The Ganges River particularly in the old and religious city of Varanasi is polluted by the discharges of cities and towns into the river. Human corpses and raw sewage are the major sources of the rivers pollution. There is no sewage system for 90% of the population. Coliform levels are 120000 colonies/100 milliliters of water. Industry must pay for a permit to dump into rivers but there is no rule governing urban contributions to pollution control. In 1992 members of an environmental group Swatch Ganga attended a conference conducted by the Friends of the Ganges in order to gain moral technical and financial support for cleaning up the river. A strong point was made about fertility levels being lowered when infant mortality declined particularly infant mortality due to water-borne diseases. 50 teachers were also trained to test for water quality by a simple method that students could use. The engineers in attendance discussed the construction of a deep water gravity system for transporting sewage which would not harm the citys ancient architecture but would be costly. Other suggestions were a Chinese-style composting of sewage and an American method for chemical treatment of water. There was no perfect method suggested. The publicity attracted the attention of the Minister of Environment; Dr. Mishra an elite Brahmin founder of Swatch Ganga was asked to personally present the conference recommendations. Friends of the Ganges was also able to raise funds for a community water testing laboratory and to send Dr. Mishra to the USA to study successful river cleanup models. There is a great love of the river and an estimated 70000 pilgrims come to Varanasi every day. There is a need to unite the Moslems Buddhists Jains and Sikhs in a grass-roots effort to clean up the river. There is also need for strong national government financial support. The late Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi spearheaded the Ganga Action Plan to construct and renovate treatment plants for 24 cities along the river but the program ended with much to be done; monsoons overwhelm the sewage pumps many months of the year. There are fights over regional cost-sharing.

The sacred and the profane.

Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of "Postmodernism"

The rhetoric of english India

Muslims and the State in Britain, France, and Germany. By Joel S. Fetzer and J. Christopher Soper. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 224p. $60.00 cloth, $14.99 paper. The central question of Joel Fetzer and J. Christopher Soper's well-written and highly accessible book—how to explain the disparate political responses to the religious concerns of Muslims in Britain, France, and Germany—is clearly important. Indeed, while the question was pertinent before the tragedy of September 11 in 2001 and the American invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, it has become exponentially more urgent since. Although the difficulties of incorporating Muslim populations into the countries receiving them were neither a cause of nor directly connected to the aforementioned events, the negative chain reaction they subsequently precipitated within and outside of the diverse Muslim community within Western Europe nevertheless exposed serious tensions between many of the community's religious practices and the dominant cultural, social, and political mores of the host societies. In short, the answer to the book's organizing question very much matters for Western Europe's political, religious, and social tranquility.

Muslims and the State in Britain, France, and Germany

Reviewed Medium: book
 Authors: Jack Zipes
 Year: 2006
 Pages: 272
 Publisher: Routledge
 ISBN: 9780415976701 (soft cover). Prices: £15.99(soft cover).

Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization

History, Narrative, and Testimony in Amitav Ghosh's Fiction

In the expansive manner in which ‘diaspora’ has come to be employed, the centrality of religion in the ‘classical’ understanding of the concept has been subsumed under categories such as ‘ethnicity’ and ‘culture’. Yet even as religious practices and beliefs undergo transformation in the diaspora, studies of South Asian emigrant groups show that religion remains a key marker of community identity – its pivotal role invigorated by the contemporary precipitation in global connections. By scrutinising the specific experiences, practices and contentions of a wide‐array of diasporic communities, the articles in this Special Issue reveal the renewed power of religion in the South Asian diaspora.

Religion and the South Asian diaspora

The novel as a genre, especially in the twentieth century, has undergone a great deal of change. In The West, one can witness a movement away from the Victorian Novel form of the nineteenth century. This movement can, to an extent, be seen reflected in commonwealth countries too, where during the middle and latter half of the twentieth century, we observe a shift away from previously established western modes. In India for instance, the earlier fascination with Western form and theory, reflected in the works of Rabindranath Tagore and Sarojini Naidu, is replaced by the increasingly experimental works of the later writers. This change can be seen in the fiction of Raja Rao, as in the poetry of A. K. Ramanujam, the drama of Girish Karnad and many other writers. In the works of these writers, we notice a harking back to traditional native literatures. Thus poetry in Indo-Anglian writing very frequently incorporates the techniques of the Sanskrit kavyas, prose works adopt the ornate style of the Puranas,2 and dramas feature the poetics of Sanskrit natakas. 3 Very often these works, we find, deliberately draw attention to their experiments. This is certainly true of Raja Rao, whose works have all demonstrated a greater affinity to Sanskrit forms than to the English novel form. With Narayan’s works however, the deceptive simplicity of his fiction very often obscures his superb capacity to blend traditional Indian modes with the English novel form. Narayan’s instinctive assimilation of his native literature together with what appears to be a natural affinity to the English novel form has led to the creation of a class of fiction which appears simple only

Patterns of Story-telling in R. K. Narayan's The Guide:

Forests have always had a very special resonance with humans, one which is evidenced in the ways they are depicted in literatures and art throughout human civilization. This study attempts to look at the ways in which two contemporary authors, one Cameroonian and the other Singaporean, depict the forest in their novels. In both Linus Asong’s Crown of Thorns and Meira Chand’s A Different Sky, the nature/culture binary is shown as primal. Both narratives underline the essential inhospitability of the forests for human habitation. However, Asong’s narrative insists on the importance of ritual in negotiating this uninhabitable terrain and how, were the conduct of this ceremonial ritual to fail, the nebulous harmony between humans and this terrain will be irrevocably broken. Chand’s text, set in Second World War Singapore, reveals how, when the cultural terrain is rendered inhospitable to man due to conquest and human brutality, the forest appears as a refuge. However, this is misleading, for the essential dis...

Forests and ecocultural disequilibrium in two postcolonial novels from Cameroon and Singapore

The dynamics of globalization and digitization are not only shaping a new media order but also making significant impacts on the cultural dimensions of an older societal order in the case of the Tamil Diaspora. The emerging transnational phenomenon of Tamil television challenges constructed boundaries, contests traditionally homogenized spaces such as those of nation and homeland, questions the principle of territoriality and opens up the sphere both from without and within the national space. New media practices and flows are shaping media spaces with a built-in transnational connectivity, creating contemporary cultures pregnant with new meanings and experiences. This article aims to map the developments around transnational Tamil television. It scrutinizes the nature and impact of Tamil media emerging from Singapore and Malaysia on other parts of the diasporic Tamil world, and also alternatively, the nature and effect of Tamil media from India and elsewhere in Singapore and Malaysia. Issues of multicult...

Chitra Sankaran

Papers

History, Narrative, and Testimony in Amitav Ghosh's Fiction

Religion and the South Asian diaspora

Patterns of Story-telling in R. K. Narayan's The Guide:

Forests and ecocultural disequilibrium in two postcolonial novels from Cameroon and Singapore

Transnational Tamil television and diasporic imaginings