litterateur Vijila Chirappad. A close reading of her poems reveals a series of serious discriminations and disparities meted out to the lower castes by the ideologies upheld by the dominant castes. The canonical tradition of Malayalam literary discourse never bothered to give a realistic representation of the sensibilities of the marginalized sections of Kerala society. For example, the literature produced by upper-caste Malayalam poets was the result of a torpid lifestyle, detached from the world of sweat and toil. The long silenced and neglected voices of Malayali Dalit writers, especially women writers, have now amassed noteworthy recognition and accolades from literary spheres across India as well as academia devoted to Dalit literary studies. One of the chief traits visible in their texts is a strong note of resentment and resistance, which is the manifestation of their long-suppressed anguish and rebellion. Their use of linguistic structures and thematic content might sound too raw and painfully honest. We come across these tenets in the poems of Vijila Chirappad, who had struggled severely to come to the fore through the medium of literature. This paper tries to provide insights into the different forms of discriminations confronted by Dalit women of Kerala society and how Vijila Chirappad, who hails from this community has given expression to it through the frankness of her poems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an overview of the current trends in technical communication in English in India. The use of English language has undergone a great change and has largely become industry-specific. The prescribed text books for college students, which earlier had a mix of prose, poetry, drama and essays, have now been replaced by text books in Business English or Communciative English. This paper examines the effects of learning English purely for the purpose of professional communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will look at three dimensions of culture, in addition to religion, in the poetry of Agha Shahid Ali and try to arrive at an understanding of the nature of the poet's attitudes towards his past and present milieu and his inheritance. The first dimension is that of the relationship of the writer to the past and to Indian culture with reference to rituals and traditions and the location of these in the poet's familial environment. The next dimension is that of myths, legends and folklore. The focus will be on the use of mythology, made by the poet, which he recasts to reflect contemporary concerns and explore personal dilemmas. Finally, this paper will try and understand the role of religion in the life of the poet and the extent to which religious affiliation and belief impacts on his identity. Does the poet display an attitude of acceptance or does he use moribund practices as a tool of protest and in the spirit of reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

PCK Prem has emerged as a major poet writing in the contemporary world of Indian English poetry. It is needless to say that he has secured his place not only as a contemporary poet but also as a contemporary critic. His book, English Poetry in India: A Comprehensive Survey of Trends and Thought Patterns (2011), from AuthorsPress, New Delhi has found favour with the critics and students of Indian English poetry. Though his latest book of poems is Rainbow at Sixty (2010), but in the present paper I attempt an exploration of his book, Enigmas of Identity, published about 21 years back in 1990, for the study of hope and beauty as manifest in it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though trace fossils have been recorded from the Tal Group of the Krol-Tal Belt by earlier workers, most of the records are at generic level only. This paper describes, in detail, 24 ichnospecies from 20 ichnogenera, some of which are being reported for the first time, from the Ganog and Koti Dhaman sections of the Nigalidhar Syncline, H.P. Based on the ichnostratigraphic and ichnofabric analyses these ichnofossils have been categorized into three ichnoassemblages, namely Palaeophycus-Phycodes, Daedalus-Phycodes, and Cruziana Ichnoassemblages. An attempt has also been made for correlation of the Tal sections with other Precambrian-Cambrian sections of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much has been said about how fruitfully European aesthetics worked on the minds of Indian writers in the 19th century. For this reason Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), even before he turned twenty, in the eyes of some of his compatriots was already a Romanticist—'the Shelley of Bengal'. Of course, he could not be Shelley because of the very different historical circumstances of India and England (in India at that time historically could not be born aesthetic rebels like Shelley). But what was implied in this assertion remains: in Bengali writing about Tagore and his embarkation upon new aesthetic approaches, almost always the view is expressed that this happened only because of foreign influences. The task of this paper is to show very summarily that such a conclusion may not be correct. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shelley, one of the major English Romantic poets, was greatly influenced by the Indian thought that reached him through the works of the early English Orientalists of his time. Although his dream of personally visiting India had never materialized, his favorite readings included Sir William Jones's poems and essays on Indian subjects in 1770s, Captain Francis Wilford's essay, "Mount Caucasus" (1801), Sidney Owenson's The Missionary: An Indian Tale (1811), and James Henry Lawrence's The Empire of the Nairs, or, The Rights of Women: An Utopian Romance (1811). This paper provides an account of the influence of these works on some of Shelley's major poems (such as Queen Mab, Alastor, The Revolt of Islam, Prometheus Unbound, "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" and "Adonais") in their setting, style, and themes. As a revolutionary, Shelley was influenced by the forces of liberation and freedom suggested by oriental models as opposed to the hackneyed and overused neoclassicism of European literature. This paper argues how his was an attempt at a sympathetic understanding of India as a cradle of ancient civilization that knew no divide in terms of the so-called Western moral and racial superiority. His creative vision of India embraced an approach to integration as opposed to the Victorian reaction of mixed feelings. In fact, the Indian influence was not just a matter of stylistic embellishment away from the traditional but an indirect yet powerful means of attacking Western political system he so passionately rebelled against. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As part of an ongoing ethnographic study, this paper aims to consider the practice of poetry, sher-o-shayari , as naturalistic peer learning among a group of heroin addicts in Yamuna Bazaar, New Delhi. By examining meanings given to sher-o-shayari and experiences of participating in the practice, this article makes the claim that the practice of poetry involved three learning processes. First, it entailed ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ during group sessions in which implicit performance rules were created, evolved, and transferred to newcomers. Second, it included ‘meaning negotiation’ in which participants ‘break’ and ‘join’ different lines, images, or themes in group improvisation or individual creation events. Third, it contained ‘reflective learning’, which enabled development of the ‘whole’ person and helped situate the individual in the social world. Such data are important for the creation of ‘organic’ peer education programs that utilize naturalistic peer learning mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My recent research on an early female bhakti saint brought to the fore differences between her perspective as represented in poetry attributed to her and her medieval biographer's representation of her concerns. Through that study, the widespread academic use in recent scholarship of traditional biographies to interpret female bhakti saints became especially visible and problematic to me. In this experimental essay, I consider what patterns we might find if we prioritize the poetry attributed to influential female bhakti saints, navigating the significant issues of subjectivity, voice, and utterance to discern the contours of their devotional subjectivity as an authoritative nexus for conceptualizing and expressing individual and group devotion. In contrast to scholarly assurances that female bhakti saints are internally steadfast or that they are mainly troubled by external situations, I argue that their devotional subjectivity voices their realization that diverse embodied experiences of contestation are generative for a shared sense of devotion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article assesses the topic of theatrical performances and sculpture in medieval India through an analysis of the relationship between narrative sculptures, literary works of poetry (kāvya), and theatrical performances, as these are described in the manuals on dance/theatre (nāṭya), such as the Nāṭyaśāstra of Bharata, with the commentary Abhinavabhāratī by Abhinavagupta, Saṅgītaratnākara, and Nṛttaratnāvalī. The sculptures included in this study are found in four temples built by the Hoysaḷa dynasty in the 12th and 13th centuries and represent the story of "Arjuna and the Hunter (kirāta)", told in the Mahābhārata and in later literary works that were well-known in the courts of South India, including the Hoysaḷa court. After providing a detailed description of the sculptures based on the śilpa and nāṭya śāstras (treatises on sculpture and theatre), the study suggests that the sculptors carving these images adopted the technical language of nāṭya according to its theatrical usage (viniyoga), as an instrument to convey specific meanings and to express the emotions (bhāvas and rasas) evoked in the story, in both dancing and non-dancing figures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By examining the Sutta Nipāta, considered one of the collections containing the oldest texts of the Pāli canon, this study aims to reconstruct social, historical, and anthropological aspects of archaic Buddhist doctrine at the time of its definition in dialectic with the forces of orthodoxy and constituted power in 6th century BCE India. This study also provides important insights into the development and definition of contemplative practices devoted to the search for the 'absolute' (paramattha and brahmavihāra), which has often received little attention in meditation studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The treatise called the Natya Shastra has been told and retold for centuries. Originally written by the sage Bharatmuni somewhere around the 3rd century BC to the 2nd century AD, this book is considered a pedestal for modern drama and poetry. Bharatmuni in his work mentioned emotions as Rasa which he termed the ultimate reality. The concepts given by the sage have stood the test of time so much so that this ancient theory has now permeated into modern literature, architecture, animation and cinema. In his treatise, Bharata has given eight essential emotions that together bestow upon a spectator an aesthetic pleasure and Bibhasta Rasa is one among them. The permanent emotion of this Rasa is disgust. This study analyses the application of this particular Rasa in Public Service Advertisements by the Indian government. Antitobacco, anti-smoking and traffic awareness campaigns are the major thrust areas. For this purpose, secondary data was collected online on the Youtube platform and detailed content analysis was done and evaluated through Youtube comment scraping. The study concluded that the use of disgust in advertising is highly effective when used for public awareness campaigns. Also to be noted here is that Bibhasta emotion does not manifest in isolation. Other Rasas always follow it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The members of the Miya community in Assam, India have been facing an exacerbated threat of statelessness. Among the emancipatory grassroots organizations that have emerged to defend the rights of the Miya community, is an aesthetic resistance movement, now recognized as the 'Miya Poetry' movement. The bulk of the movement's work since its emergence in 2016 has been to call attention to the discriminations and human rights violations faced by the Miya people in citizenship contestation processes. Miya poetry has, on the one hand, received wide acceptance as a poetry of protest and resistance in artistic, academic, and liberal media circles, while on the other, its contributors have been frequently criminalized or questioned by the state for their political views. In this article, we argue that Miya poetry should be looked at beyond the frames of resistance and protest in order to understand its social work as a human-rights movement. These poems have the affective capacity to build resilience, to facilitate complex understandings of difference, and to reimagine equality, democratic values, and freedom from forced assimilation as integral to the idea of citizenship. We used innovative methods to form our data corpus, combining life history interviews with analyses of selected poems. We deployed thematic analysis to report our results. The findings will be useful not only for the poets and artists of different genres who seek to defend human rights, but more broadly for global human-rights practices that wish to actuate a deeper reflective engagement with art-based activisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jāyagauḍa's Kannaḍakuvalayānanda , the name may suggest, is another run-of-the-mill regional adaptation of Appayya Dīkṣita's bestseller textbook of Sanskrit poetics— The Joy of the Night Lily (Kuvalayānanda). However, a close reading of Jāyagauḍa's definitions and more importantly, his carefully curated examples, tells a different story. Jāyagauḍa's text is by no means a slavish translation, nor is his aim to present a brandnew, local theory of poetic figures. Rather, the Kannaḍakuvalayānanda places recent ṣaṭpadi poetry at the center-stage of poetics and creatively shifts the valence of understanding figures from abstract theory to writerly and readerly practice, beginning with Appayya Dīkṣita's own examples. The interaction of a "Sanskrit" poetic theory with a Kannada poetic memory here produces most unusual results. This experiment also draws our attention to a dazzlingly new (and as it turns out, very traditional) mode of doing literary criticism—in Sanskrit as well as in Kannada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study which examined the effectiveness of art therapy and artistic engagement in addressing the anxiety and stress of COVID-19 patients and their treatment teams in Kolkata, India. Among the various art and performance activities during the study are drawing, poetry, music, and theatre. Also mentioned are the factors leading to stress and anxiety like fear of death and isolation, and the effectiveness of art as a tool to improve relisience of patients and their carers.

Daruwalla is one who is good in presenting what he sees and one who is non-committal and who has a neutral approach. Daruwalla, though outwardly may be ironic and sarcastic in his tone and the manner in which he describes what he sees, has all the sympathy of the society he sees around. He is an individual who has experienced the impact of the post-independence trauma, the formation of India and Pakistan, the formative period of 'India Union'. The vision he had, the reality he saw around were poles apart. The Western education he had, the post he held and the reality that he experienced are reflected in his poems. He gives us a panoramic picture of Indian landscape where there are contradictions galore. This paper is an attempt to probe the sensibility of Daruwalla as a poet who has a deep concern of the Indian society though he has not explicitly expressed his concern of the Indian society his choice of subject and theme and his vivid depiction of the unhealthy practices of the people are nothing but his concern for the society. He is able to express his sympathy of the Indian society in a subtle way in both the poems: "Graft" and "Death by Burial". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vihang Naik's poems embrace themes like religious, social, cultural, political, economic and personal history. "Indian Summer" deals with nature in summer. Poet's love for environment is apparent in "Summer Hill Devdars". An earthquake can significantly change the face of the Earth, its geographical features become manifest in his poem "Gujarat". Verandah and Banyan have been used as suggestive symbols. His poetic style is laconic marked by linguistic deviations, mainly graphological deviations. He is an environment friendly and geographically bound poet. His love for nature and life at its simplest form is well expressed in his poems. His words are simple like the simplified life he portrays in sync with nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1920s, a new genre of didactic poems prescribing the proper Islamic practice of everyday peasant lives were published out of printing presses in deltaic, eastern Bengal's small towns. This article argues that these printed poems constituted a discourse of agrarian Islam that prescribed reforms in peasant material life—work, commerce, consumption, attire, hairstyle, and patriarchal authority—as a means of ensuring the viability of peasants’ market-based livelihoods. The article examines the emergence of a small-town Muslim intelligentsia that authored and financed the publications of these poems out of the Bengal delta's small-town printing industry. Eschewing communalism as an analytical frame in understanding South Asian Muslim identities, this article argues that Bengali peasant Muslim subjectivity was located in peasant engagements with agrarian markets. Agrarian Islamic texts urged Muslim cultivators to be good Muslims and good peasants, by working hard, reducing consumption, and balancing household budgets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article profiles Indian lion-tamer and poet Mahakavi Subramania Bharati. Born in the principality of Ettayapuram on December 11, 1882, Subramania loved poetry and music as a child. He earned the title Bharati from the learned courtiers of Ettayapuram because of his poetic flair and clever repartee. He was left in the custody of an aunt after his father died. Subramania studied Sanskrit, Hindi and English.

Rabindranath Tagore was essentially a religious thinker and he always upheld the primacy of the soul. In his work My Religion, he observed that "Man's religion is his innermost truth. One's religion is at the source of one's being"1. But he was not religious in the traditional sense and was least concerned with the practices of the communal religion he belonged to (i.e. Hinduism). The idea of a direct, joyful, and totally fearless relationship with God can be found in many of Tagore's religious writings, including the poems of Gitanjali. From India's diverse religious traditions he drew many ideas, both from ancient texts and from popular poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The British empire set off an explosion of poetry, in English and native languages, particularly in India, Africa and the Middle East. This poetry – largely neglected in the scholarship on nationalism – was often revolutionary both aesthetically and politically, expressing a spirit of cultural independence. Attacks on England and the empire are common not just in native colonial poetry but also in poetry of the British isles. This article discusses some of the most influential poets, including: Shawqi of Egypt, Tagore of India, Rusafi of Iraq, Yeats of Ireland, Iqbal of Pakistan, Greenberg of pre-State Israel, and Kipling, the ‘poet of empire’. In contrast with other empires, many poets were inspired by British culture to create revolutionary art and seek political independence. Most strikingly, British rule was instrumental in the revival of vernacular Hebrew poetry after 1917 as the centre of Hebrew literature shifted from Odessa to Tel Aviv. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the expression of environmental concerns in the selected poets of Nagaland, India. It traces the origins of their ecological concerns. It speculates that such poetry evolved as a response to a growing consciousness of environmental responsibility despite of political and social instability. Poems discussed in detail in the article include "My Eyes Have Seen Again," by Wetshokhrolo Lasuh, "For My Son," by Easterine Iralu and "Puliebadze," by Nini Lungalang.

This article uses case examples of analytical work with “the affliction of love” to show how bringing mythology and poetry into clinical work can help shed light on the nature of the agony inherent in a love relationship. A discourse on why we fall in love and five degrees of love, according to the religious lore of India, follows. The views of Jung and Rumi regarding the mystery of love are compared and used as guidance for development of ego qualities that could help the individual bear this alchemical process. A possible psychological value gained is an access to the transformative potential of romantic love, particularly in developing a relationship with one's inner healer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a compilation of bibliography of Indian literature in 2007. It explores on the good deal of bilingual creativity in poetry and paralleled by the number of collections of multi-lingual poetry and prose in South Africa as their translations between different media are noted as a reflection of a continuing dialogue between fiction and cinema in the country where films have a special place in the national imaginations, and orality and writing in New Zealand and East and Central Africa. Furthermore, it lists bibliographies under a specific category in literature which includes, poetry, drama, and letters.

This article examines the text-metrical ("poetic") organization of epistemic stance-taking in discourse, focusing on epistemic stance in a form of argumentation, Tibetan Buddhist 'debate' (rtsod pa) at Sera Monastery in India. Emergent text-metrical structures in discourse are shown to reflexively map utterance-level propositional stance into larger-scale, fractionally congruent models of interactional stance. In charting the movement from epistemic stance to interactional stance by way of poetic structure, the article argues for and clarifies the place of poetics in the study of stance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information about Indian English literature wherein poetry and drama have emerged which is unusual because fiction usually prevails. New playwrights were published, and famous poets brought out their new works, and new poets made their debut in book form. On the other hand, disappointment has came to novelist, however, there were also interesting novels published such as Altaf Tyrewala's "No God in Sight" and Rupa Bajwa's "The Sari Shop" which won the Sahitya Akademi Award for 2006. It also features E.V. Ramakrishnan's collection of poems "Terms of Seeing". Young women poets including Tishani Doshi, Meena Kandasamy and Anjum Hasan have published their first works.

This article looks at the context of Indianness in the poems of A. K. Ramanujan. Ramanujan is known as one of the important poets in India due to the terseness of his diction, the consummate skill with which he introduces rhyme and assonance into his verse, his etched, crystallized images and his discipline in handling the English language. The common themes of his poetry include Hindu heritage, conjugal life, family life, childhood and consciousness about the opposite sex.

The article explores the authenticity of Indian literature and the development of modern genres and aesthetic conventions in the nineteenth-century colonial Bengal. According to the author, Bengal have continued its neglect and ignore the seminal role of poetry in formulating the nationalist imagination. Novels and short stories as forms of new fiction have been connected to the questions of political modernity.

This article presents the author,s views on Margaret Trawick's book "Notes on Love in a Tamil Family." It was researched in three phases, in 1975, 1980 and then in 1984. First published in 1990, the book was awarded the 1992 Coomaraswamy award for significant scholarly work on South Asia. Oxford University Press, India brought out an Indian edition in 1996. Trawick's meeting with Themozhiyar, or Ayya, as he is also known in the book, was a serendipitous one. She was in Tamil Nadu researching concepts of the human body in South India. Ayya was introduced to her as a "Tamil scholar who made his living by lecturing at religious gatherings about Saiva literature." Ayya introduced Trawick to the epic poem Tirukkovaiyar by Manikkavacakar.

The article profiles Indian poet Adivi Bapiraju. Bapiraju was born on October 8, 1895 at Saripalli near Bhimavaram in West Godavari district in India. He joined the primary school at Kovvuru in 1903, and later attended high schools at Narsapuram and Vijayawada. His studies and life were chequered with crests and troughs.