Abstract

The emergence of humanistic geographers like Tim Cresswell, Edward Relph, and Yi-Fu Tuan from the 1970s onwards redefined the meaning of ‘place’, through extensive emphasis on human experience within and beyond the physical landscape. Since then ‘place’ has stretched its domain and traversed the terrains of various disciplines, including literary study and production. Discussing ‘place’ in relation to how the acclaimed Indian writer Neelum Saran Gour represents Allahabad shows how she reframes the ‘cultural geography’ of the city. While decoding her literary spaces, this interview focusses on the multidimensional concept of ‘place’ from geographical and social–cultural perspectives and how Allahabad, or any other place like Allahabad for that matter, becomes an extension of the writer’s ‘self’ and its inhabitants. This interview also explicates how Gour conceives the invisibilities of multicultural North Indian society in terms of its various linguistic and gendered identities. In turn, Gour’s work moves from regional singularity to represent ‘Indianness’ more broadly.

中文翻译：

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Silhouetting自我和社会：Neelum Saran Gour访谈

摘要

从1970年代开始，诸如Tim Cresswell，Edward Relph和Yi-Fu Tuan等人文地理学家的出现，通过广泛强调自然景观内外的人类经验，重新定义了“地点”的含义。从那时起，“地方”就扩展了自己的领域，并穿越了包括文学研究和生产在内的各个学科的领域。与著名的印度作家尼拉姆·萨兰·古尔（Neelum Saran Gour）代表阿拉哈巴德的讨论“地点”表明了她如何重塑城市的“文化地理”。在对她的文学空间进行解码的同时，这次访谈从地理和社会文化角度着眼于“地方”的多维概念，以及阿拉哈巴德或其他类似阿拉哈巴德的地方如何成为作家“自身”及其居民的延伸。这次采访还阐述了古尔如何通过其多种语言和性别身份来理解北印度多元文化社会的隐身性。反过来，古尔（Gour）的工作也从区域单一性转向更广泛地代表“印度性”。