The Kafkaesque portrayal of the dichotomy between human brutality and monstrous gentleness can been seen in works such as The Metamorphosis (1915) and “A Hunger Artist” (1922). The depiction of the alienated state of the protagonists under the inevitable cruelty of worldly gaze denies the incompatibility of humanness and monstrosity. In other words, the more human-like characters possess monstrous brutality in their act of peripheralizing the others, while those who are more monster-like are embodied with the sweetness of human predicament. These observations tend to verify Derrida’s statement that “[m]onsters cannot be announced. One cannot say ‘here are our monsters’, without immediately turning the monsters into pets” (Derrida 79). Being inspired by Derrida’s stance, this paper explores the applicability of this aforesaid notion to Kafka’s monsters.

One of the seminal works of British New Wave Science fiction, J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World had a pioneering influence on early climate fiction novels and remains an important work in exploring climate change through fiction despite later developments of the genre. It is also the debut of the Ballardian hero – an exceptionally unheroic character type who may be defined by their self-obsession and detachment, often verging on the neurotic and the solipsistic. In the interest of re-reading Ballard in the Anthropocene from an ecocritical perspective, the paper attempts to make a connection between these defining traits of the Ballardian hero and the climate-changed world of the novel, arguing that the latter, by destabilising the Man/Nature dynamic, demands a restructuring of western hegemonic masculinity. The intention of this article is both to recognise unfamiliar faces of hegemonic masculinity in its relation with Nature and to invite more discussions of gender in reading climate fiction.

Homer's 'The Iliad' candidly portrays how patriachy socialises men into believing that an ideal man was the one who expressed his aggression through all forms of violence including war and gender based violence. Any form of masculinity which deviates from this script of hegemonic masculinity was denounced as effeminate and cowardly as all male characters in 'The Iliad' associated kindness and tenderness with that group in society that was constantly disparaged as being the 'weaker' sex, women. In any patriarchal society like the Homeric world, male homosociality encourages men to adhere to the code of hegemonic masculinity. In 'The Iliad', becoming a distinguished warrior and sacrificing one's life in the battlefield is depicted as one of the most honourable vocations that a man could engage in. Through the framework of masculinity studies, the paper examines how the dominant men of the patriarchal society of 'The Iliad' employed violence as an instrument of asserting their hegemony over subordinate men and women and affirming the ideology of male supremacy.

In Amitav Ghosh’s The Ibis Trilogy an ordinary Bengali Brahmin male named Baboo Nobokrishna Panda becomes androgynous in course of his life after the death of his spiritual guru Ma Taramony who promised him to return to his body after leaving mortal life. After his transformation he becomes an extraordinary person. Though he works as a clerk of Mr. Burnham, a racist colonial business tycoon, he covertly resists colonial oppression and subverts colonial authority in multiple occasions. The surge of maternal feeling in him propels him to extend his protective sympathy to the victims of colonialism. He shows how the dismantling of strict boundaries of heteronormative gender enjoined by colonial Modernity can be a means of empowering the natives against colonial authority. The article is intended to examine, from the decolonial perspectives of Walter D. Mignolo as well as the theoretical perspectives of Ashis Nandy and Sudhir Kakar, the transformation of Baboo Nobokrishna as well as his subversive activities as an embodiment of the traditional Indian concept of ardhanariswara. It aims to analyse how the notion of divine androgyny enshrined in Indian tradition as well as in Bengali Bhakti movement is a potent source to resist colonial hegemony which functions by prioritising masculinity over feminity.

This paper scrutinizes the politics of militant masculinity and gender hierarchy in the Naxalite movement by analysing select memoirs of women activists. The Naxalite Movement was an armed peasant insurgency in India that took inspiration from Chinese revolutionary Mao Tse-tung’s concept of peasant revolution. The movement had very specific gendered constructions of masculinity and femininity. This problematized the identity of the activists, who were often caught in a binary relationship of “militant masculinity” and “chaste femininity.” Naxalite leader Charu Mazumdar’s perception of “martyrdom” advocated a notion of “militant masculinity” which required the creation of a “new man” who was “free of all self-interests.” The insistence on the creation of a self-renouncing revolutionary figure eventually problematized the position of both men and women in the movement. In the party hierarchy, women were mostly relegated to secondary positions, while it was the duty of the chivalrous male Naxalite to safeguard the honour (izzat) of the women against class and caste-based violence. The paper will analyse the multiple facets of militant masculinity and the sharp divisions of gender within the movement stemming largely from the creation of an identity based on this masculinist ideology. It will take into account K. Ajitha’s Kerala’s Naxalbari: Ajitha: Memoirs of a young revolutionary” (1982), Krishna Bandyopadhyay’s Naxalbari Politics: A Feminist Narrative (2008), Kondapalli Koteswaramma’s The Sharp Knife of Memory (2015) and Gita Ramaswamy’s Land, Guns, Caste, Woman: The Memoir of a Lapsed Revolutionary (2022).