Convective instability and mass transport of diffusion layers in a Hele-Shaw geometry

We consider experimentally the instability and mass transport of a porous-medium flow in a Hele-Shaw geometry. In an initially stable configuration, a lighter fluid (water) is located over a heavier fluid (propylene glycol). The fluids mix via diffusion with some regions of the resulting mixture being heavier than either pure fluid. Density-driven convection occurs with downward penetrating dense fingers that transport mass much more effectively than diffusion alone. We investigate the initial instability and the quasi steady state. The convective time and velocity scales, finger width, wave number selection, and normalized mass transport are determined for 6,000<Ra<90,000. The results have important implications for determining the time scales and rates of dissolution trapping of carbon dioxide in brine aquifers proposed as possible geologic repositories for sequestering carbon dioxide.Comment: 4 page, 3 figure

The Bride of His Country : Love, Marriage, and the Imperialist Paradox in the Indian Fiction of Sara Jeannette Duncan and Rudyard Kipling

Introduction: For many literary scholars and general readers, the expression \u27Kipling\u27s India\u27 neatly delineates the imperialist society that existed on the Indian subcontinent in the late nineteenth century. The phrase, however, is deceptive in its simplicity. It does not reveal, or even imply, the internal workings behind what is certainly a vast imaginative construct, a construct that involves a specific political ideology, various cultural myths, and an extraordinary emotional investment. In the words of one critic, Kipling was a mythmaker for a culture under protracted stress (Wurgaft xx). He voiced the bewilderment and memorialized the tragic — and sometimes pathetic — grandeur of the British people in India. But Kipling was not Anglo-India\u27s only mythmaker. As a woman in a staunchly masculine society, Sara Jeannette Duncan was able to incorporate into her fiction a feminine perspective on Anglo-India\u27s political, social, and emotional ambitions. In many ways her work serves as a foil to \u27Kipling\u27s India,\u27 for it exposes, both explicitly and implicitly, some of the patriarchal assumptions that lie at the core of his vision. Yet Duncan was also a product of her age and, like Kipling, a child of the Empire. Although a Canadian and hence an outsider in this predominantly British community, she too adopts the role of the mythmaker on occasion, becoming an advocate of the imperialist doctrine that so preoccupied the Anglo-Indian people. One of the most interesting facets of the Anglo-Indian myth involves the notion that India had, at some point during its historical association with the West, loved and married Britain. Both Kipling and Duncan use this metaphor (Kipling much more frequently than Duncan), apparently regarding it as an accurate depiction of the colonial relationship between these two countries. Indeed, this metaphor of love and marriage is of extreme importance in their work, since it serves as their explanation and justification of a political belief that, as the nineteenth century drew to a close, was becoming increasingly difficult to defend — namely, the belief in the necessary continuance of British imperialism in India. Traditional criticism tends to associate Anglo-Indian writers with a univocal and inflexible imperialist ideology; but this approach overlooks the philosophical complexities that accompanied the British presence in India, complexities which these authors often acknowledge in their fiction. Although the colonial mentality expressed in the works of Kipling and Duncan is indeed, as critics have observed, dominated by the conviction that the British had a right to maintain control over India, neither of these writers can properly be labelled apologists of the Empire, at least not without qualifications. Kipling, for example, did not become a full-blown imperialist until around the turn of the century when he attempted to incite public enthusiasm in Britain for the cause of the Boer War.Prior to this period, during and shortly after his second residency in India, he was much more equivocal in his stance on imperialism, frequently questioning the British administration of India and commiserating with the plight of the Indians under alien rule..

From Tawa\u27if to Wife? Making Sense of Bollywood\u27s Courtesan Genre

Introduction: Although constituting what might be described as only a thimbleful of water in the ocean that is Hindi cinema, the courtesan or tawa\u27if film is a distinctive Indian genre, one that has no real equivalent in the Western film industry. With Indian and diaspora audiences generally, it has also enjoyed a broad popularity, its music and dance sequences being among the most valued in Hindi film, their specificities often lovingly remembered and reconstructed by fans. Were you, for example, to start singing Dil Cheez Kya Hai or Yeh Kya Hua especially to a group of north Indians over the age of about 30, you would not get far before you would no longer be singing alone.\u27 Given its wide appeal, the courtesan film can surely be said to have a cultural, psychological, and ideological significance that belies the relative smallness of its genre. Its meaning within mass culture surpasses its presence as a subject. And that meaning, this chapter will argue, is wrapped up not only in the veiled history of the courtesans, a history that Hindi cinema itself has done much to warp and even erase, but in the way in which the courtesan figure camouflages a deep-seated anxiety about female independence from men in its function as a festishized other to the dominant female character, the wife or wife-wannabe, whose connotation is so overdetermined in mainstream Indian society that her appearance in Hindi cinema seems mandatory

In Pursuit of Feminist Postfeminism and the Blessings of Buttercup

Introduction: I\u27m pretty sure I\u27m not alone in thinking that the term “postfeminism” is often and perhaps most frequently used—by the mainstream media generally and by actual people—as a kind of casual dismissal of feminism that comes implicitly coupled with the suggestion that the cutting-edge place to be these days, with regard to women, is the one where the old victim mentality has been sloughed off and a new flying-free-of-those-chains approach to gender in all its diversity and in all its equal opportunity has been boldly embraced. Given the terms of this unstated argument, any criticism of this postfeminism automatically slots the critic into the role of the relic, the leftover women’s libber still fighting battles that no longer need to be fought. And who among us, standing in front of our students or our colleagues, wants to be seen to be so pathetically tilting at windmills? Only the bravest. Or the least self-conscious. Because this form of postfeminism works to keep women quiet about their structural complaints and teaches them to interpret those complaints as being of individual rather than collective origin, it works as another new face of patriarchy

Charting the Anger of Indian Women through Narayan\u27s Savitri

From the introduction: Written in the late 1930s, when a new irascibility crept into the largely female-produced discourse on the status of women in India, The Dark Room is about a particular woman\u27s indignation and revolt. Savitri is a Hindu wife following in the glorified footsteps of other Hindu wives, such as her namesake from the Mahabharata and Sita of the Ramayana. Although she lives up to the ideals of servitude and devotion implicit in these powerful feminine figures, Savitri of The Dark Room is betrayed by a patriarchal system that allows her husband the freedom of infidelity but denies her the right to economic independence. At the close of the story she finds herself trapped in a marriage that she cannot end and that she can barely alter. But Savitri does rebel, though her rebellion is enormously circumscribed by her gendered helplessness. That Narayan documents her rebellion as well as her helplessness and, significantly, refuses to close on the endnote of tranquillity and detachment that characterizes most of his novels (the two qualities that Western literary scholars like best to celebrate In his work) makes The Dark Room a radical exception. What I am going to argue in the pages that follow is that The Dark Room not only reveals the traces of the 1930s women\u27s movement in India in its intersections with Indian nationalism of the time, but also that these traces ground the novel in ways that resist the discourse of timelessness that we have come to expect in Narayan\u27s work. Understood within its historical context, this novel is a testament to a particular kind of female loneliness and loss. Outside of that very timely arena, The Dark Room can look like an aberration and feel like a disappointment, though neither of these responses does justice to its powerful message. Before we can explicate that message, we need first to acknowledge and explore the political circumstances that middle and upper class Indian women confronted in the period surrounding the production of this novel

Yaari with Angrez: Whiteness for a New Bollywood Hero

This chapter comments on the relative insignificance of whiteness to Hindi film narratives, with white characters turning up, when they do, often as peripheral figures to create the effect of historical accuracy. It argues that in Hindi cinema, whiteness cannot function as it does in the West, where the legacy of imperialism has made it an unmarked category, whose invisibility allows it to function as a norm against which the aberration of racial others may be measured. In Indian films, whiteness is marked; and it is, increasingly, markedly white—to be resisted, or desired, or dismissed

Tommy Atkins in India: Class Conflict and the British Raj

TO BE ADDE

The High Cost of Dancing: When the Indian Women\u27s Movement Went After the Devadasis

Introduction: On the other side of patriarchal histories are women who are irrecoverably elusive, whose convictions and the examples their lives might have left to us--their everyday resistances as well as their capitulations to authority--are at some fundamental level lost. These are the vast majority of women who never wrote the history books that shape the manner in which we, at any particular historical juncture, are trained to remember; they did not give speeches that were recorded and carefully collected for posterity; their ideals, sayings, beliefs, and approaches to issues were not painstakingly preserved and then quoted century after century. And precisely because they so obviously lived and believed on the underside of various structures of power, probably consistently at odds with those structures, we are eager to hear their voices and their views. The problem is that their individual lives and collective ways of living them are impossible to recover in any form that has not already been altered by our own concerns. In making them speak, by whatever means we might use (archives, testimonials, court records, personal letters, government policy), we are invariably fictionalizing them because we are integrating them into narratives that belong to us, that are about us. Given the inevitability of our using them for our own purposes, we cannot justify taking that all-too-easy (and, as this essay will suggest), middle-class stance that posits us as their champions, their rescuers from history. It falls to us to find other motives for doing work that seeks them. In the case of this essay, the them are the devadasis or temple dancers of what is now Tamilnadu in southern India (the term devadasis literally translates as female servant of God ), especially those dancers who were alive during the six decades of the nationalist movement. This movement was meant to grant Indians freedom from colonial oppression and give them a nationalist identity, but if it succeeded, at least to some extent, in accomplishing these things, it did so at the cost of the devadasis and their dance traditions. Janet O\u27Shea (1998) explains the logic through which the newer institution, nationalism, drove out the older one, the profession and culture of the devadasis: Indian nationalism has often required a shift away from cultural diversity in order to construct a unified image of nationhood . . . The de\u27rlagfns were threatening . . because they represented, for the new nation, an uncomfortable diversity of cultural practices and cultural origins (p, 55). Most scholars who have written about the modern history of the devadasis would agree with this explanation. To the elite men and women who had the greatest say in what would constitute the new Indian nation, the devadasis were an embarrassing remnant of the pre-colonial and pre-nationalist feudal age and, as such, could not be permitted to cross over into the homogeneity that the nationalists hoped would be post-colonial India.The campaign to suppress the devadasis and to eliminate their livelihoods culminated in the Madras Devadasis Prevention of Dedication Act of 1947, an act brought about largely through the efforts of middle-class Indian nationalists who were also social reformers and, often, feminists--that is, advocates not only of nationalism but of the burgeoning women\u27s movement that was to ensure so many of the legal rights Indian women enjoy today. That feminists who were determined to extend the rights of some women should also work to deny rights to other women is the conundrum that this essay examines

Devadasi Defiance and The Man-Eater of Malgudi

Introduction: In 1947, after over 50 years of agitation and political pressure on the part of a committed group of Hindu reformers, the Madras legislature passed an act into law that would change forever the unique culture of the professional female temple dancers of South India. It was called the Madras Devadasis (Prevention of Dedication) Act. Despite having the wholehearted support of the Indian women’s movement of the time, the Act represented the imposition of androcentric values on a matrifocal and matrilineal tradition, a tradition which had for centuries managed to withstand the compulsions of Hindu patriarchy. The devadasis were eventually forced to give up their profession and their unusual way of life. But the dance itself was not lost. It was, instead, reconstructed as a national treasure. One of the consequences of the 1947 Act is that, today in India and all over the world, the temple dance, once exclusively performed by devadasis, is dominated by women of the upper castes. What I intend to do in the following pages is to explore the much suppressed history of the devadasis through a reading of R.K. Narayan’s novel The Man-Eater of Malgudi. It might seem strange to readers that I should press this wonderfully funny book into the service of my historical rescue because it is generally interpreted as a story about two male characters, Nataraj and Vasu. These characters are frequently understood as antagonists, with Nataraj symbolizing the harmony that Narayan is supposed to prefer and Vasu the chaos he apparently dislikes. There are alternative explanations