Department of History

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

It is a rare occurrence to find texts created by children at times of great upheavals. Be it the Partition of India, civil wars in erstwhile colonized spaces or other narratives of dislocation and exile – the narratives and cultural artefacts are usually those which have been produced by adults. The Art of Exile: A Collection of Paintings by Tibetan Children in India is a pleasant exception. It brings together the first-hand accounts of children who have experienced one of the biggest cases of displacement of this century. My paper will attempt to read the text as a unique perspective on the impact of exile and displacement on little children. While attempting to locate and extract the repressed traumatic memories of their violated childhood through their paintings and interviews, the paper will focus on understanding the child’s perspective of such trauma, the way they select which memories to remember or forget, and their interpretation of the same.

World University root node

Other Publications

Childhood Traumas: Narratives and Representations

Colours of trauma paint a thousand words: “Leaving Tibet” in paintings by Tibetan children in India

In this article we consider several geometric properties of a Banach space X which are preserved under every isometric embedding of X into spaces of functions on discrete sets. © 2019 American Mathematical Society.

Contemporary Mathematics

Into isometries of banach spaces

The Cambridge Companion to Rabindranath Tagore

An Ecology of the Spirit: Rabindranath’s Experience of Nature

In this paper we examine some of the problems of world historical frames especially as they are made manifest in the classroom, and we show how we designed a course to resist and avoid reproducing Eurocentrism and other biases. We reject frameworks that insist on focusing solely on connectivities, entanglements, braidedness, and "Big History." Drawing pedagogical and intellectual inspiration from the writings of Paulo Freire, Ivan Illich, John Holt, and Rudolf Steiner, we make a case for widening the scope of world history by insisting that it take on board the ruptures, dissonances, and messiness of a human past that defies easy cataloguing and facile connectivities. We centered the course around developing students' understanding of how history is constructed and written, including how we can construct, write, and teach many possible narratives of world history. We argue that a course taught in such a way can be a vehicle for deepening human understanding, for decolonizing thought, and for helping students understand and articulate their position in the world. © Copyright 2019 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.

Asian Review of World Histories

Rewriting World History in the Classroom: Pedagogical Dispatches from India

Identities in South Asia: Conflicts and Assertions

Was Bhagat Singh an internationalist?: Resistance and identity in global age

In many insects, individuals primed with low doses of pathogens early in life have higher survival after exposure to the same pathogen later in life. Yet, our understanding of the evolutionary and ecological history of priming of immune response in natural insect populations is limited. Previous work demonstrated population-, sex- and stage-specific variation in the survival benefit of priming response in flour beetles (Tribolium castaneum) infected with their natural pathogen Bacillus thuringiensis. However, the evolutionary forces responsible for this natural variation remained unclear. In the present work, we tested whether the strength of the priming response (measured as the survival benefit after priming and subsequent infection, relative to unprimed controls) was associated with multiple fitness parameters and immune components across 10 flour beetle populations collected from different locations in India. Our results suggest two major selective pressures that may explain the observed inter-population variation in priming: (a) Basal pathogen susceptibility – populations that were more susceptible to infection produced a stronger priming response and (b) Short-term early reproductive success – populations where primed females produced more offspring early in life (measured over 2 days) had lower survival benefit (measured over 120 days), suggesting a potential trade-off between early reproduction and priming response. However, the negative association between survival and reproduction is limited to priming and infection in adults, but not in larvae. While other components of beetle fitness (starvation resistance and larval development) and immune function (haemolymph antibacterial activity and antimicrobial quinone secretion) also varied widely across populations, none of them was correlated with the variation in priming responses across populations. Our work is the first systematic empirical demonstration of multiple selective pressures that may govern the evolution of immune priming in the wild. We hope that this motivates further experiments to establish the role of pathogen-imposed selection and fitness costs in the evolution of priming in natural insect populations.

Department of Biology

Fulltext

Journal of Animal Ecology

Pathogen susceptibility and fitness costs explain variation in immune priming across natural populations of flour beetles

Indian Journal of Medical Research

Patient-driven initiatives for prioritizing drug discovery for rare diseases

Focusing on the Delhi gang rape of 16 December 2012, the article describes the force of two aggregations by which the violence is carried out and represented—the raping mob and the mourning and protesting crowd. Even though all six members of the mob are arrested within three days of the rape, we find disparate and spontaneous crowd formations across the city, expressing their anger at police apathy and state indifference in securing public spaces. This article teases out the relationship between the mob and the crowd. As far as the mob is concerned I show how the trial court presupposes a bond that ties the members together. This bond is found in the elaboration of ‘conspiracy’ and ‘dacoity’. This connection is further amplified through detailed forensic evidence, which channels the animacy of the rape into a medical–legal language of fact. In reacting to the rape crowd formations point us to the intensity of an egalitarian release. I follow Canetti’s development of ‘discharge’ and sting, without which the crowd does not exist. Finally, I show how crowd formations intersect with public discourses drawn from visual reportage as well as the medical condition of the victim. © 2019 SAGE Publications.

Department of Sociology & Anthropology

Contributions to Indian Sociology

Crowds, mob and the law: The Delhi rape case

Information, Accountability, and Cumulative Learning: Lessons from Metaketa I

Dilemmas and Challenges of Citizen Information Campaigns: Lessons from a Failed Experiment in India

Despite the notable progress in the stabilization of main group radicals by NHCs and cAACs, no germanium radicals have been isolated so far due to synthetic challenges. Stabilization of neutral [:E I R] (E = Si, Ge) radicals is an uphill task, as these reactive transient species are highly susceptible to dimerization. Herein, we report the synthesis of acyclic neutral germanium(I) radicals Cy-cAAC:GeN(SiMe 3 )Dip (1) and Me-cAAC:GeN(SiPh 3 )Mes (2) obtained by the reduction of [Ar(SiR 3 )NGeCl 3 ] with KC 8 in the presence of cAAC. Compounds 1 and 2 are well characterized by single crystal X-ray structural analysis, cyclic voltammetry and EPR spectroscopy. Furthermore, the structure and bonding of compounds 1 and 2 have been investigated by theoretical methods.

Department of Chemistry

Journal of the American Chemical Society

Isolation of Transient Acyclic Germanium(I) Radicals Stabilized by Cyclic Alkyl(amino) Carbenes