Department of English

Ashoka University is a private university located in Sonipat, Haryana, India, focusing on liberal arts and sciences. It was established in 2014.&nbsp;It is guided by an academic council of academics and scholars from around the world. The council sets the university&#39;s academic standard, advising on matters of curriculum, faculty hiring and research.&nbsp;

Ashoka University offers a full-time 3 (+ 1) year undergraduate programme. The University comprises of&nbsp;2500 plus students, with a mix of both national and international students.&nbsp; &nbsp;

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Ashoka University

The invention of paratheatre, as a concept applicable to modern performance, stems from the work of Jerzy Grotowski (1933–1999), Polish avant-garde theatre director, best known for pioneering the ‘Poor Theatre’. In the 1970s, Grotowski pursued a series of investigations into paratheatre, attempting to change the relationship between spectator and spectacle. This paratheatrical research, iterations of which Grotowski called ‘Special Projects’, took place primarily in the Polish countryside, but also in other locations, including Pennsylvania.1 Participants applied, and were chosen for a certain openness to the experience, which involved living in nature, doing various exercises, some of them ritualistic, and not performing for an audience. A core aim was to free actors from artificiality, including the built environment of the theatre, roles separate from the self, and narrative and plot.2 Speaking of Grotowski and the Laboratory Theatre members, Kumiega writes, ‘The activity that encapsulated their search (from 1970– 1978) became known in time as paratheatre: formally, this related to an activity that had its roots in drama, but specifically did not result in a theatrical presentation before an audience. The terms “spectator” and “actor” lost their divisive significance, and both the action and the creation became the collective responsibility’. 3 Grotowski presented the results, which he called ‘University of Research’, in Wrocław in July of 1975, at the Theatre of Nations Festival. This paratheatrical research continued for a few years after that, and the Laboratory Theatre finally disbanded in 1984.

Theatre and Metatheatre

Defining Paratheatre, From Grotowski to Antiquity’

Nund Rishi (1378–1440), or Shaikh Nūr al-Dīn Nūrānī, revered and remembered by most Kashmiris as the ‘Alamdār (flag-bearer) of Kashmir, is one of the most significant figures in the history of religion and literature in Kashmir. The mystical poetry of Nund Rishi is not merely one among the many Muslim literary apocalypses across the Middle East and South Asia, it also constitutes an ‘apocalypse from below’—a vernacular apocalypse that questions religious and political authority in medieval Kashmir. The mystical poetry (shruk) of Nund Rishi transforms the elements of a traditional apocalyptic mode in Islamic eschatology into a vernacular literary apocalyptic. © 2021 South Asian Studies Association of Australia.

South Asia: Journal of South Asia Studies

Vernacular Apocalypse in Medieval Kashmir: The Mystical Poetry of Nund Rishi (1378–1440)

In the early 20th century, when K M Munshi was making a name for himself in the literary and cultural sphere of Gujarat, he was both intervening in and departing from the past. Curating elements of the past that suited his equally curated modernity, Munshi exemplifies many connections that become evident of Gujarat in the subsequent years. In this paper, we ask: “What was Munshi's past?” In other words, whom was he responding to from the 19th century? The period of our inquiry in Munshi's life is the one that witnessed the famous Patan trilogy. The questions are situated in both cultural history and literature.

World University root node

Economic and Political Weekly

Past continuous K M Munshi, Gujarat and the Patan Trilogy

Theatre Survey

Caste as Performance: Ayyankali and the Caste Scripts of Colonial Kerala

This article argues that Lady Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania and Margaret Cavendish’s The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World engage in an unrecognized form of utopianism that is situated in women’s friendship. This utopianism departs from the traditional definition of utopia as an idealized geographical place and instead acts as a heuristic device for imagining alternatives to the present. As women’s friendships in these works blur binaries to imagine new categories, they enact a form of utopian thinking that offers new political and philosophical possibilities while remaining aware of their limitations. This article thus makes the case for Wroth’s unrecognized influence on Cavendish’s work as well as for a new understanding of early modern women’s friendship and utopianism.

SEL - Studies in English Literature

Utopian friendships in Mary Wroth and Margaret Cavendish

Transdisciplinary Ethnography in India: Women in the Field

Traversing the otaak: Gendered fieldwork and boundaries of language

This paper traces the conceptual-linguistic journey of the term “secular” in India and shows how its entry into any discussion was accompanied by questions of ambivalence about equivalence. An anxiety around its foreignness; or its inefficacy by being both excessive and inadequate as a word can be traced through multiple sites. It proliferates, meaning many things and nothing at all. What makes it so unsettled, so polyphonic, and therefore ready to be seized? Does that have to do with being neither fully embraced nor ignored, on the threshold of language, as it were?. © 2020 Economic and Political Weekly. All rights reserved.

Economic \& Political Weekly

Secular, Secularism and Non-translations

Centenaries, bi-centenaries, and similar milestones are occasions to reflect upon people, events, institutions. 2015 was the year that brought together two major authors born in the same year, one hundred and fifty years ago – W.B. Yeats and Rudyard Kipling – both with connections with India, although in two entirely different ways. Reading milestones is a temptation to dwell on the moment, on uniqueness and on individual achievement. What I wish to do here instead is to open up the perspective. Milestones are part of a process and that process is a journey. I would like to suggest that the very notion of a journey is central to the ways in which Yeats and Kipling wrote their finest poetry. Their individual modes of interweaving this concept into their poetry are an index to both their similarities and their differences.

Yeats, Kipling, and the haven-finding art

This essay aims to theorise the present moment of translation in India without losing sight of its historical and contemporary understandings. It traces in the pre-modern moment, a range of linguistic negotiations to destabilise a theory of an absence of translation and dwells on perceptions of linguistic difference to show what 'translation' meant in pre-modern India. We demonstrate subsequently how colonial technologies produce the institution of language through translation and also how translation rests upon the institutions of languages. We argue that 'translation' as a term and as a concept of text-to-text/written transference of meaning is a nineteenth century phenomenon dating back to the colonial period. Furthermore,in the postcolonial moment that saw the use of translation in the service of regional and national identities, we also examine the complex relationship between English and the 'modern Indian languages' that has given rise to new creolised idioms.