Contemporary Literary Review India

Theme of Redemption in Khaled Husseini’s The Kite Runner

Bilquees Dar — 2025-10-05

Khaled Hosseini’s Novel, The Kite Runner is considered one of the major novels of the late 20^thcentury.The narrator considered a ‘living classic’ creates a story of redemption which transcends both culture and time. The novel is set in Afghanistan, a country in the process of being destroyed with the fall of monarchy and the intervention of Soviet military to the exodus of refugees to Pakistan and the United States and also the rise of the Taliban. The Kite Runner thus transports readers to Afghanistan at a tense and crucial moment of change and destruction. Besides this, it is a haunting tale of friendship which spans cultures and continents and follows a man’s journey to confront his past and find redemption. The protagonist Amir, the son of a rich Kabul merchant and also a member of the ruling caste of Pashtuns moves to California and becomes a successful novelist but returns back after 26 years to redeem his sins by saving his friend Hassan’s son’s life. Hosseini also uses the dynamics of father-son relationships to express theme of redemption using a web of tragedy to bring the assurance that there is always "a way to be good again".

Queer Narratives in Malayalam: Explicating the Politics of Authorial Cisgender Gaze in Ram C/o Anandhi

Dr. Denny Joseph — 2025-10-05

This article critically examines the representation of queer and transgender identities in Malayalam literature, focusing on the pervasive influence of authorial cisgender gaze in shaping these narratives. Through an analysis of works such as Ram C/o Anandhi, Randu Penkuttikal, and Shabdangal, the study highlights how cisgender authors often frame queer lives through heteronormative lenses, reducing them to tropes of suffering, or moralistic resolutions. Drawing on theorists like Butler, Halberstam and Stryker, the study argues that such portrayals reinforce heteronormative comfort rather than transgender authenticity. Transgender characters are frequently excluded from visual narratives or depicted as tragic figures, while lesbian relationships are invalidated through forced heteronormative conclusions. The article also explores the commodification of trans trauma and reader-pleasing strategies that prioritize sympathy over agency. By contextualizing these literary trends within broader theoretical frameworks such as performativity, the male gaze, and transgender critiques, the paper underscores the need for authentic, inclusive storytelling that transcends cisgender perspectives. Moving on from tracing the evolution of queer studies, this study examines a few queer narratives in Malayalam, and concludes with an examination of the politics of authorial cisgender gaze in Akhil P. Dharmajan’s Ram C/o Anandhi (first published in 2019), emphasizing the need to move beyond reductive portrayals and embrace the complexity of queer lived experiences.

The Semiotics of Kashmiri Proverbs: An Examination of the Interplay between Language, Culture, and Power

Saima Malik — 2025-10-05

With the significant shift in focus by historians worldwide from traditional political history to social history, the common people have assumed a central role in recent historical discourses. To put together the objective and impartial history of the people, emphasis is put on accessing and analysing the folk collective mentality. The paper will focus on the popular folk sayings like proverbs (zarb-ul-misl) and riddles (pretche) of the Kashmiri language and will highlight how these folk sayings are in themselves a repository of some particular historical context and by extension transgenerational carriers of history. A highlight will be made of how historical accounts are transmitted through these means to posteriority. Thus an active archive is established in the social consciousness of a particular community through the language they share. Kashmiri being predominantly an oral language also navigates through the dynamics of remembering-forgetting. In that context revisiting and analysing the popular folk sayings allows a fresh peep into the history of the place and language.

A Critical Analysis of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight Children

Mohammad Amir — 2025-10-05

English literature has sometimes been stigmatized as insular. It can be argued that no single English novel attains the universality of the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace or the French writer Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary. Yet in the Middle Ages, the Old English literature of the subjugated Saxons was leavened by the Latin and Anglo-Norman writings, eminently foreign in origin, in which the churchmen and the Norman conquerors expressed themselves. From this combination emerged a flexible and subtle linguistic instrument exploited by Geoffrey Chaucer and brought to supreme application by William Shakespeare.

Under the Western Eyes: Reading Moroccan Migrants’ Tryst with Memory, Identity and Destiny in Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits

Samra Ejaz — 2025-10-05

The increasing number of Moroccan citizens leaping at a chance of illegally crossing the Strait of Gibraltar in the pursuit of even a slightest “charm of luck” critiques the neo-liberal ideas of State which presents the freedom of movement itself as a crucial terrain of rule. While the influx of migrants from the other North African countries towards Europe continue to surge in numbers, the recent sway in the number of refugees and migrants from Morocco arriving in Spain by no safe and legal routes have led to an increased militarization and strategic aggressiveness on their borders as part of repressive state apparatus. The deplorable living conditions of refugees and migrants, reduced to ‘bare life’, make us question the ‘laws of hospitality’ of both the host countries. Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (2005), a collection of short stories by Moroccan-American author Laila Lalami, identifies the desperation of Moroccan youth and captures their multifaceted migratory experience across their stratified, postcolonial society through the lives of four young Moroccan immigrants who hope to seek a better life in Spain by crossing the Strait of Gibraltar on a lifeboat. Drawing from the colonial wound of the postcolonial nation of Africa, Lalami’s book dispels any unjustified homogenisation of its Moroccan community by contrasting its economic precarity, social invisibility, conflicting “Muslim” identity and gender normativity through the characters who reject the traditional, stereotyped performance of a Third-World immigrant. However, this paper seeks to investigate such a pluralized, free community whose individuals do not appropriate their differences, but allow their cultural positioning to contextualise their migratory experiences and precariat living within the contemporary social discourse particularly through the lens of gender. For this purpose, the paper draws upon Roberto Esposito's ideas of a community, and follows Foucault, Derrida, Agamben, Butler and Hall in their critique of State (Morocco and Spain) and their unequal power structures that reconfigure gender performativity amid crisis, all the while exemplifying through the stories the constructs of how discrimination against the migrant ‘other’ is embedded, operated and legitimised in the West.

When Freedom is the Ultimate Value: Women Poets Divided by Space and Time

Srividya S. — 2025-10-05

This paper attempts to strike a comparison between the articulation of select women poets who are separated by space and time but united by the desire for freedom. Both The Therigatha, a collection of poems by the early Buddhist nuns called Theris and Wild Words: Four Tamil Poets, a collection of twentieth-century feminist poetry by Tamil women, offer an insight into the dynamics of patriarchal oppression of the female body and its rebellion, through different ways, albeit differentiated by vast stretches of history and time. Female body and sexuality and its intersection with identity, politics, religion and caste, as treated within the cultural context of their times, is at the core of the discourse. These poems focus on the body's resistance to the cultural norms of the times, be it the strictly religious setting of the Buddhist Sangha of the 6th Century CE or the Tamil social context of the 20th Century CE. These poems, when analysed through the lens of intersectional feminism, throw light on the lived experiences of women against the background of the perennial Nature-Culture debate informing the ethos of the Indian subcontinent.

Encoded Inequities: A Synthesis of Data Feminism, Race After Technology, and Algorithms of Oppression

Mahendra Thapa — 2025-10-05

Encoded Inequities: A Synthesis of Data Feminism, Race After Technology, and Algorithms of Oppression is an essay by Mahendra Thapa.

Injured Dreams, The Graduates, Believer, Life

Srijani Dutta — 2025-10-05

Injured Dreams, The Graduates, Believer, and Life are stories by Srijani Dutta.

Unlived

Vinodkumar Damodaran — 2025-10-05

Unlived is a poem by Vinodkumar Damodaran.

Language — A Living Spirit of the People, Not a Tool of Power

Khurshid Alam — 2025-10-05

Language is not an invention. It is not a theoretical construct devised in a university seminar. Nor is it the outcome of scientific experimentation in a lab. Language is born of the people—shaped slowly over centuries, through daily use, communal rituals, shared struggles, and inherited memory. It binds people not by rule, but by rhythm—of feeling, of expression, of identity.

To read in details, see this article.

The Epistle of Love

Dr. Anuradha — 2025-10-05

The Epistle of Love is a story by Dr. Anuradha.

Rajan Narayan

Atmaram Khandilkar — 2025-10-05

Rajan Narayan is a story by Atmaram Khandilkar.

The Cosmic Joke – A Fable?

Jayanti Datta — 2025-10-05

The Cosmic Joke – A Fable? is a story by Jayanti Datta.

Naked Man

Subhajit Bhadra — 2025-10-05

Naked Man is a story by Madan Sarma. Originally written in Assamees and translated by Subhajit Bhadra.

The Dial

Pradip Mondal — 2025-10-05

The Dial is a story by Pradip Mondal.