The Radley Side Of Silence Analysis

“Silence is violence” is a common phrase used by people nowadays which references people who lack initiative when it comes to speaking out against oppression. The same phrase could be applied to the ideas within Shusaku Endo’s novel, Silence. Endo was clever to name his novel Silence, because the word is a very prominent symbol within the story. In fact, it plays a crucial role to the development of the main character. Although some readers may argue that the role of silence in the book is neutral, I claim that silence plays a negative role for the characters because it is what causes protagonist Rodrigues to renounce his faith. In the story, it represents the silence of God, which induces Rodrigues to question his religion through the torture of innocent Japanese Christians.

“India has never been a symbol of unity of Hindu-Muslim civilization. It is not possible for the British Government to create homogeneity between Hindu and Muslim culture and civilization as the two systems are distinctively opposed to each other. There is no way other than the partition of India”

No one can truly understand sympathy until they have suffered. In his The Chosen, a postmodern novel, Chaim Potok surveys the meaning of compassion learned through suffering. Danny Saunders, a brilliant Hasidic Jew, lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn along with his friend, Reuven Malter, in the 1940s. With his photographic memory, Danny aspires to become a psychologist, but he knows that he will have to inherit his father’s position as the rabbi of their community. In addition to this, his father, Reb Saunders, will not speak to him about anything other than the holy book of Talmund. Danny is forced to keep his ideas and experiences to himself, leading to him suffering because of this silence. Chaim Potok’s The Chosen uses Danny’s gradual shift

Many people believe that in the 1940’s most of India’s problems involving independence was to do with divisions within India rather than British imperialism. In this essay I will be looking at both points of view and finally giving my opinion. I will be using three sources also to help me show both sides of the story. I will also be using my further knowledge to add a wider range of knowledge.

The partition of India and its subsequent independence is the most barbaric incident in the history of India. Millions of people were forced to leave their homes and many were butchered in the worst possible ways. There was an unorganised and unplanned brutality. The unbelievable part was how could our sense of moral righteousness be handicapped by the actions of a few. How could it be that the same people who had driven the Britishers out of 'their' country could in turn start killing each other. The communal politics reached every nook and cranny in India polluting whole of the country with the advertisement of a freedom of a very unique kind than that imagined by many people of India.

Mr. Cook makes a strong case in his attempt to understand the causes and contributing factors behind the segregation along race, class and gender lines which were so prevalent in British ruled India, but also strictly observed within Britain and her other colonies. In “Conflicting Ideologies in British India, 1875-1900” he cites factors both specific to India, in particular the suppressed revolt of 1857, and those more external, like the “hardening racism” in Europe. The substantial losses, both financial and in human lives, associated with the revolt of 1857 resulted in a significant decline in trust and an increasing hesitancy to risk “antagonizing Indian sensibilities”. Since the revolt was viewed as retaliation for British attempts to Westernize India, this fearful reluctance to continue along the path previously envisioned by some which ultimately resulted in Britain’s empowerment, modernization and civilizing of the native Indians to a place of independent governance and administration, became less appealing but also served as additional justification for European society’s changing perception of race. The elite Anglicized Indians had not only dared to challenge British authority and administrative processes, but they had dared to utilize their Western teachings to do so. This clearly barbaric application of treasured knowledge, which the British perceived they had bestowed upon the fortunate Indians as a gift, was viewed as further proof of the inability to

Today, India is a free country, but this country’s history to freedom was not pleasant. Britain, a country that occupied many territories, came to conquer India for its valuables. During this time, they treated Indians poorly and stole all the goods of the country to trade. This rule continued for nearly two-hundred years, and India struggled to fight for freedom from 1857 to 1947. On August 15, 1947, India finally gained its independence through the India Independence Act passed by the British House of Common. The British House of Commons is the UK parliament that is part of the legislative branch. The act stated that India would be divided into two dominions, India and Pakistan, thus granting Pakistan independence on August 14 and Indian independence on August 15. Marc Aronson, in his book Race, explores and examines the concept of race where the reasoning behind racial discrimination can be seen. Aronson provides the four pillars of race, which show an ideology behind racism that occurs universally. During the British-rule in India, the British racially discriminated Indians. As a result of the discrimination, Britain

Silence symbolizes power. Silence showcases the ability of restraint and often times angers those who participate in the other end of an argument and do not have the ability to restrain themselves from bursting. Similarly, In The House of the Spirits and Madame Bovary, Isabel Allende and Gustave Flaubert emphasize the symbol of silence in order to emphasize the lack of power from which Esteban and Charles suffer within their families, within society, and within their marriages.

In The Silenced Dialogue, Delpit examines the hushed dialogue, which she sees as a steady and troublesome issue in the American educational system. Delpit relates how nonwhite teachers have enthusiastically stood up about being let well enough alone for the discussion concerning how to best instruct offspring of shading. Delpit looks at the issues that make these complete correspondence obstructs through the viewpoint of her subject, the way of life of force. The creator recommends that in spite of the fact that she accepts that a society of force exists in this nation, she doesn't advocate for latent mass consistence, yet rather a differing qualities of style and that each social gathering ought to be permitted to keep up its own dialect style.

Motionless, like a wounded prey cornered by its predator, I finally understood the definition of fear. To be victimised as the villain of the story. To be discriminated as the plague behind all creation’s problems. To be stereotyped as the face of the oppressors. The fear was so overwhelming and overpowering, as if my stomach was rotting away, with whatever dignity that remained of me being eaten by blood-thirsty parasites. I could only pray for the Earth beneath me to crack wide open and swallow me into an eternal abyss- away from this trembling terror.

In the summer of 1947, millions forcefully emigrated from India to Pakistan. People were uprooted from their homeland and sent to live in Pakistan. Some would travel on foot, some in carriages, but most by Train. The trains were given a warm sending off by the officials and sent on their way. As the train reached Pakistan, the doors opened and out flowed a pool of blood. Almost everyone on the train had been massacred. One of those people was my great-grandfather. Thus, due to this catastrophic and melancholic incident, escalated the great conflict between India and Pakistan, more specifically, the conflict in Jammu and Kashmir.

The Partition of India in August, 1947 was a significant event in history that accounted for the separation of one of the world’s oldest civilization into two, independent nations – Pakistan and India. Like many other wars in history, The Partition of India was instigated by religious, political and social conflict. This resulted in violence, discrimination and the largest human displacement in contemporary history. While the Partition was well-studied, much of our understanding was focused on the political side of history, not the human side of it. This was why oral history played an important role in manifesting the complexity of a historical event. Our focus here is Maya Rani’s testimony from Butalia’s book, The Other Side of Silence:

Before the Partition of India, in 1947, India was considered a country with a reasonably peaceful history. However, during and after the Partition, sexual violence, both towards men and women, escalated, resulting in the rape and abduction of over 80,000 women. Cracking India, by Bapsi Sidhwa, tells a story that highlights these violent acts by both Muslims and Hindus, through the eyes of a disabled young Parsi girl named Lenny, who witnesses first hand the violence of Partition when she mistakenly participates in the abduction of her ayah, Shanta. Throughout Cracking India, Lenny observes as the religions involved in Partition become increasingly violent towards both men and women, within their own religions and against others.

In 1947, the partition of India on the departure of British colonial power laid the seed for widespread bloodshed, Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin pioneer a new understanding of partition through the voices of affected women for the first time, whose stories were buried under the dust of time and the blankets of the patriarch. Authors, Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin both have strong roots in women’s studies. Menon as an independent scholar and publisher focused on violence against women, and Bhasin for her work with South Asian women’s movements for the United Nations. As feminist scholars and activists, Menon and Bhasin’s Borders and Boundaries expands from their previous scholarly publications. Menon and Bhasin argue the importance of a feminist approach to studying India’s partition against the backdrop of an overwhelming wealth of political and communal histories, the gruesome reality that Partition was distant from the smooth process written on paper. They also argue the objectification of women, whose bodies became symbolic territories to ‘claimed, conquered and marked, as “women became the respective countries, indelibly imprinted by the other.”

Bapsi Sidhwa is a Pakistani Parsee journalist. She has composed The Bride, The Crow Eaters, Ice Candy Man, An American Brat and Water. Sidhwa characterizes herself as Pakistani, Punjabi, Parsee lady journalist (Monsoon, 2000). Khushwant Singh is a Sikh Indian journalist. He has composed books like Train to Pakistan, I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale and Delhi. The present study proposes to attempt a correlation fundamentally between Ice Candy Man and Train to Pakistan for the depiction of the diverse parts of Partition by the two essayists in these books.