Anjali Gera Roy

Potential therapeutic targets for inflammation in toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4)-mediated signaling pathways

Inflammation is set off when innate immune cells detect infection or tissue injury. Tight control of the severity, duration, and location of inflammation is an absolute requirement for an appropriate balance between clearance of injured tissue and pathogens versus damage to host cells. Impeding the risk associated with the imbalance in the inflammatory response requires precise identification of potential therapeutic targets involved in provoking the inflammation. Toll-like receptors (TLRs) primarily known for the pathogen recognition and subsequent immune responses are being investigated for their pathogenic role in various chronic diseases. A mammalian homologue of Drosophila Toll receptor 4 (TLR4) was shown to induce the expression of genes involved in inflammatory responses. Signaling pathways via TLR4 activate various transcription factors like Nuclear factor kappa-light-chain-enhancer (NF-κB), activator protein 1 (AP1), Signal Transducers and Activators of Transcription family of transcription factors (STAT1) and Interferon regulatory factors (IRFs), which are the key players regulating the inflammatory response. Inhibition of these targets and their upstream signaling molecules provides a potential therapeutic approach to treat inflammatory diseases. Here we review the therapeutic targets involved in TLR-4 signaling pathways that are critical for suppressing chronic inflammatory disorders.

Celebrating ‘the sons of Jats’: the return of tribes in the global village

While critics of globalization had apprehended that its homogenizing wave would erase ethnic, cultural and sectarian difference to produce cosmpolitanized identities, the counter movement towards fragmentation in the present global process has paradoxically led to the thickening and intensification of boundaries and the return of ‘the tribes’, which converge on primordial essences such as language, culture, region, religion, ethnicity and caste. The return of the tribes in the global era appears to confirm Samuel Huntington’s apprehensions about the future civilizational realignment of the world along the lines of religion and ethnicity (1997). The thickening of boundaries noted by theorists of globalization in the contemporary world has been particularly visible along lines of religion. While Islamic identity narratives have received considerable global attention, particularly after 9/11, a transnational consolidation of Sikh ethno‐religious identity post 1984 has gone relatively undocumented. This essay traces the production and mobilization of a transnational unified sacral Sikh narrative after 1984 to argue that it reveals deep fissures along class, caste and sectarian differences.

Making and Unmaking of Strangers – The Komagata Maru Episode and the Alienation of Sikhs as Undesirable Persons

The Komagata Maru episode, which became a test case for White Canada and Asian Exclusion polices, epitomizes the process of ‘the making and unmaking of strangers’ under British imperialism (Bauman 1997). While the passengers on board the ship chartered by Gurdit Singh, a descendant of one of the Sikhs who had arrived in the British Malaya as part of Captain Speedy’s force in 1872, viewed themselves as British subjects who were free to move within the borders of the British Empire that included the Dominion of Canada, the Immigration Act of 1910 posited the immigrant, as Audrey Macklin convincingly argues, as the other of the Canadian subject (2011). The Komagata Maru episode strongly underlines grave inconsistencies in the definition of the stranger in different parts of the British Empire. In movements triggered by imperial policies and agendas such as those to Shanghai, the British Malaya or East Africa, the Sikh was regarded as a favourable stranger. In movements initiated by himself, the Sikh was resignified as a hostile stranger and his movements were closely regulated. This paper will closely examine newspaper reports, letters, telegrams and witness statements of the Japanese crew and British officials in the Komagata Maru Inquiry Committee Report to focus on the resignification of the Sikhs from favourable to hostile strangers under the British Empire through their being labelled as aliens, undesirable persons and ‘dangerous seditionists’ prejudicial to the safety and tranquility of the British state.

The journey of the Komagata Maru: national, transnational, diasporic

ABSTRACT More than a hundred years ago, a Japanese ship called Komagata Maru chartered by Gurdit Singh, a prosperous entrepreneur based in Singapore, carrying 376 Punjabi passengers - largely Sikhs but also some Hindus and Muslims - from Hong Kong was not permitted to land in Vancouver on grounds of a stipulation about a continuous journey from the port of departure and forced to return to Budge Budge near Kolkata where the passengers were fired at, detained or kept under surveillance for years. The Komagata Maru has become the site for the contestation over discriminatory policies regulating South Asian migrations to Canada. While the passengers perceived it as a violent instance of the suppression of the freedom and rights of the loyal subjects of the British Empire, the colonial administration justified its action alleging that seditious activities were being carried out on the chartered ship. The resurrection of the Komagata Marus tragic journey in Canadian and Indian national memories foregrounds a number of key contemporary debates related to memory and history; imperialism and resistance; racism, exclusion and inclusion; nation and citizenship; mobilities and immobilities; and emigration and diasporas.

Haroun and Luka: A study of Salman Rushdie’s talismanic stories

Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) and Luka and the Fire of Life (2010) are telling instances of his hybridization of Eastern and Western narrative and aesthetic traditions. However, scholarly attention paid, perhaps rightfully, by the overlapping discourses of postcolonialism and postmodernism to the themes of Rushdie’s hybridity and cosmopolitanism has led to only a token acknowledgement of his indigenous influences. Particularly, the Islamic storytelling tradition of the dastan has been completely overlooked. While acknowledging that many narrative traditions of the West and the East, such as fairy tales, fantasies, boys’ adventure stories, as well as One Thousand and One Nights, Kathasaritsagar, Panchatantra, mythography, and so on, intersect in Rushdie’s children’s stories, this article seeks to foreground Rushdie’s embeddedness in the Indo-Islamic visual, narrative, and performative cultural heritage through tracing the dastan elements in Haroun and Luka.

The remembered railway town of Anglo-Indian memory

Unlike those who grew up in railway towns, the majority of Indians would have a hard time locating towns with quaint names on the Indian map that signified adventure, romance and the Raj. Kharagpur is one such colonial railway town whose history has been overwritten by one of the ‘temples’ of the postcolonial nation state, the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology. But Kharagpur, about 110 km away from Kolkata, is remembered as home in Anglo-Indian memory and finds a mention in histories and fiction dealing with the Anglo-Indian community. Senior residents of Kharagpur corroborate these memories of a vibrant Anglo-Indian community thriving in Kharagpur until the early 1960s when the exodus began. Little remains of that remembered past in the Anglo-Indian neighbourhoods where about 200 Anglo-Indian individuals struggle to resettle in the new constitutional and social space comprising independent India. Yet, the nostalgia of the Kharagpur diasporas produces it as an idyllic colonial outpost with a quintessential Raj lifestyle. Through examining the narratives and oral histories of the Kharagpur diaspora, this article complicates the way that the remembered railway town is produced as home by the community displaced by the new dynamics of power in independent India.

Dream of a World Without Borders

This essay revisits the ‘Komagata Maru’ incident of 1914 to investigate the legalities that have complicated migration from some parts of the world to others since the era of apparently porous colonial borders to the highly bordered contemporary world that is differentially porous. It shows that the promise of free movement in the global village is undercut by the reality of legislation and juridical issues that continue to regulate the movements of people from one part of the world to the other. It focuses on legal borders that restrict the movement of people in the contemporary world by returning to an earlier moment when several of these issues were foregrounded. The essay draws on Hardt and Negri’s (2000) Empire and Foucault’s notion of governmentality to identify the juridical procedures, tactics, apparatuses of security and machineries of surveillance that the British government employed against imperial subjects during the Komagata Maru episode of 1914. It argues that the national and supranational organisms united under the single logic of the sovereignty of the British Empire, through which state-centric imperialism obstructed the mobility of the passengers on the Komagata Maru, make it resemble the new Empire.This essay revisits the ‘Komagata Maru’ incident of 1914 to investigate the legalities that have complicated migration from some parts of the world to others since the era of apparently porous colonial borders to the highly bordered contemporary world that is differentially porous. It shows that the promise of free movement in the global village is undercut by the reality of legislation and juridical issues that continue to regulate the movements of people from one part of the world to the other. It focuses on legal borders that restrict the movement of people in the contemporary world by returning to an earlier moment when several of these issues were foregrounded. The essay draws on Hardt and Negri’s (2000) Empire and Foucault’s notion of governmentality to identify the juridical procedures, tactics, apparatuses of security and machineries of surveillance that the British government employed against imperial subjects during the Komagata Maru episode of 1914. It argues that the national and supranational...

The Production of Alternative Global Spaces: Walking in the City in Salman Rushdie’s Novels

de Certeau explicitly posits walking as a mode of resistance, which has been updated in theories of affect and posthumanism that advocate a return to the concept of the body and the human, respectively. These new theories propose a modified walker who blurs the subject–object/human–nonhuman distinction, reinforcing both a contested embodiment and an inclusive approach to the “other” in self-fashioning. Salman Rushdie, too, uses the trope of walking in the city as an altered act of resistance. Walking, an exercise in Rushdie’s novels that deconstructs the autonomous bodies of walkers at the moment of their encounter with material cities, aligns itself to postanthropocentric discourses of walking. This fracturing of the autonomous bodies of walkers, however, is a result of the modified body politic and relevant to migrant figures from the Global South rather than to the provincial walkers of the Global North.

Immobile mobilities and free-flowing Sikh movements from Punjab

ABSTRACTThis essay borrows Bryan Turner’s theory of the ‘enclave society’ to throw light on imperial tactics and strategies deployed to immobilize the transnational movements of Sikhs under imperialism focusing on the Komagata Maru episode [2007. “The Enclave Society: Towards a Sociology of Immobility.” European Journal of Social Theory 10 (2): 287–304]. It proposes the notion of immobile mobilities to argue that while regulated movements from Punjab were catalyzed by imperial policies related to the recruitment of Sikhs in the imperial army, police and railways in the nineteenth century, free movements were immobilized through domestic and international regulations and legislations in the imperial ‘immobility regime’. It begins with providing an overview of the imperial policies through which assisted movements of different Asiatic groups produced sequestered spaces that Turner considers as the features of an enclave society. Then, it proceeds to trace the immobilization of the free flows of Sikhs throug...ABSTRACT This essay borrows Bryan Turner’s theory of the ‘enclave society’ to throw light on imperial tactics and strategies deployed to immobilize the transnational movements of Sikhs under imperialism focusing on the Komagata Maru episode [2007. “The Enclave Society: Towards a Sociology of Immobility.” European Journal of Social Theory 10 (2): 287–304]. It proposes the notion of immobile mobilities to argue that while regulated movements from Punjab were catalyzed by imperial policies related to the recruitment of Sikhs in the imperial army, police and railways in the nineteenth century, free movements were immobilized through domestic and international regulations and legislations in the imperial ‘immobility regime’. It begins with providing an overview of the imperial policies through which assisted movements of different Asiatic groups produced sequestered spaces that Turner considers as the features of an enclave society. Then, it proceeds to trace the immobilization of the free flows of Sikhs through strategies of closure, sequestration, isolation and detention.

Naqal and the Aesthetics of the Copy

In the last two decades, South Asian film studies have called attention to its generic difference from Euro-American cinemas by locating it within Indian narrative, visual, and performative traditions. This chapter interrogates the popular perception of Indian commercial cinema as a poor imitation of Western popular cinema not only through the concept of mimicry as defined by postcolonial theorists, but also through the traditional trope of naqal or imitation, the defining principle of several Indian performing arts. The question to be addressed is whether the element of imitation complicates the summary dismissal of Indian cinema as copy in order to isolate an alternative aesthetic of the “copy.”