Discourse of Zindaginama: A Semio-Anthropological Critique

The semi-anthropological critique of Krishna Sobti’s Zindaginama is a brilliant analysis by Dr. Kumool Abbi of a well-known Hindi text with a socio-cultural background of the erstwhile Punjab of the early years of the twentieth century. It presents a social construct which is upheld by the traditional values of family and community but which is also being simultaneously undermined by various existential assertions and intrigues. What we have here in this beautifully articulated text and the most rigorously realised conceptualisations is that every structure, social, cultural or political is in perpetual dialectical interaction with its anti-structure. As a result, within a given manifest synchrony, the diachronic movements continuously subvert the so-called static wholes. The processes of structuration and de-structuration are reciprocal and simultaneous.