AustLit
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'This collection of essays takes an interdisciplinary approach to the ecological, social, economic and, in particular, the cultural dimensions of the Australia-India relationship. The essays provide many levels of focus on environment, place and culture. Some evoke appreciation of particular "places," either in India or Australia. Many explore how literature has treated "landscape," while some are comparative studies of cultural, historical and political development. The essays arise from a particular gathering of scholars: The East India chapter of the Indian Association for the Study of Australia (IASA) held its inaugural international conference in Kolkata on 22-23 January 2009. Much of the work is comparative, exploring common Indian and Australian themes of colonial and postcolonial experience, implications of migration and diaspora, and shared language and literature. The work also explores shared environmental crisis, manifest in landscapes such as the Mouths of the Ganges and Australia's Murray Darling Basin. Such comparisons indicate our shared experience of the "crisis" of ecological, social, economic and cultural sustainability. As human future is colonized through environmental degradation, and determined by human migration and shared culture and values, our relationship to "place" is revitalized and reassessed. We seek simultaneously a reconciliation between humans and a realignment of the human-nature relationship. This is the most basic meaning of social and ecological sustainability' (publisher website).
Contents
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The Two Way Flows : Connecting Cultures, Understanding Others,
single work
criticism
(p. 2-13)'Sanjukta Dasgupta's introductory essay contains a reminder of early comparisons of Australian and Indian agricultural development, for example in the study by the second Australian Prime Minister, Alfred Deakin, Irrigated India: An Australian View of India and Ceylon. Dasgupta explores connections in cultural, political and economic realms, arising from migration and diaspora narratives, from concepts of "transnation", from the "othering of the unknown as uncanny", and the reversal of othering within the diasporic community. It is a call for a more holistic understanding of our varied political affiliations, the "sharing of capital at all levels", and cultural exchange in search of new ties and new mappings of location and geographies (Editor's preface).
- Landscape and Identity in 19th Century Poetry of Australia, single work criticism (p. 14-28)
- “Magic of Dawn”: Early Travelling Along the Murray, single work criticism (p. 30-53)
- The River Is Three-Quarters Empty : Some Literary Takes on Rivers and Landscape in India and Australia, single work criticism (p. 54-71)
- Unearthing the First Native-Born Australian Novelist : Reading Wanderings in India as a Cross-Cultural Text, single work criticism (p. 149-159)
- Water, Soap and Sanitation : Assimilationist Whitewash and Stolen Generations Narratives in South-West Australia, single work criticism (p. 218-236)
- Native Newspaper and Colonial Owner: A Study of The Flinders Island Chronicle and Samachar Durpun, single work criticism (p. 237-248)
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Terrains of Self-Fashioning : Indian Diasporic Fiction in Australia,
single work
criticism
(p. 250-260)'Sanghamitra Dalal shows how perception of landscape iconography changes, using Mena Abdulla's The Time of the Peacock and Christopher Cyrill's The Ganges and its Tributaries. These texts indicate evolving representation of landscape and place, which Dalal uses to mark phases of diasporic identity formation and of differing modes of integrating homeland and host land' (editor's Preface).
