Scholars of English literature, social scientists and experts from other related disciplines ,including visual art from all over the country and abroad, are participating in a vibrant international conference being held at Doon University from December 18 onwards.
The conference, which will conclude on Wednesday, has been organized jointly by The Forum on Contemporary Theory , Baroda and Department of English, Doon University, Dehradun.
A plenary session of the conference was devoted to the close reading of The Everest Hotel :A Calendar by renowned Doon-based author Irwin Allan Sealy. This has been considered Sealy’s best work and has gained him an international following after being short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1998. Set in the town of Drummondganj, a fictional town in northern India close to the Himalayas ,The Everest Hotel centres on a former hotel turned convent-shelter and its inhabitants .Sealy introduces each chapter with a rhapsodic ,lyrical description of nature: mountains ,leaves, flowers, the “objects” of nature and builds his narrative on details around the place where the humans and things intermingle in the author’s evocation of the seasons in their diurnal motion. The panelists were Dr Jasbir Jain ( “Baramaha ,the lacanian ‘Real’ and Sealy’s Everest Hotel”),Satish C Aikant (“Of Seasons and Cloistered Spaces: Reading Allan Sealy’s The Everest Hotel”) , Ananya Ghoshal (“Materiality of Sound/ Music in Allan Sealy’s The Everest Hotel”) ,Preeti Maneck (“An Ecologicl Reading of I. Allan Sealy’s The Everest Hotel”) and Shailesh Kumar Mishra “ Irwin Allan Sealy’s The Everest Hotel:Things Speak Here”).This session was chaired by Bishnu Mohapatra. Dr Jasbir Jain,in her paper, said that The Everest Hotel, with its association with mountains, its past history and present dilapidated condition creates an atmosphere of decay . Satish C Aikant’s paper attempted a critical reading of The Everest Hotel to relate its structural details to the issues of temporality, notions of cyclic change and environmental concerns in contemporary India .
Other session at the four day conference had themes including “Re- Assemblage(Theory, Practice, Thing)”, “Objects :Fictive & Real”, “Objects in Art & Performance”, “Creativity :Text ,Music, Rhythm”, “Materiality and Feminism”, “consciousness ,Materiality and Social Struggle” and “ The Thing Called literature”. Since the beginning of the new century, scholars across the disciplines have focused more and more on objects and things, matter and materiality. New theoretical and critical paradigms have surfaced : “thing theory” , “a speculative realism” and a range of new materialisms Indeed, conversations about the “materiality of communication” were already part of media studies in the closing decades of the twentieth century. The conference discussed how, today, we approach the materiality of media in relation to their dematerializing effects.
In her paper titled “Re-membrance of Things Past in Rushdie’ Midnight’s Children”, Richa Joshi Pandey, assistant professor in the English Department at Doon University, examined Rushdie’s novel in terms of the narrator-subject’s negotiation with ‘things’ from the past, signaling a repetitive uneasiness about the untranslatability of “things” . The Forum on Contemporary Theory is a non-profit organization devoted to inter-disciplinary dialogue on a broad range of topics having contemporary relevance. It has established a Centre for Contemporary Theory which organizes an annual international conference , a national workshop an a month-long Theory-Praxis course . On the opening day of the event, a Mask Dance was held ( Burhdeva/ Naarad in A Mask Dance-Drama of Garhwal) by Vidyadhars’ SRICAlA, Srinagar (Garhwal) .It was directed by Suresh Kala .The Script and Research was done by Dr. D. R. Purohit .The play is based on a traditional form of theatre in Garhwal performed during the six-month-long processional rituals of the deities (Jakh, Dwari, Chandika, Kaans and Ksetrapaal) travelling from village to village in the Nandakini, Birahi, Alaknanda and Dhauli rivers of the Badrinath valley. This mask presentation is an attendant ritual to the main performance in which actors personifying mythical and human characters on tableaux enact the drama. The narrative, fused with a satirical strain, is built upon witty exchanges between the master director Bhaan and the master performer Burhdeva or Naarad..