Silent Words

Affirmation of the Gendered Stereotypes in William Shakespeare's Hamlet: A Gender and Feminist Critique                                                                          -Rajan Gautam        This essay reads William Shakespeare's  Hamlet   taking the basic insights from the Gender and Feminist Criticism which hold a view that "patriarchal ideology pervades those writings which have been traditionally considered great literature" (Abrams, 89), and that literary texts use the recurrent images and stereotypes that need to be identified and analyzed so as to understand the ideology of the time. Shakespeare's  Hamlet  also abounds with these stereotypes and images. My contention is that Shakespeare  subscribes to the sexism of the age b...

The Kite Runner  chronicles the story of Amir, the son of a wealthy merchant living in Afghanistan. He has difficulties in adjusting himself in the traditional Afghan society. His growing distance with his father in Afghanistan who is the embodies the masculine traits,  his intimacy with Rahim Khan who seems have some feminine traits, and his improved relation with Baba America have a lot to do with his failure to internalize the traditional masculine codes. He is less competitive, more emotional, and always craves for feminine touch and loves to read and write poems and stories rather than playing sports. He is neither athlete like his father not has any fierceness of his father.  He in this sense stands for an emergent masculinity that embodies virtually no traits of traditional manhood or masculinity. By protecting Sohrab, Hassan’s son from the Talib Aseef, one of his childhood nemeses after much tribulation in Afganistan and later adopting him as his son, he...

                                        With two of my Sweet Students, Sanju and Sehnaj..2011.

Saturday Outing...Had fun...Got to learn so many things there...Especially the one: Don't go to parks and romantic places without your girl friend....so many couple there....haha...

This is one of my favorite photos...and it has captured one of my life's memorable moments...:) With my students: Asmita (in Green Top), Sujita and my friend HK 

Scripting the Unwritten: ‘Little’ History in Manjushree Thapa’s The Tutor of History Recently the novelists from Nepal have moved from key events in the history of the nation to focus on those that may not have made a global impact. Manjushree Thapa’s The Tutor of History is an example at hand.   The Tutor of History , a story of poor and downtrodden people is a subalternist critique of Nepali politics and history. The characters drawn in the book are from the grass root level where they run an unnoticed life between hope and frustration. By presenting the bleak life of ordinary people, Manju is redrawing the boundaries of history through marginal landscape. So, the text is a history of subalterns who lived during 1990s and remained unnoticed in Nepali history written academically. To prove this hypothesis, this paper will draw basic insights from Deepesh Chakravarty, Ranjit Guha, Gayatri Spivak, Michel Foucault and Hayden White [1] . [1] I will be taking basic insights of ...

Reports of governmental and non-governmental agencies present a very appalling picture of child labor in Nepal. There are thousands of children—I call them ‘forgotten children’—working as domestic workers hidden behind mansion walls. These are the children who experience little or no childhood at all. Leela is a ten-years-old servant in one of the houses in Kathmandu. Every morning at 5:30 she gets up, trudges out to a nearby public tap to fetch water for her master's household, sweeps the yard and then prepares tea for the whole family. Then she helps prepare the family’s meals, runs errands and washes dishes and clothes. When the whole family has taken the meals, then only she can have her turn. If something goes wrong from her side, she is beaten and even tortured. Leela is one of the most forgotten children, a domestic worker hidden behind mansion walls. Like her, thousands of children are exploited in our societies. With a dream of a bright future, these kids are sent by ...