What is Flipped Learning?
Flipped learning is a “a pedagogical approach in which direct instruction moves from the group learning space to the individual learning space, and the resulting group space is transformed into a dynamic, interactive learning environment where the educator guides students as they apply concepts and engage creatively in the subject matter.”
Task : 1
1)Write a note on S. Radhakrishnan's perspective on Hinduism.
As an academic, philosopher, and statesman, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888-1975) was one of the most recognized and influential Indian thinkers in academic circles in the 20th century. Throughout his life and extensive writing career, Radhakrishnan sought to define, defend, and promulgate his religion, a religion he variously identified as Hinduism, Vedanta, and the religion of the Spirit. He sought to demonstrate that his Hinduism was both philosophically coherent and ethically viable. Radhakrishnan’s concern for experience and his extensive knowledge of the Western philosophical and literary traditions has earned him the reputation of being a bridge-builder between India and the West. He often appears to feel at home in the Indian as well as the Western philosophical contexts, and draws from both Western and Indian sources throughout his writing. Because of this, Radhakrishnan has been held up in academic circles as a representative of Hinduism to the West. His lengthy writing career and his many published works have been influential in shaping the West’s understanding of Hinduism, India, and the East.
He admits that there is in fact a lot of conflict between the castes. He puts this down to uneven wages and functioning of money in the world. He believes that artists and statesmen should receive less money than manual workers because their reward is in the love of their job, and therefore has a higher spiritual reward. He concludes that “A just organization of society will be based of spiritual liberty, political equality and economic fraternity”.
2) The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian is 'more of a national than personal history.' Explain.
Nirad Chandra Chaudhuri (1897-1999) was born in a small town in pre-independence India called Kishorganj, East Bengal. Among other literary giants, such as R, he has made a special niche for himself. K. Narayan, and in the field of autobiography, Mulk Raj Anand. Published in 1951, his first book, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, made him famous in the whole field of literature and intellect.
The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian is the autobiography of a writer from India, Nirad C. Chaudhuri. Written when he was around 50, it documents his life in Kishoreganj, a small town in present-day Bangladesh, from his birth in 1897. The book relates his mental and intellectual growth, his life and development in Calcutta, his observations of vanishing landmarks, the connotation of this is dual-changing Indian situation and historical forces that were leaving an imminent affair with British from India. The book is divided into four books, each consisting of four chapters and a preface. The first book is entitled “Early Environment” and its four chapters are: 1) My Place of Birth, 2) My Ancestral Place, 3) The Place of My Mother and 4) England.
The autobiography has acquired many distinguished admirers over the years. It was thought by Winston Churchill to be one of the best books he had ever read. “No better account of the penetration of the Indian mind by the West – and by extension, of the penetration of one culture by another – will be or now can be written.” V. S. Naipaul said. It was included in The New Oxford Book of English Prose in 1998, as one of the few Indian contributions.
Task : 2
4)Write a critical note on the poems by Nissim Ezekiel.
Nissim Ezekiel is an Indian poet who is famous for writing his poetry in English. He had a long career spanning more than forty years, during which he drastically influenced the literary scene in India. Many scholars see his first collection of poetry, A Time to Change, published when he was only 28 years old, as a turning point in postcolonial Indian literature towards modernism.
Ezekiel was born in 1924 in Bombay to a Jewish family. They were part of Mumbai's Marathi-speaking Jewish community known as Bene Israel. His father taught botany at Wilson College, and his mother was the principal of a school. Ezekiel graduated with his bachelor's degree in 1947. In 1948, he moved to England and studied philosophy in London. He stayed for three and a half years until working his way home on a ship.
Upon his return, he quickly joined the literary scene in India. He became an assistant editor for Illustrated Weekly in 1953. He founded a monthly literary magazine, Imprint, in 1961. He became an art critic for the Times of India. He also edited Poetry India from 1966-1967. Throughout his career, he published poetry and some plays. He was professor of English and a reader in American literature at Bombay University in the 1990s, and secretary of the Indian branch of the international writer's organization, PEN. Ezekiel was also a mentor for the next generation of poets, including Dom Moraes, Adil Jussawalla and Gieve Patel. Ezekiel received the Sahitya Akademi cultural award in 1983. He also received the Padma-Shri, India's highest honor for civilians, in 1988.
Ezekiel died in 2004 after a long battle against Alzheimer's Disease. At the time of his death, he was considered the most famous and influential Indian poet who wrote in English.
Despite the fact that he wrote in English, Ezekiel's poems primarily examine themes associated with daily life in India. Through his career, his poems become more and more situated in India until they can be nothing else but Indian. Ezekiel has been criticized in the past as not being authentically Indian on account of his Jewish background and urban outlook. Ezekiel himself writes about this in a 1976 essay entitled "Naipaul's India and Mine," in which he disagrees with another poet, V.S. Naipaul, about the critical voice with which he writes about India. "While I am not a Hindu and my background makes me a natural outsider," Ezekiel writes, "circumstances and decisions relate me to India. In other countries I am a foreigner. In India I am an Indian. When I was eighteen, a friend asked me what my ambition was. I said with the naive modesty of youth, 'To do something for India.'" We can see this attitude at work in Ezekiel's poetry—even when his poems are satirical, they come from the voice of a loving insider rather than someone who is looking from the outside. In this way, Ezekiel's poems are quintessentially Indian because they exist there. Ezekiel writes, "India is simply my environment. A man can do something for and in his environment by being fully what he is, by not withdrawing from it. I have not withdrawn from India."
Task : 3
1)Write a note on the changing trends in Post-Independence Indian Writing in English.
Post-Independence Indian English fiction is virtually synonymous with Post-colonial Indian English fiction. The visibility of Indian English fiction dates back to the fourth decade of the twentieth century when Mulk Raj Anand, R.K.Narayan and Raja Rao published their novels in English.
If we take a look at the trends in Indian English fiction, we will be struck by realism that underlies this genre in the post-Independence period. We come across five broad types of realism – social realism, psychological realism, historical realism, mythical realism and magic realism in Indian English fiction. Women novelists like Kamala Markandaya, Nayantara Sehgal and Shashi Deshpande lay emphasis on social realism and family relationship. Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve and A Handful of Rice deal with stark social realism depicting how the transition in the society affects family relationship. The women in women’s fiction seeks an identity of her own, independent of her husband. Shiv K. Kumar has rightly observed this with reference to Shashi Deshpande’s That Long Silence:
In That Long Silence, Jaya the protagonist, resents the image of a wife ‘yoked’ to her husband – ‘a pair of bullocks yoked together’. This is the image that haunts her all the time. So married to Mohan – a sedate, well-placed business executive – she secretly wishes to savour existential freedom through some disaster befalling him. So she feels ‘relieved’ when he is charged with embezzlement and they have to live in a sort of hide-out. She now feels redeemed as a woman with an identity of her own, seeing her husband rudderless and pathetically dependent upon her – this man whose ‘fastidiousness, passion for neatness and order had amazed me when married’ (23).
Nayantara Sehgal writes about the political situation in the country, and politics becomes a metaphor for her fiction. Anita Desai, on the other hand, dives deep into human psyche and writes about psychological realism. In course of an article, “The Indian Writer’s Problems”, Anita Desai says,
By writing novels that have been catalogued by critics as psychological and that are purely subjective, I have been left free to employ simply, the language of the interior. Even when two characters meet, they use this particular type of language – the language of their thoughts, their interior selves – which has nothing to do with geography and can be written in any language (Explorations in Modern Indo-English Fiction, 225).
Anita Desai experiments this in her Sahitya Akademi Award winning novel, Fire on the Mountain. The novel depicts the predicament of women in a society that fails to satisfy their desire and fulfil their hope. There is a need for women to understand each other. That is why Desai brings a kind of reconciliation between Nanda Kaul, the protagonist and her great grand daughter, Raka towards the end of the novels.
2)“India is not a country”, says Raja Rao, “India is an idea, a metaphysic.” Explain with examples.
Raja Rao to write a book on India, he replied that India did not exist. As the central figure in his novel The Serpent and the Rope says, “Anybody can have the geographic—even the political—India; it matters little. . . . India is not a country like France is, or like England; India is an idea, a metaphysic.” Strangely enough, this concept, which ultimately questions India’s material existence, helped shape the Indian Revolution. It lies, too, at the heart of Raja Rao’s fiction, and his devotion to it has helped him create out of an adopted language one of the few truly unique styles in Third World literature.
Third World writers often accuse each other of being imitative, tame. They bicker about cultural imperialism, and not without reason. Much Third World literature is written not in native languages, but in Western languages and after Western literary forms; and most Third World writers, even the brilliant ones, have indeed developed literary sensibilities and approaches to language and form that are heavily Westernized. But is Spanish or French or English supple enough to reproduce the ambience of, say, Igbo or Malayalam speech? Do Western form and native sensibility clash? If, for example, a writer comes from a Third World culture which views man as having little personal history and standing essentially outside time, will there not be a problem in conveying that view if he uses the Western novel form, which, at least traditionally, assumes and focuses on personal identity developing in time? Surely, synthesis is the problem, for it is too simplistic to assume, as many militant Third World writers seem to do, that colonialism is really a lesser historical phenomenon whose cultural influences can someday be completely neutralized. Still, it is true that too many writers, too much seduced by Western form and language, have unconsciously given up, or made quite secondary, the sensitive rendering of their own culture’s vision.
Of the few writers who have managed to synthesize forms and idioms out of the clash of the native and Western, one certainly thinks of Raja Rao, whom many consider the most brilliant Indian ever to write fiction in English. Forty years ago, in a preface to his first book Kanthapura, he wrote one of the first manifestos on Third World literary style.
Thank you!
