&ldquo;IIT Jodhpur is committed to impart quality education to facilitate the creation of qualified, competent and responsible human resources to meet the emerging technological challenges of the world. It is working towards creating an equitable learning platform that is positive, accessible and effective in the face of the modern societal and scientific advancements.

Flexibility in curriculum, in all its academic programs, encompassing elements of teaching, research, creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship is the most unique feature of IIT Jodhpur. The Department of Science and Technology (DST), under the National Mission on Cyber Physical Systems, has identified IIT Jodhpur as a Technology &amp; Innovation Hub in the area of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality. The institute has also been nominated as the coordinator for the Jodhpur City and Knowledge Cluster by the Office of Principal Scientific Adviser, Government of India.

The sprawling 852-acre IIT Jodhpur campus is a majestic tribute to the deep-rooted diverse cultural heritage of the region. The campus is an architectural masterpiece, which is slated to become an international exemplar of sustainability with net-zero energy, and advanced water and waste management strategies.&rdquo;

IIT Jodhpur

‘Lihāf’ by Ismat Chughtai is widely read as a tale of feminist and queer rebellion but it also narrates a complex account of a young girl’s initiation into sexuality as a result of her molestation by a much older woman. In this narratological study that also draws upon the historical context of the Urdu world of letters which framed Chughtai’s own self-fashioning as a writer and intellectual, I argue that the case for a feminist and queer-positive reading of ‘Lihāf’ often misses or downplays the sexual molestation of the narrator as a child and remains inattentive to the ways in which Chughtai constructs conflict and tension between the two voices that narrate the story: that of the adult narrator, a Muslim woman, who opens the tale and then, deploying the voice and perspective of a child, recalls and reconstructs the memory of the fateful events of her childhood. Central to my reading is the point of view of the child whose movement in and through the female-dominated zenānā re-presents the case for viewing ‘a women’s utopia’ in dystopic ways. By splitting the female perspective into two overlapping realms – those of the adult and the child – Chughtai rewrites desire as experienced by the ‘New Woman,’ a historical figure of feminist emancipation often identified in established literary and critical readings with Begum Jān. Such an identification, I argue, is, in fact, unidimensional and is trenchantly undermined in the story by the brutal and intersecting logic of patriarchal domination and class exploitation, a logic at whose fulcrum is the figure of the child as the dark Other of the New Woman.

School of Liberal Arts (SoLA)

South Asian History and Culture

‘No one heard me!’: sexual self-fashioning and the child in ‘Lihāf’

Rev. of Stories by T. Padmanabhan. Trans. and ed. by Sreedevi K. Nair and Laila Alex.

Himal Southasian

The Craft of Writing

Malayalam cinema offers a unique body of work for scholars seeking to understand the heterogenous traditions of Indian engagement with Shakespeare. In this article, after a brief overview of the history of Malayalam reception of Shakespeare generally, I focus on the film adaptations of director Jayaraj (Kaliyāttam / Othello [1997]; Kannaki / Antony and Cleopatra [2002]; and Veeram / Hamlet [2017]). Of particular relevance is Jayaraj’s interest in Shakespeare’s female characters, whom he reshapes by immersing his adaptation in the local practices and idioms of Kerala culture, thus transforming the Shakespearean play-text thoroughly. The article examines the influence especially of kathāprasangam upon Jayaraj to understand what aspects of Shakespeare endure in Jayaraj’s films and what are transformed. By approaching the question of adaptation from the perspective of the emic and the etic, an apparatus made influential by linguist-anthropologist Kenneth Pike in his analysis of a cultural text, I examine why, in Malayalam, cinematic Shakespeares have seen greater commercial and critical success than Shakespeare in translation or literary adaptation. The article seeks to understand this disparity by closely reading some of the recurrent patterns that emerge in Shakespeare transculturated in the two domains of Malayalam literature (including translation) and film.

Indian Theatre Journal

Transculturated Shakespeare: Malayalam cinema and new adaptive modes

In their theory of class formation and social revolution, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were scathing about the lumpenproletariat, condemning it as anti-revolutionary, morally bankrupt, and a bribable tool of the bourgeoisie, a view that remained influential well into the mid-twentieth century. Not until Frantz Fanon appropriated the term lumpenproletariat in The Wretched of the Earth (1961) and applied it to what he saw as a whole class of people waiting to be brought into and redeployed as the vanguard of a new revolutionary proletarian consciousness did it shed its negative connotations. The changed trajectories of the proper place and role of the lumpenproletariat can be seen in working-class literatures of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which constitute an important stage upon which to refine Marxian and Fanonian understandings of the lumpenproletariat. This essay examines three novels written in the last thirty years: Herbert, by Nabarun Bhattacharya, written originally in Bengali and published in 1993; How Late It Was, How Late, by Scottish writer James Kelman (1994); and Sacred Games, by Vikram Chandra (2006). Read contrapuntally, these works provide a literary platform for the exploration of the representational shift in the role and function of the lumpenproletariat in the twenty-first century.

Asian Review of World Histories

The Lumpenproletariat and the Itinerary of a Concept: Some Literary Reflections

Geoffrey&nbsp;Bawa&nbsp;(1919–2003) was Sri Lanka’s most celebrated architect in the 20th century and his&nbsp;half-a-century long career shaped the nation’s visage&nbsp;to the world, even as&nbsp;Bawa’s ludic and polystylistic architectural innovations sat uneasily with Sri Lanka’s majoritarianism grown increasingly strident after independence in 1948. This paper examines&nbsp;Bawa’s architectural sites as “visual texts” that exhibit a fraught, fractious engagement with the dominant nationalism&nbsp;of his times.

Economic and Political Weekly

Geoffrey Bawa and Ludic Modernism

Shifting the postcolonial focus away from the city and towards the village, this book examines the rural as a trope in twentieth-century South Asian literatures to propose a new literary history based on notions of utopia, dystopia, and heterotopia and how these ideas have circulated in the literary and the cultural imaginaries of the subcontinent.&nbsp; &nbsp;

Utopia and the Village in South Asian Literatures

World Literature Today

Sri Lanka

Rev. of City of Rains by Nirmal Dass.

Canadian Literature

A Few Pearls in a Lot of Gravel

Rev. of Kaghazi hai Pairahan: The Paper Attire by Ismat Chughtai. Trans. By Noor Zaheer. OUP: 2016.

The Book Review

Mixing Memoir And Desire

Introduction to the special issue, Translated Worlds: History, Diaspora, South Asia. Co-written with Chandrima Chakraborty.

Postcolonial Text

Translated Worlds: Passages, Journeys, and Returns

In this essay, I attempt two things: to see in what ways Karnad achieves in Naga-mandala an interface between myth and history, and from a feminist perspective, resurrects through such interface her-stories. At the same time, I shall explore how despite the play's emphasis on women's stories, the act of telling and, by extension, its potential to engender lasting change continues to be circumscribed by the strictures of phallocentric myth so that the vision offered at the end of the woman-centric play remains, from the feminist point of view, deeply problematic albeit productively so.

Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific

Girish Karnad's Naga-mandala: Problematising Feminism

SAWNET: South Asian Women's Network

Rev. of Juki Girls, Good Girls: Gender and Cultural Politics in Sri Lanka’s Global Garment Industry by Caitryn Lynch.

Introduction to Special Issue "Maritime Transmodernities"

The Contours of a Field: Literatures of the Indian Ocean

Nethra

Colonial Cousins: Mohandas Gandhi, Leonard Woolf, and the Place of the Rural

Martin Wickramasinghe (1890-1976), often called the Bard of Sri Lanka, had a long writing career spanning many decades and was also concerned with the dynamics of the changing village in Ceylon (as Sri Lanka was called until 1972). Along with Ediraweera Sarachandra, Wickramasinghe was at the forefront of literary realism in the 20th&nbsp;century: his book Landmarks of Sinhalese Literature&nbsp;(1948) established a pioneering model of criticism for social realism that was to influence several writers for many decades in Sri Lanka. It was a model that tied in with Wickramasinghe's anti-colonial politics and one of the central essays in Landmarks&nbsp;was on The&nbsp;Jātakas upon which Wickramasinghe drew in order to examine the modes of realistic writing that he felt best represented Ceylonese life and culture. And yet, it is a curious paradox that,&nbsp;in his own novels,&nbsp;Wickramasinghe&nbsp;never employed the kind of realism he extolled in&nbsp;The&nbsp;Jātakas, taking for his own model the psychological realism of European masters, especially the Russians. What explains this paradoxical approach to social realism as a representational mode? Indeed, how does one examine the question of Wickramasinghe's literary style which straddles the European and the Ceylonese? This article explores Wickramasinghe’s own discussion of specific&nbsp;Jātaka tales in order to understand what constituted for him the locus vivendi&nbsp;of Sinhala literature in the middle of the last century. It is a template that provides a compelling counterpoint to the adaptive examples one finds in India, where The&nbsp;Jātakas remained at the peripheries of the question of realism. Instead, in Indian literatures (in English as well as Hindi and Malayalam, two of the more established vernacular languages), realism took on very different functions. This article attempts to create an orbital reading of these multiple traditions bearing upon the pivotal legacies of The&nbsp;Jātakas.

Polygraphiques

Rewritings of the Jātaka Tales in Colonial and Postcolonial Texts

The essay turns to Punyekante Wijenaike’s 1971 novella, Giraya, to study the ways in which the Gothic features as a framing device for the exploration of the gendered and ideological domain of home in twentieth-century Sri Lankan writing. The walauwe or feudal manor is transformed, in Wijenaike’s novella, into a spectral space that challenges the prevailing nationalist discourses and literatures which fashioned the Sri Lankan nation as a rural utopia. Nostalgia and visions of national utopias give way to terror and dislocation as the fragmentary narrative of Giraya calls into question, from the very heart of the idealized nation – its home – the representational powers of the ordered social realist novel, Sri Lanka’s most dominant literary genre in the post-Independence era

University of Toronto Quarterly

Giraya and the Gothic Space: Nationalism and the Novel in Sri Lanka

Amitav&nbsp;Ghosh&nbsp;remains an atypical member of the postcolonial club (as it were) because of his insistent focus upon the sea (rather than land) in a number of his works as the locus for viewing/understanding the historical and cultural encounters between the West and the non-West. Indeed, where much postcolonial writing remains centred on issues of land, dispossession, and diaspora,&nbsp;Ghosh&nbsp;has shown remarkable dissidence in his interests in the sea and, in what I, adapting the Latin American philosopher Enrique Dussel, call, “maritime transmodernities” in order to launch his critique of both Eurocentrism and its equally problematic&nbsp;agon, critical postcolonialism.&nbsp; Through a close reading of the littoral, coastal, and maritime in the three novels that comprise the Ibis Trilogy, I hope to show the ways in which&nbsp;Ghosh’s interest has subtly shifted from land and territorial structures for articulating and critiquing contemporary political events (The Calcutta Chromosome, 1995;&nbsp;The Shadow Lines, 1998) to the sea and to maritime frameworks for understanding the deeper, more genealogically complex currents of human interaction across time and space, a move that marks such works as&nbsp;In An Antique Land, 1992; The Hungry Tide, 2004; and the Ibis Trilogy, 2008-15. Such a move has entailed the transformation of the postmodern novel into what I call "the transmodern novel." For such an assessment of Ghosh's corpus of writings, central is also a reading methodology that itself has a transmodern face and actualizes multiple centres of hermeneutics, enabling one to read a writer like Ghosh from/within diverse traditions. In such a light, I read Ghosh's reworking of many of the tenets of the postcolonial and the postmodern (novel) from the vantage of a specifically Bengali literary heritage.

Maritime Transmodernities and The Ibis Trilogy

Rev. of India’s Forests, Real and Imagined: Writing the Modern Nation by Alan Johnson.

Forests as Settings for Stories of Nationhood and Modernity

Phoenix: Sri Lanka Journal of English in the Commonwealth

Imagining Ceylon: The Special Cases of Leonard Woolf and Martin Wickramasinghe

Rev. of A House by the Sea by Sikeena Karmali