Multinational Research Society Publisher

MRS Journal of Arts, Humanities and Literature

Issue-1(January), Volume-2 2025

1. Gender, Guilt, and Grace: Feminist and Postcolonial Intersections in J...
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Prof. Awadh Kishor Pandey*
Professor, Dept. of English Kamla Rai College, Gopalganj, Bihar
1-4
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22122858

J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace (1999) has occupied a contested place in postcolonial and feminist criticism since its publication, admired for its unflinching portrait of post-apartheid South Africa and simultaneously indicted for the way it renders its female characters instrumental to a white male protagonist's moral education. This paper examines the novel's central preoccupations — gender, guilt, and grace — as they intersect with the unresolved racial and historical anxieties of the new South Africa. Reading David Lurie's disgrace alongside his daughter Lucy's, the paper argues that Coetzee stages two parallel and unequal reckonings with power: one narrated in the confessional register of a man learning, however incompletely, to see himself as an object rather than a subject of desire, and the other largely silent, borne on Lucy's body and her refusal to translate her suffering into a language the novel's men, and by extension its readers, can easily consume. The paper draws on feminist theories of the gaze and of narrative silencing, alongside postcolonial theories of land, restitution, and the politics of reconciliation, to argue that Disgrace refuses the redemptive closure its title's final word seems to promise. Grace, in Coetzee's rendering, is neither earned nor granted; it is at best an uneasy, provisional accommodation with loss.

2. India–Nepal Relations in a Changing South Asian Geopolitical Landscape
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Professor (Dr.) Shakil Ahmad A...
Head, PG Department of Political Science, Ramjaipal College, J. P. University, Chapra, Saran, Bihar 841301
5-8
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22208337

This article examines the evolving bilateral relationship between India and Nepal against the backdrop of intensifying great-power competition in South Asia. Drawing on the 1950 Treaty of Peace and Friendship, the open-border regime, the 2015–16 economic blockade, the May 2020 Nepali map controversy over Kalapani–Lipulekh, and expanding Chinese infrastructure investments, the analysis highlights both enduring linkages and emerging frictions. Particular attention is paid to hydropower cooperation (Arun-III, Arun-IV and Pancheshwar), electricity exports to India and Bangladesh, labour-migration remittances, and Nepal‘s balancing strategy between its two giant neighbours. The study concludes that while structural asymmetries and territorial disputes continue to strain trust, pragmatic energy and connectivity initiatives offer pathways for a more mature partnership.





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