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Doctoral Theses
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1. The need for dalit history 2. The lack of dalit histories 3. The social history of
dalits 4. The economic history of dalits. Conclusion. Works cited
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This thesis analyses contemporary religion in the public sphere through a study of
two transnational yoga groups led by anglophone gurus, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, of
Art of Living Foundation (AOL), and Jaggi Vasudev, of Isha Foundation (IF). It
primarily explores the relationship between the print materials circulated by Guru-
led faith organizations for a religiously or spiritually motivated anglophone public
and their socio-political context, especially with respect to modernity,
mediatization, and individualism. The term gurudom, as a “realm” of the modern
guru, is not only associated with the power that is traditionally ascribed to
thefigure of the guru, but also the networks of capital, publicity, geography, and
scale. Chapter I discusses the emergence of the transnational anglophone yoga
guru in the context of guru devotionalism in India. Chapter II introduces the two
gurus in detail, and critically examines their promotional brochures. Through a
close study of biographies and devotee memoirs, Chapter III discusses the genre of
“guruography” as proposed by Stephen Jacobs, and identifies the various common
features that are found in the biographies and memoirs of Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
and Jaggi Vasudev. The project also draws on Srinivas Aravamudan’s work on
“guru English” to study the language used by gurus to communicate with their
audiences. Based on a study of the magazines Rishimukh and Forest Flower
published by AOL and IF respectively, Chapter IV examines guru language to gain
an understanding of how guru-speak works at the intersection of consumer-
culture, modernity and the desire for happiness and wellbeing. Finally, Chapter V
uses illustrations from the various books, lectures, and talks published by AOL
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The thesis “Cultural Politics, Gender and Aesthetics: A Study of Mirabai’s Poetry in
Translation” is a reading of Mirabai’s padavaliin Marwari and Braj Bhasha
translated in English. The first chapter commences with a critical inquiry of
primary texts of Mira’s poetry drawn from oral and written sources. The Dakor
manuscript and subsequent editions of Mira’s poetry are examined. Hagiographical
and biographical details of her life story are compared to reach to decisive
conclusions about her dates. The second chapter examines the varieties of
English/es used in a postcolonial context in translations of Mirabai’s poetry.
Theories of language are discussed to understand hybridity, hinglification,
Americanization and resistance of Victorian English. The third chapter evaluates
the meaning of sacred and bhakti in the context of Indological readings. The
chapter underlines the use of erotic in select translations of Mirabai and how they
limit the ideas of sringara rasa, madhurya bhava and viraha. The fourth chapter is
about gender the limited ways Mira has been contained in the moulds of kulnasi or
destroyer of family honour and sadasuhagin or eternally wedded. She resists
patriarchy by subverting these stereotypes. Her love poetry is written from a female
perspective and questions the genre. The fifth chapter is on Mirabai’s poems that
belong to the margins as they are not traditionally seen as canonical. They appeal
to the populace and to the working classes. There are also poems addressed to the
Rana and Jogi that constitute a genre by itself that belong to revolutionary
aesthetics. The sixth chapter is about the adaptation and polysemiotic translation
of Mirabai’s poetry into music. The singing of her poems as bhajans is examined
using Parita Mukta’s field survey of the Bhajaniks. The cultural industry and its
exploitation of Mira’s poetry for commercial purposes that limits her aesthetics, is
analysed.
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1. Marga and desi traditions: search for the “Original” Mirabai 2. Translating
mirabai into English/es 3. Sacred literature: bhakti, Mirabai and the translation
industry 4. Women saint poets: the gender guestion in mirabai 5. Mirabai:
revolutionary poetics & aesthetics 6. Orality and performance: padavali in musical
rendition. Conclusion. Works cited.
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Abstract
This thesis identifies and addresses a gap in scholarship about the Punjab
Partition that pertains to migrant women’s occupation of the city of Delhi. It takes
into account research on alternative historiographies of Partition, on histories of
women’s participation in cities, as well as the varied theoretical frameworks for
imagining spatiality in general and specifically the spatialities of north-Indian cities
in the first half of the twentieth century. Within this consideration of existing
research, it locates refugee women and formulates questions about their
relationship to urbanity, their labour and their representation. The thesis engages
in a close reading of select writing, comprising Yashpal’s novel This is Not That
Dawn, Anis Kidwai’s memoir In Freedom’s Shade, and two short stories,
Jyotirmoyee Devi’s “That Little Boy” and Suraiya Qasim’s “Where Did She Belong?”,
to see how these writers, within the specific framework of their genres, map post-
Partition Delhi, as the space of modernity, improvement and progress, or as an
assemblage of possibilities claimed through walking, travelling and occupying
spaces, or as an intersection of many peoples and cities separated not by historical
but social distance. These different ways of imagining the city allow for different
imaginaries of women’s place as well as violence. The enquiry is turned towards
relations of the urban as they change with the Partition and yet exist
independently as foundational to the ways communities are constituted.
Simultaneously, the materiality of geographical and architectural spaces as well as
of women’s movement and appropriation is brought into focus. The thesis extends
the understanding of the ways in which women’s belonging and citizenship are
transacted in everyday geographical spaces like homes and cities and the centrality
of women’s sexuality in the gendered representation and construction of these
spaces.
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The period of transition from the nebulous Dalit socio-political movements in Hindi
regions to the emergence of modern Hindi Dalit literature as an autonomous.
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The thesis analyses the expressions of Islandness, the physical, psychological, and
metaphorical experience of belonging to an island or an islanded space, in
Noontide Toll (2014) by Romesh Gunesekera, Nothing’s Mat (2014) by Erna
Brodber, and Hag-Seed (2016) by Margaret Atwood. I analyse the selected texts to
locate the representation of islands within the preconceived notions about island
spaces and examine the texts’ significance within Anthropocene and Decolonial
Island Literary Studies. The thesis problematises the perception of islands within
pre-established frameworks that restrict the authentic representation of the
historical, social, and cultural reality of island communities. It also examines the
definitions of islands, Islandness, and placeness to conceptualise the analyses of
the selected texts within Island Studies. I examine the image of Sri Lanka, as
depicted in Noontide Toll by the British Sri Lankan author Romesh Gunesekera,
during the period that immediately followed the Indian Ocean Tsunami (2004) and
Sri Lankan civil war (1983 -2009). The thesis explores the alternative frameworks
that the Jamaican author Erna Brodber formulates in Nothing’s Mat to
comprehend Islandness through the fractal nature of Jamaican familial ties and
traditional agricultural practices. I also examine Atwood’s Hag-Seed, which
repositions the island space in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest within a prison
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space and study the convergence of physical and metaphorical Islandness in the
fictional prison. The thesis looks at selected literary works from and about island
spaces, written in the last decade to examine how the represented Islandness
negotiates the perceived role of islands, aligns with the pre-established perceptions
about island societies, and challenges the neocolonial interests in island nations.
Through my analyses, I try to intervene in the interdisciplinary discourse of Island
Studies that restructure and reframe the perception of island spaces across the
world.
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1. Introduction 2.Islanding Sri Lanka: post-civil –war, post – tsunami Sri Lanka
islandness in reomesh gunesekera’s noontide toll(20140 3. Re- engineering
blackspace: Jamaican islandness in in erna brodber’s nothing’s mat(2014) 4.
“ Some subtleties o’ the isle “ : islandness in Margaret atwood’s Hag-seed (2016)
5. Conclusion. Bibliography.
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At the close of this thesis, we are already conversant with how the tarot houses
layers of meaning within its palimpsest-like form. We have seen that although the
tarot may be used as a means to magic, even enchantment, it is extremely adept at
housing and expressing emotional and political disenchantments. I will begin my
concluding remarks by addressing notions of dissidence attributed to goddess
worship and the tarot. Next, I will express how each chapter of my thesis
contributes towards the vision of my thesis. I will then proceed to illustrate how
the feminist tarot can move beyond the moment of its inception towards becoming
more inclusive and how it can be used as a powerful medium for telling stories. I
will conclude my thesis with a discussion of affect, emotion, and politics to further
theorise the materiality of the tarot.
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This work focuses on how contemporary graphic life narratives intervene in the
representation of contemporary cultures, straddling pre- and post-millennial
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themes and politics. Graphic life narratives in the twenty-first century signpost the
changing demography of life narration, the changes in form of graphic
representation, and the location and circulation of texts. Graphic life narratives
about individuals (or communities) coming from diverse contexts have the
potential to fulfil a need in the development of a cosmopolitan society, with explicit
appeals for supranational human rights advocacy and transnational humanitarian
action. The study argues that graphic life narratives circulate as “soft weapons” to
create a critical awareness of contemporary issues and conflicts. They provide a
verbal-visual and critical literacy to both veteran and newer audiences to debate
and engage with the experiences represented, even as they may be co-optable or
culturally translatable. The major ways in which they operate as soft weapons in
this study include politics of collaboration and aesthetics of solidarity, production
of graphic knowledge through a study of graphicality, assemblage and diverse
multimodal storytelling, re-imagining the global/local/cosmopolitan, and the
possible transformation of readers and the reading-viewing process. The
“Introduction” details the aims, objectives and broad categories around which the
analysis is built. The first chapter, looks at how a graphic life narrative responds to
cultures and sites of unrest in the world via a reading of Malik Sajad`s Munnu: A
Boy from Kashmir (2015), to argue how comics storytelling is capable of
challenging the documentary-style historical memoirs/reportage of lives in conflict
zones. Chapter two, reads Shaun Tan`s The Arrival (2006) as a graphic response to
understanding the experience of migration, especially in the contemporary world,
by remediating comics storytelling in excluding verbal language. In chapter three,
the collage-like assemblage of Mira Jacob’s memoir Good Talk (2019) breaks away
from the conventional modes of visual storytelling to problematize how emigrant
communities constitute diasporic populations in the “First World”, often resulting
in complex assemblage-like identities. Chapter four, probes how cross-cultural
conversations through collaborative and transnational practices can offer
innovative ways of reimagining social movements by studying Arthur Flowers,
Manu Chitrakar, (and Guglielmo Rossi)’s I See the Promised Land (2013), a griot–
patua biography of Martin Luther King Jr. Chapter five, looks at Phoolan Devi:
Rebel Queen (2020) to probe the challenges of transmediating oral testimony into a
graphic biography, especially when it represents the life of a controversial icon at
the intersection of caste, class and gender.
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12. VANDANA
Power, Politics and Praxis: Translating Dalit Literature.
Supervisor: Prof. Raj Kumar
Th 26651
Abstract
This thesis has attempted to analyze how translations facilitate the spread and
circulation of opinions and experiences across the world. The first chapter
discusses where translated Dalit literature stands within the global literary canon
of World literature, alongside a discussion of the major premises of World literature
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diverse social dynamics, such as class, gender, caste, culture, race or religion,
creates unique challenges for domestic workers, which are normalised and
celebrated in the literary representations.
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